“O comrades of my time! Don't ask your doctors and not the priests when you die internally! You have lost faith in everything great, so must you go if this belief does not return, like a comet from foreign skies.”
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(Hölderlin, Hyperion)

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I. In the shadow of God

Contemporary thinking takes the form of strolling. The work of the term is suspended and a participatory perception takes its place. Strolling is an active forgetting of the texts, which, if successful, rediscovers the world as an attempt to write an essay. Sometimes, however, you also come across literal finds. For example, the author was recently surprised by a graffito on his aphilosophical trips around the world. The following saying was written on an unappealing Leipzig house wall:

“God is dead.” (Nietzsche)

“Nietzsche is dead.” (God)

In Nietzsche's most legendary formulation, this profound laconicism could be dismissed as an elegant, defiant anti-atheist answer if it did not also contain statistical truth. There are currently just over eight billion people living on the planet. Of them, around 2.4 billion belong to the Christian religion, two billion to the Islamic religion and a good one billion to the Hindu religion. Almost a billion people are convinced atheists. From a purely statistical point of view, humanity's dominant concept of truth should therefore be metaphysically constituted. Even in 2024 after the birth of Christ, if you follow the dates, the saying of Jesus “I am the way and the truth and the life”¹ mean at least a quarter of the truth for humanity.

However, it can be denied that remaining in the official ties of a religion would be equated with the effectiveness of a religion. A different concept of truth has become established for the western hemisphere and the areas of its cultural influences. There is no longer a religious truth of revelation in the culture here. On the one hand, the focus on scientifically proven objective observational data that has emerged since the 17th century and its triumph in technical equipment and, on the other hand, the discussion of subjects as a voice in public space, which regulates itself through various forms, is decisive.

However, this truth beyond a divinely formed truth represents an epochal upheaval, the effects of which show symptoms of a crisis. To the subjects who have become “transcendentally homeless” (Georg Lukács), the world appears to be, as Max Weber said, “disenchanted.” With regard to the entire period of modern times, Nietzsche therefore points to an accelerating decentration of the human being, in which the feeling of nihilism is spreading: “Since Copernicus, humans seem to have fallen onto an inclined plane — they are now rolling away from the center point — where? In nothing? In's'pierced Feeling his nothingness? ”²

For Nietzsche, the reason for post-Copernican nihilism lies in the incomprehensible and usually not even understood devaluations of supporting understandings that were metaphysically constituted: “God is dead: but the way people are, there will be caves in which you show your shadow for thousands of years. — And we — we must also conquer his shadow! ”³

Two other dark truths can be added to support this Nietzsche finding. With the atomic bombings in August 1945 at the latest, science proved to be a seductive political handmaid. Her achievements since modern times, which consisted negatively in the neutralization of heated theological dogma struggles and which manifested themselves positively in the discovery of the world as an explorable space of complexity, are overshadowed by this. And the belief in the truth of the discourse was also clouded. Since the democratic mass agitations in the virtuous terror of the French Revolution, there has been suspicion of mob rule against the concept of truth of the resentful public. Alexis de Tocqueville's expression of the “tyranny of the majority” and Heidegger's formulation “dictatorship of man” point to the irreversible illiberal potential of democratic truth procedures as well.

This is an epistemological twilight over the era of globalization. God, science and conversation may not be dead. But they are all battered in the position of unquestionable authority. Time is doomed to an uncertain freedom of thought, which must inform itself through competent authorities. In differentiated complexity, there is a growing need to be an expert in the selection of experts who can provide you with halfway information about what is happening. What remains, however, is donated by the media, which people believe.

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II. Kings and couriers

Franz Kafka's diary notes contain the following aphoristic parable: They were presented with the choice of being kings or couriers. Like the kids, they all wanted to be couriers, so there are lots of couriers out there. And so, because there are no kings, they chase things together and shout to each other their own messages that have become pointless. They would like to put an end to their miserable lives, but they don't dare to do so because of the oath of service.⁴

The situation, which Kafka's little piece describes, illustrates the situation of the chaotically synchronized media world in the global age with a discrete reminder of what media were in the original sense. This does not only mean that Kafka is softening the understanding of media from fixation on technical equipment. Technical media are primarily just reinforcements of human mediumship. People are messengers, emissaries — “ángeloi” in ancient Greek — of information and passions.

But Kafka's text also shows how central to an intact media hemisphere the belief in participation in essential things is. The modern prejudice about this participation is that it is under culturally critical suspicion. This is plausible in view of the hierarchical order of the oldest media formations. From the outset, cultures were characterized by authorities who acted with the claim that the divine spoke through them. In the form of priestly kingship, they legitimized worldly power through spiritual closeness to the supernatural. The media were the messengers of objective truth and thus ruled by the grace of God.

Plato's concept of truth has a subversive power insofar as it requires secular God media to be able to attest to their strong relationship to the very top through logical coherence. Instead of cryptic oracle words and their supposedly high sense, the philosophical structural change of the public is trying to gain media authority through evidence. Competent expertise should prevail instead of social power. Plato's philosophy laments the shortage of skilled workers in the truth economy. The “philosopher king” should therefore be attributed the most competent competence. However, this result of platonic thinking raises the suspicion that something too much Pro domo to be. That is probably one of the reasons why its political market readiness was difficult. The first academy was therefore built outside the city walls of Athens. That they are after all almost 1,000 years (around 386 BC to 529 AD) Consistent, speaks for a location of university truth as distant proximity to urbanity. The truth of the Agora and the truth of the Academy come into productive tension due to a well-tempered distance from each other.

Kafka's profound parable now visualizes a situation in which Plato's concept was destroyed by his success. It shows the situation that results when the emancipatory push of Plato's primacy of evidence reveals an autonomy that drives criticism of all higher authorities to the point that the concept of “authority through truth” is shaken overall. None of the couriers dares to play language games in the form of “king's words” anymore. No one wants to be in charge because no one is a sufficient expert. Too much philosophical reflection allows us to distance ourselves from the idea of royalty, a philosopher king and certainly from seizing power through self-coronation. Complete Platonism is anti-Napoleonic.

There are plausible reasons for shaking faith in truth. The Enlightenment forced everything before the judgement of reason. As a result, it decomposed the canonical collection of classical orientations. In this way, a traditionally tense world is no longer inherited, but the impulse to create independent worlds through autonomous thinking. With the deformities that have come to light over time in science and in finding the truth by the public, reason itself has now returned to the judgement of reason.

With regard to the terror of virtue on the left of the Rhine, the Teutonic thinkers tried to think of a reorientation of the Enlightenment just a few years after the French Revolution. In doing so, art took on the role of complementing the cold-calculating mind. It alone solves the social question of how to immunize the Enlightenment into terrorist arbitrariness before it is implemented. Schiller, for example, was convinced “that in order to solve that political problem through experience, you must take the path through aesthetics, because it is beauty through which you migrate to freedom. ”⁵ Only an expanded formation of characters makes Jacobins citizens. The refinement of the human race should be an aesthetically promoted “development of sensibility.”⁶ move forward. Schiller's idea of comprehensive aesthetics resulted in the concept of beautiful politics. However, these all-too-beautiful ideas were tainted by the real aestheticism of the sublime state. Schiller was enthusiastic about the possibility of social synthesis through joy: “Beggars become princely brothers” (An die Freude). The disillusionment is followed by the reality in which emergencies require a say. When emergency policy reigns, social aesthetics turn into cheesy “sympathy with death” (Thomas Mann). The focus here is on heroic sacrifice for the big picture. In the 20th century, in the form of socialism and fascism, there was an unpleasant policy of the exalted as a new religion, which saw Enlightenment as a lethal revolution. The joy of being a meta-representative of every community has now turned into aggressive universalism.

With these sad results, the Enlightenment began to doubt itself so much that it questioned itself. Because the new kings were only spreading orders and not truths again, the couriers constantly whispered to themselves the message that they were probably all just deceivers. And at the same time, some couriers spread the rumor that every word may only ever be understood as bossy power and not as a power of competence. These unhappy messages replaced the king's word and gave a devastating but at least sustained participation in truth. The Enlightenment thus found a new security in ever more detailed critiques — to the delight of all fanatics and charismatics of the authoritarian: “Enlightenment is totalitarian. ”⁷ This dark truth was complemented by a negative aesthetic that suggests the experience of the “non-identical” as the only way out.

Nietzsche's thinking attempts to convert this enlightenment into a philosophy of dawn. To do this, he starts with a rehabilitation of Schiller's idea of a truth of art. His approach is to advance education about the Enlightenment by a further stage of reflection. When reason puts itself before the judgement of reason and dismantles itself ever more hermetically in ever new hermeneutical circles of suspicion, why not reconfigure this spiral of self-loathing? In Nietzsche's thinking, the placing of reason before the judiciary of reason as a whole is placed before the judiciary of reason. Art as a “cult of falsehood” gains as “good will [] to appear”⁷ a meaning that is intended to breathe new life into Enlightenment. Even though no one is a king anymore, there is still royalty as an effect of a noble lie about vitality. When faith in all great truths is lost, faith in the greatness of intelligent life can become a sublime truth. This has political implications: In a balanced social aesthetic, the heroic of the sublime is defused into an educational campaign that works on itself. And the politics of joy finds its realism in a commitment to a whole as a cooperative system that opens up spaces. What happens to couriers when it doesn't need a king or suicide, but an epistemological form of irony so that their miserable lives can change?

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Link to part 2

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Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. Frankfurt am Main 2004.

Kafka, Franz: Reflections on sin, suffering, hope, and the true path. In: Max Brod & Hans Joachim Schöps (eds.): During the construction of the Great Wall of China. Unprinted stories and prose from the estate. Berlin 1931, pp. 225 — 249 (online).

Schiller, Friedrich: On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters, Zurich 1998.

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Footnotes

1: Mt. 11, 27; John 10:9; Rom. 5.1; Hebrews 10:20.

2: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 25.

3: The happy science, Aph 108.

4: Cf. Kafka, Considerations, P. 234.

5: Schiller, About aesthetic education, 2nd letter, p. 405.

6: Ibid., 8th letter, p. 430.

7: Adorno & Horkheimer, dialectics, P. 12.

8: The happy science, Aph 107.

The Enlightenment’s Twilight

Nietzsche's Truth of Semblance I

Nietzsche's best-known formulation, according to which God is dead, not only shows an anti-religious thrust. In particular, it points out that in modern times, constitutive self-evident elements no longer have traditional validity. As the cultural understanding of truth has faltered, not only has this or that truth become questionable, but the understanding of what truth actually is. This puts enlightenment under pressure to find the questions to which it should be the answer. It is this abyss of uncanny questionability from which Nietzsche's thinking attempts to show ways out that are viable. In the first part of his text Enlightenment Twilight Michael Meyer-Albert talks about the clarified doubts of the Enlightenment about itself.

Torn between philology and art, between word and music, Nietzsche is also not immune from the religious exaltation of art typical of the time. He becomes a fan of Richard Wagner and temporarily tries himself as an amateur composer. For Nietzsche, the “unfinished composer” — a name attributed to Gustav Mahler — music was an essential theme of his life, but he chose the word as a vocation, as a weapon and as a tool.

In the Middle Ages and in some cases up to modern times, art and artists were at the service of religion. The church acted as a client; the artists and musicians had to decorate monasteries and cathedrals with paintings or to enrich the service with compositions. The artist was therefore an (anonymous) instrument of God. The better his works came to him, the greater was the love of God that was expressed in them. The view that all great art is praise of God has been held even into modern times, for example by the Catholic writer Marcel Proust. At a young age, Nietzsche also sees music primarily as a gift from God:

“Forever thanks be sung by God of us, who offers us this wonderful treat,” wrote Nietzsche in 1858 as just under fourteen years old:

God gave us music so that we firstly, are directed upwards through them. The music combines all qualities, it can uplift, it can dance, it can cheer us up, yes it is able to break the most raw mind with its soft, wistful tones. But its main purpose is that it guides our thoughts towards higher things, that it elevates us, even shakes us.²

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The new art religion in the 19th century

In the Romantic period, the praise of God became a hymnal veneration of nature and art. In venerating historical and contemporary masterpieces, people now paid homage to a genius who lived in an inaccessible distance, although human. Art night and art enthusiasm were now an expression of a quasi-religious veneration of art. A well-known example of this was the collection of essays The heartfelt outpouring of an art-loving monastery brother by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenröder and Ludwig Tieck. They told the life stories of “the great blessed art saints” in the style of hagiographies. At the beginning of the 19th century, also as a result of the French Revolution, the desire for originality and community spread. The reliance on emotional connection led to a new appreciation of feelings. Even in the final phase of the Ancien Régime, there was a countermovement to the rationality of the Enlightenment. Called “Sturm und Drang” in Germany, the Romantics opposed courtly authority and stiff formal traditions and instead focused on personal feeling and experience. Intimacy and enthusiastic goodness were now celebrated as the driving forces of private life and friendship. The love marriage became a bourgeois ideal, but friendly men also hugged and kissed each other intimately, wrote each other sentimental letters and swore eternal loyalty to each other. What would have been unthinkable in aristocratic court culture based on the French model became very popular in theatre, music and literature in the following decades. According to Nietzsche, the great popularity of the opera at the time was the layman's protest “against cold music that had been taught,” which was intended to regain a soul with the “revived polyhymnia”: “Without that profound religious change, without the abatement of the inner excited mind, the music would have remained taught. ”³ The cultivation of the emotional world, a now expressive, authentic language and a spiritually based veneration of art formed the basis of the new “art religion” of the 19th century. It transferred the spiritual-religious needs of the bourgeoisie to the arts, especially opera and symphony, primarily theatre and ballet, followed by poetry and the visual arts. Nietzsche recognized the scope of this historical trend: “Art rears its head where religions subside. She adopts a number of feelings and moods generated by religion, puts them close to her heart and is now becoming deeper, more soulful herself... “According to Nietzsche, religion is stronger than art, not the other way around, as some secular cultural people would like: “The wealth of religious sentiment that has grown into electricity breaks out again and again and wants to conquer new empires.” According to Nietzsche, In addition to politics and science, above all, art: “Wherever there is a higher level of human endeavor If you notice gloomy colors, you can assume that ghost gray, incense scent and church shadows have stuck to it. ”⁴

As part of the religious movement typical of the time that had swept over cultural life, opera and theatre became the ultimate artistic disciplines in a “Gesamtkunstwerk” -like, multi-sensual production. Renowned composers and virtuosos were revered as geniuses and treated as stars. Parallel to this enthusiastic mood in cultural and social life, however, hard-hitting capitalism changed the world. The natural sciences, in particular biology and medicine, experienced a strong upswing. The new art religion was used against the now rapidly advancing profanization, rationalization and scientification of all areas of society. One of their prophets was Richard Wagner. Wagnerianism soon polarizes the public as a new quasi-religious movement, and the young Nietzsche enthusiastically joins in. After a concert visit in autumn 1868 — the tristan-Prelude and the Meistersinger-Overture was on the agenda — Nietzsche switched entirely to the Wagnerian camp. Nietzsche gets to know Wagner personally in Leipzig, and he visits him at his house near Lucerne within the next three years 23 (!) Times — peak phase of that “star friendship” that Nietzsche started in The happy science alluded.⁵ Wagner also appreciates the admirer, who is 31 years younger. In 1872, he sums up: “Strictly speaking, after my wife, you are the only profit that life has brought me. ”⁶

Wagner may have exploited his young fan from the start and with long-term calculation. After Werner Ross, Wagner hires Nietzsche de facto as an academic PR powerhouse and ensures that he receives a professorship in Basel. Wagner needs an intellectual who certifies the high quality of his musical project. He uses his young wife Cosima to keep Nietzsche happy with many and long letters. Nietzsche praises in lectures and in his first publication The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music Wagner in heaven, sees him as a “reformer” and innovator of Dionysian Greek culture comparable to Luther. In a letter to Nietzsche, Wagner sees himself as an “prevented philologist,” while he describes Nietzsche as an “prevented musician.” Wagner dictates to Nietzsche the division of labor between the two: “Now remain a philologist in order to be conducted by music as such. ”⁷ Nietzsche fulfills the task by postulating that the Greek drama was created from original Dionysian music. Although this was destroyed by Socrates and Co., thanks to Wagner's genius, it is now possible to build on these original traditions after 2,000 years. The birth of tragedy, Nietzsche's first important work, contained a preface to Richard Wagner and was explicitly dedicated to him. At the time, Nietzsche presented him as a possible new founder of a culture comparable to Greek and, as an avowed Wagnerian, at the same time distanced himself from scientific philology. As a result, his further scientific career was blocked — as a philologist, Nietzsche was ruined from then on. The friendship, which was fragile and charged with expectations from the outset, lasted ten years and finally turned into harsh criticism:

We were friends and became strangers to each other. [...] That we must become strangers is the law about us: by doing so, we should also become more venerable! It should also make the thought of our former friendship holier! [...] And so we want to believe in our star friendship, even if we must be enemies of each other on Earth.⁸

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Musical achievements and music criticism

In the 19th century, art entered unimagined spheres that were previously reserved for the sacred. At the same time, however, modern music criticism is also developing. Back then, music may have reached the height of its historical appreciation — both in sensory experience and as an object of analytical thought. Nietzsche's thinking about music should also be considered against this background. Throughout his life, but without systematics, he has been involved in music theory discussions. He is also increasingly critical of Wagner's work — and dedicates a brilliant polemic to him: “My biggest experience was a recovery. Wagner is just one of my illnesses. ”⁹ On a practical level, Nietzsche worked as a veritably talented pianist from childhood, and he also started attempts as an autodidactic composer. In addition to more conventional song compositions from his youth, his later Manfred meditations relevant, which were created under the influence of Wagner music and were probably also intended for performance before Wagner. However, Nietzsche made the mistake of asking Hans von Bülow, the composer and Wagner conductor, for a professional opinion. This is indiscriminate: “An imagination tumbling in remembrance of Wagnerian sounds is not a production basis. ”¹⁰ In fact, Nietzsche's compositions show little innovation that could point to music of the future. As a musician, Nietzsche remains more conventional. It is not surprising, the NZZ once summed up,

that Nietzsche, who boasted in letters that there had never been a philosopher who was a musician to the extent and to the extent that he was himself, had barely any effect due to his musical convictions. Today, over a hundred years after his death, the philosopher Nietzsche is a European figure of undeniable significance, and the “unfinished composer” Nietzsche is a historical episode.¹¹

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What did music really mean to him?

Nietzsche made numerous commitments to music — especially in his youth, but also in the last conscious years of his life. But how intensely Nietzsche really perceived the music remains an open question in the end. What did he particularly appreciate about music?

Was it pure sound enjoyment, a purely formal, concrete musical experience, so to speak? Or wasn't the religious charge of listening to music more likely to create feelings of grandeur? So was the combination of listening to music with educational background, with lyrics (poetry) and with a historical-religious context decisive for enjoyment? “Music is not in and of itself so meaningful for our inner self,” writes Nietzsche, but only poetry has “placed so much symbolism in rhythmic movement, in strength and weakness of sound, that we think it speaks directly to the interior and comes from within.” It was therefore only the intellect that “put meaning into the sound.” ”¹² Some current authors speculate that music has enabled him to reach and express deeper layers of unconscious feeling.¹³ But this positive attitude in his youth is soon overshadowed by suffering from the contrast between science and art. Nietzsche sees the need to “escape from rapid changes in artistic tendencies into a haven of objectivity,” as he writes in an autobiographical review from around 1868.¹⁴ Nietzsche notes elsewhere: “[N] he lives with some peace, security and consequence only by forgetting himself as a subject, and indeed as an artistically creating subject.”¹⁵ He attempts this agonizing contrast through his theses in his first work The birth of tragedy to overcome. “As a musician, Nietzsche is certainly a romantic in general,” Curt Paul describes Janz Nietzsche's dilemma, but after “as a thinker he begins to overcome Romanticism, Schopenhauer's romantic musical criticism, he must fall silent as a musician and alienate himself from Wagner. ”¹⁶

Little is known of Nietzsche's sex life and sexual orientation. It is entirely conceivable that the excitement of music also had an erotic component in him. Once, Nietzsche notes down a “ranking” that appeals to him the most. First place: “musical improvisation in a good hour”, then: listening to certain pieces by Beethoven and Wagner, third: thinking while walking in the morning, the fourth is “Vollust”, which ends the list. “When he fears the lust of sexual intercourse — not that of desire — and flees, he experiences his music and the inventive wandering of his mind voluptuously, with sensual intensity,” concludes Werner Ross in his book The Wild Nietzsche, or the Return of Dionysus.¹⁷

There are apparently three sources of energy that recharge and intensify Nietzsche's love for music: religion, poetry and Eros. According to Nietzsche, music and the other arts needed a particular “physiological precondition,” the intoxication, especially the “frenzy of the festival.”¹⁸. According to Nietzsche, creativity can only develop uninhibited from a state of excitement in which clear thinking and rational consciousness have been switched off or dampened. Thinking further: The works of art created in intoxication are particularly good and successful works of art when they in turn can make viewers and listeners feel intoxicated. Nietzsche is obviously very enthusiastic about intoxication and its numerous variants. He raves about the “intoxication of sex,” but also about the “intoxication of celebration, competition, bravura, victory, all extreme movement; the intoxication of cruelty; the intoxication of destruction.” The motive for the conspicuous praise of all sorts of Dionysian debauchery may be found in his education, but above all in the lack of “debauchery” actually experienced. Here, the music experience certainly also offered an opportunity for sublimation. And so the realm of music served him as an overflow basin for the powerful floods of instincts and feelings.

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Literature

O.A.: Life without music is simply a mistake. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/articleDLWL3-ld.38202.

Figl, Johan: Feast day cult and music in the life of young Nietzsche. In: Günther Pöltner e. a. (ed.): Nietzsche and music. Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 7—16.

Janz, Curt Paul: Nietzsche's Manfred Meditations. In: Günther Pöltner and others (ed..): Nietzsche and music. Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 45—79.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: [From the years 1868/69]. In: Works in three volumes. Munich 1954, pp. 148—154.

Ders. : About music, in: From my life (1858). Online: http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-unpub/youth/1858-fmlg.htm.

Ross, Werner: The Wild Nietzsche, or the Return of Dionysus. Stuttgart 1994.

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Footnotes

1: Götzen-Dämmerung, Sayings and arrows, Aph 33.

2: About music.

3: Human, all-too-human I, Aph 219.

4: Human, all-too-human I, aph. 150.

5: Cf. The happy science, Aph 279.

6: Cit n. https://www.wagner200.com/biografie/biografie-1866-1870-exil.html.

7: Quoted by Werner Ross, The wild Nietzsche, P. 59.

8: The Happy Science, Aph 279.

9: The Wagner Case, preface.

10: Quoted by Curt Paul Janz, Nietzsche's Manfred Meditations, P. 52.

11: OP., Life without music is simply a mistake.

12: Human, all-too-human I, Aph 215.

13: See, for example, Johan Figl, Feast day cult and music in the life of young Nietzsche, P. 12.

14: [From 1868/69], p. 148.

15: About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense, paragraph 1.

16: Janz, Nietzsche's Manfred Meditations, P. 47.

17: P. 114.

18: Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, Aph 18.

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Source of the Article Image

Jens Fläming, A Nie-Na-Nietzschemann is dancing. Oil on canvas, 1984. Nietzsche Documentation Center Collection in Naumburg. (Image courtesy of the artist.)

Nietzsche and Music

For hardly any other philosopher, music was as important as it was for Nietzsche. “Without music, life would be a mistake”¹, he wrote. Christian Saehrendt goes for Nietzsche PopArts The question of how this high appreciation of sound art was manifested in his life and work. He talks about Nietzsche's own compositions as well as one of the most iconic aspects of his life: his friendship with Richard Wagner. He shows that the music for Nietzsche is almost erotic It was important — and in this respect he was not so “out of date” at all, but a typical child of his time.

For example, you shouldn't ask the money-collecting banker about the purpose of his restless activity: it is unreasonable. The workers roll as the stone rolls, according to the stupidity of mechanics. — All people disintegrate, as in all ages and even now, into slaves and free people; for anyone who does not have two thirds of his day for himself is a slave, he is, by the way, whoever he wants: statesman, merchant, official, scholar.¹

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Contrary to all hermeneutical rumours, this quote makes it clear that Nietzsche is a good critic of capitalism. Even more — and this is likely to completely confuse academic minds — Nietzsche defends reason against capital in him. The banker is unreasonable because the former means, money, became an end in itself, capital, resulting in an inversion of means and end, in short: alienation. Money, however, cannot be eaten, as the myth of King Midas already reminds us; the pursuit of profit therefore becomes a life-averted delusion that collectively infects the atomized. The banker is thus a representative of irrationality and remoteness, as only the priest once was — which can also be seen in the effects of the financial market as a new place of worship. The supposedly most rational or streamlined form of transport in society — spoken with Nietzschean Max Weber — is therefore unreasonable for Nietzsche at heart, just because she is turned against life. Continuing with Weber: Purpose-rational action as such, which has said goodbye to substantive reason, becomes irrational because, cut off from the question of possibility and goal, it becomes entangled in its own function and only hunts for ghosts. It is obvious that Nietzsche was not only a contemporary of Marx, but also criticized the same society as that society, namely the capitalist one. Even more, it can help us today to further deepen many Marxist insights. For example, he proved how behind the alleged egoism of his class — the representatives of Protestant ethics — the ultimate Super-ego of self-weakness stuck, and how the flaunted luxury of the upper class, as they lose all personality behind their performance and thus impoverishes humanly, descends into asceticism. This, not least, was where Freud's reception of Nietzsche began, but this translated him back to bourgeois: into the absolute necessity of renouncing all culture. Nietzsche, on the other hand, stands for a culture of the body and a cultivation of pleasure rather than its suppression, which, as it were, must include reason as “great health” (Nietzsche), instead of remaining rejected by it.  

What is described in the opening quote as the “stupidity of mechanics” can therefore also be understood in Marxist terms as an “automatic subject,” as which capital functions. Under his spell, it is not the economy that serves us, but we serve it, which is why we do not work to live, but live to work. In short, the world is upside down because it is headless, i.e. ruled by an anonymous structure. The result: “slave morality” is rampant everywhere, affecting everyone, but particularly dominating the rulers, the successful, the beautiful, powerful and strong, because they are most deeply entangled in the false awareness of their grandeur, which, regardless, remains mere appearances. The opening quote argues against this pretense that wage slavery is still slavery, that modernity is not as liberal as it appears to be, and that statesmen, merchants, officials, scholars — i.e. the “high animals” from politics, business, state and cultural enterprises — are no less slaves than their former counterparts from ancient Greek times. The supposedly Nietzschean, in actual Schumpeter, adoration of the entrepreneur as a genius, as a creator, as a heroic individual thus receives an embarrassing refutation in Nietzsche himself: The individual principle lies precisely behind the celebration of individuality, because the persona, still that of power, is, according to the Latin root of the word, a mere mask of character, and thus implies the deep impotence of those people that they have to bear. From this perspective, Nietzsche becomes an alienation theorist par excellence. As against his modernist students Freud, Weber or Joseph Schumpeter, in order to become who he is, he must also be defended from his other, later, post-modern epigons — just as Adorno once had to defend Bach “against his lovers.” Just as it was once necessary, according to Bataille, to protect Nietzsche from the fascists, so today it is important to protect him from further integration into post-modern ideology. This certainly requires saving criticism — but this should primarily be about highlighting the emancipatory aspects of Nietzsche's thinking.

It remains to be clarified that what Nietzsche was largely reduced to in the post-structuralist reading — death of the subject, transhumanism, post-criticism — not only massively shortened, but completely upside down. Let us briefly review the shrinkage stages of post-modern Nietzscheanism, which have popularized that perversion. Instead of being a gravedigger of the subject, Nietzsche, particularly the middle period, can be understood far more convincingly as an individualist, existentialist or anarchist, to whom, influenced by romance, hardly anything is more important than qualitative individuality, self-conscious resistance and self-strong deviance — i.e. as everything that postmodernism abhors, denies or tries to dispose of in the blind spot of history. Nietzsche also calls for a new People who set their own goals instead of slipping off into an updated afterlife to humanity — i.e. lost transhumanistically to the back worlds of whimpering theo or technocracy and their theodicy — idolize the last person as aimless, willless, freely collaging and programmable Frankenstein. And post-critics who refer to Nietzsche are also rejected, as his aphorisms can hardly be understood otherwise than as those of a gifted critic and stylish polemicist. There are also reasons for this choice of form. Finally, the Nietzschean affirmation of life requires the negation of an entire system of resentment that only sees its own worth in comparing, competing, defeating and only mobilizes its own appreciation by devaluing others. In short, anyone who loves life must hate the forces hostile to life; anyone who affirms it must deny them; anyone who wants to live criticizes. Affirmation and criticism are thus a dialectic instead of, as the cheerful cynics of post-criticism tell themselves, antipodes to one another. In short, Nietzsche is not a gravedigger of the subject, not a transhumanist and not a post-critic, but their incarnate negation, precisely because he takes the affirmation of life so seriously.

Contrary to Nietzsche's postmodern reformats, he can be read more as an alienation theorist critical of capitalism, who socializes profoundly in Christian terms so that not least — like Marx — is in the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach. Related to Young Hegelianism not in spite of, but precisely because of, extensive Hegel complaints, Nietzsche sees capitalist modernity — to which postmodernism as Decadence The last man and his slave morality are, of course, part of it — the metaphysics at work, from modern science to modern economics. While the former is scientistically speaking to the only truth in order to declare its positivist abbreviations the absolute essence of the universe, the latter is never just a political economy, but always a moral economy. For Nietzsche, debt and debt, a negative financial and ethical balance, are indivisible from one another, as he said in his The genealogy of morality clarifies. Capitalism is therefore to be understood as a religion, as Walter Benjamin emphasized, and not as an already reasonable or enlightened system. Modern economics and science, capitalism as a religion and scientific positivism are also combined by means of modern technology to exploit nature, which devastates both internal and external nature.

Together, Nietzsche sees real nihilistic violence at work whose negation of life could only stop people's self-determination and new determination beyond alienation. In this sense, he thinks anti-capitalist, yes, sometimes beyond the equally materialistic Marx, since he places the question of subjectifying capitalist objectivity centrally. Nietzsche's answer: Idealism, its real abstractions and its “identity principle” (Adorno), which are based on the exchange value of capital and in the self-purpose logic of capital, generate three tendencies in their subjects — one towards positivism, one towards nihilism and one towards moralism. All three can only be understood together, and cultural criticism only exists as one that involves political as a moral economy — i.e. as a dedicated critique of capitalism.

Marx's version of this critique is certainly the most developed, complex and important up to our time. But Nietzsche can supplement them by showing in his work: Positivism is also a form of alienation, of reifying thinking, and forces science into scientism by naturalizing it. “Scientific socialism” thus acquires a different, more ambivalent meaning. Nihilism, in turn, can be understood as a form of subjectification of late capitalism, after capital buried the former bourgeois values under its own development, so that nihilistic anti-bourgeoisie — whether in a modernist or post-modern manner — is no longer directed against capitalism, but is in an elective relationship with capital that is unconscious of itself. And moralism is also no real alternative to the said interplay of positivism and nihilism, because here the primacy of politics does not really replace that of economics. Rather, political impotence results in a moralizing resentment, which is therefore in continuity of being wrong and has no better purpose that could still break it.

Isms were always opposed to Nietzsche, as an enemy of the system: he found the positive side of life stifled in positivism; the critical moment of negation degenerated into an irrelevant, because indefinite apology of nihilism; and morality, which in turn could also serve to protect vulnerable bodies and the one earth that we animate, goes wrong in the moralism of inquisitorial gestures, who value nothing but their own nullity dispels isolated persons. What should therefore be written in the 21st century in the spirit of Nietzsche is a genealogy of moralism, which must be, as it were, a genealogy of positivism and nihilism, and as such a historical questioning of that social objectivity which forces positivist, nihilistic, moralistic modes of subjectification — in order to question capitalist totality in all its facets.

Nietzsche's work does not work against the subject, people, or criticism, but against the — devaluating — principle of capital, which destroys bodies, takes lives and threatens our living space. At least that is the more interesting reading of his oeuvre, which is far more emancipatory than that of postmodernism.

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Footnotes

1: Human, all-too-human, Vol. I, Aph. 283.

Nietzsche’s Critique of Capitalist Alienation

In the penultimate part of the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “Lukas Meisner comes to a surprising result at first glance: Nietzsche and Marx both practice fundamental criticism of capitalism and Nietzsche can serve to Marx's To complement a critique of political economy with a no less radical critique of moral economy.

I. Who was Bataille?

Paul Stephan: Dear Jenny Kellner, dear Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, The article on Bataille and Nietzsche's conception of an “economy of waste” has made us — and also numerous readers — curious to learn more about Georges Bataille and his reception of Nietzsche. Jenny Kellner, you have studied them very intensively in recent years as part of your — now successfully completed — doctoral project on the subject Anti-economic communism. Bataille's philosophical challenge. (Congratulations at this point!) Would you like to start our conversation with a brief outline of the very fundamental question of who Bataille actually was and what distinguishes his Nietzsche reception from others?

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Jenny Kellner: I'd love to. Georges Bataille was a French writer, sociologist, and philosopher of the first half of the 20th century, but he strangely evades this kind of disciplinary attribution. His work and work is characterized more by procedures that are likely today as inter- or transdisciplinary would be called. He was certainly heavily influenced by contemporary intellectual trends such as Surrealism around André Breton, ethnology following Marcel Mauss and psychoanalytic theory according to Sigmund Freud, but in my opinion there are also systematic reasons for Bataille's “transdisciplinarity” and the difficulty of “classifying” him correctly in theory. These reasons may gradually become apparent in the course of this dialogue. With regard to Bataille's specific relationship with Nietzsche, I would first like to mention three points: First, I imagine Bataille as a kind of hinge between Nietzsche and French “contemporary philosophy” (i.e. the currents of post-structuralism, deconstruction, difference theory). He was one of the first French thinkers to intensively study Nietzsche's work from the 1930s and, above all, tried to defend it against the takeover by German National Socialism. With his interpretation of Nietzsche's thought as a theory of paradox, which has a labyrinthine structure, he paved the way for the rich and heterogeneous French Nietzsche reception of the second half of the 20th century (from Michel Foucault to Gilles Deleuze to Sarah Kofman and others). Second, Bataille's defense of Nietzsche against fascist occupations also had the function of making him fertile for a particular form of anti-fascism, which deviated strongly from the form of party doctrinal communism. The secret society founded by Bataille in 1936 Acephale (German: “headless”), whose public organ was a magazine of the same name, theoretically referred primarily to the Dionysian aspect of Nietzsche's thinking. An attempt was made here to oppose the mythological power of the fascist project not with rational arguments, but with a kind of anti-authoritarian, Dionysian, binding mythology. Thirdly, Bataille's affirmative relationship with Nietzsche is particularly characterized from a philosophical point of view by the fact that he — in contrast to the vast majority of other admirers of Nietzsche — too maintained an affirmative relationship with Nietzsche's theoretical antipode Hegel. The way in which Bataille brings Nietzsche into play in the course of his interpretation of the master-servant dialectic leads to the concept of ruler-free “sovereignty”, which is central to Bataille's Nietzschelectüre (and for his entire thinking).

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PS: Thank you very much for this initial overview, which should make it clear why Bataille is not simply 'one Nietzsche reader among many, 'but one of the most important Nietzsche interpreters of the 20th century; and not simply an interpreter, but someone who independently thought about Nietzsche's impulses and referred to his time. Professor Schönherr-Mann, you too have studied not only Nietzsche, but also Bataille. Would you like to add something important to this or perhaps even disagree?

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Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann: I would like to point out a particular punchline in the relationship between Nietzsche and Bataille: “I am Nietzsche.” It is not Nietzsche who says that, but Bataille! He distances himself from the Nietzsche research of his time by simply assuming that you can only understand Nietzsche from your own perspective, precisely if you “are” Nietzsche yourself. In his own letter, Bataille therefore seeks communion with Nietzsche.

In January 1945, Bataille's Defence appeared under the title Nietzsche and the will for opportunity. However, this book doesn't seem to be that much about Nietzsche. The third and longest part contains a diary from 1944, i.e. from the time of the liberation of France and Europe. Nobody wanted to celebrate Nietzsche's 100th birthday this year, except the Nazis in Weimar in the form of a ghostly celebration in the Allied bombardment, to which Mussolini also contributed an ancient statue of Dionysus.

Bataille was the only one who dared to save Nietzsche from the Nazis, who therefore wrote two texts for his birthday, one under the title “Nietzsche Memorandum”, published in a volume Compensation to Nietzsche, and the one mentioned.

Bataille considers Nietzsche to be his twin brother and thinks as passionately and related to the specific life of humans as Nietzsche. According to Nietzsche's insight, which Bataille picks up, man lives in a world in which he has no purposes given to him, which he must seek for himself. In this respect, Nietzsche and Bataille's philosophy proves to be a plea for human freedom.

With the title of the book Nietzsche and the will for opportunity Bataille distances himself from an understanding of Nietzsche, which, in its central conception of the will to power, constitutes a claim to power that may use force unscrupulously — an understanding that was then compiled from the estate by the work compiled by Nietzsche's sister from the estate and diligently manipulated in the process The will to power seemed promoted.

On the one hand, Bataille shares Nietzsche's famous thesis of the death of God. But what Nietzsche coldly diagnoses without regret in order to now set off for new, albeit only earthly shores, has, on the other hand, burned itself deeper into Bataille's thinking. Bataille doesn't want to give up the divine in a world where God is dead.

Atheological sum III That is the subtitle of this Nietzsche volume. Bataille is thus positioning itself vis-à-vis Summa theologica by Thomas Aquinas, who, like no other, has founded the Catholic worldview to this day. Bataille transforms atheism into atheology. The first volume of atheological sum under the title The inner experience deals with methods of meditation and mysticism. But people also experience ecstasy and contemplation under conditions when God is dead, particularly in eroticism. Bataille has dedicated one of his most famous works to her under the title Saint Eros (1957).

Overall, the three volumes of the atheological sum play a central role in his theoretical work, including in particular his economic work The ostracized part. Attempt at a general economy belongs (1949), which will certainly keep us busy in our conversation.

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II. What is freedom?

PS: Yes, Bataille's Nietzschean economic critique in the name of an “economy of waste” will certainly have to be returned to. But first, I would like to address a common point that came up in your first two answers: that Bataille represents a “philosophy of freedom” or “rulerless “sovereignty.” Around the same time, the existentialists led by Sartre, Albert Camus and Simone de Beauvoir also developed a “philosophy of freedom,” sometimes with reference to Nietzsche. However, this is a freedom of consciousness, which implies moral responsibility, which brings these thinkers into a certain proximity to philosophical idealism, to Kant, Hegel and perhaps even Fichte. Based on this understanding, the existentialists sometimes very polemically distanced themselves from Bataille and saw him as a pseudo-radical nihilist who was afraid of actual practice. Even today, the concept of “freedom” is once again very controversial in philosophical debate. To what extent does Bataille's (Nietzschean) understanding of freedom differ from the idealistic or existentialist concept? And how would you defend it against existential polemics?

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JK: Exactly, the relationship between Bataille's concept of freedom or sovereignty and questions of (political) practice is a very interesting problem. Professor Schönherr-Mann has already pointed out the importance of eroticism in Bataille's thinking. In my opinion, however, it would be wrong to interpret Bataille's emphasis on eroticism as a kind of retreat from the field of politics. Rather, I believe that Bataille takes erotic experience seriously in the sense of an experience of ecstasy, loss of sense and self-worth precisely because it is actually of political significance for him when it comes to radical insubordination. If bataille can be subordinated a policy, then a type of policy of permanent revolt. Sovereignty, as Bataille understands it, is not a characteristic or condition that enables action; rather, it is a rejection of action itself. Action always implies a purpose-means structure (i.e. it is embedded in the rational discourse of mediation) and thus has a fundamental structure of procrastination. But you are only sovereign in the moment — and the erotic experience can be such a moment. Eroticism is about a hopeless waste of energy, an unproductive expenditure of strength (which, by the way, also leads directly to Bataille's “general economy”). What sets us apart when we are “sovereign” (for example in erotic experience, but also in gifts without consideration or in art) is that we have nothing and no one at these moments serve (which is associated with an erosion of subject and object, i.e. also with an experience of community that may be similar to the mystical one, but deviates from it in that one becomes a heterogeneous multiplicity, the Nietzschean desert). The aspect of radical “indiscriminacy” is what Bataille so strongly affirmed about Nietzsche's philosophy. In Batailles as well as in Nietzsche's perspective, all morality, all action is a form of servitude. In Nietzsche and the will for opportunity This idea appears when Bataille points out that fighting for freedom bitterly always means giving it up first. The relationship between freedom or sovereignty and political struggle or political practice is therefore a paradox for Bataille from the outset. We are dealing with a concept of freedom which in fact leads into an abyss, into a fall into nonsense, which the existentialists mentioned above also seem to know, but which they believe to overcome through a moral philosophy of 'freely chosen responsibility'. For Bataille, on the other hand, there is no turning back from the abyss into a regulated moral existence. But that doesn't mean that his thinking is apolitical or political without consequences. Because the radical challenge of rational discourse also questions social conditions and political connections in a very fundamental way. Interestingly enough, Bataille shows his excessive identification with Nietzsche, to which Professor Schönherr-Mann has pointed out, particularly clearly in a short essay from 1951, which has the title Nietzsche in the light of Marxism carries. According to my analysis, Bataille contrasts two forms of emancipation in this essay: a communist form involving the liberation of all of humanity goes, and a Nietzschean form, which is about the liberation of whole people goes, that is, a person who does not subordinate himself to any particular objectives, no action imperatives. Both forms of emancipation clash with each other, are mutually exclusive, but at the same time are interdependent on each other, provided that one is void without the other, or neglecting one would necessarily mean counteracting the other. This shows what is so extremely controversial about Bataille's concept of freedom (and therefore of his Nietzsche reading) from a political point of view: Bataille is far from turning Nietzsche into a left-wing political perspective, making him politically “serviceable.” But he also does not play Nietzsche off against the communist political project. Rather, he places both in a paradoxical tension that cannot be “abolished” in any sense (Hegelian or otherwise). Any emancipatory project that reduces one side of emancipation to the other or ignores one of the two sides runs the risk of turning into a reaction. In my opinion, this is an important aspect of the political significance of Bataille's Nietzschean sense of sovereignty.

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SM: Bataille responds to the start of the Second World War with a partly diary-like, partly philosophical text The friendship, which he published in 1944. It says almost programmatically:

With the passion, the vicious lucidity that I am capable of, I have wanted That the life in me undresses. I've been writing this book since the state of war, everything else is empty in my eyes. I want nothing but to live: alcohol, ecstasy, naked existence, like a naked — and confused — woman. To the extent that the life that I am is revealed to me and at the same time, since I have lived it without hiding anything, is visible from outside, I can only bleed, cry and desire within.¹

That is a different answer to war than you find in French existentialism, which takes shape in those years when Camus in The myth of Sisyphus 1942 attested to people the opportunity to revolt even in the face of their hopelessness. Sartre's analysis 1943 in Being and nothingness attributes to consciousness the ability to change, thus establishing freedom phenomenologically — not idealistically: at most from a materialistic and communitarian perspective — which results in individual responsibility for one's own life. For the militarized societies since the beginning of the 19th century, in which people are led as subjects, these are intolerable claims. Bataille does not follow this understanding of responsibility, although it can rely on Nietzsche. And Camus is still taking L'Homme Revolté (1951) takes a rather skeptical attitude towards Nietzsche, as he is suspected of being close to the Nazis.

There is another parallel between existentialism and battalion, which dates back to the development of the former in the thirties. Bataille wrote in The friendship: “Anyone who speaks of justice is justice himself, suggests a judge, a father, a leader. I'm not proposing justice. I bring complicit friendship. A feeling of festivity, of freedom of movement, of childlike and demonized lust” (p. 58). Bataille rejects the hope that problems could be solved by states.

Individual relationships are taking the place of politics, which in turn for Bataille are in no way based on successful communication, as Camus, Sartre and de Beauvoir imagine. In contrast, Bataille writes:

To the extent that beings seem perfect, they remain isolated, closed within themselves. But the wound of incompleteness opens it. Through what you can call incompleteness, animal nudity, wound communicating The various, separate beings gain life by losing themselves in communication with each other.²

Bataille's thinking is not only in Die friendship, but consistently, but especially in The ostracized part and in Saint Eros (1957) characterized by a radical rejection of social discourses, which he counters with provocative ideas. This is also found in the early existentialism of the thirties and still in the forties, when it is not about individual responsibility but about separation from the social sphere.

That is the title of Sartre's novel The disgust (1938) as well as in Camus' novel The Stranger from 1942. In Sartre's story Herostrate (1939) he has certain sympathies with a gunman. And in the third volume of The paths of freedom The hero, a Parisian philosophy teacher like Sartre, shoots at German soldiers completely senselessly:

It was a huge revenge; every shot avenged him for an old doubt. [.] He shot at man, at virtue, at the world: freedom — that is terror; [.] he shot at the beautiful officer, at all the beauty of this earth, at the street, at the flowers, at the gardens, at everything he had loved.³

As early as the 19th century, there was a philosophy that society rejects without caring about state alternatives: Max Stirner and Nietzsche; in the 20th century, in addition to the existentialists and E.M. Cioran, there were primarily writers such as Henry Miller, Philip Roth, Charles Bukowski, Hermann Hesse, Franz Kafka. Philipp Blom names Diderot and Holbach 2011 Evil philosophersbecause, like the Marquis de Sade, they defend sensuality and pleasure. Bataille and Sartre could share such a title, even if the former emphasized sovereignty and the latter emphasized responsibility. Like Nietzsche, both are concerned with an individual who is not subordinate to state and society. Most contemporaries regard this as evil.

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III. What is the economics of waste?

PS: A key theme of Batailles is not only the critique of collective, state, in favor of individual sovereignty, but also, as Jenny Kellner explained in her mentioned article, the critique of capitalist efficiency logic in favor of an “economy of waste.” This moment seems to me to play no role in comparatively ascetic existentialism. In fact, both motives seem to be found in Nietzsche — the apology of ecstasy and the critique of “ascetic ideals,” as well as the emphasis on individual responsibility. Here you quickly ask yourself what corresponds more to our current social reality: From the standpoint of the ecological movement, it is true that in the current capitalist economy, we are already dealing with an “economy of waste” and, in contrast, more individual and collective responsibility in the sense of asceticism is required. In this sense, could we perhaps speak of a certain obsolescence of Bataille's criticism? Don't we already live in an uninhibited economy and should, for the sake of the future of the planet, discover the joys of renunciation? What do you mean, Mrs. Kellner?

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JK: That is a very good question! Bataille clears in the Inner experience a that asceticism can be a means of freeing oneself from the bondage of possession and materiality. However, according to Bataille, there is also a certain promise of salvation: It is about giving up a part of yourself in order to save another part (e.g. called a “soul”). Structurally, this certainly applies to the ecological ascetic ideal you mentioned. Bataille's wastefulness, however, is about a more radical rejection of property and materiality, which no longer implies salvation and salvation (and is therefore just as' evil 'as Professor Schönherr-Mann Bataille and the existentialist thinkers attested above). By the way, I don't think that Bataille's economic critique is outdated, but that this impression is created by a misunderstanding. Because, to put it in a nutshell, with Bataille, waste is not the same as waste. The basic thesis of his theory of economics states that it Definitely There are surpluses that must be spent without profit, but this waste can take a variety of forms. It can be chosen consciously and according to criteria of Fallen, that is, in the broadest sense after aesthetic Criteria are designed — that would be a active and glorious form the waste of excess money. But it can also suffered passively When its necessity is met with denial and repression — that is when it comes to us. Bataille speaks here of “catastrophic forms” of spending and cites modern war as an example of this⁴. But environmental disasters can of course also be explained in exactly this way. Benjamin Noys points out in the afterword to the new edition of Ostracized part from 2021 that this book, published for the first time in 1949, foresees the global crisis and that, precisely for this reason, there has been increased interest in it again today. Bataille's argument consists in this paradoxical phrase: Since we are unable to consciously gloriosis Practicing waste is the inevitable waste disastrous against ourselves and destroys us. Here it becomes clear that Bataille is really pursuing an enlightenment project with his economic critique:

Our ignorance has only one undeniable consequence: it leaves us sufferWhat we would do ourselves if we knew effect could. It deprives us of choosing the type of sweating that we like. Above all, however, it exposes people and their works to catastrophic destruction. Because if we do not have the power to destroy the excess energy ourselves, which cannot be used elsewhere, it destroys us like an untamable animal, and we ourselves are the victims of the inevitable explosion.⁵

This also means that ascetic principles, however well-intentioned they are with regard to the ecological crisis and as useful as they may seem, could possibly have the exact opposite effect of what they are intended to do. In any case, this risk exists when ascetic restraint is the only means to be used to avert the crisis. Especially when it's in the form of moral Drucks It remains unforeseeable where which boilers will explode and with what consequences. Here we are also experiencing quite a bit of bigotry today when capitalist production continues unabated with all its destructive consequences, but at the same time private individuals are encouraged not to shower for so long, to use electricity, gasoline, meat and packaging more sparingly, etc. I would also doubt that what we call “capitalist waste” here actually represents profitable expenditure in order to Bataille is doing. When huge amounts of electronic waste are generated every year because the mobile phone and computer industry is constantly launching new devices onto the market, or when buildings, billboards and shops are illuminated at night, then this is not done with the awareness that excess energy is being spent senselessly here — as a glorious gift without consideration, as Nietzsche's Zarathustra would say yes — but from completely rational economic calculation: There are people who benefit massively from this waste! These are therefore not useless expenses at all in a Bataille-Nietzschean sense. If you look at factory farming, for example, you are dealing with a highly efficient form of food production. From an economic point of view, it would be wasteful to give animals space and healthy food and time to live and grow. According to the criteria of increasing added value and maximizing profits, factory farming, production of more and more waste, exploitation of resources and the environment, etc. make perfect sense. Bataille's insight consists in saying: This rationalistic logic of increasing productive forces and the corresponding growth ideology will sooner or later be directed against ourselves! The excess of capitalism exists not in his wastes. Rather, these are an unwanted secondary disastrous Follow the capitalist (and Protestant!) Principle that Not at all It can be wasted that the last bit of added value that is possible must be squeezed out of every thing, every individual, every movement on the globe. We know the paradox of increasing efficiency: If more can suddenly be produced in a shorter period of time, this in no way means that production time is actually reduced, but on the contrary that more and more and more is produced. Basically, it is about the insight made in another context by Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment It was formulated: that excessive rationalism necessarily turns into irrationalism. Bataille's economic theory perspective uniquely sensitizes to the crazy paradoxes of rationalization principles. I therefore think it is more relevant than ever.

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PS: Capitalism, born out of the spirit of intra-world asceticism, to say it with Max Weber, thus produces huge surpluses, which it is no longer able to channel precisely because of its totalising efficiency logic and which repeatedly lead to catastrophic explosions. This really seems to be an original synthesis of Marx's economic and Nietzsche's cultural crisis theory. We may be able to marvel at such 'fireworks' in Ukraine right now. It may indeed be time to focus on “glorious waste” instead of asceticism in order to save the planet — that would perhaps also make the ecological movement more attractive. Do you see a similar topicality in these thoughts, Professor Schönherr-Mann?

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SM: Yes, Bataille's “general economy” is highly topical. The only question is whether anyone really wants to read this, not just among ecologists. Because strangeness is likely to increase with his understanding of nature, as it is said in The ostracized part: “I am starting from a fundamental fact: Thanks to the interplay of energy on the earth's surface, the living organism generally receives more energy than is necessary to sustain life” (1985, p. 45). It is not too little energy that is spread across the earth as a principle of life, but too much energy that nature must waste. This contradicts ecological notions of cycles, balances, and stabilities. For Bataille, on the other hand, nature does not have a constant state, but is in constant change. This comes closer to Darwin's theory of evolution than a self-image that searches for harmony with nature and likes to be based on supposedly naturally living groups of people in the jungle.

Bataille transfers this principle of natural waste to civilization. The law of economic movement is not growth, but waste — a principle that runs through history for bataille: temples and palaces, extensive festivals and excessive luxury, today at least widespread consumption in richer countries. For Bataille, on the other hand, it is a

The fact that, generally speaking, there is no growth, but only a luxurious waste of energy in various forms! The history of life on earth is primarily the effect of insane excess: the dominant event is the development of luxury, the production of ever more expensive forms of life.⁶

It is precisely this waste that is ostracized across the board in modern times — a phenomenon that did not exist before: The Christian poverty rule resulted in a church that developed pomp. Bataille refers to the Protestant work ethic, which, according to Max Weber, promoted the development of capitalism, which is concerned with efficiency and increased production. Bataille acknowledges this in Saint Eros 1957 with the words: “Producing at low costs is a pathetic human wish” (p. 56).

The Soviet Union admits to Bataille that it is concerned with the question of fair distribution of goods. In contemporary capitalism, he also notices a tendency towards waste, writing is created The ostracized part But in 1949 against the backdrop of the Marshall Plan, when the USA supported Europe with transfer payments to promote post-war reconstruction. But Bataille recognizes that this waste has ulterior motives to strengthen Europe vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and to create future sales markets. It is therefore not pure waste after all.

Nevertheless, the Marshall Plan comes close to another type of waste when Bataille remarks: “What prevents one in complete conflict from seeing war as inevitable is the idea — to reverse a Clausewitz formulation — that the economy under current conditions is its continuation by other means” (ibid., p. 210). The USA is thus waging an economic war against the Soviet Union. Waste then has a martial sense.

Bataille regards war itself as a waste. That is obvious. Because what monarchs primarily did up to the 18th century, the nation state continues. The Soviet Union is also consistently militarized under Stalin. Fascism in particular, with its belligerent orientation, is linked to monarchical waste. Does the battalion rate positively? Since the 19th century, people have hoped to achieve their goals with war and only with war: Hegel, Juan Donoso Cortés, Proudhon, Marx and Max Weber have relied on war.

At the same time, in contrast to the economized living conditions, he seems to have a lively character — this is how Carl Schmitt will see it. Bataille, however, is referring to another speaker:

War is one last game, it is a tragic game: a game in which you use everything you have, including your own life, and I think that is what Nietzsche loved about war; for him, life was essentially a game. Nietzsche has undoubtedly also had the experience that there is no game that is superior to war; it is the only game in which the bet is total.⁷

Peace-loving readers such as Arthur C. Danto would like Nietzsche to pull these martial teeth out. But Bataille lives in an extremely warlike period and is not one of the pacifists.

But he also does not count himself among the militarists, any more than among those who think they must save the world, with or without violence, and who also have a grand plan for this, including an appropriately dimensioned narrative. Instead, Bataille said in 1957: “I'm not taking responsibility for the world, in any sense. ”⁸ For Bataille, war has a certain sense as a waste, especially because it is ostracized, but nothing more, certainly not a cathartic or even a disastrous one. He has just survived the latter.

So waste, whether as a war or as a party, makes no sense. Seine general economics Rather, with waste, demonstrates the futility of the same, as Bataille said about his work in 1951: “My entire philosophy consists in saying that the most important goal in life is to get rid of the habit of always having a goal in mind” (ibid., p. 53). Who among the politically, socially or ecologically engaged people wants to make friends with such a statement? If you want to make battalions fruitful for the liberal economy and ecology, you would have to rethink these two, namely in the direction that there is no sense.

This brings us closer to Nietzsche, who, however, is more constructive, as he wants to create new value, and if you disregard his enthusiasm for war with Danto. Nevertheless, what Bataille remarked about herself in 1953 is all the more true for Nietzsche: “I would like to say that I am most proud of having caused confusion. That means having combined the most exuberant and shocking, the most scandalous way of laughing with the deepest religious spirit” (ibid., p. 132). What confusion Nietzsche has also created!

Is it surprising then when Maurice Blanchot, who is shocked by such provocations, rejects any spiritual commonality in his obituary for Bataille 1962, even in the face of Bataille's death: “Death thus has the false virtue of acting as if it gives back closeness to those who have separated serious differences.”⁹?

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PS: I think we see that Bataille's interpretation is characterized by the fact that he emphasizes and affirms the destructive, 'nihilistic' aspects of Nietzsche to others. However, he is not satisfied with mere skepticism, but gains from this nihilism the freedom to create new concepts that have lost none of their fascination power, regardless of whether it concerns the conception of non-subjective sovereignty or conscious waste as an alternative to capitalist efficiency logic. Thank you for this extremely instructive conversation!

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Sources

Battalile, Georges: Saint Eros. Berlin e. a. 1984.

Ders. : The ostracized part. Attempt at general economics. In: Ders. : The abolition of the economy. Munich 1985, pp. 33—234.

Ders. : The ostracized part. Attempt at a general economy. Berlin 2021.

Ders. : The tasks of the mind. Conversations and Interviews 1948-1961. Berlin 2012.

Ders. : Friendship and Hallelujah. Atheological sum II. Berlin 2002.

Ders. : The inner experience. Berlin 2017.

Ders. : Nietzsche in the light of Marxism. In: Werner Hamacher (ed.): Nietzsche from France. Hamburg 2007, pp. 19-26.

Ders. : Nietzsche and the desire for opportunity. Atheological sum III. Berlin 2005.

Blanchot, Maurice: Friendship. In: Ders. : The friendship. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin. P. 369—373.

Sartre, Jean-Paul: The paths of freedom, Vol. 3. Reinbek b. Hamburg 1987.

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Footnotes

1: P. 56.

2: Ibid., p. 39.

3: P. 220.

4: Cf. Bataille, The ostracized part, First part, section 4: “War as a catastrophic expenditure of surplus energy” (1985, p. 48 ff.).

5: Ibid., p. 48.

6: Ibid., p. 56.

7: Nietzsche and the will for opportunity, P. 110.

8: The tasks of the mind, P. 98.

9: Blanchot, The friendship, P. 372.

“Je suis Nietzsche!”

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A Dialogue about Bataille, Freedom, the Economy of waste, Ecology and War

Paul Stephan talked to Jenny Kellner and Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann about the interpretation of one of the most important Nietzsche interpreters of the 20th century: Georges Bataille (1897—1962). The French writer, sociologist and philosopher defended the ambiguity of Nietzsche's philosophy against its National Socialist appropriation and thus became a central source of postmodernism. Based on Dionysian mythology, he wanted to develop a new concept of sovereignty that transcends the traditional understanding of responsible subjectivity, and criticized modern capitalist rationality in the name of an “economy of waste.” With all this, he provides important impulses for a better understanding of our present tense.

“Step out of your cave: the world is waiting for you like a garden. ”¹

Teutonic Educational Paths

Almost exactly 100 years ago, Thomas Mann said in his speech From the German Republic formulated a late commitment to liberal modernity. He describes this politicization as part of a comprehensive educational path that is exemplary of the cultural history of Germany, that belated nation, which only successfully achieved its arrival in political modernity from outside in the form of a kind of liberalism. Looking back, Thomas Mann summarizes his development in a sentence that, like few lucid, brings up the German spirit: “No metamorphosis of the mind is more familiar to us than that which begins with sympathy with death, at the end of which there is a determination to serve life. ”²

It is precisely this educational path that is also found in Nietzsche's work. The highly gifted pupil and student, who became professor of classical philology at the age of 24 in 1869 and gave up this promising academic career, became a Wagner disciple who hoped for a mystical cultural revolution from the master from Leipzig. As a result of the experiences of the real “Christmas Festival” with their banal narrow-mindedness and narrow-minded banality in Bayreuth in 1876, a world collapsed for Nietzsche. This crisis gave rise to a new hope: the life ideal of the “free spirit.” Since the death-friendly sirens of music were not silent for Nietzsche, but still sound crooked, he has dedicated himself to philosophy as a decision to serve his life. Without Wagner's music, life doesn't have to be a mistake. But for life to sound good, it needs a bright philosophy as a substitute music. Nietzsche's thinking is a critique of tragedy from the spirit of vitality. In the following, I would like to very briefly recall four basic dimensions of his philosophizing vitalism.

The philosophizing body

Nietzsche's thinking contradicts the Western hierarchy, according to which the body is subordinate to the spirit. The classic understanding of truth as something immutable, substantial, universal is inverted by him. Nietzsche therefore defines his thinking as a negation of Plato's philosophy. This turn to the concrete was formulated in the 19th century through Kierkegaard's Christian-existentialist ideas and the Young Hegelian practice philosophy against Hegel's work on the conceptual system. But Nietzsche goes beyond that. His grounding of philosophy does not end in a leap of faith or in revolutionary agitations. For him, thinking is grounded in the nervous open-mindedness of the body. Philosophy is therefore an effect of body tension that is articulated in terms of the media and at the same time reflects its articulations as repercussions on the body. This leads to a philosophy that abandons its ambitions for a comprehensive system. The treatise and the treatise become the essay and the aphorism. The coherence of arguments and definitions becomes constitutively somatic. The work of the term is always also the work on the metaphor, on the sound, on the mood. For the spiritual physicality of “thinkers”³ The rule is: Philosophy becomes style and style becomes philosophy. It is not just about thinking correctly, but above all about how to think correctly fascinates. Thinking that doesn't amaze at yourself isn't worth thinking about. A realm of ideas is only worth as much as it is able to increase the wealth of the world.

Appearance instead of being

Nietzsche's body thinking lives the “path of despair” (Hegel), he not only philosophizes about it. For him, philosophy takes place as an existential confrontation with emotional pain, which always occurs when a world that was believed meant everything falls apart. Nietzsche thinks because what is is too little as commitment and too much as dissonance. The contradictions are too great. The Modus operandi This post-Hegelian somatic dialectic is an “art of transfiguration.” The central location for this can be found in a late preface to the Happy science:

A philosopher who has gone through many health conditions and does it again and again has also gone through just as many philosophies: he may Just no different than translating one's condition into the most spiritual form and distance every time — this art of transfiguration is It's just philosophy.⁴

With this idea, Nietzsche transforms his suffering life into an epochal example. He thus transfigures his existence as a whole into a philosophical existence. The philologist thus becomes a philosopher through his transfigured despair. And only as a philosopher, as a member of a way of life that allows him to repeatedly move his life away as an object of knowledge, does the former model student, model wagon disciple manage to stay alive: “I'm still alive, I still think: I still have to live, because I still have to think. ”⁵ Reading Nietzsche means taking part in a philosophy that transforms tragedy into irony.

The existentialist, unphilosophical openness of Nietzsche's philosophy finally creates a new concept of truth. Because life is surrounded by life-threatening truths, which it cannot simply leave behind, but must come through recognizing, appearances must save life from a demoralizing agony. Appearance creates being in order to be. Truth becomes second-order truth, as Luhmann would say. It is interesting that Nietzsche's concept of truth overlaps with the concept of life in biology in one essential insight: Life requires boundaries as a cell membrane from an environment and as various types of spaces in a cell. Seen in this light, Nietzsche's false truth could be understood as a cultural continuation of naturalistic evolution. His philosophy provides conceptual compartments whose membrane of illusions and transfigurative interpretations enables permeable selectivity. Philosophy as a semblance of distance keeps truth at a distance and thus allows the existence of an unlikely vitality. Nietzsche's answer to the cultural environment of an omnipresent world: The courage to live after the death of God springs from the magic of high-spirited thinking: “Make [S] o/ My old seven things/ Me seven new things. ”⁶ For example, an external world dominated by the test of God and pseudo-religious compensation (Wagner cult, communism, fascism) becomes livable by an inner world that relies on self-interest through philosophical “self-heterogenization” (Novalis). That is why Nietzsche Gottfried Benn's notorious lines could be omitted Your etudes: “Being stupid and having a job:/that is happiness”, rephrase: Being intelligent and being able to believe in yourself: that is happiness. The rest is criticism.

The critique of resentful reason

The role of cultural critic, with which Nietzsche is initially and mostly identified, is actually an effect of Nietzsche's cosmopolitan nervousness. It is too permeable for the world to be able to live without philosophy. His critique is an immune response.

In contrast to Heidegger's thinking, which interprets moods ontologically, Nietzsche sees moods as cultural artifacts. Emotional states are forms of emotion. As a cultural critic resentful of culture, Nietzsche defines Europe's basic anger as resentment. Resentment is the vengeful envy of living life for successful vitality. As an everyday phenomenon: Standing on the edge of the dance floor and instead of getting into the dance mood, start talking about the dancers, the music, the lighting, etc. Nietzsche sees this dynamic as the essential growth of Europe's feelings. This “conspiracy of the suffering against the well-off and the victorious”⁷ takes place as a debt attribution: “I suffer: someone must be to blame for this — that's what every sick sheep thinks. ”⁸

It is crucial for Nietzsche that this search for guilt is actively promoted. In the type of priest, Nietzsche recognizes professional resentment, which mobilizes the mass of frustrated people against the existence and existence of this self through reinterpretations. In return, the value of justice is exploited as a transfiguration for agitations. Successes are defamed as exploitations with noble indignation. For Nietzsche, it is time for Paul to press. Even though Nietzsche's own appraisals against Christianity itself seem to straddle again: His idea of a cultural production of feelings of retaliation from the two components of frustration measures and agitation radicals, which solidify themselves in a militant morality of justice, has an interpretatively unused power, especially for the diagnosis of the 20th century. It is necessary to learn from this what should no longer be the case in the 21st century so that the end of the story achieved with modernity and described by Francis Fukuyama does not come to an end.

Nietzsche's thinking as reverse Paulinism remains current in order to deconstruct the toxic semblance of resentful “truths.” It is particularly important in the 21st century to develop an idea of viable universalisms for the global world following the rage of lethal universalisms in the last century. Philosophically, Nietzsche thus offers a way out of the critical theory industry with its intellectualized “sympathy with death” and its managed sensitivity to the existing.

The art of living of the future

Ultimately, however, Nietzsche's thinking does not result in thinking. His idea of placing life instead of truth at the center of philosophy is consistent in that philosophy is incorporated into the art of living. The criticism of resentment is realized in a lived Yesagen as existential estheticism. For Nietzsche, this is expressed in eight aspects:

a. In post-classical terms, Nietzsche's philosophical hedonism is no longer based solely on the value of self-knowledge. He transforms Socratic self-knowledge into thankful complacency. This is a prophylactic distancing from the automatisms of resentful resentment: “Because one thing is necessary: that people are satisfied with themselves achieve [...]! Anyone who is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to take revenge for it: the rest of us will be his victims.”⁹.

b. In order to achieve one's own satisfaction, it is essential that the physiological place of thought is maintained: adequate sleep, good nutrition, but also a prudent music diet — listen to a little Wagner, a lot of Bizet! — are useful for that.

c. Nietzsche particularly emphasizes the value of selective blindness for a comprehensive affirmation of life. Only by consciously looking away, not seeing, not informing can a space stabilize for sympathetic perceptions of the world. In his empathy for empathy, the empathic person knows that there is an overload of the empathic, which coarsenes empathy, makes sentimentally inaccurate or leads to an addiction to concern. Only a world of avoidance allows cosmopolitanism to come into the world:”Look away Be my only negation! ”¹⁰

d. Nietzsche also repeatedly admonishes against unreflected diligence and “indiscriminate haste at work.”¹¹. The otium of a Vita contemplativa requires “resolute laziness”¹². Only when boredom is consciously managed does the possibility of astonishing liveliness arise.

e. For witty laziness, it is important to lose your stoic self-control again and again and to be able to entrust yourself to the impulses that drive your being. As an “eternal guardian of his castle”¹³ Are you “impoverished and cut off from the most beautiful coincidences of the soul” (ibid.).

f. Nietzsche's art of living thus offers a broad departure path for spiritual and emotional flights of all kinds. Life should develop into further, more lasting and comprehensive states through ever new reflections and transfigurations. It is thus ideally interspersed with the veins of high feelings, as “a constant like climbing stairs and at the same time resting on the cloud.”¹⁴.

g. This creates a stable sense of life in which the absurdity of existence has been converted into a beautiful openness. Before Camus, Nietzsche thinks of the idea of Mediterranean existentialism beyond Camus. The despair in “silence of the world” (Camus), in “abandonment” (Heidegger), in “disgust” (Sartre) for contingency is lightened into the “heaven of chance”¹⁵.

h. For Nietzsche, the art of living is embodied in creative education. The rich pass on their wealth. Her good news is: You too live near the beach. The great is accessible. Be good to life because the chance to live is there.

Nietzsche's “decision to make a living” thus results in Mediterranean existentialism. Reading it means discovering and learning to despise the “sympathies with death,” in yourself and in others. And it means following the appeal of common sense and trusting yourself in the impressions of brilliant life that are always available to everyone. The last transfiguration: Jumping over your own resentful shadow “into seine Sun”¹⁶.

Sources

Man, Thomas: From the German Republic. In: Collected works in individual volumes. From the German Republic. Political Writings and Speeches in Germany. Frankfurt am Main 1995, pp. 23—41.

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Footnotes

1: So Zarathustra spoke, The convalescent, 1.

2: From the German Republic, P. 22.

3: The happy science, 301.

4: The happy science, Preface, 3.

5: The happy science, 276.

6: The merry science, prelude, 1.

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

8: On the genealogy of morality, III, 15.

9: The happy science, 290.

10: The happy science, 276.

11: The happy science, 329.

12: The happy science, 42.

13: The happy science, 305.

14: The happy science, 288.

15: So Zarathustra spoke, Before sunrise.

Deciding to Serve Life

An Essay on the Meaning of Nietzsche's Philosophy

Nietzsche is generally regarded as a literary philosopher whose aphoristic nihilisms not only conjure up the death of God, but who also reinforced the dark sides of German history as a posthumous master thinker. In contrast, the following text would like to be part of the series What does Nietzsche mean to me? invite you to learn to read Nietzsche anew as the discoverer of the all-too-unknown philosophical continent of Mediterranean existentialism.

I. The 'Poland complex'

“I am a Polish nobleman pure sang [pure blood; PS], to whom not even a drop of bad blood is added, least of all German. ”¹ Apart from the superlative of this statement — which can almost be described as' Trumpesk 'from today's perspective — Nietzsche certainly had reasons to believe in his Polish origin, which was repeatedly emphasized in letters and in his estate from 1880. In any case, as he reports several times,² He is repeatedly considered one of their own by exiled Poland and had his Polish origin confirmed by a document from an alleged genealogist.³ Even his sister shares this family legend. The core argument of the two is that their family name, which sounds a bit Slavic-sounding on the first listen, is actually derived from the Polish “Nietzky.” In the 18th century, one of their ancestors was elevated to count by Augustus the Strong, but had to leave the country after his death due to his Protestant beliefs. Max Oehler only proved in the 1930s — not without, of course, the problematic interest in identifying Nietzsche as a “pure-blood” in the sense of Nazi ideology — that this entire story could be a mere fantasy that should give the family a certain exotic sparkle and, last but not least, a drop of blue blood.⁴ In particular, the pastor's family had to confirm their identity that they were descended from a martyr of Protestantism. Perhaps the legend is therefore also the background to Nietzsche's famous sentence from 377. Aphorism of Happy science:

We are, in one word — and it should be our word of honor! — good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, overburdened but also overrichly committed heirs of millennia of the European spirit: as such, they also outgrow and reject Christianity, and precisely because we out They grew up to it because our ancestors were Christians of the reckless righteousness of Christianity who willingly sacrificed good and blood, status and fatherland to their faith.

This sentence shows in particular what Nietzsche might have been another reason for his obsession with his Polish origins: In the course of the 1870s, he became more and more alienated from the Bismarck Empire he despised, subjectively and objectively, and saw himself as a wandering cosmopolitan, as a “good European,” as an eternal homeless person. His desire to be a Pole meets this need for ever greater detachment from Germany — but at the same time reveals the desire for a new home, a new identity bond. At first glance, there seems to be a certain contradiction between the two impulses — but only at first glance. On closer inspection, they turn out to be quite compatible with each other.

II. The posthumous fragment

What is the nature of this new identity, which Nietzsche only discovered in Ecce homo public, but which plays a not insignificant role in private statements as early as 1880? What does it mean to him to be a Pole? An estate fragment written in 1882 and rarely noticed in research provides information about this, which is worth looking at in its entirety:

I was taught to trace the origin of my blood and name to Polish nobles, who were called Niëtzky and gave up their homeland and nobility about a hundred years ago, finally avoiding unbearable religious oppression: they were Protestants in fact. I do not want to deny that as a boy I was no small proud of my Polish descent: what of German blood in me came only from my mother, from the Oehler family, and from my father's mother, from the Krause family, and it wanted to seem to me that I had remained essentially Polish. It has been confirmed to me often enough that my appearance is Polish; abroad, such as in Switzerland and in Italy, I was often referred to as Polish; in Sorrento, where I spent a winter, the people called me il Polacco; and especially during a summer stay in Mariánské Lázně, I was reminded of my Polish nature several times in a remarkable way: Poles came to me, greeted me in Polish confusing and confusing with one of her acquaintances, and one before whom I denied all polenthum and whom I myself as Swiss introduced, looked at me sadly for a long time and finally said “it is Still the old race, but the heart turned God knows where.” A small notebook of mazurcas, which I composed as a boy, had the inscription “Our old forders in mind! “— and I was mindful of them, in various judgments and prejudices. The Poles seemed to me to be the most gifted and chivalrous among the Slavic peoples; and the talent of the Slavs seemed to me higher than that of the Germans, indeed I thought that the Germans had only joined the ranks of gifted nations through a strong mixture of Slavic blood. It was good for me to think of the right of the Polish nobleman to overturn the resolution of an assembly with his simple veto; and the Pole Copernicus seemed to me to have made only the greatest and most worthy use of this right against the decision and inspection of all other people. The political irrepressiveness and weakness of the Poles, as well as their debauchery, were evidence to me of their talent rather than against it. In particular, I revered Chopin for freeing the music from German influences, from the hange to the ugly, dull, petty bourgeois, tappish, important: beauty and nobility of spirit and in particular noble joy, exuberance and splendor of the soul, as well as the southern gluth and heaviness of feeling had not yet been expressed in music before him. Compared to him, Beethoven himself was a semi-barbaric creature whose great soul was poorly brought up, so that she never really learned to distinguish the sublime from the adventurous, the simple from the lowly and disgusting. (Unfortunately, as I will now add, Chopin has grown too close to a dangerous current of the French spirit, and there is quite a bit of music by him that comes across as pale, sun-poor, depressed and richly dressed and elegant — the stronger slave has not been able to reject the narcotics of an overrefined culture.)⁵

One should not be fooled into thinking that this fragment is written in the past tense. This entire complex of topics plays absolutely no role in Nietzsche's estate, including his childhood and youth writings, before 1880. In fact, it seems that Nietzsche only thought of remembering this family legend because he was mistaken for a Pole.

In any case, in 1877, in a letter to his girlfriend Malwida von Meysenbug, he reported that he got along very well with two Polish ladies during a stay at the spa, without even addressing his own Poleness with one syllable.⁶ And in 1878, in an estate fragment, he wrote down, interestingly enough, the opposite of what he wrote down five years later:

Poland is the only country of Occidental Roman culture that has never experienced a renaissance. Reformation of the Church without reforming the entire spiritual life, and therefore without establishing lasting roots. Jesuitism—noble freedom is ruining it. That is exactly how the Germans would have felt without Erasmus and the humanist impact.⁷

In short: In this fragment, Nietzsche is concerned with the fiction of a continuous way of seeing that has existed supposedly since childhood, which is intended to hide the stark breaks that his thinking experienced again and again. During his student years, he was still an ardent Prussian patriot, admirer of Bismarck and sympathized with German nationalism until the early 1970s.

Why was Nietzsche thought to be a Pole in the first place? In view of the frequency with which Nietzsche reports on such encounters, this story is not implausible, however suspicious one might be of the self-stylization Nietzsche sometimes engaged in in his letters. In 1884, he met in Nice with his girlfriend Resa von Schirnhofer, who wrote a remarkable report on this encounter in 1937, which gives an extremely vivid impression of how Nietzsche affected his contemporaries. It states:

Back then, the [presumed Polish origin of Nietzsche; PS] was new to me and interested me, as I had seen characteristic shape-related heads in a historical painting by Jan Matjeko's [sic] in Vienna of a resemblance that existed not only superficial in mustache growth, which I had also said to him, which he seemed very pleased about. Because he was very proud of his Polish character physiognomy.⁸

In making this statement, Schirnhofer is particularly likely to refer to Matejko's paintings Sobieski near Vienna thought (cf. the article picture), which was exhibited there in view of the 200-year anniversary of the victory of the united Christian Army on September 12, 1683 against the Ottoman army that had besieged Vienna. At that time, the Turks suffered a crashing defeat, which sealed the fall of the Ottoman Empire. An advance by his elite cavalry commanded by the Polish-Lithuanian King John III Sobieski was decisive for the Christian victory. A Polish achievement that many self-proclaimed 'saviors of the Occident' still find difficult to recognize today. In 1883, it was in any case a veritable provocation to show this painting in view of the non-existence of the Polish nation state in Vienna, which was intended precisely as such by the nationalist Matejko. Contrary to the usual customs of the time, the painting could be seen free of charge and he had an explanatory pamphlet printed with patriotic content.⁹

The beard dress of the king and his knights is in fact confusingly similar to Nietzsche's walrus beard. And this is not an isolated case: This type of beard has a long tradition on Polish royal portraits.¹⁰ Von Schirnhofer downplays the role of beard in her report, but there is some evidence that it was he in particular who led the Poles to think of Nietzsche as one of their own. However, this must not lead to the fallacy that Nietzsche let his schnauzer grow for this reason. On the contrary, there is much to suggest that student Nietzsche may have copied his now iconic beard from the most famous wearer of this extremely eye-catching type even then — the later Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.¹¹ Prussia had therefore become a Polish beard.

This transformation is no more a contradiction than the mentioned simultaneity of Nietzsche's self-definition as a Pole and as a “good European.” Because the Poles are considered Nietzsche right now as a nation of free spirits, of “great [n] individuals.”¹². A paradoxical “anti-collectivist collective,” which is particularly notable for its remarkable constitution. When you realize that even the young patriot Nietzsche admired Bismarck above all because he regards him as a “great individual,” a political genius to his liking (a rating that remarkably continues to be found in his writings even after his break with the Reich), then it becomes clear that his beard should express one thing above all else: his own belonging to that illustrious circle “large Individuals” who, in his opinion, should direct and direct world history. So if Nietzsche's sister should claim on the occasion of the outbreak of the First World War: “Bismarck is Nietzsche in cuirassier boots, and Nietzsche, with his doctrine of will to power as a basic principle of life, is Bismarck in a professor's skirt.”¹³, that is by no means completely unjustified. But unlike in the case of Heidegger's embarrassing mustache from 1933,¹⁴ It would be wrong to infer a political affinity between the two from the visual resemblance between Bismarck and Nietzsche's beard: Nietzsche worships Bismarck and his policy of “blood and iron,” which he even revered in Beyond good and evil expressly welcomed as a southern antidote to the “spirit of the North,”¹⁵ not because it is nationalistic politics, but for similar reasons, for which he admires Goethe, Napoleon or even Copernicus and the Poles par excellence: Because they all correspond to his idea of “great individuals” who are concerned about the opinion of the “mob”¹⁶ Disregard and a truly”tall Policy”¹⁷ operate in the sense of “life” (ibid.).

III. Individualistic (anti-)politics

Like hardly any other, the estate fragment is suitable for clarifying the problems of Nietzsche's conception of the “great individual.” For now, it seems like a commitment to an almost anarchist individualism, which only has the catch of being limited to the nobility. Nietzsche even goes so far as to protect the individual's attachment to the stability of the community: For him, the fact that no state can be made with a consensus democracy is no argument against this form of political form, quite the opposite. At the same time, however, he does not plead for completely uninhibited individualism, as he associates it, for example, with German petty bourgeoisie and French decadence: His preference is not simply for individuals per se, but big Individuals whose greatness he associates with chivalry, beauty of the soul and aesthetic taste — which, however, is not an actual virtue at the same time, as he also celebrates the dissolute and irrepressible character of the 'Polish soul. ' You can see that his definition of “greatness” is rather vague here as elsewhere: Beethoven, whom he otherwise transfigured as one of the greatest geniuses,¹⁸ Is now suddenly devalued what exactly the resemblance between Chopin, Copernicus and Polish nobles should exist, is facie completely unclear. In any case, he uses himself, and this is the crux of the matter, primarily esthetic Criteria for a politic Verdict — moral and, in the usual sense, political criteria are ignored and even decisively devalued.

In this fragment, Nietzsche obviously oscillates between two moments that otherwise determine his thinking as well as his history of political influence: First, that of radical individualism, which makes him interesting for anarchists — on the other hand, that of the aesthetic transfiguration of an aristocratic “master morality,” which refers to his fascist reception. In this passage, Nietzsche is leaning towards the anarchist rather than the fascist pole — and yet it does not result in praise of universalized indiscriminate freedom.

IV. Utopia and Reality

It is hardly possible to adequately appreciate the 'Poland Fragment' if you do not consider whether it relates to any historical reality at all or whether it is a typical Nietzsche half-truth or even fiction. In this case, however, the 'fact check' is surprisingly in favour of the poet-philosopher: During the period of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic, which lasted from the 16th century until the dismantling of Poland in the late 18th century, Polish society was in fact characterized by individualism that was probably unique in history. In any case, all members of the nobility — around 15% of the population¹⁹ — met on equal footing and were able to participate equally in a political system that included elements of consensus and even council democratic elements. At the noble meetings, every member could actually veto all decisions of the meetings — which not only meant that they withdrew a resolution, but that the entire assembly had to be dissolved and no longer had a quorum. A regulation which — as you might expect — is regarded by most historians as one of the main constitutional reasons for the fall of Poland.²⁰ As early as the middle of the 18th century, even republican voices such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in response to a corresponding request made a comprehensive proposal to restructure the Polish state, were of the opinion that that “liberum veto” was absurd and had to be eliminated as quickly as possible.²¹ In fact, it not only resulted in the paralysis of all political decisions: Both the high nobility and even foreign powers made targeted use of it to corrupt the Polish state and increase their influence. A seemingly democratic settlement was in fact an instrument in the hands of the most powerful.

The time of “golden freedom” was, to put it bluntly, a time of darkest lack of freedom for all those who did not belong to the nobility and on whom the nobles were allowed to exercise their arbitrary freedom. While the noble meetings — Nietzsche is probably alluding to this — often degenerated into wild drinking binge with hearty fights, the vast majority of the population lived in abject poverty. Extraordinary social inequality, oligarchic rule behind a radical democratic façade, which Rousseau clearly laments. If you look at the political reality of old Poland, then the romantic image that Nietzsche paints of him quickly fades away. It is more an example of a particularly bad than a particularly successful political order according to all usual criteria. Only Nietzsche's aestheticized look makes them appear somewhat acceptable.

Rousseau believes that the problem is not the right of veto per se is. But, according to him, it does not work in a society that is characterized by social inequality and antagonistic particular interests and in which there is therefore no strong sense of cohesion. In particular, he believes that the development of patriotic heroism is necessary to save Poland from destruction: Every individual should be prepared to sacrifice himself for the fatherland. This idea has a superficial resemblance to Nietzsche's emphasis on chivalry and grandeur of the old Poles, but Rousseau does not involve any individualism, on the contrary: as a result of Rousseau, each individual should see himself not primarily as an individual but as a Pole. It is moral heroism, whereas in Nietzsche's case it is amoral.

Rousseau's critique of Polish society is based on pragmatic political criteria on the one hand — his aim is to preserve the Polish state — and on the other hand from the ultimate moral purpose of all politics, which he had already achieved in 1762 in Social contract articulated: A society without masters and servants, in which general and particular interest coincide. His considerations were incorporated into the Polish Constitution of 1791 — which was too radical for the surrounding absolutist monarchies so that they immediately occupied and divided Poland among themselves. (They had been able to live with the old constitution of “golden freedom” earlier.) — And they were also an important source of inspiration for the revolutionaries of 1789, who were mostly ardent admirers of the “citizen of Geneva.”

V. Conclusion

It may be recognized that Nietzsche's praise of chivalric self-will and aristocratic excessiveness is a legitimate antidote to the petty bourgeoisie of modern societies. The late Rousseau, on the other hand, propagated a nationalism that appears highly problematic from a liberal perspective and which should have an inglorious history of influence in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But the bottom line is that Rousseau is right: Consensus democracy is a model that makes no sense in an antagonistic society; Poland's “golden age”, celebrated by some liberals to this day, was in fact one of corruption, of social anarchy in the worst sense of the word and not exactly of cultural flourishing outside of Nietzsche's excessive imagination. Copernicus not only lived before the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic, it is also completely anachronistic to attribute him to one of the later established nations. He probably saw himself primarily as a subject of his employer, the Prince-Bishop of Warmia. Chopin, in turn, lived after the break-up of Poland; his father was French and France was his main place of activity.

“Old Poland” is a romantic place of longing, but it is not a desirable political utopia. Even in this fragment of the estate, which at first glance seems quite likeable, Nietzsche does not exactly show his brightest side. What is remarkable, however, is how he succeeds in both criticizing the shallowness of modern individualism and questioning modern collectivism. The tremendous potential and radicality of his thinking lies in this ability to merge very different, yes: contradictory, perspectives. But when it comes to political thinking in the strict sense of the word, it is probably better to stick to Rousseau.²²

Sources

Benne, Christian: Liberum veto. How democratic is Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism? In: Martin A. Rühl & Corinna Schubert (eds.): Nietzsche's Perspectives on Politics. Berlin & Boston 2023, pp. 161—180.

Ders: Tell yourself. In: Ders. & Dieter Burdorf (eds.): Rudolf Borchardt and Friedrich Nietzsche. Writing and thinking in terms of philology. Berlin 2017, pp. 95—111.

Dabrowski, Patrice M.: Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland. Bloomington & Indianapolis 2004.

Janz, Curt Paul: Frederick Nietzsche. A biography. Vol. I. Munich & Vienna 1978.

Oehler, Max: To the Nietzsche family tree. Weimar 1939.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Considerations on the Government of Poland and its proposed reform. In: Socio-Philosophical and Political Writings. Munich 1981, pp. 507—561.

Ders: Of the social contract or principles of state law. In: Socio-Philosophical and Political Writings. Munich 1981, pp. 269—392.

Schirnhofer, Resa from: From the person Nietzsche. In: Journal of Philosophical Research 22 (1968), PP. 250—260.

Summer, Andreas Urs: “Bismarck is Nietzsche in cuirassier boots, and Nietzsche... is Bismarck in professor skirt”. In: Journal of the History of Ideas VIII/2 (2014), p. 51 f.

Stephen, Paul: Significant beards. A philosophy of facial hair. Berlin 2020.

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Article image

Jan Matejko: Sobieski near Vienna (1883). Image source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlacht_am_Kahlenberg#/media/Datei:Sobieski_Sending_Message_of_Victory_to_the_Pope.jpg.

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Footnotes

1: Ecce homo, Why I'm so wise, 3.

2: See, for example, the report from his girlfriend Resa von Schirnhofer (From the person Nietzsche, P. 252). Nietzsche reported on this anecdote in at least five letters in the 1980s. To his important correspondent Georg Brandes He writes approximately on 10/4/1888 Right at the beginning of a short curriculum vitae: “I am usually considered Polish abroad; the list of foreigners in Nice's comme Polonais listed me this winter.” For a complete list of those letters, see my own book Significant beards, p. 101 et seq., where I have already explored in detail the connection between Nietzsche's beard and his “polentum” described here (see ibid., pp. 102—105).

3: Cf. Yanz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 1, p. 27 f.

4: Cf. Oehler, To the Nietzsche family tree.

5: Subsequent fragments 1882, 12 [2].

6: Cf. Letter from 4/8

7: Subsequent fragments 1878, 30 [54].

8: From the person Nietzsche, p. 252. In Mentioned letter to Brandes <k>Nietzsche also writes himself: “I am told that my head appears in Matej O's pictures. ”

9: Cf. Dabrowski, Commemorations, p. 59 f.

10: Consider something like Matejko's Portrait of King Stanisław Leszczyński or The list of all kings and dukes of Poland on Wikipedia. In the 20th century, the nationalist Polish dictator Józef Piłsudskian continued this tradition — and thus looks almost confusingly similar to Nietzsche in some portraits (see e.g. this photo).

11: See also how about the relationship between Bismarck and Nietzsche in general, in more detail Stephan, Significant beards, PP. 95—99.

12: Subsequent fragments 1884, 29 [23].

13: Quoted after summer, “Bismarck is Nietzsche...”, P. 52.

14: See that there pictured photo and also Stephan, Significant beards, p. 69 f.

15: Cf. Aph 254.

16: Subsequent fragments 1888, 14 [182].

17: Subsequent fragments 1888, 25 [1].

18: That's what it's called in a very typical estate fragment: “Beethoven, Goethe, Bismarck, Wagner — our last four great men.” Here Nietzsche praises “the monological secret divinity of Beethoven's music, the self-sound of loneliness, the shame while still being loud...” (ibid.) Not a word from Chopin.

19: Cf. The corresponding entry on Wikipedia.

20: For a first overview, see the corresponding article on the English-language Wikipedia.

21: Cf. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland.

22: For a somewhat more benevolent, contradictory presentation of Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Poland, cf. the corresponding research contributions by Christian Benne (Tell yourself and Liberum veto).

“Poland is Not Yet Lost”

Germany's Neighboring Country as a Political Utopia in Nietzsche's Posthumous Writings

The late Nietzsche repeatedly imagines himself as a descendant of Polish nobles. It is not just a personal whim, but also says something about Nietzsche's philosophical positioning: For him, Poland is a kind of “anti-nation,” a people of “big individuals” — and last but not least, the Polish noble republic is the political utopia of a radical democratic community, which, precisely in its failure, corresponds to his idea of “aristocratic radicalism.” Paul Stephan goes in this Long Read explores the deeper meaning of this topic in Nietzsche and questions his transfiguration of the old Rzeczpospolita: From a political point of view, this is not as desirable a model as Nietzsche suggests. Jean-Jacques Rousseau continues to lead in this regard Considerations on the Government of Poland from 1772.

Yes, that's right, I don't deny it anymore, I don't refuse, I admit it, I'm one of those who Nietzsche Zarathustra Read in bed with a flashlight at the age of 15 and felt quite attached to the ideal of superman, shall we say. Belonged among the little precocious atheists who really get on the heels of every enlightened religious teacher, was one of those who felt meant when Nietzsche wrote about the ominous “we.” And then on top of that, I never got away from it. I stuck with Nietzsche or maybe Nietzsche, writing theses about him and my dissertation. It should be noted that there were also others in between, for example Kant or Husserl, but this article is not intended to be about that, but only about the one thing I haven't gotten away from, from whom I probably won't get rid of, because thanks to his memorable quotes, a little Nietzsche sits in my head and gives occasionally — fortunately only occasionally! — add his mustard.

But why, we can ask imprudently, should Nietzsche even be a philosopher of adolescence and what does this accusation imply? For a long time, Nietzsche hoped for an appropriate response to his philosophy, at least to a slightly larger readership, but this was denied to him. In a package to mother and sister, he sent unsold copies of the Zarathustra as a “ball of books” and wrote laconically: “[S] pits him nicely in a corner and makes him mold”¹. In his books, he quarrels with readers, wishes for the right, the chosen ones and imagines himself to millions of readers in Ecce Homo, and then ask: “Did they understand me? ”². Towards the end, there is some intellectual correspondence that goes beyond the personal environment, for example with Georg Brandes, who gives Nietzsche's philosophy the nickname of “aristocratic radicalism,” which Nietzsche certainly likes,³  and who stood up for him in the later discussion of Nietzsche's questionable fame. Nevertheless, Nietzsche is no longer aware of his appreciation, because the wave sets in when he has already fallen prey to the mental transformation. But then the tide is tremendous, among writers and among artists. Gottfried Benn judges on behalf of one — his — entire generation: “He [Nietzsche] is [...] the far-reaching giant of the post-Goethean era”⁴. After all, academic philosophy must also take note of him, but in a self-reflective way, she asks: Should it do that at all? Is Nietzsche not just a “fashion philosopher” (Heinrich Rickert), a decadent, destructive aphorism writer who, instead of arguing, overwhelms readers with memorable images? Is Nietzsche not more among artists and poets, as Alois Riehl tries to show⁵ to calculate, and just a little, somewhat lagging, so to speak, among the thinkers?

Some, such as Ludwig Stein and Ferdinand Tönnies, wish to suppress Nietzsche's influence; they are afraid of the moral and political implications that they see conjured up by Nietzsche's philosophy. An amoralism is breaking ground, an unparalleled desire for intellectual destruction. Anyone who does not recognize that this philosophy must be rejected in the strongest possible terms is blind.

Among all the harsh allegations such as moral depravity, mental illness, lack of reasoning and scarce originality, there is also that of Nietzsche's attraction to young, emotionally and spiritually not yet strongly developed characters, i.e. in short — young people. Because of their fierce desire for their own genius, lack of sanity and immature emotionality, they are particularly suitable to be seduced by such a philosophy. Although the accusation of spiritual seduction of youth towards a philosopher is almost as old as philosophy itself, can we actually ask ourselves whether there isn't something that makes Nietzsche particularly attractive to young people and would possibly justify the fact that colleagues still look at their valuable Nietzsche researchers today with slight amusement?

Anyone who has read something about Nietzsche will not be able to deny that he speaks in the language of forcefulness, that he demands and warns that he follows him on his paths of thought, that he describes personal developments such as those of free spirits, which seem like an adventure. And his vocabulary is also adventurous, it goes downhill and sideways, into thickets, thinking ships on the high seas, searches for new shores and undiscovered countries, flies from peaks into the deepest chasms, is on the hunt and must fear being hunted. This thinking is a fiery existence and requires of the adept nothing less than to change one's own life, or at least to put it to the test, because “How much truth enduresHow much truth dares a ghost? ”⁶ The brave must ask himself. The metaphors remain undetermined; everyone must intervene and interpret for themselves, for example with the appeal to build houses on Vesuvius⁷ could be meant. There is something restless in Nietzsche's philosophy, something that just doesn't want to stand still, a longing for the foreign and one's own discoveries that is so great that love for the previous spiritual home can turn into contempt: “Better to die than here live”⁸. It is a departure into the unknown that only dazzling now and then gives clues as to what it is: Is it the “big politics”⁹ Or is it a life as an artist? Is it about revolutionizing the local cultural landscape or simply shaping yourself? About finding happiness in the moment or in current eternity, or not about your own work?

And isn't all of this the perfect philosophy for young people? All that urging and longing? The desire to be chosen, to have an “actual” task, and always the eloquent contempt for the comfort of setting yourself up in a homely community, i.e. the everyday adult world, where you have come to terms with yourself, is pragmatic and may have gained a realistic, but we can also say: ideless, self-assessment. And all of this is presented to you not in a long, dry treatise, but in small, linguistically brilliant bites. You can open the book anywhere and incorporate an elegant saying, nothing builds on each other, it doesn't aim in the direction of a conclusion anywhere. And there is also a lack of strict terminology that makes the philosophical books so boring, no countless definitions, no bland syllogisms. Technical terms incorrect display and the few incomprehensible passages, for example Latin, can be safely skipped. These are — even at the risk of snubbing some Nietzsche experts who claim that you could not understand him without extensive knowledge of Greek or Schopenhauer, or does the vulture know which philosophy — books that really anyone can read and anyone can interpret. They also do not require any previous knowledge of philosophy, but from time to time provide a brief overview of a previous prominent thinker, so that the young reader is immediately given the right prejudices for further studies.

Perhaps, we can graciously admit, it is quite nice when someone finds their way to rocky philosophy through Nietzsche, but what if they stick with it? Shouldn't you find your way to serious philosophizing at some point and leave the pathos-laden ballast behind, deal with the issues more soberly and calmly, and even make a productive contribution in a humanitarian society that Nietzsche — excuse me please — would have spit on?

However, admiring Nietzsche is not that easy and it wasn't even as a teenager. There were too many theses that were not only easy and mocking, there were also passages of dripping contempt for the weak, the compassionate, there were the vicious comments about women and the conjuring of leaders like the Earth has not yet seen them¹⁰. “Are you a Nietzsche fan? “I was asked when I Beyond good and evil read. No, because it's impossible to be a Nietzsche fan. On the one hand, it is impossible because there are so many contradictory theses that uncritical approval only entangles you into indissoluble contradictions that are difficult to ignore. On the other hand, it is impossible because Nietzsche has made every effort not to be found likeable, even though he himself claims otherwise. And he succeeded. Only those who are not uncomfortable with the excessive self-exaltation of Ecce Homo feels no reluctance to talk about the “misdeeds”¹¹, no aversion to the gayst of one of pigeons and lions Zarathustra¹² can be elevated to the rank of Nietzsche fan. And that must also be a rare species among Nietzscheans. Yes, you are attracted to something that appeals to your own taste, that requires “more of life” — and the one that repels you is a mystery. Which Nietzsche statement is true? The one I support or the one I reject? What did he “actually” mean? Do you think Nietzsche is the philosopher of passion? Far from it... How much does he warn in Human all too human before the Romantic period, in Zarathustra in front of the ridiculously self-deceitful projection power of poets and philosophers, how often he tries to unmask how our wishes and passions deform and — make us sick. Remember: Voltaire, not Rousseau is Human all too human dedicated.

Behind every statement about what Nietzsche actually meant, a question mark must first be placed. And your own philosophizing begins with the question. What is the evidence that Nietzsche means it that way and what against it? What do you wish for yourself when you interpret Nietzsche like that? What would you say for and against?

Nietzsche doesn't get clearer over time, it doesn't get more transparent. On the contrary, it is becoming ever more diverse, ever more varied, more and more varied. What is to be said of a pastor's son who in antichrist In the midst of a tirade against the weak, the “misguided,” Christian writes that everyone who “has theologian blood in his body [...] crooked and dishonest about all things from the outset.”¹³ stand? Is that a self-refutation, is the blood to be understood spiritually, is that crazy? Or is someone playing with the reader? Is someone who sometimes calls themselves “buffoon sausage” ironized¹⁴  describes?

Who is Nietzsche? What is his philosophy?

It doesn't leave you alone, it leads you into a maze that is less about the result of a thought than about the various directions of movement and finally also about the dead ends, the mistakes, the angles.

You can't help but notice that something you would have liked to believe in is lost. It can happen that what others find moving or uplifting makes you laugh, it can also be that skepticism is occasionally directed at yourself due to the warming feelings of sympathy and compassion. You don't get out of dealing with Nietzsche's philosophy unscathed, but perhaps with more perspectives, a wider horizon and a questionability that makes your life shimmer more exciting than any answer that would have satisfied.

Sources

Benn, Gottfried: Doppelleben. In: Autobiographical and Miscellaneous Writings Vol. 4 Wiesbaden 1977.

Riehl, Alois: Frederick Nietzsche. The artist and the thinker. Schutterwald 2000.

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Footnotes

1: Letter to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche dated 16.4.1885.

2: Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 7.

3: Cf. Letter to Georg Brandes dated December 2, 1887.

4: Benn, Doppelleben, P. 154.

5: See his monograph Frederick Nietzsche. The artist and the thinker from 1897.

6: Ecce homo, preface, 3.

7: Cf. The happy science, 283.

8: Human, all-too-human I, Preface, 3.

9: See e.g. Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 1.

10: Cf. Beyond good and evil, 10.

11: The Antichrist, 2.

12: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, The sign.

13: The Antichrist, 9.

14: Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 1.

Is Nietzsche a Philosopher for Adolescents?

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In her contribution to the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “Our main author Natalie Schulte explores the question of whether the thinker can be described as a “philosopher for adolescents” and reports on her own relationship with him.

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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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Wrangling Over The Will: The Nietzschean-Marxian Legacy

About Jonas Čeika's How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle

Nietzsche has repeatedly become the subject of political interpretive projects, from left and right. Nietzsche and Marx was seen time and again as a double team of a concept of comprehensive emancipation beyond the well-trodden paths of dominant left-wing political trends. In his book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century and in countless YouTube videos, Jonas Čeika updates this perspective for our time. For Nietzsche PopArts, Henry Holland addressed the question of what to think of this approach.