Do I love music? I don't know: I also hate them too often. But music loves me, and as soon as someone leaves me, it jumps over and wants to be loved.

(Subsequent fragments 1882)

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“I am thirsty for a master of music, said an innovator to his disciple that he would learn my thoughts from me and speak them in his language from now on: that way I will better reach people's ears and hearts. With sounds, you can seduce people into every fallacy and every truth: Who can make a sound refute? ”

(The happy science, Aph 106)

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I. From art to life

One of Nietzsche's most famous sentences is: “Without music, life would be a mistake.”¹. The sentence sounds nice for now and is suitable for calendar sayings, memes and concert announcements. It seems like a pathetic commitment to music, almost a bit cheesy; at least philosophically a bit deep. Who wouldn't want to agree with him?

But as is so often the case, it is important to consider the context in which Nietzsche expresses it. In fact, the complete sentence is: “How little goes into happiness! The sound of bagpipes. — Without music, life would be a mistake. The German thinks of himself singing God songs.” The relatively shallow statement at first glance thus gains in complexity and ambiguity: The “sound of a bagpipe” is, after all, the most trivial form of musical expression, far removed from the complex sound structures of the compositions of Beethoven, Chopin, Wagner or Bizet, for which Nietzsche is otherwise enthusiastic. For Nietzsche, “happiness” is especially a highly ambiguous goal in life. “We invented happiness”², say the “last people” in So Zarathustra spoke and thus represent a complacent hedonism that Nietzsche is a horror. Preferably a heroic, “dangerous”³ Live as a happy person — that is his motto. When you also consider how unflattering he is, especially in the Götzen-Dämmerung, about the Germans and their narrow-mindedness, this suggests an almost opposite interpretation of this aphorism than you would expect at first glance: Nietzsche may want to make fun of exactly this sentimental view and the “song-singing” god of the Germans. He would like to plead for a “Dionysian” worldview that knows how to affirm life without the sheer comfort of music and other narcotics.⁴

In this spirit, in the preface to the new edition of his first work, he takes The birth of tragedy From the spirit of music⁵ They also returned their musical emphasis, which in retrospect appears too pessimistic to him, as a bad heirloom from his former idols Wagner and Schopenhauer. For Schopenhauer, music is the highest form of art, the almost immediate revelation of the will of the world — Wagner eagerly followed up on this point of view and early Nietzsche followed them in it. “Without music, life would be a mistake” is, in itself, a Schopenhaurian sentence rather than a Nietzsche sentence. Nietzsche breaks with this aestheticism after writing in the rather embarrassing propaganda book that was completely neglected in the history of impact Richard Wagner in Bayreuth flared up one last time, from Human, all-too-human systematically. “Art,” “genius,” “comfort,” even the “Dionysian” and the “Apollinian” — all of this is never completely abandoned, but is repeatedly reconfigured to distance oneself from romanticism as far as possible. Contrary to persistent prejudice, Nietzsche is not an aestheticist in his middle and late periods of work, but on the contrary a very skeptical observer of the artists' hustle and bustle. “[N] ur as aesthetic phenomenon Is existence and the world perpetual warranted”⁶ It's still called in his debut work — the late Nietzsche already rejects the question of such a “grand justification of the world” as metaphysical. It was only as such a critic of art and of traditional understanding of art that he was able to become one of the most important philosophical pioneers of aesthetic modernism, whose protagonists are precisely united in that they no longer regard art as a comforting power outside of life, but as part of life itself. When it claims a deeper truth, avant-garde art no longer wants to comfort or edify, but rather to disturb and shock. It tends towards anti- and non-art. You may still be able to apply the concept of music as a consolation to Bizet and Wagner — from the Vienna School at the latest, the advanced music systematically creates disturbing soundscapes that are more likely to scream out “Life is a mistake” as the opposite. With composers such as John Cage, “new music” after the Second World War tended more and more towards noise and silence. A great trend that even the more radical trends of pop music (punk, metal, certain forms of rap and techno...) are unable to escape.⁷

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II. Distracting comfort, sincere appearance

So does the enthusiastic Wagner enthusiast and amateur composer Nietzsche become a music despiser? Here we again encounter the problem that Nietzsche is Human, all-too-human systematically refuses to be a systematist, and this applies in particular both to his statements about art in general and about music in particular. A veritable 'aesthetic' or 'philosophy of music, 'as described in Birth of Tragedy There is hardly any more to deduce from these heterogeneous statements apart from the above-mentioned great tendency towards art skepticism, which robs art of its elevated position and brings it back into the larger tendencies of life that the “art of works of art.”⁸ wants to replace with “that higher art, the art of festivals” (ibid.).

But let's stick with the music. In the Birth of Tragedy It still appears as a primal force that tears the subject out of normality and brings it into a pre-subjective state, as a force of liberation. For Nietzsche, listening to music allows you to experience the purity between humans and humans, animals and humans, humans and nature.⁹ That even sounds a bit socialist; but the early Nietzsche is a strict aestheticist, inasmuch as he desperately wants to see this experience banished to the realm of art. you shalt Even act out there so as not to jeopardize normality. The temporary liberation experienced in music thus virtually enables social enslavement and alienation. So you can “let yourself go” here in order to be able to function in everyday life again — and the early Nietzsche has nothing wrong with that, but that is the reason for his hopes in Wagner's Bayreuth project. The hollowed out “optimistic” ideologies of the 18th and previous 19th century, which all failed to really solve social problems, is to be replaced by a new “pessimistic” culture that no longer justifies itself rationally but aesthetically. Great tragic music in the style of Wagner as a means of defense against the proletariat and women's emancipation — UFA, Hollywood and today's club culture send greetings... The music is particularly suitable for this reactionary program because it fascinates without language, yes, without images. It can immediately seize the masses and therefore manipulate them more successfully than the other arts.

From the point of view of free-spirited Nietzsche, the situation is now very different. In addition to philosophy and religion, art now appears to him — just think of the motto of this blog — as a falsifying force, no longer as revealing a deeper truth of being. It is a way in which humans prepare the world so that they can even find meaning in it.¹⁰ In this respect, it is no closer to truth than the other modes of falsification, even though, for Nietzsche, the falsification practice of art differs in that it is deliberate and is therefore more sincere than that of religion and philosophy, which claim to express a higher truth. The artist lies without shame and the art viewer consciously enjoys the appearance of art. In this sense, art is more truthful than religion and philosophy, but its works are therefore no more true.¹¹

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III. Carmen versus Isolde

Even at this stage, however, music continues to have special significance for Nietzsche, as it is closest to the physicality of the human being. It serves to express direct bodily affects and can especially cause and intensify them. In particular in Zarathustra He therefore depreciates music in relation to language and imagination: According to him, sounds can express the physical dimension of a person better than words and images. His hero Zarathustra appears again and again as a dancer or singer¹² — and the book itself, with its three or four books, is clearly designed as a kind of symphony.

The assessment criterion for music therefore remains what kind of affects it expresses and which reinforces or even evokes it: Are they world-denying affects that comfort us and distract us from the reality of life (grief, crippling memories, resentment) — or life-affirming ones that connect us with reality and cheer us on to activity (joy, exuberance, laughter, happy forgetting)?¹³ In his last writings, Wagner appears as a representative of the first form of music. His complex harmony, which explores the limits of tonality, now appears to Nietzsche as music of beguiling and bewitching, which sets us apart imaginarily about life and provides a bland comfort. Against this background, Wagner's late turn to Christianity only appears consistent. It is music that makes us forget suffering, but doesn't really let us get beyond it. Its effect is fascination, not liberation.¹⁴

On the other hand, Bizet's harmoniously comparatively simpler, more accessible music, which today's music connoisseurs regard as almost “popular.” His easy opera carmen confronts Nietzsche polemically with Wagner's sultry “stage dedication play” Parsifal. According to him, in contrast to the decadent comforter Wagner, Bizet is “the last genius who saw a new beauty and seduction.”¹⁵ has; he wrote music for “good Europeans” (ibid.), discovered “a piece South of music“(ibid.).

What he sees in this opera could perhaps best be described as the 'cheerful realism of great passions. ' Here, life is not denied as an “error,” but rather life in all its suffering as a mistake Affirmative and life-affirming affects such as pride, joy, jealousy and love heightened to insanity are presented.¹⁶ The action is not set in a mythological parallel world, but in the reality of the 19th century; it is not Nordic heroes, but workers of a cigar factory, prostitutes, soldiers, smugglers, bullfighters who appear on stage. Carmen is a self-confident woman who consciously manipulates men and follows her passion. Compared to Wagner's “Maiden,” she's almost a feminist, even though she eventually falls victim to a “femicide.” And last but not least, it represents a southern, non-European type that the “good European” should approach in order to “get away from humid North”¹⁷ to redeem: “[I] hers merriment is African” (ibid.). It is those not numbing, but invigorating, not fascinating, i.e. desubjectizing, but inspiring, empowering music which, according to late Nietzsche, has a liberating effect and which Bassline is able to pretend to philosophy, it conflates, animates, realizes:

Have you noticed that music frees the mind? Gives the thought wings? That the more you become a musician, the more you become a philosopher? — The gray sky of abstraction as if struck by lightning; the light strong enough for all the delicate things; the big problems close at hand; looking over the world as if from a mountain. — I just defined the philosophical pathos.¹⁸

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IV. Music of Self-Affirmation

With this position, Nietzsche is very far removed from the elitist gesture of avant-gardes and new music in particular. In this sense, Mahler, Schönberg, even Cage, would be regarded as representatives of the “Wagner type”, as creators of life-denying funeral music in which the declining West feels sorry for itself.

The famous ending to Sartre's novel is more likely to correspond to Nietzsche The disgust. The protagonist Antoine Roquentin has decided to leave the small town in which he lives and go to Paris, but the feeling of weariness and world pain, of “disgust,” remains. Speaking with Nietzsche, he is trapped in resentment and nihilism and no longer sees any sense in his existence. When listening to the jazz song Some of These Days He is met with an epiphany: This song is simply there and represents a being that is not alien, that does not coldly reject the desire for meaning, but makes sense of itself — simply because it exists. This epiphany enables Roquentin to overcome his crisis of meaning. He decides to create such a work himself, which stands for itself and defies being absurd:

She sings. These two are saved: the Jew and the Negress. Saved. [...] [S] they have cleansed themselves of the sin of existing. Not completely natural — but as far as a person can. [...] The Negress sings. So you can justify your existence? Just a little bit? [...] Couldn't I try... Of course it wouldn't be a piece of music... but couldn't I, in another genre...? It should be a book [...] But not a history book: The story speaks of what has existed — an existing person can never justify the existence of another existing one. [...] Another type of book. I don't really know which — but behind the printed words, behind the pages, you would have to sense something that didn't exist, that was above existence. A story like there can be none, an adventure, for example. It should be beautiful and hard as steel and make people feel ashamed of its existence.¹⁹

In a very similar way, Nietzsche, tired of the North, hears in Carmen's song “the logic in passion, the shortest line, the hard necessity.”²⁰. It is not about comfort, not about sentimentality, romance and longing; neither finding a deeper meaning in the world nor endless grief over his absence, but his conscious creation in the knowledge that it is a creation that does not correspond to anything in the world. — In Nietzsche's sense: “And how Moorish dance appeals to us in a calming way! How in his lascive melancholy even our insatiability learns satiety! “(ibid.)

In the song, as melancholy as it may be, Roquentin feels a self-affirmation of the active power of humans not simply to come to terms with the absurdity of the world, but To make something out of yourself. This attitude enables him to throw himself back into life.

This attitude has not only an existential but also a political dimension. The affective, inspiring power of music has always served political movements of all kinds to mobilize their followers and create a community between them. A force that is “beyond good and evil,” inasmuch as even the most reprehensible movements captured their lower affects in music. But it should not be forgotten that Wagner was a reactionary and anti-Semite, and Hitler and the Nazis were enthusiastic admirers of the 'Master from Leipzig'. Here too, especially in music, the prevailing mood was a world-negating one, an obsession with death, nothingness, an obsession with obsession in the form of an eternally unsatisfied longing that finally unleashed in the practice of self-destruction. The Second World War as a production of a Wagner opera, including the final world fire.

How different do the heroic battle songs of the revolutionary movements of the same time misunderstood by Nietzsche sound. This is where exactly the affects that he affects are expressed carmen admires. Not gayst, not self-reduction, not fascination, but music of self-empowerment. The “sound” of the black emancipation movement can serve as an example of this. Black music, misinterpreted as “N*** music” even by anti-fascist avant-gardists such as Adorno²¹ always expressed the displeasure with the monotony of being a slave and the longing for freedom — but this in no resentful form, but even in the blues still carried by a deep mood of affirmation of life. Society pushes me around, my girl leaves me, I'm back on the street “like a rolling stone”²², but I still grit my teeth and keep going.

In his song Hurricane (1975) Bob Dylan set a musical memorial to the black boxer Rubin “Hurricane” Carter, who in 1967, according to Dylan's account, was wrongly convicted of triple murder by a jury of only whites, simply because it must have been the “crazy n***”. The text simply tells the story soberly. It is not about revenge, it is not whinfully lamented about the wrongs of the world, it is simply said what is the case so that everyone understands: Here someone was convicted of murder simply because of the color of their skin. While his accusers, the real criminals, drink martinis on the beach, he, who almost became world champion, has to sit in a jail cell. But there is no reason for resignation, for sentimentality, for romance. The fast-moving sound of the song makes it clear: We won't forget this injustice, but we won't sink into grief for it — because then the accusers would have won. We'll just keep fighting the racist “idiots” wherever we can. “One time he coulda been/The champion of the world” Dylan sings, “One day he could have been world champion”, but it almost sounds like “One time he's gonna be/The champion of the world” — “One day he will be world champion.” There is no time to grieve over missed opportunities.

At about the same time, 1976, it was the black singer James Brown who gave this' Nietzschean 'attitude even more clearly when he met his audience in the song with the same title asked: “Get up offa that thing/And dance 'till you feel better” — “Get up from that thing/And dance until you feel better.” With Nietzsche, we would have to move from a call for “active forgetfulness.”²³ and to “overcome yourself”²⁴ Speak: Get your A*** up again and again and despite the negative experiences you have, don't settle into a passive attitude of resentment, but stay active so that you can say over and over again: “I'm black and I'm proud.” — “I'm black and I'm proud.” ”

For Nietzsche, the liberating power of music therefore lies in its potency, us from the “spirit of gravity.”²⁵ to solve and move upwards — in order to gain the strength from this survey to destroy what destroys us: “And yet everything that breaks our truths — may break! Many houses are still to be built! ”²⁶

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The article image is by Leipzig artist Toni Braun (link). The title is Celestial urging Paul Stephan has already written about this work, partly generated with AI, elsewhere on this blog (link). Many thanks to the artist. Photo: Konrad Stöhr (detail)

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sources

Sartre, Jean-Paul: The disgust. novel. Reinbek near Hamburg 2004.

Sloterdijk, Peter: The thinker on stage. Nietzsche's materialism. Frankfurt am Main 1986.

Stephen, Paul: Boredom in perpetual excess. Nietzsche, Intoxication and Contemporary Culture. In: Dominik Becher (ed.): Controversial thinking. Friedrich Nietzsche in philosophy and pop culture. Leipzig 2019, pp. 217—250.

Ders. : Nietzsche's non-aesthetics. Nietzsche as a critic of the separation of life and art. Online.

Vogt, Jürgen: “Without music, life would be a mistake.” On a sentence by Nietzsche for music education. In: Journal of Critical Music Education, online.

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footnotes

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

2: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

3: Cf. The happy science, Aph 283.

4: For an appropriate interpretation of this sentence, see also Vogt, “Without music, life would be a mistake”.

5: Cf. Birth of Tragedy, An attempt at self-criticism.

6: Birth of Tragedy, 5.

7: On Nietzsche's transformation from aestheticist to “non-aesthetician,” see also Stephan, Nietzsche's Non-Aesthetics. On Nietzsche and techno, see Stephan in particular, Boredom in perpetual excess.

8: The happy science, Aph 89.

9: See in particular the end of the first section of the tragedy book (link), whose “socialist” appeal, for example, Sloterdijk in The thinker on stage emphasizes.

10: See e.g. So Zarathustra spoke, On the blissful islands.

11: See e.g. The happy science, Preface 4 & Aph 361.

12: “Are all words not made for the difficult? Don't all words lie to the easy! Sing! Don't talk anymore! “, it says in a prominent place (cf. The seven seals, 7).

13: See. The happy science, Aph 370.

14: See in particular Nietzsche's last major polemic against Wagner, The Wagner Case as well as my article Menke facinirt on this blog (link).

15: Beyond good and evil, Aph 254.

16: “At last the love that goes into the nature back-translated love! Not the love of a 'higher virgin'! No Senta sentimentality! But love as fate, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel — and in that nature! Love, which in its means war, at its root is Todhass The sexes are! “(The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 1)

17: The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 2.

18: The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 1.

19: Sartre, The disgust, p. 277 f.

20: The Wagner Case, Letter to Turin, 2.

21: Although this is not about the skin color of the musicians, as will soon become clear, but a specific musical style.

22: Cf. Bob Dylan's famous song.

23: On the genealogy of morality, II, 1.

24: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, About overcoming yourself.

25: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, The spirit of gravity.

26: So Zarathustra spoke, About overcoming yourself.

“Music, your advocate”

Nietzsche and the Liberating Power of Melody

After Christian Saehrendt took a primarily biographical look at Nietzsche's relationship to music on this blog in June last year (link), Paul Stephan focuses in this article on Nietzsche's content statements about music and comes to a somewhat different conclusion: For Nietzsche, music has a liberating power through its subjectivating power. It affirms our sense of self and inspires us to resist repressive norms and morals. However, not all music can do that. With late Nietzsche, this is no longer Richard Wagner's opera, but Georges Bizet's opera carmen. Our author recognizes a similar attitude in Sartre's novel The disgust and in black popular music, which is not about comfort or grief, but affirmation and overcoming.

We are not the kind of people who first think between books, at the instigation of books — our habit is to think outdoors, walking, jumping, climbing, dancing, preferably on secluded mountains or close to the sea, where even the trails Get thoughtful.¹

I. Standing

Whoever is standing has something to say. At the very least, this position should reflect a precise position that claims validity in the exposed situation of upright. The Agora, the meeting place of the ancient polis, is the prototypical place of representation. Whoever stands wants to have a say. Hannah Arendt saw in a public voice the implementation of Vita activa as an essential dimension of the human being. The quest for fame through successful public interaction legitimizes citizenship, “natality.” Such an interaction knows how to successfully weave the impulse of the new, which comes into the world with every life, into the already existing garb of the usual in such a way that the impulse to contribute innovatively is also stimulated in others. The recumbent “being to death” of mortals, which their teacher and lover Martin Heidegger adopted as the dominant mode of being, takes the place of Arendt the struggling being, which is based on the birth of the standing person. Every walk through the streets and squares of a city teaches about the “freedom to be free” (Arendt). Like a hidden pantheon, urban places remind us of the glorious ancestors after whom they are named. For standing, this means: We stand up in the light of the famous people who have stood up successfully before us.

II. Sitting

Who is standing does not understand. He wants to make an impact. If you sit, you don't want to have an effect. He wants to understand. Those who sit do not represent points of view, but think about them, at least in traditional European areas. If you look at Asia, the inactive activity of just sitting — for example that of “zazen” from the Japanese centre—gains in particular the train of not thinking. In contrast, European zazen is realized in an intellectual collection that creates well-thought-out connections in conceptual coherence. The immediate subsides and a reflection sets in, which learns to embrace broad topics. The proximity of everyday “talk” (Heidegger) gives way to concentration which, according to the pathos of sedentary thinking, explores the essential things. The typical tool for seated thinking is the book. The person sitting usually sits to read and write. Reading writing and writing reading are the elementary movements of sedentary thinking.

The result of European sedentary thoughtfulness could be described as a “sitting point” if the word didn't sound too funny. When sitting, thinking gains an initial transformation. It creates extraordinary deceleration and concentration, which invents and discovers new levels of abstraction through dialogue with absent spirits, conveyed through the book. The sitting starts with Vita contemplativa. Philosophically, sitting is like dying lucid in the midst of everyday life.

When the person sitting up again, he returns to the world of viewpoints. Ideally, he does this not just to represent his old views with new impetus. Anyone who gets up philosophically from sitting down stands up with reinforced enlightenment sympathy. This is traditionally expressed through an unusually complex form of rhetoric, which wants to share its reflexive differentiation gains. Sitting brings prudence to standing.

III. Walking

When you leave, you don't represent any points of view, you don't just think about them, you think about thinking about points of view. With Nietzsche's approach of physical reflection, thinking achieves the mode of true walking for the first time. His idea of relating body and mind as a form of reflexive nervousness emerges as a suspicion of sedentary thoughtfulness and its primary color of gray. Nietzsche's thesis: The immobility of sitting leads to the hypertrophy of a thoughtfulness that removes life too much from the mindset mind:

As little as possible sit; do not believe a thought that was not born outdoors and during free movement — in which the muscles do not also celebrate a party. All prejudices come from the intestines. — The sitting meat — [...] the actual sin against the Holy Spirit.²

For Nietzsche, sedentary thinking is too unvital to be able to think objectively about life. The exuberance and reactivity of the presence of mind is lacking. In the slowness of contemplative sitting, the vast horizons and surprising connections are quickly lost sight of. In particular, sitting lacks a lively presence. The phenomena evaporate before his spectator reflection. Thinking as a nervous reflection that gives one's moods a say is an affront to sedentary thinking that is rationalized away as irrationality.

In contrast, the walking thinker knows that thinking does not think. They are states that think. Seated thinking is uptight thinking that considers everything but its own stiffness. Nietzsche thus extends the universal romantic irony of the rigid text to a physiological irony versus a thinking identity. Just because you're there in a variety of ways can you be diversity-minded. He turns Descartes' “Cogito ergo sum,” “I think therefore I am,” around: “Sum ergo cogito.”

With Nietzsche, philosophy thus acquires an expanded objectivity as physical coherence. The successful theory is walking that becomes experienced and is flexible enough to explore and illustrate it linguistically. Nietzsche's definition of Vita contemplativa is therefore constructive. The “thinkers”³ Evolve and condense reality through its “vis creativa” (ibid.), its creative power. Ideally on the go as a “walk with thoughts and friends”⁴. Nietzsche even dreams of a wandering urbanity that replaces his previous dreams of a music-mythical Bayreuth. After his Wagner discipleship, he is interested in a culture of Enlightenment with “quiet [s] and wide [s], extended [n] Places [s] to think about, places with spacious long hallways [...] [W] ir want within us go for a walk when we walk in these halls and gardens. ”⁵

IV. Migration as emigration

From a cultural therapy perspective, Nietzsche's walking thinking recognized that a society that does not produce strolling intellectual culture is upset by resentful compensation. A sedentary enlightenment ultimately falls prey to agony, which is unpleasantly encouraged by moralizing by repeatedly mobilizing points of view, supported by irrational myths. Anyone who does not cultivate walking will have to endure marching. It is this poisonous compensation for a lack of modern intellectual mobility that led Elias Canetti in 1960 to a profound interpretation of the German nature and his romantic “sympathy with death” (Thomas Mann): The army was the mass symbol of the Germans. But the army was more than the army: it was the marching forest. In no modern country in the world has the forest feel remained as lively as in Germany.⁶

Anyone who doesn't want to endure marching emigrates. Therefore, the mobility of enlightenment is wandering. You hike to be able to walk. And it is only when you reach new levels of walking that you are able to emigrate from the resentments that have persisted with you. As a wanderer who distances himself doubly — from the customs of a public sphere and from his internalized imprints — the philosopher thus becomes the guardian of being bright. While Hegel only formally devots what he calls the “path of despair,” it becomes an existential truth for Nietzsche. Crises of despair lead to overcomes that result from changes of opinion, crystallize in revaluations and are ultimately intended to assume the habit of reshuffles. Dialectics becomes an “art of transfiguration”⁷, which is free from the burden of “commanding Werthurtheile []”⁸ and wants to free her feelings of life internalized in flesh and blood. This includes being able to endure the freezing cold of lack of social closeness in order to gain new vitality. For Nietzsche, hiking has the intensity of mountaineering because it has to overcome itself and also emigrate out of itself. Nietzsche's birth of the idea of superhuman humanism originates from the spirit of an existence in ice and high mountains, whose movens a “migration in Forbidden”⁹ is. Nietzsche's metaphor for this dimension of wandering thought is alpine:

that ices It is near, loneliness is tremendous — but how calm all things are in the light! How freely you breathe! How much you feel about yourself! — Philosophy as I have understood it so far and Did you live, is voluntary life in ices and High mountains [...].¹⁰

Nietzsche acclimatization to mountain air means a strict selection of diet, place of residence and type of recreation. To get away from Schopenhauer's pessimism, Wagner's romanticizing tragedy, Prussian-German militarism and creating the mood for “pathetic and bloody quackery.”¹¹ To solve revolutions, the life-walker Nietzsche listens intensively to Bizet, travels to Sils and Genoa, follows a strict diet — “No snacks, no café: Café darkens. Thee Only beneficial in the morning”¹² —, lives in secret. Nietzsche's philosophy as a “decision to serve life” (Thomas Mann) in the mode of wandering is less a “work on concept” (Hegel) than a culture of the physical. In doing so, cultural psychologist Nietzsche abhors “the hope of sudden Recovery”¹³ and votes for gradual change through small doses. Life reform of one's own life instead of political revolution against the system:

If a change is to be as profound as possible, the remedy is given in the smallest doses, but incessantly over long distances of time! What can be done big all at once! So we want to be careful not to exchange the state of morality to which we are accustomed with a new appreciation of things head over heels and with violence — no, we want to continue living in it for a long, long time — until, presumably very late, we become aware that the new value estimate has become the predominant force within us and that the small doses of it, That we'll have to get used to from now on, have created a new nature within us.¹⁴

From Genoa, Nietzsche writes of the successes of his post-heroic loneliness:

When the sun is shining, I always go on a secluded rock by the sea and lie still outside under my parasol, like a lizard; that has helped my head again several times. Sea and pure sky! How did I torment myself before! Every day I wash my entire body and especially my entire head, in addition to heavy tossing.¹⁵

V. Wandering as overcoming

However, Nietzsche's mobility of migration adds another dimension to this kinetics of thought. Just being alive on a therapeutic journey and working on your resilience is not enough. Life wants vitality. In order to sustain itself, it must increase its spirits. Walking thinking may be courageous; it is only through hiking that one becomes cocky. The hiker Nietzsche realizes: The philosopher's bottled oxygen in the lonely mountain air is self-enthusiasm as a desire to discover a new world. Hiking becomes an existential approach to existential topics.

Since Nietzsche sees and reflects on a constitutive grounding of the mind in the body, his philosophy must address his existential tension. Philosophy doesn't come from the skin that makes it think. Nietzsche's “perspectivism” therefore has narrow limits. It follows the paths of the basic moods in which you live. For Nietzsche, this means that he must philosophize the bipolar vitality of his life. His thinking is born in the interplay of his minimum and maximum vital signs:

From the hospital look to healthier concepts and values, and vice versa from the abundance and self-certainty of rich Looking down on the secret work of the décadence instinct — that was mine longest exercise, my actual experience, if anything, I became a master at it.¹⁶

Nietzsche's wandering means experimenting with the constitutional conditions of an immigrant living mind. Despair is not simply resolved; rather, it is sought out. Nietzsche's ethos of dangerous philosophy invents language games that emerged from despair games. Different than in Heideggers The dirt road — as a manifesto of intentionally idyllic walking in the “space and time” of horizontal areas — Nietzsche's wild contemplation gains verticality. Nietzsche's hiking becomes a kind of laboratory for altitude experiments that research how far you can go. In a recent publication, Sloterdijk points out that the phenomenon of the vegetation line in particular must have been a significant inspiration for Nietzsche in order to gain an expanded understanding of nature and human existence during his “margins of liveliness.”¹⁷ It is precisely because Nietzsche does not keep both feet in the middle of life, but always revisits this dead zone of existence beyond life and this dead zone of existence, that life is rediscovering for him. In this way, the plight of wandering becomes the virtue of a more precise philosophy of life. A successful reception of his findings and “true ecstasy of learning”¹⁸ Because of his philosophy, Nietzsche believes that it is only possible for readers who can understand his range of ups and downs in life, “because I come from heights that no bird has ever flown, I know chasms into which no foot has yet strayed” (ibid.).

Nietzsche's dangerous meditation on the intermediate realm of absolutely inhospitable rockiness of existence and “infinite [r] abundance of light and depth of happiness” reaches the summit¹⁹ in his idea of the “eternal return of the same”, which, according to his own statement, came to him in August 1881 on the Pyramid Rock of Surley. With this idea of a modernized cosmos, Nietzsche is trying to overcome the biggest challenge of the wanderer who emigrated from the lowlands, which lies in the fact that the true is understood as the heavy, serious, tragic — think of the European mega imprints of Plato's melancholy concept of “anamnesia” and Augustine's gloomy idea of “original sin” — and passively endured. The pain of truth and the truth of pain are not denied. However, the pain is no longer being substantialized. Saying yes to a cosmos that allows everything to recur again in the same way affirms a life of wandering with an entrepreneurial commitment to actively shape the oscillation of arrival and overcoming as a new basic form of a post-metaphysical life that strives to do its best. Without success, life is a mistake, but failure is part of the business of being. Being there, sticking with it, testifying more consciously is everything:

Everything goes, everything comes back; the wheel of being rolls forever. Everything dies, everything blossoms again, the year of being runs forever.

Everything breaks, everything is reassembled; the same house of being is built forever. Everything divides, everything greets each other again; the Ring of Being remains faithful to itself forever.

Being begins in every instant; the sphere there rolls around every here. The middle is everywhere. Crooked is the path of eternity.²⁰

Nietzsche's idea of an eternal return is a post-metaphysical thought experiment that provokes existential resilience in an era marked by the death of God. With this, the politically disastrous pain compensation from the redemptive whole other and from saving Advent, the hoped-for return of Christ, lose their charisma.

However, physical thinking, which introduced feeling into reflection, must admit that the time for general post-metaphysical mobility has not yet been reached. Standing too loudly, sitting loudly, indignant marching and wounded emigration dominates. Resentment still reigns. A discouraging philosophy of culturally critical suspicion sets the tone.

VI. Hiking as flies

Nietzsche's wandering leaves his time behind in order to be able to dive into it again. The difficult mobility that hiking requires as an emigration from surviving influences inspires thinking just as the attempts to carry out hiking as an experiment that shows how far you can go. The result is a kind of physiological dialectic: When wandering, life that thinks and thinking that lives change. Nietzsche recognized that hiking, which affirms itself in its severity, changes its aggregate state. Now thinking no longer runs the risk of just taking the form of a beatiful stroll or a frivolous cheer up. Thinking comes to a fluid mode as thinking outside of oneself. As overthinking, philosophy becomes dancing and ultimately carried by one's own thermals into flying. The aim of hiking is to fly. The wanderer and his shadow become an aviator and his sky. Paths become runways. Looking back, Nietzsche can say: “And all my wandering and mountaineering: it was only an emergency and a remedy for the clumsy: — fly I alone want all my will.”²¹.

Migration creates a fly which, if successful, becomes halcyonic. The last way of thinking is halcyonics. The highest kinetics of thought thus repeats the calmness of ancient thought as a show in a more reflective way. There is no longer a need for a pre-modern god and no more modern self-encouragement. Existence is enough. The contingency, which in modern existentialism is philosophically emotionalized as “disgust” (Sartre), as the “absurd” (Camus), as “abandonment” (Heidegger), is shown by hiker Nietzsche as “heaven coincidence” (ibid.). This drains the physiological cause of resentment. When existence is no longer interpreted “fundamental-ontologically,” as something permeated by pale and absurd basic sentiments, the tragic interpretations of being lose their validity. Where Heidegger suggests that “deep boredom in the abysses of existence like a silent fog goes back and forth”²² And shows the arch-conservative's clear will to philosophize a new state of emergency out of this phenomenon as an “emergency of needlessness,” Nietzsche's halcyonism points to the innocence of contingency. Boredom as a lull in life is rather a phase that precedes new winds. No swirling fog fundamentally dips existence in pale gray. Rather, it is always open like a vast field in which, as in the deep light of late summer days, world tensions arise, such as floating, silver spider threads that can be condensed into ideas. Thoughts become a kind of air plankton. Halcyonic contingency discovers the reality principle as unexpected lightness. The clearest concentration of the high notes praising thinking is perhaps found in the section “Before Sunrise” in Zarathustra. In it, the wandering Cogito praises the space that makes it fly. Altitude as a distance from the social you entails a new closeness to heaven, as a condition for the possibility of freedom. Nietzsche's thinking, which has wandered freely, begins to sing when it comes to and from these levels of thought:

Oh heavens above me, pure! Lower! You pit of light! Looking at you, I shiver with divine desires.

To throw me in your height — that is my Depth! To hide me in your purity — that is my Innocence! [...]

We have been friends from the very beginning: we have grief and reason in common; we still have the sun in common.

We don't talk to each other because we know too much — we keep silent, we smile at what we know. [...]

Together we learned everything; together we learned about ourselves and smile cloudless: —

— smile down cloudless with clear eyes and from miles away when coercion and purpose and guilt steam like rain among us.

And I wandered alone: Wes Did my soul starve in nights and astray paths? And I climbed mountains Whom Have I ever looked for, if not you, on mountains?

And all my hiking and mountaineering: it was only an emergency and a remedy for the clumsy: — fly Alone wants my whole will, in thee Fly in!²³

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sources

Canetti, Elias: Mass and power. Frankfurt am Main 1980.

Heidegger, Martin: Basic concepts of metaphysics. Frankfurt a.M. 2001.

Sloterdijk, Peter: Who hasn't thought gray yet. Berlin 2022.

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Source of the item image.

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footnotes

1: The happy science, Aph 366.

2: Ecce Homo, Why I'm So Clever 1.

3: The happy science, Aph 301.

4: The happy science, Aph 329.

5: The happy science Aph 280.

6: Cf. Canetti, mass and power, p. 190 f.

7: The happy science, Preface, paragraph 3.

8: The happy science, Aph 380.

9: Ecce homo, preface, 3.

10: Ibid.

11: Morgenröthe, Aph 534.

12: Ecce Homo, Why I'm So Clever 1.

13: Morgenröthe, Aph 534.

14: Ibid.

15: Letter to letter to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche, January 8, 1881.

16: Ecce Homo, Why I'm So Wise 1.

17: Cf. Sloterdijk, Who hasn't thought gray yet, p. 207 f.

18: Ecce homo, Why I write such good books, 3.

19: Ecce homo, preface, 4.

20: So said Zarathustra, The Recovered, 2.

21: So Zarathustra spoke before sunrise.

22: Heidegger, Basic concepts of metaphysics, P. 119.

23: So Zarathustra spoke before sunrise.

On Dubious Paths ...

An Outline of Nietzsche's Concept of Wandering

Perhaps it is Nietzsche's main philosophical achievement that he described thinking as a process that happens in person. For him, reflection is a cooperative tension of body and mind. The mind is grounded in the nervous cosmopolitanism of the body. Nietzsche's conversion of Christianity: The flesh becomes word. This shows thinking in gestures. The following is intended to provide a sketch which indicates the main types of these reflexive gestures. This is intended to illustrate what it means when Nietzsche repeatedly describes himself as a wanderer. An intellectual tour that leads from standing and sitting as basic modes of traditional philosophy to walking, (out) wandering and halcyonic flying as Nietzsche's alternative modes of liberated thought and life.

arrival

While I'm being driven through the streets of Hanoi in a strapless taxi staring with dirt and smelly of smoke and through the smudged window pane (oil, butter?) Trying to look outside, I have slight doubts as to whether this traffic zone was a happy choice. Nietzsche was a hiker, he wrote wonderfully seductive sentences about traveling on foot. However, the appeal of hiking never took hold of me. I don't like to ride mountains first up and then down again. In most cases, the hiker does not even look up at all the colorful, billowing treetops and the azure blue sky, but at the ground. To the stones and root traps that even the most unusual vagabond doesn't want to stumble across. It is even worse to hike in company or on well-visited hiking trails. Always looking at the previous hiker's butt, these slow eggs frustrate me after just a few minutes. Walking in company creates evil and misanthropic thoughts that are directed against the faster and fitter before us. I also wouldn't like to be in front of me if I knew that someone like me was walking behind me with such thoughts.

Hiking to viewpoints on beautiful summer days reminds me of ant colonies running into a high-altitude cul-de-sac — what are they looking for up there? There is nothing to eat — take a look around — “Oh that's nice, but it was worth it, isn't it? “— to then scurry down the path again, after the woman in front again, then to a hostel and the next day to another hill. A pretty pointless undertaking seen from an assumed bird's eye view, which I don't want to recommend in the long run.

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Rolling language family

voyages I like it though. Rolling travel on wheels, more precisely on a bicycle. In doing so, I am committed to a relatively new German tradition. You see bicycle travelers abroad — usually other European countries — usually two puffing, sweaty figures in cycling dress, with squeaky orange bicycle bags, water bottle on the middle bar and cell phone on the handlebars. Then you can be sure that these are Germans. If not, then it is a Swiss, something like an ideal German, less often you can also find an Austrian, Belgian or Luxembourger riding a bicycle, but I have never met anyone from Liechtenstein before. Nevertheless, I am inclined to believe that there must be something in the language that tempts constant, tenacious and certainly also somewhat monotonous movement. The German-speaking Waldschrat has left his pine forest, put on his padded cycling shorts and conquered the asphalt.

Now you will have to admit that you will also have to cycle up mountains now and then, move rather slowly just like when hiking and, if you travel as a couple, there will be a woman in front again or something. Yes, I admit that and I prefer the mountains on bike trips from below and from afar, so I can enjoy them wonderfully. But once you have forcibly worked your way up the old climb, then at least you can heat it down afterwards and let your thoughts fly freely.

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Flowing traffic

Perhaps, as I think in a taxi honking over a red light, I should have listened more to Nietzsche and tried hiking again, because Hanoian traffic doesn't exactly tempt you to contribute to excess. And whether I will actually be able to get out of the city of eight million inhabitants alive by bicycle seems to me no longer a question that I absolutely want answered. Traffic lights are used more for decorative purposes; the horn's acoustic signal is far more important: “Attention here I come”. After all, traffic in the city center is slow, because everything that moves, regardless of whether pedestrians (usually tourists), cyclists (usually poorer dealers), scooter drivers (the most dominant and largest crowd), car drivers (privileged but unfortunately not agile enough to prevail against the gap drivers), moves on the street. There are also sidewalks in Hanoi, but they are used for parking and when they are not parked, they are occupied by the shops behind them as additional sales and seating space. If you want to cross a street, stick to the following rule: Walk slowly and evenly into flowing traffic, don't stop and don't turn around, traffic will simply continue to flow around you and let you live (probably).

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Transport individualists and ghost drivers

For Nietzsche, Asia is governed by the rules of an ant state in which everyone knows their role and position, which is full of willing, synchronized labor slaves. Nietzsche did not differentiate between China and Vietnam and other Asian countries. He prefers to write about China and “Chinese”, which means mediocrity, lack of individuality as well as modesty and other, in his opinion, reprehensible virtues.¹ Let us not dwell on the fact that Nietzsche was by no means a philosopher of political correctness. He wouldn't be today and if you imagine that there was a mood that met this term even back then, Nietzsche missed the socially appropriate and decent tone of voice even during his lifetime. For him, some aphorisms suggest, Asia begins in Russia and then Asia does not stop for a long time. There aren't many differences. Asia is a metaphor and not a reality. Were Nietzsche to visit today's Hanoi, the reality would surprise him. The country, which sees itself as a communist — and even when it comes to communism and anarchism, Nietzsche thinks of harmonization — consists of transport individualists. Everyone is different, everyone makes their own decisions. It is difficult for a European to be able to endure so much individualism. Shouldn't you at least complain about the “ghost drivers” in traffic and loudly reprimand them, the ones who simply drive in the opposite direction with their fully loaded vehicle or scooter because they want to turn left right away? But how are you supposed to grumble, how to complain when the horn, that full-tonous instrument of rebuke, has been robbed of its original purpose and reduced to a mere descriptive reference?

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“This today, that tomorrow”

The set of professions that Vietnamese can choose from is also individualistic. In the morning he is a plumber in a scooter workshop, in the evening he is a cook. She works as a hairdresser, but only for a few hours, because her shop is also well equipped to do the job of a locksmith. Foot massage in the back room, tea shop in the entrance area, no problem. Diversity rather than unity is all the more true in culinary terms. There are endless stands of “mini restaurants” shooting out of the ground in the evening. Plastic chairs and tables are placed on the street from some business premises in the back rooms of workshops, clothing stores, shoe stores. gas cookers, pots, food and ingredients as well. Smoke and steam from various exotic dishes are rising everywhere. What forms, permits, notices, certificates and special permits would you have to obtain in good old Europe to be both a workshop and a restaurant? One of them is complicated enough. Because in a country that wants to turn its normal population into employees, the “small business owner” is not welcome. I wonder who pays taxes here? And if so, for what? What the state is missing out on in this way is something that people in our latitudes do not want to tolerate in order to feed themselves.

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Imagination from the first floor

All private buildings could also be seen as a balancing act between dream fulfillment and permanent temporary arrangements. Although there is typical architecture, narrow, long, tall buildings, which, from a collectivistic point of view, could be arranged well and gladly in rank and file, but which constantly want to punch out of balance through their artistic individual design: There the wrought-iron balcony, here a Virgin Mary set in a bay window, the imitation marble over it, the cinnamon-colored pillars. In front of the carefully and imaginatively designed façade, the garage on the ground floor is unbeatable in terms of versatility and ugliness, the consistent proof that “form follows function” in no way leads to an appealing aesthetic. Pragmatism on earth, imagination from the first floor to the top floor. Nietzsche might have liked the Vietnamese vertical?

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Bridges made of confection

I must admit that there is always a problem when it comes to dialogue with the deceased. How can you be sure that he is not talking to himself? Where do our interpretations end and where do the projections begin? I would have liked to ask a specialist. And Vietnam would probably have been a suitable country for that. Because maintaining contact with deceased ancestors through altars and offerings is omnipresent. If the bridge between the kingdoms of the hereafter and this world is built from fruit, canned tea and sweets, perhaps with so much delightful materiality, the hereafter cannot degenerate into a peel, pale and unbelievable illusion?! The merchant's boy kneels in awe before the altar, prays or negotiates. He then removes the dragon fruit from the altar and gives it to me as a gift from the dead. I simply did not dare to ask.

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Link to part 2 (Cambodia)

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The pictures for this article are photographs by the author.

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footnotes

1: See for example: M206, FW 24, FW 377, JGB 267, GM I, 12.

Traveling with Nietzsche through Southeast Asia I

Vietnam

Our author Natalie Schulte spent nine months cycling in Southeast Asia. She traveled 5,500 km through Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Malaysia. In the luggage for motivation and discussion was as usual So Zarathustra spoke. But Nietzsche's thoughts were also frequently present beyond this work. In her short essay series, she talks about her travel experiences with and without Nietzsche.

I. Foucault — the thinker of our time

There is little doubt that Foucault was a Nietzschean. This is what Jan Rehmann says in the first edition of his recently published and also translated into English¹ study Postmodern left-Nietzscheanism firmly: “Foucault has known himself so consistently and frequently as a Nietzschean from the beginning to the end of his letter that his 'fundamental Nietzscheanism” is hardly disputed in literature.” (p. 19) He substantiates this on the basis of the following collage of Foucault's self-confessions about Nietzsche:

“Nietzsche was a revelation for me” (1982), “we needed his figures [...] of superman and eternal return to wake up from the sleep of dialectics and anthropology” (1963), “an invitation to question the category of the subject and to wrest it from him” (1978), his announcement of the end of man “has assumed prophetic value for us” (1966), his “presence is always more important” (1975), “Nietzsche and Heidegger, that was the philosophical shock”, “but finally the former prevailed” (1984).²

Similar tributes could also be found in the works of Foucault's philosophical colleagues Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, who were equally involved in the project of “post-structuralism,” but it is Foucault's interpretation that has had the most decisive influence on the familiar view not only of Nietzsche, but also of the world, far beyond academic discourse. The best proof: The omnipresence of the word “discourse” itself, which he played a leading role, although defined very differently in the various phases of his work.

Not least in 1966, together with Deleuze, Foucault published the French translation of Giorgio Collis and Mazzino Montinari's new edition of Nietzsche's writings, which is now regarded as a scientific standard and milestone in the “denazification” of Nietzsche.³ In particular, she made Nietzsche's supposed main work The will to power, from which Deleuze in his study Nietzsche and philosophy had quoted excessively from 1962, as fiction identified Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche and her collaborators and replaced it with a heterogeneous plurality of countless fragments of the estate. However, Foucault's essay was particularly effective Nietzsche, genealogy, history from 1971, a kind of program of his Nietzsche interpretation as well as his own philosophical project: Nietzsche is presented here as a radical critic of all fixed structures of meaning, as a cheerful nihilist who has put an end in particular to the myth of a uniform subject through its dissolution into contingent historical games of forces.

In recent years, I have repeatedly taught seminars on Foucault's writings and in particular his Nietzsche interpretation at various colleges and universities, and in doing so I have repeatedly come across a remarkable fact: Despite the obvious gaps in his theory — such as in particular how he himself is able to rescue this theory from the maelstrom of power, and whether he does not implicitly himself presuppose normative standards, a concept of truth and even of subjectivity —, his theses are usually written by students without “swallowed” major objections, albeit without real enthusiasm, and defended them against the criticism I have often put forward. And I feel the same way myself — after many years of working with Foucault: Although I rationally recognize that he is secondary as a philosopher — caught up in hopeless self-contradictions and actually just an adept of Nietzsche and Heidegger in everything original — I feel a peculiar familiarity when reading his writings that stands in a strange contrast to Foucault's radical rhetoric, and that is not just the result of my reading.

We live, especially when we are in discourse — that cursed word! — the social and cultural sciences and of everything that somehow sees itself as “critical” and “left,” in a disposition — i.e. a strategic discourse formation, as the master calls it — which has been shaped by Foucault more fundamentally than by probably no other thinker. No one developed such a pure version of “postmodernism,” which is so compatible with everyday intuition, and which continues to define the cultural climate up to the present day. No one, except perhaps the sister mentioned above, achieved so much, for better or for worse, to popularize Nietzsche and his continued work; and that after his seizure by the Nazis and Fascists after 1945 had actually so fundamentally disavowed him. When we read Nietzsche, we always read him through Foucault's glasses — yes, we go through the world through Foucault's eyes, he is the theorist who defines our time like no other.

This is not necessarily meant in terms of a causal relationship. Foucault was above all a good diagnostician who, in an almost chameloid way, in this respect not unlike the “seismographer” (Ernst Jünger) Nietzsche, captured the basic sentiments of his time and brought up, at least halfway, plausible terms; terms such as “discourse,” “power,” “delusion,” “genealogy,” “dispotive” and many others that were not primarily based on their theoretical Coherence or philosophical depth seem plausible, but precisely because they correspond to those moods. And it is precisely those moods of an exhausted modernity, tired of its former ideals, that define our time to this day, even though we have for several years been a certain revival of objective truth beyond the indiscriminate flickering of discourses (keyword: climate and corona) and the so-called “great stories” by Foucault's colleague François Lyotard, the end of which defined “post-modern knowledge,” experience — just think of the newfound pride in the “free West” or the revival of those thought long ago dead nationalist and imperialist narratives. We certainly live according to postmodernism, but this “after” has not yet been finally decided. That is precisely why it is worth taking a closer look at Foucault's “new book”.

II. Between System and Intoxication — An Iconic History of Philosophy

Foucault wrote the over 400 pages long unfinished manuscript The discourse of philosophy According to the editors in 1966. It is eerie to hold the “new book” of a dead person in his hands who, like Kafka, refused to accept any posthumous edition of his estate. However, it is particularly spooky because it seems so familiar, just as if you had read it before. This is not only due to the fact that Foucault naturally takes up earlier theses in him and anticipates later ones; it is above all because he in turn creates a “big narrative” there — that you obviously need “big stories” to substantiate the end of them is one of the frequently discussed basic paradoxes of post-modernism — which may have been radical, provocative and scandalous in 1966, but long since 2025 Consensus is, seems almost a bit boring and staid, in any case corny.

Boredom sets in when reading because, for Foucault's circumstances — his writings are convincing not least because of their polemical, funny and ingenious rhetoric, with which he consciously mobilizes the mentioned moods and conceals his intellectual imcleanliness — the book is written extremely technically and dryly. My personal hypothesis: Perhaps Foucault, who had not yet “arrived” at the time, wanted to apply for a permanent chair of philosophy, so to speak. The book barely contains a trace of social criticism and, in particular, of the later power criticism that can be easily reconciled with emancipatory concerns, which is associated today with Foucault in general, in form and content, and sometimes Foucault sounds more like Hegel than Nietzsche.

Due to the sometimes very technical character of the book barely accessible to laypeople, here are just a few of its guiding principles: Around 1640 — keyword: “Cogito ergo sum” (Descartes) — a new order of knowledge developed, within which philosophy played a completely new role. According to Foucault, it is actually impossible to compare the philosophy before and after Descartes, since although both discourses talk about the same objects, they do so in a completely different mode: Before Descartes, philosophy was a subdiscipline of a unified cosmos of knowledge; now it confronts literature and science as an independent mode of knowledge production. This new “classical” philosophy tried to combine universal truth and the particular position of a subject. She did this in various ways, with Foucault, who, especially in his late work, repeatedly tries to prove how different discourses interact and are part of overarching networks of power, surprisingly postulates that these ways were a logical and necessary result from Descartes' guiding principle and that there was no interaction between philosophy and the other discourses.

From Descartes to Husserl, philosophers would have tried to articulate a universal truth that is also the individual truth of a unified subject. This project came to an end after just 300 years: The “Descartes Event” was replaced by the “Nietzsche Event.” When it comes to the exact definition of this event, Foucault flips from his otherwise very technical style into a very pathetic and flowery style, as you would expect from his writings. He refers to Georges Bataille, one of his most important “teachers,” and the inventor of the “Theatre of Cruelty,” Antonin Artaud, both convinced Nietzscheans, and praises Nietzsche as a kind of Messiah of a “radical [n] new beginning [s]” (ibid.). It relates in particular to Ecce homo and sees in Nietzsche's writings a way of thinking in which the uniform subject is replaced by a “multiplicity of subjects” (p. 212), “a great pluralism” (p. 213), “an indecipherable multiplicity of masks or faces” (ibid.), in which philosophy and literature, philosophy and madness and even philosophy and religion converged: “[I] n this sense is philosophical discourse should not be so far removed from religious discourse: but no exegesis; the word of Christ itself.” (p. 208)

Soberly, Foucault then continues to bring this project into the context of the general Linguistic turn — that is, the decisive turn from consciousness to language in the humanities from 1945 — and tries to develop the methodology of “archaeology” as an analysis of the “discourse archive” of a culture, which he admittedly breaks off. Perhaps he himself noticed that there are worlds between such “archaeology” as a meticulous, serious discourse analysis and praise of desubjectization and anarchic myth based on Bataille and Artaud. And as mentioned, there is still no talk of “power” here either: It was probably only the events of 1968 that prompted Foucault to (re) politicize his discourse analysis accordingly and to focus more on his first works Madness and Society (1961) and The birth of the clinic (1963).

III. What comes after postmodernism?

Of course, these three basic tendencies — discourse analysis, criticism of power, praise of desubjektification — are not particularly well conveyed in Foucault's thinking anyway. But that is perhaps exactly what accounts for his success. Just like with Nietzsche, anyone can put together their Foucault and, as you can easily see when you look at his numerous interviews, he seems to be himself in the role of the ambiguous theory derby and dazzling provocateur on the fine line between edginess and to have enjoyed a position of power in academia. In the mainstream, he acts primarily as a catchword for “unideological” cultural studies without existential philosophical, Marxist or psychoanalytical ballast; in left-wing circles as a — perhaps even anarchist — critic of repressive power structures, artists and artist-philosophers, he is regarded as a sequel batailles.

The basic mood that Foucault expresses: You want to be critical and reject “repressive” ideologies, but therefore just as little as you don't want to pack yourself with too much “metaphysical” baggage as the last major “system builders” of the 20th century did in the generation before Foucault, such as Adorno, Sartre, Bloch and Heidegger, in any broken form. Foucault thus turns out to be a very precise thought leader of what is now referred to as the “left-liberal mainstream” and, in his ambiguity, enables sometimes more or less radical connections as needed. His extensive abandonment of strong, not just aesthetically motivated, value judgments makes it possible anyway to always read his analyses both as mere descriptions and as critiques, even if his tone of voice usually implies a certain evaluation. A bit of criticism, a bit of cynicism; a bit of liberality, but just no system criticism; individual “art of living,” but please no demanding ethics of authenticity; fascination with desubjectization, but only in art and literature please... Foucault: The leading ideologue of Juste Milieu of our time.

How do we now go beyond this ideology and understand it, perhaps even inspired by Foucault himself, as a device of power that oppresses us and limits our life opportunities? What comes after postmodernism? And should we even yearn for “post-post-modern” conditions? Perhaps we will regard postmodernism as the era of Foucault and Deleuze with as much sentimental melancholy as Nietzsche sometimes regarded the 18th century of Rousseau and Voltaire...⁴ Only when the fascinated priests will once again bless the weapons for the wars of a new imperialism⁵ We may be able to appreciate the cheerful nihilism of postmodernism again, but by then it may be too late...

Or is another way out possible that lies beyond the alternative of repressive “big stories” and a big narrative about the end of the great stories? One way to get there may be an unbiased re-reading of Nietzsche's writings. When Nietzsche, for example, in Zarathustra proclaims: “Man is a rope, tied between animal and superman”⁶, is this not to be understood in the sense of a rearticulation and perhaps even radicalization of classical humanism rather than in the sense of the “death of man,” as Foucault Nietzsche's writings believed to be able to infer as a diagnosis and appeal? And the “last person” that Zarathustra contrasts with the superman is not exactly the self-satisfied “postman” of post-modernism who lives without “big stories”? Are they not the ones of whom it is said: “[F] rech in brief lusts, and throughout the day they barely threw goals anymore”⁷, and aren't they “the colorful speckles [...] [that] are you paintings of everything that was ever believed”⁸, masked people without identity, for whom the late Nietzsche only had contempt? In Ecce homo He doesn't seem to be preaching desubjectization right now, but, on the contrary, is almost convulsing for a”Self-defense”⁹ To ward off the incipient delusion and to announce a bold program that has an almost anti-post-modernist effect:

My task to prepare humanity for a moment of supreme self-reflection, a big noonWhere she looks back and looks out, where she emerges from the reign of chance and the priest and the question of why? , of what for? for the first time as a whole poses —, this task necessarily follows from the insight that humanity is not on the right path of its own accord, that it is absolutely not It is divinely ruled that, precisely under their most sacred values, the instinct of negation, corruption, the décadence instinct has acted seductively.¹⁰

Even the late Nietzsche does not want, as Foucault claims in the said essay, knowledge that only serves to cut up but not to understand (see p. 180), but his cutting criticism is fed back to a primarily affirmative project which can certainly be understood as a continuation of that of the Enlightenment: In moral issues, people should no longer submit to the patronising rule of nature and ideology, but rather finally, on the basis of insight into their natural driving forces, a people-friendly develop autonomous morality. One may disagree with the specific form of this morality in Nietzsche's late work, but this program — deliberately formulated openly — remains forward-looking. It shows little interpretative honesty to see in it merely the expression of an ironically satirical mask play, even when Nietzsche's gesture in Ecce homo It may seem grotesque. Perhaps he just seems bizarre and megalomaniac from the perspective of our own small-mindedness and because of the stunting of our utopian imagination?

In other words: Neomoderne based on Nietzsche instead of post-modernism would perhaps be an alternative to ideological radicalizations, which, to top it all off, rely on Nietzsche, and the continued post-modern skepticism that remains powerless towards them? Or was it not just another “apparatus of power,” from whose clutches, according to the late Foucault, there was no escape anyway? A question that we don't ask the world, but that it asks us...

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Item image source: https://www.flickr.com/photos/kongniffe/5340624604

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literature

Foucault, Michel: The discourse of philosophy. Berlin 2024.

Ders. : Nietzsche, genealogy, history. In: Writings. Dits et Ecrits. Vol. 2nd ed. by Daniel Defert & François Ewald. Frankfurt am Main 2002, pp. 166—191.

King, Matthew & Matthew Shape: On Jan Rehmann's Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism: Foucault & Deleuze. In: Historical materialism, online.

Rehmann, Jan: Postmodern left-wing Nietzscheanism. Deleuze & Foucault. A deconstruction. 1st ed. Bonn 2004.

Ders. : Postmodern left-wing Nietzscheanism. Deleuze & Foucault. A deconstruction2nd ed. Kassel 2021.

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footnotes

1: For an extensive review and appreciation of this translation, see Matthew King & Matthew Shape, On Jan Rehmann's Deconstructing Postmodern Nietzscheanism (link).

2: Ibid.

3: See also Jonas Pohler's comments in his report on the previous annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society on this blog (link).

4: See e.g. Beyond good and evil, Aph 245.

5: And actually it's a long time now...

6: Preface, 5.

7: So Zarathustra spoke, From a tree on a mountain.

8: So Zarathustra spoke, From the land of education.

9: Why I'm so smart, 8.

10: Ecce homo, Morgenröthe, 2.

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Discourse, Power and Delusion

Michel Foucault's Nietzsche Interpretation Revisited

The humanities scene recently experienced a minor sensation: In the estate of Michel Foucault (1926—1984), one of the most important representatives of post-structuralism, its editors came across an elaborate book manuscript with the title Le discours philosophique, on which the avowed Nietzschean had worked in 1966. It was published in German by Suhrkamp in 2024. Nietzsche plays a decisive role in this comprehensive analysis of philosophical discourse since Descartes. Paul Stephan takes this event as an opportunity to take a closer look at the most influential Nietzsche interpretation of the 20th century to date.

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Part II: Nietzsche's Critique of Schopenhauer

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V. The Fight Against Nihilistic Pessimism

For Schopenhauer, the will represents the monistic principle of the world to which all worldly phenomena can be traced back. It is the metaphysical essence that underlies Kant’s thing-in-itself, that which “constitutes the inner essence of things.”¹⁵ Nietzsche deals intensively with Schopenhauer’s concept of will and regards it as a metaphysical hypothesis that must be refuted in order to be able to develop a philosophy that consistently affirms life. For Nietzsche, the struggle against Schopenhauer’s thesis of will turns into a struggle against nihilistic pessimism.

For Nietzsche, pessimism itself is not actually the main problem: “It is not pessimism (a form of hedonism) that is the great danger [...] [but] the meaninglessness of all events!”¹⁶. Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to life, which brings the various manifestations of the eternal will in the graded scale of nature under a single expression of a “blind urge” that tirelessly drives all living beings to satisfy their selfish instinct for survival, thus making the world a “playground of tormented and frightened beings,”¹⁷, results in what Nietzsche considers a life-threatening devaluation of existence. In The Antichrist (1888), he makes it clear: “Schopenhauer was hostile to life: that is why compassion became a virtue for him.”¹⁸

Nietzsche is alluding to the ethics of compassion presented in the fourth and final section of The World as Will and Representation. Schopenhauer’s concept of the will to life already contains within itself the moment of its negation. This nihilistic morality of the self-abolition of the will leads to nothingness, which, significantly, corresponds to the concluding words of Schopenhauer’s magnum opus. Schopenhauer himself understood this morality of the negation of the will as asceticism, which he presented as “the self-chosen penitential way of life and self-mortification for the purpose of the lasting mortification of the will.”¹⁹ By making this lifestyle and its destructive treatment of the will the negative philosophical starting point of his own mammoth project, the “revaluation of all values,” Nietzsche progressively turned into an anti-Schopenhauerian.

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VI. Will to Life or Will to Power?

Nietzsche conceives his concept of the will to power as a double antithesis to Schopenhauer’s will to life. This anti-model is twofold in that it arises from a twofold, “ethical” and “metaphysical” – two terms that, strictly speaking, no longer fit Nietzsche’s understanding of philosophy – opposition to Schopenhauer’s philosophy. In Nietzsche’s eyes, the concept of the will to life does not adequately reflect the multiple physio-psychological struggles that structure reality from within. In 1882, he made the statement: "Will to life? Instead of it, I only ever found the will to power“²⁰.

The will to power is a complex concept: the meaning and the central role Nietzsche assigns to it are difficult to decipher. It is not entirely clear whether, as with Schopenhauer, it is a concept with a metaphysical claim or rather a regulative principle of a new way of life. For there are passages in Nietzsche’s writings that confirm both the one and the other hypothesis. In an posthumous fragment from 1885, for example, he makes a statement that is strongly reminiscent of Schopenhauer’s metaphysics: “This world is the will to power – and nothing more! And you, too, are this will to power – and nothing more!“²¹. Later, however, in a fragment entitled “Will to Power as Knowledge” – an idea that Martin Heidegger would make the main subject of his lecture in the summer semester of 1939 at the University of Freiburg²² – he states that his concept of the will to power is less concerned with revealing the true knowledge of the nature of the world than with “imposing as much regularity and form on chaos as is sufficient for our practical needs”²³.

One thing is certain: Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power is an attempt at an alternative interpretation and evaluation of life, which is intended to pave the way for a new way of life that goes against Schopenhauer. In other words, the aim is to oppose the basic nihilistic idea that man’s main drive corresponds to a “blind urge” to live, which leads him to cling to the preservation of his existence without reason - and in turn to prove that man does not in fact strive for his (survival) life, but for power.

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VII. Yes or No?

The two thinkers’ contrasting interpretations of life and the world – as a reflection of the will to power or the will to life – go hand in hand with opposing ideas of the meaning of life. Schopenhauer’s view of existence as a manifestation of the blind, insatiable will to life inevitably leads to its complete self-negation. In the fourth book of the first volume of The World as Will and Representation, Schopenhauer makes it clear “that suffering is essential to life and therefore does not flow into us from outside, but that everyone carries the inexhaustible source of it around within himself.”²⁴ Schopenhauer's answer to the “meaning of life question” is therefore based on a twofold thesis: firstly, that life and suffering essentially belong together, and secondly, that suffering is pointless and should therefore be avoided. The avoidance of suffering as a task in life, which Schopenhauer does not understand in the hedonistic sense of striving for sensual pleasure – because all happiness is of a negative nature and consists only in a brief interruption of the only “positive” lack – can only occur through an ascetic negation of that from which eternal suffering receives its nourishment, from the will to life. Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which with Rudolf Malter²⁵ can certainly be understood as a soteriology²⁶, therefore reacts with a decisive “No!” to the egoistic will to life in order to put an end not only to individual suffering, but also to suffering in the world in general.

Nietzsche reacts quite differently to the problem of the suffering character of life. The new life that he seeks to conceive with the idea of the will to power presupposes a certain willingness to suffer on the part of man, a certain will to suffer. “The will to suffer is there immediately if the power is great enough,”²⁷ Nietzsche wrote in his notebook in 1883. His “true” pessimism comes to the fore with this concept of the will to suffer. Nietzsche directs his alternative concept of pessimism, which he also calls a “pessimism of strength” or a “classical pessimism”, against the “romantic” pessimism, which in his eyes was represented not only by Schopenhauer, but also by Alfred De Vigny, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Giacomo Leopardi, Pascal and all world religions.

Against these representatives of romantic pessimism, but above all against Schopenhauer’s negation of the will to life, “a supreme state of affirmation of existence is to be conceived, in which even pain, every kind of pain, is eternally included as a means of enhancement: the tragic-Dionysian state”²⁸. With his tragic-Dionysian pessimism, Nietzsche thus answers the question of accepting suffering for life in the exact opposite sense to Schopenhauer’s “No!” with a convinced, thoroughly combative and new “Yes!”.

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VIII. Atheism and Amoralism

Since Schopenhauer, philosophy has had to do without one of its oldest and strongest arguments to explain what holds the world together at its core: God. Reality now demanded an atheistic interpretation of itself; it wanted to be perceived as such, i.e. no longer as a mere creature of an unattainable Creator. Nietzsche was impressed by Schopenhauer’s claim to philosophy, which consisted of interpreting the nature of the world without the support of an ultimate God thesis. In his eyes, Schopenhauer was “as a philosopher the first admitted and unbending atheist we Germans have ever had”²⁹.

Nietzsche’s philosophy was directly linked to Schopenhauer’s atheism, which pointed the way for a new, anti-transcendental method. “Atheism was what led me to Schopenhauer”³⁰, he explains in Ecce Homo (1889). In this context, too, Nietzsche would value Schopenhauer’s diagnosis of the state of metaphysics more than the therapeutic he proposed. For Schopenhauer, unlike Nietzsche, the death of God does not simultaneously lead to the downfall of moral values. For Schopenhauer, atheism and amoralism do not go hand in hand. Although he does not follow the Christian doctrine of God, he nevertheless remains faithful to the philanthropic morality of Christianity. Schopenhauer recognizes love of mankind (caritas), which Christianity was the first to “bring up theoretically and formally establish as a virtue, the greatest of all”³¹, as the most important principle of morality, which is closely connected to his metaphysics. He thus remains a Christian at heart, even though he rejects the Christian doctrine of God with his reason.

In this respect, Nietzsche goes a significant step further than his educator. In his eyes, the latter was still far too much of a moralist to recognize the necessity of the arrival of a new, powerful, life-affirming man. “Schopenhauer was not strong enough for a new yes,”³² he wrote in a posthumous fragment from 1887. This new “yes”, to which he wanted to educate his readers against his educator, presupposed an overcoming of morality. In order to overcome morality, man must vehemently fight the inclination to pity his fellow human beings, which Nietzsche, in contrast to Schopenhauer, does not regard as “natural” but as culturally created. “I count the overcoming of pity among the noble virtues”³³, Nietzsche will thus write in Ecce Homo. But who is this conqueror of morality, who ultimately stands before Nietzsche’s eyes as the ideal of human self-education?

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IX. The “Buddha of Frankfurt” versus the “Inverted” Zarathustra Ideal

Schopenhauer’s philosophy was strongly influenced by his antagonistic youthful experiences of the overwhelming beauty of nature and the devastating misery of the human and animal kingdom. Looking back on his youth, the private scholar, who was already in his mid-forties at the time, wrote: “In my 17th year, without any scholarly education, I was as seized by the misery of life as Buddha was in his youth, when he saw illness, aging, pain and death.”³⁴ The Buddha figure, who played a central role not only in his own philosophy but also in his self-perception as a human being, would accompany Schopenhauer even after his death. To this day, some of his attentive readers give him the nickname “the Buddha of Frankfurt”.

Nietzsche too names Schopenhauer and Buddha in one breath. However, the aim of his philosophy is to transcend the Schopenhauerian-Buddhist view of life in order to provide a stage for a new prophet. He wants humanity to receive a new “glad tidings” by means of a new “clairvoyant”, according to which life “must no longer, like Buddha and Schopenhauer, be viewed under the spell and delusion of morality”³⁵. Nietzsche wants us to open our eyes to an “inverted ideal”, namely “the ideal of the most exuberant, liveliest and most world-affirming human being” (ibid.).

The prophet of this radical affirmation of the world and of life is called Zarathustra. However, unlike the Buddha reference in Schopenhauer’s thinking, the figure found in Nietzsche’s works has little to do with the historically transmitted teachings of the founder of Zoroastrianism. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra conveys a teaching to his disciples that had never been expressed before: that of the Übermensch, with which he “gave humanity the greatest gift it has ever been given.”³⁶ In Nietzsche’s eyes, this gift consists of having liberated humanity from the traditionally handed-down vices of bad conscience, flagging self-pity and convinced self-mortification.

Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, like Schopenhauer’s Buddha, recognizes the perpetual cycle of being, but he draws a different conclusion from this insight; the aim of life is not to break this eternal cycle, as in Buddhism, but to want “the eternal return of the same”:

Zarathustra is a dancer – like the one who has the hardest, the most terrible insight into reality, who has thought the “most abysmal thought”, yet finds in it no objection to existence, not even to its eternal return, – rather a reason to be the eternal yes to all things themselves, “the immense unlimited saying yes and amen.”³⁷

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X. Conclusion: War of the Roses and Patricide

From our overview of Nietzsche’s works and posthumous fragments, we can undoubtedly conclude that the themes, motifs and arguments of Schopenhauer’s philosophy play a central, omnipresent role in his thinking. The will to life and the will to power, pessimism, atheism, the eternal return, nihilism, compassion, music as metaphysics, genius: each of these main motifs of Nietzsche’s philosophy finds a model in Schopenhauer’s thinking.

The educator who offered him a deeper, will-philosophical and pessimistic view of the world in his younger years remained an intellectual challenge for Nietzsche until the end: the model of a philosopher for whom he himself wanted to be the alternative. The history of the Nietzsche-Schopenhauer relationship thus corresponds to a one-sided love story that turned into a war of the roses. Not to stop at the world view of his beloved educator, but to offer an opposing, larger view of things based on it: That was what really mattered to Nietzsche. Whether he understood Schopenhauer correctly on all points was ultimately of no great importance to him. In the end, one thing counts for him above all: the patricide he accomplished in the service of the Übermensch:

I am far from believing that I have understood Schopenhauer correctly; I have only learned to understand myself a little better through Schopenhauer; that is why I owe him the greatest gratitude.³⁸

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Tom Bildstein (born in 1999) lives in Brussels and is a PhD student in philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) since 2023. He is currently writing a dissertation in French on the “Paths of the Will” in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. He is also a member of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft and is working intensively on the problem of the thing-in-itself in Kant and Schopenhauer, which was also the topic of his master’s thesis and a conversation with Raphael Gebrecht (Bonn) published on the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft blog (Das Problem des Dinges an sich, 2023; link). He is also the author of a scientific paper: Nietzsche et “la grande erreur fondamentale de Schopenhauer” (published in the journal Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia, 2024). In 2024, he won the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft essay prize with his submission Der Mut zum Idealismus. Schopenhauer’s kompendiarischer Kantianismus.

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Sources

Heidegger, Martin: Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis. Frankfurt am Main 1989.

Malter, Rudolf: Arthur Schopenhauer. Transzendentalphilosophie und Metaphysik des Willens. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1991.

Schopenhauer, Arthur: Der handschriftliche Nachlaß, Band 4, I. München 1985.  

Ders.: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I. Frankfurt am Main 1986.

Ders.: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II. Frankfurt am Main 1986.

Ders.: Kleinere Schriften. Frankfurt am Main 2006.

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Source for the Article Image

Photo of the first edition of The World as Will and Representation, Foto H.- P. Haack Wikimedia (link)

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Footnotes

15: Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, p. 397 (chap. 24).

16: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1885, Nr. 39[15].

17: Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung II, p. 744 (chap. 46)

18: Der Antichrist, 7.

19: Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung I, p. 504. (§ 68).

20: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1882, Nr. 5[1], 1.

21: Nr. 38[12].

22: Vgl. Heidegger, Nietzsches Lehre vom Willen zur Macht als Erkenntnis.

23: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1888, Nr. 14[152] (my emphasis).

24: P. 415 (§57).

25: Cf. Malter, Arthur Schopenhauer. Transzendentalphilosophie und Metaphysik des Willens.

26: This ancient Greek term (sōtḗr means "savior") signifies within a Christian context the doctrine of salvation.

27: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1883, Nr. 16[79] (bold int the original).

28: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1884, Nr. 14[24].

29: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 357.

30: Ecce homo, Unzeitgemäße, 2.

31: Schopenhauer, Kleinere Schriften, p. 583.

32: Nr. 10[5].

33: Warum ich so weise bin, 4.

34: Schopenhauer, Der handschriftliche Nachlaß 4, I, p. 96 (§ 36).

35: Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 56.

36: Ecce homo, Vorwort, 4.

37: Ecce homo, Also sprach Zarathustra, 6.

38: Nachgelassene Fragmente 1874, Nr. 34[13].

The Educator’s Mark

Schopenhauer's Omnipresence in Nietzsche's Philosophy II

After explaining in the first part of this article (link) how Nietzsche transformed from an admirer of Schopenhauer to a critic in the course of the 1870s, Tom Bildstein now examines in more detail how the mature Nietzsche sought to overcome Schopenhauer‘s pessimism and counter it with a “life-affirming” philosophy. Schopenhauer‘s “will to life,” which the misanthrope would like to see ascetically denied, is to give way to the “will to power” as the fundamental principle of all life, which cannot be denied without contradiction.

Part I: From Disciple to Critic

Nietzsche has the reputation of being a free spirit. The image that posterity has painted of him resembles that of an unbound, self-thinking philosopher with an independent judgment of reality. However, this image can be deceptive, as Nietzsche was by no means completely free from traditional world views and values. His free spirit first had to be educated to freedom. Nietzsche owes his philosophical education to one person in particular: the pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). It was to the author of The World as Will and Representation (1818) that Nietzsche dedicated his third Untimely Meditation, which he published under the title Schopenhauer as Educator (1874). However, Nietzsche’s dialog with his educator is not limited to this Untimely Meditation: it runs through almost all of his published works and can also be traced in numerous letters and posthumous fragments. To what extent was Nietzsche’s philosophy influenced by Schopenhauer and what are the central points of divergence between these two thinkers?

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I. Nietzsche’s first Acquaintance with Schopenhauer or the Leipzig “Schopenhauer-Erlebnis”

Some books are read by pure accident. If a book captivates us, the unexpected reading experience suddenly takes on a mystical glow. It seems as if the reading of this one book was in fact not determined by chance, but by fate. The first, rather accidental reading of Schopenhauer had a similarly magical effect on the young Nietzsche. Between October 1865 and August 1867 – the exact date is not known – when he was standing in an antiquarian bookshop in Leipzig, holding Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation (1818) in his hands, a “demonic” voice whispered to him, in his own words: “Take this book home with you”¹. Once home, Nietzsche allowed himself to be captivated by this monumental work: “For a fortnight in a row, I forced myself to go to bed at two o’clock in the morning and leave it again at exactly six o’clock. A nervous excitement took possession of me” (ibid.).

The Leipzig reading experience immediately turned Nietzsche into a Schopenhauerian. The young student of classical philology found himself in Schopenhauer’s texts at this stage of his life, i.e. in his mid-20s. “[H]ere I saw a mirror in which I beheld the world, life and my own mind in appalling magnificence” (ibid.), he writes in his Review of my two Years in Leipzig (1867/68). In his first creative period, until the mid-1870s, Nietzsche allowed himself to be guided by Schopenhauer’s philosophy, above all by its central element, the metaphysics of will, in terms of his worldview and understanding of life. “[S]ince Schopenhauer removed the blindfold of optimism from our eyes,” Nietzsche wrote in a letter to his friend Hermann Mushacke in 1866, “one sees more clearly. Life is more interesting, even if uglier“².

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II. The Birth of Birth out of the Spirit of Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics

In his early years, Schopenhauer’s authority would define Nietzsche not only as a person, but also as a philosopher. His first philosophical work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music (1872), was deeply influenced both terminologically and ideologically by Schopenhauer’s philosophy. The Birth, which was given the subtitle Hellenism and Pessimism in its second edition of 1886, can be understood as Nietzsche’s attempt to dialectically unite and play off against each other his Graecophilia on the one hand and his enthusiasm for Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will and music as well as its compositional realization by Wagner on the other. The “tremendous contrast”³ between the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which Nietzsche makes the central theme of this work, is prefigured in Schopenhauer’s main work in the opposition of will and representation. In this respect, Nietzsche will understand music “according to Schopenhauer’s teaching”, as he himself writes in the Birth, as the “language of the will”⁴.

However, Nietzsche’s enthusiasm for his metaphysics and aesthetics never turned into an apologetic of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, as the American philosopher Paul Swift correctly notes in Becoming Nietzsche (2005) – an older, but still very readable and compact study on Nietzsche’s early sources of inspiration⁵. Nietzsche himself later regrets that in his first philosophical writing he “laboriously sought to express strange and new appreciations with Schopenhauerian and Kantian formulas, which fundamentally went against the spirit of Kant and Schopenhauer, as well as their taste!“⁶ The fact that at that time he was only able to think of the aesthetic and epistemological approach to the world by means of the concepts inherited from Kant and Schopenhauer prevented him from recognizing the novelty of his own observations. In order to develop his thinking freely and help it to achieve a new dimension, Nietzsche first had to critically examine this basic framework.

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III. From Educator to Philosophical Opponent

Under the title Schopenhauer als Erzieher, Nietzsche published the third part of his Untimely Meditations in 1874. This is the only text that he dedicates directly to his “first philosophical teacher”⁷. In this text, as in almost all of his writings up to that point, Schopenhauer is still predominantly presented in the positive light of a “role model”. However, this is the last time that Nietzsche will have an all-round gentle treatment of his “educator”. In Schopenhauer as Educator, Nietzsche still presents himself as a loyal reader of his master: “I am one of those readers of Schopenhauer who, after reading the first page of his work, know with certainty that they will read all the pages and listen to every word he has ever said”⁸. He explains this particular fascination for Schopenhauer in this writing by its “impression mixed from three elements”: “his[] honesty, his[] cheerfulness and his[] consistency” (ibid.).

Schopenhauer as Educator thus marks a turning point in the Nietzsche-Schopenhauer relationship. His interest, which until then had been directed more towards his philosophy, now focused more on Schopenhauer as a philosopher and a human being. On December 19, 1876, Nietzsche claims in a letter to Cosima Wagner that he “is not on his [Schopenhauer’s; TB] side in almost all general statements; already when I wrote about Sch., I realized that I had gone beyond everything dogmatic about it; I cared all about the person”⁹. At this time, Nietzsche is particularly taken with Schopenhauer’s non-academic career and his contempt for unfree and inauthentic academic philosophy. He saw the role of the new philosopher, educated by Schopenhauer against his time, as “becoming the judge of the so-called culture surrounding him”¹⁰. In order to follow this maxim to the letter, Nietzsche therefore endeavoured to prove his own integrity as a philosopher. However, this also means that, as the unbending judge of the ambient culture, he had to denounce Schopenhauer’s “dangerous” influence on it.

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IV. Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer

The fact that Nietzsche not only had the ability to be enthusiastic about individual ideas and thinkers but was also capable of intensely criticizing formerly highly respected authors and thoughts, can be deduced from his polemical writings¹¹ against his second educator¹², the Schopenhauerian Richard Wagner. With regard to his two masters, Nietzsche hoped, as can be read in his posthumous fragments from 1884, that the people of the future, superior to their time and culture, “will finally have so much self-overcoming to cast off the bad taste for attitudes and the sentimental darkness, and will be as much against Richard Wagner as against Schopenhauer“¹³.

Nietzsche’s change of attitude towards his educators may seem surprising at first glance: Is he now completely rejecting the roots of his own thought? However, Nietzsche does not take such a radical approach. Schopenhauer and Wagner are not simply erased from his mind: instead of thinking with them, Nietzsche now thinks against them. He would, so to speak, appoint his two educators as the ideal opponents – he called them his “antagonistic masters”¹⁴ in a letter to the Danish essayist Georg Brandes (1842-1927) in 1888 – of his own cultural and philosophical thinking. Schopenhauer would also play an important role in Nietzsche’s terminological considerations, insofar as the basic concepts of his mentor’s philosophy will form the starting point for defining the central terms of his own thinking.

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Link to part 2.

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Tom Bildstein (born in 1999) lives in Brussels and is a PhD student in philosophy at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB) since 2023. He is currently writing a dissertation in French on the “Paths of the Will” in the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer. He is also a member of the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft and is working intensively on the problem of the thing-in-itself in Kant and Schopenhauer, which was also the topic of his master’s thesis and a conversation with Raphael Gebrecht (Bonn) published on the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft blog (Das Problem des Dinges an sich, 2023; link). He is also the author of a scientific paper: Nietzsche et “la grande erreur fondamentale de Schopenhauer” (published in the journal Voluntas: Revista Internacional de Filosofia, 2024). In 2024, he won the Schopenhauer-Gesellschaft essay prize with his submission Der Mut zum Idealismus. Schopenhauer’s kompendiarischer Kantianismus.

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Sources

Nietzsche, Friedrich: Rückblick auf meine Leipziger Jahre. In:  Werke in drei Bänden. Autobiographisches aus den Jahren 1856–1869. München 1954. Link.

Swift, Paul A.: Becoming Nietzsche. Early Reflections on Democritus, Schopenhauer and Kant. Lanham 2005.

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Source for the Article Image

Photograph by Schopenhauer dated 3/9/1852, link

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Footnotes

1: Rückblick auf meine zwei Leipziger Jahre.

2: Brief v. 11.07.1866; Nr. 511.

3: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1.

4: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 16.

5: Cf. esp. its second chapter, „Nietzsche on Schopenhauer in 1867“.

6: Die Geburt der Tragödie, Versuch einer Selbstkritik, 6.

7: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 4.

8: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 2.

9: Bf. Nr. 581 (my emphasis).

10: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 8.

11: Der Fall Wagner (1888) und Nietzsche contra Wagner (1889)

12: In a letter from 12/13/1875 to his lifetime friend Carl von Gersdorff, Nietzsche characterizes both Schopenhauer and Wagner together as his educators (cf. Bf. Nr. 495).

13: Fragment Nr. 26[462].

14: Bf. v. 19.02.1888; Nr. 997.

The Educator’s Mark

Schopenhauer's Omnipresence in Nietzsche's Philosophy I

It is no secret that one of Nietzsche’s most important philosophical references was the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860). That’s reason enough to trace the history of Nietzsche’s reception of Schopenhauer in a two-part article. In the first part, Schopenhauer scholar Tom Bildstein examines how the young Leipzig philology student Nietzsche was first inspired by Schopenhauer’s magnum opus The World as Will and Representation (1818), only to turn into a harsh critic of the Frankfurt “sourpuss” within a few years. — Link to part 2.

Are there politics, world views, social movements that are free from resentment? Practically everyone will say that about themselves. Of course, everyone gives good reasons for their opposition to their competitors, so that this is not based on affective rejection.

The philosopher Jürgen Grosse denies this claim and demonstrates in his new book that all political-social trends since the Enlightenment have been based on resentment. Even though he does not explicitly mention contemporary political scientism, but en passant The ecological worldview: These too use affectively exclusionary terminology when they describe their opponents as deniers of their scientific or ecological truths.

Is there no exception at all? Yes, the hippie movement of the sixties. But didn't the hippies get out of middle class life? Did they not develop any resentment towards him? Grosse attests to the alternative movement of the eighties, but not to the hippies. They left the meritocracy, but nonchalantly, not aggressively like the bohemia of the late 19th century or even political protest movements.

On the one hand, the hippies developed their own values, on the other hand, their own life practice with their own contexts of meaning. Grosse writes:

Here, too, the scene sees its refusal as merely a forced position, not as an original negation: originally, the wealth of meaningless expression, such as Bob Dylan, or meaning-twisting expression, such as Jefferson Airplane cultivated, was repressive-derived, however, the construction of rigid forms that deny meaning. (P. 289)

The hippies also do not live in a primary opposition to capitalism, as they embody a hedonism that does not want to produce but still consumes. Grosse also attests something similar to the youth scene in the GDR, which managed without emancipatory claims and had simply disappeared from politics.

But as far as the counterculture in the western world in the second half of the 20th century is concerned, Grosse sees significant differences between the US and the Western European counterculture. The American one focuses on a nature that also refers to the indigenous people; the European is primarily nihilistic, which combines great things with resentment and thus with cynicism and envy.

At the center of the Great Book is Nietzsche, about whom he remarks: “Up to Nietzsche, resentment had been described psychologically and morally neutrally or critically in European literature; according to Nietzsche, it was considered contemptuous or even in need of therapy.” (p. 74) The French enlighteners, for example, had a neutral attitude towards resentment and did not fundamentally judge it negatively.

w Nietzsches On the genealogy of morality The resentment of the Jewish priests becomes structurally negative hatred of the ruling classes, as an affective rejection of the strong, rich and beautiful, who embody the good in “master morality,” while the poor, weak and ugly represent the bad in it. According to Nietzsche, Christians transform this negative feeling into a positive revaluation of values, so that now the weak become the good, while the strong are devalued as “bad guys.” For Nietzsche, after Grosse, resentment has thus become creative, as it had already been for Charles Baudelaire.

A large book can therefore also be read from two different perspectives. It contains a history of the concept of resentment, which begins with Montaigne, maintains its momentum in the second half of the 18th century, when literature and art become socially critical, i.e. they reject absolutist society, similar to how they sharply criticize the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, which continues in the 20th century in virtually all political social movements, each fed by different forms of rejection. Nietzsche plays a key role in this.

The second reading of Großes Buch explains resentment as the basic motif of political and social movements since the 18th century. In the case of Marx, which have economic foundations and therefore a thoroughly rational character, there are affectively accelerated aversions, emotionally triggered hatred of people and ideologies, of the other thing par excellence, which go hand in hand with the hubris of living and believing the right thing yourself. The same seems to apply to all relevant political and social movements — the hippies and the youth movement in the GDR are irrelevant. This almost becomes a basic historical and philosophical motif: History is driven by resentment, but not from the very beginning — who would dare to claim such nonsense that they know the basic principle of all history!

Unlike Nietzsche, who describes it as a motive of emerging Christianity, for Grosse it is more related to the widespread claim of egalitarianism since the Enlightenment. The nobles did not need to develop resentment towards their subjects and, conversely, there was no reason for the latter to do so. Only with the claim to equality does hatred of others arise who do not appear equal enough but should be. The fact that Big Book suggests this reading is primarily due to the fact that it deals with many political and social trends in the Western world and shows their structure of resentment.

Max Scheler, who criticizes Nietzsche's concept of resentment, attests the resentment of bourgeois morality and abdicates Christianity from it. For Scheler, Enlightenment morality is based on resentment towards the Christian order of love, which is itself free from all resentment or even a “will to power.”

Ludwig Klages follows up with a biocentric way of thinking. The soul is vital to distinguish from the ego. Klages thus reinterprets Nietzsche and expands the concept of resentment. Grosse writes: “Through his hatred of the life-destroying spirit, Klages was able to become a companion of conservative revolutionaries as well as a forerunner of ecological world saving utopias.” (p. 72)

E.M. Cioran takes this to the extreme. For him, affects can only be combated by affects; if you can only free yourself from evil through evil, resentment must be exhausted. For Cioran, thinking requires insidiousness. Grosse comments on Cioran: “Envy, hate, anger are not distant states, art, philosophy, science are not affect-free pure states.” (p. 81)

While the bourgeois revolutionaries live out their hatred of absolutism and Christianity, the reaction of Joseph de Maistre or Juan Donoso Cortés reacts with revenge fantasies that are embedded theologically:

The liberal does not understand the fact of God or the self-evidence of order nor the primacy of Voluntas before intellectus. Praising and cultivating one's own impulsivity towards liberal pallor will henceforth be an elementary exercise of all reactionary theorists and writers. (P. 155)

The Catholic Léon Bloy in particular stands out, who declares himself an “anti-pig” and thus all opponents become pigs:

In view of the personal and material superiority of the bourgeois principle, which is not terror (as for the older reaction) but indifference, fanaticism on a spiritual and moral duty. When Bloy describes the beauty that has bloodbaths for him among citizens, Englishmen, emancipated, unbelievers of all kinds, it is reminiscent of de Maistre's literary eccentricity. (P. 159)

But Grosse also discovers similar resentment among anarchists, leftists and feminism, which he primarily qualifies as a bourgeois movement, as well as among his male advocates. “Women understand women become legions after 1800” (p. 183), writes Grosse. Neither in feudal-aristocratic society nor in proletarian movements has there been feminism after Grosse: “[A] ll the bourgeois woman has become conspicuous in terms of resentment.” (181)

Men are devalued and women are glorified. Feminism owes female depravity to men. The revenge motive is aimed at a revaluation of values, which, as with Nietzsche, is due to one's own weakness and to envy of the strength of men. Grosse writes:

The resentment structure typical of resentment, but also underlying bourgeois emancipation logic — private suffering as a symptom of a world situation — is already evident in the early women's movement; “open hatred of men” and ideas of female “saving the world” through hitherto exclusively female small-world virtues such as “warmth and dedication” are already detectable shortly after 1800. (P. 185)

Resentment is therefore by no means limited to right-wing or conservative tendencies such as the yuppies of the eighties or current right-wing populism, which impute an attitude of envy on the left and declare disadvantage as self-inflicted: Claims formulated by these are evoked by troublemakers. Minorities and disadvantaged people cannot, of course, present themselves as victims and pass off their way of life as ethical. This is how Grosse notes:

In advanced modernity, the reference to the Christian “chivalric” motif of renunciation of revenge has weakened. A sense of resentment and the concept of resentment are increasingly connoted with questions of social justice, in particular with a frustrated desire for equality. (P. 327)

Grosse also attributes something similar to the various anti-bourgeois artistic movements, from Sturm-und-Drang to Bohème and Surrealism to the present day. This still applies to the new semi-elites from left-wing, green or digital camps, about which Grosse remarks: “Political, media and cultural bobos [bourgeois bohemians; SM] act as primary victims as well as representatives from historical-traditional, currently ongoing injustice.” (p. 311)

Resentment for big people seems to be driving and driving politics and society for around three centuries and thus determining history. Of course, it barely achieves the creative quality of the revaluation of values. But you can argue about that. Because it is precisely ecologically ethical values that have spread in modern societies today. And perhaps also the hedonism of the hippies with sex & drugs & rock'n'roll — the latter describes Grosse as “noise” (292), a connection to Adorno's aversion to pop culture. But as you call out to the world, it echoes back.

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Photo credit Item image

Edmund Adler: The flower wreath (1950) (link)

Age-Old Rage

The birth of Modernity out of the Spirit of Resentment

“Resentment” is one of the guiding concepts of Nietzsche's philosophy and perhaps even its most effective. In his new book The cold rage. Resentment theory and practice (Marburg 2024, Büchner-Verlag), Jürgen Grosse argues that since the 18th century, more or less all political or social movements have been those of resentment. Our main author Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann has read it and presents major theses below.

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I. Nietzsche, Lagarde, Langbehn

Who actually belongs to the reputable academic world? And who determines that? Negotiating and defining scientific-academic exclusivity is a permanent problem, because the nature of engagement with the “outside” also shapes academic activity internally. Friedrich Nietzsche knew how to sing a song about it, but other intellectuals of his time also lived and suffered in “brilliant isolation” because they were ostracized from academia as newcomers, unprofessional amateurs, amateurs or impostors.

The comfort and hope of the isolated was and is the fact that their peers succeed in achieving major journalistic successes on a case-by-case basis and attracting strong public attention — which in turn brings them envy and even deeper aversion from the academic sector. This is exemplified by Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn and Oswald Spengler. In the period 1880 to 1930, these cultural critics and bestselling authors played a significant role in determining the humanities discourse in Germany, although they were all academic outsiders and socially isolated eccentrics. Langbehn and Spengler referred heavily to Nietzsche, who was regarded as a science critic and also an academic outsider of his time, and who in turn was impressed by the maverick Lagarde.

Nietzsche also fit perfectly into the pattern of the unsociable, “difficult” private scholar in character, who had neither strong family nor social ties and was largely avoided by academia. While Nietzsche only became famous posthumously, the intellectual outsiders Langbehn and Spengler were able to become both controversial and highly regarded stars of cultural life during their lifetime. In doing so, they surfed on the waves of Nietzsche reception. While Langbehn tried in vain to gain guardianship of the sick Nietzsche, Spengler became an important representative of the established Nietzsche community in the Weimar Republic¹. In two biographical sketches, Lagarde is now described as a prototype of the scientific outsider, before Langbehn comes into view as a Nietzsche epigone. In this way, similarities and differences to Nietzsche's way of life become clear.

Paul de Lagarde alias Anton Böttcher (1827-1891) was one of the most famous cultural critics in the German Empire. His main work, published for the first time in 1878 German writings, combined moral criticism of education, culture and customs with extreme nationalism. The roots of his thinking were Protestantism and Prussian ethos, the basis of his writings was a deep cultural pessimism, presented in a “kind of whiny heroism. ”² He was controversial among scientists because of his antiquated worldview and lack of methodological awareness. He had to wait fifteen years for a chair and in the meantime taught at schools until he received an appointment to the University of Göttingen in 1869. His quarrelsome was considered notorious. He was in correspondence with Richard Wagner, among others. Nietzsche was impressed by Lagarde's writings but also read them critically, while Lagarde showed no interest in Nietzsche.³ In the last decade of his life, Lagarde came closer to the anti-Semitic movement around Nietzsche's brother-in-law Bernhard Förster. In the post-war situation from 1919, a second wave of reception began. Lagarde could now serve as a convenient Nietzsche substitute for all those to whom Nietzsche's statements about the German Reich and Judaism seemed too complex and unpatriotic.⁴ With Nietzsche, he combined his high standards of himself and his enormous workload:

Of course, Lagarde lacked the philosopher's spirit of experimentation, and his outstanding character traits such as envy, avarice and resentment make us feel his inner hardening. He often carried the grudge against individual colleagues with him for years before he publicly exploded, and he relived long-ago insults over and over again. [...] In the fight against his own inner emptiness, which was expressed in massive exhaustion and exhaustion of life, he spoke of courage to himself in a loud voice [.] [...] Lagarde's fate shows how close psychological damage, targeted self-stylization and charismatic effect can be interrelated.⁵

Julius Langbehn (1851-1907) had studied various subjects in Kiel and Munich before receiving his doctorate at the age of 29 — an almost “biblical” doctoral age at the time. He then led an unsteady life with changing jobs and residences for about a decade. He was unable to gain a foothold in academia. In 1891, he demonstratively sent his doctoral certificate back to Alma Mater, the University of Munich. His anonymously written essay Rembrandt as an educator. From a German was his only, albeit resounding, literary success. The book spread pan-Germanic sense of mission and combined irrational scientific hate with global cultural missionary zeal. He deliberately had the title as an allusion to Nietzsche's third Untimely viewing, Schopenhauer as an educator, elected. Langbehn adopted ideas from young Nietzsche and integrated them into a German-national world view. He rejected later works by Nietzsche as “aberrations.” Soon after publication, Lagarde, Georg E. Hinzpeter, Wilhelm II's tutor, and even Nietzsche himself, were authors of rembrandt-Buch suspects his aphoristic, contrived style such as “a clumsy attempt to imitate Nietzsche's late prose”⁶ worked. As early as January 1890, Langbehn came out to Lagarde, whom he revered, as an author,⁷ before Langbehn's true authorship became generally known, and he received the nickname “the Rembrandt German”. The success of the book was an expression of the mystical expectations of the time, which called for prophets of all kinds, especially from the realm of art. The stylistic and intellectual deficiencies in the text had a beneficial effect under these circumstances: Chaos and absurdity could simulate depth and background, constant repetitions had a hypnotic effect, deviating sentence structure and punctuation suggested an individual “creative” expression, lack of arguments and footnotes corresponded to the writing “genius,” naming recognized artists and historical figures simulated reading and conferring authority. Many well-known reviewers wrote detailed and positive reviews. Langbehn was often seen as the heir of the silent Nietzsche. Langbehn even made an attempt to heal it in the winter of 1889/90. After he had earned his mother's trust, he accompanied Nietzsche on walks for weeks, talked to him, slandered his doctors and friends and finally even called for guardianship of the sick person.⁸ It was fatal that the spread of Langbehn's ideas coincided with the first notable wave of Nietzsche reception, meaning that both could appear as prophets of an individualistic art religion and Langbehn could even be regarded as the heir of the philosopher and guide through his ideas. Langbehn had brought Nietzsche “far more to the people than had been the case up to then”⁹, summarized Erich F. Podach as early as 1932.

II. Mechanics of Rejection: Academic Business in Conflict with Outsiders

Based on a number of formal criteria, it is easy to determine whether someone belongs to the established scientific community: academic degree and affiliation, publications in established journals and reputable publishers, presence at scientific conferences, on juries, as reviewers and on appointment committees.

This does not mean that the non-integrated person must not contribute ideas from outside to the company, but it will be much more difficult for him to be heard than someone who is already on the inside. In earlier times, when the fragmentation of disciplines had not yet progressed so far and many were doing science as private individuals, this was even easier.¹⁰

Negotiating and defining academic exclusivity is an ongoing process in academia. Dealing with outsiders, minority opinions and laypeople determines his internal climate and ability to innovate. When assessing outsider positions, insiders suffer from a fundamental problem: many researchers — in a positive sense — have a manic fixation, an unconditional will to solve a problem or find an explanation, or a highly focused flow that occurs during experiments and calculations. The psychological energy that flows into research can also involve tunnel vision and the neglect of social contacts and conventions. This sometimes manic or nerdy habit combines the reputable researcher with a psychologically impaired outsider: “However, the same incessant mental work can be observed in any paranoid and it is often difficult to distinguish a brilliant creative person from a jumble head. ”¹¹ In addition, the scientist's working methods require constant refinement and perfection of theories once established, which can lead to a fixation on certain methods and results, which sometimes results in stubbornness that hinders progress in old age:

Recognized and powerful scientists who hold outdated ideas usually try in every way to slow down other scientists and throw clubs between their legs when they have embarked on a new path.¹²

Unfortunately, there is almost only one biological solution to this problem, as Nobel Prize winner Max Planck once stated:

A new scientific truth tends to assert itself not by convincing its opponents and declaring themselves to have been taught, but rather by gradually dying out its opponents and familiarizing the growing generation with the truth from the outset.¹³

The rejection of scientific outsiders by established researchers and officials is therefore often based on an “erroneous judgment on the part of the competent person,” who is unable to abstract from his acquired convictions and thus stubbornly insists on school opinion. Professional authorities tend to dismiss positions that contradict their theories as irrelevant or even unscientific. In this sense, they look for mistakes and signs of dubiousness and find what they are looking for in particular in formal or linguistic details, while disregarding the opponent's arguments and theoretical content:

The significance of such minor deficiencies becomes all the more the focus of attention when an idea comes from someone who is only slightly regarded, has little proof of qualification and is perhaps also distinctive in character, unadjusted, excessively aggressive and megalomaniac, or, on the contrary, all too modest and reserved. The scientist therefore allows himself to be misled by his own competence and antipathy and finally makes a negative verdict.¹⁴

Because a “crank” (= jumble, lateral thinker) or more elegant “maverick” (= outsider, but also “stray”, i.e. free)

Not part of the scientific corps, publications are difficult, the necessary amateurish presentation and aggressive tone justify a superficial analysis of his ideas and make them more likely to be rejected. What follows is a series of discriminations that make the victim even more aggressive, and the likelihood of being rejected and marginalized as a madman increases significantly.¹⁵

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III. Typology of the scientific outsider

Endoheretics criticize the scientific community from within because they have a status within it, albeit disputed, while esoheretics approach the scientific community from outside and are generally completely rejected by it. In some cases, endoheretics who left the scientific community through retirement, expulsion or voluntary resignation turned into esoheretics. Nietzsche also falls into the latter category.

If heretics want to continue their research on their own and without the support of academic bureaucracy, this is only possible if private assets or non-university sponsors are available. Nietzsche lived on the pension granted to him by the University of Basel, Lagarde enabled the adoptive mother's inheritance to publish sixteen scientific papers and books in parallel with his teaching activities at schools.¹⁶ A small inheritance following the death of his mother had given Spengler the opportunity to give up his teaching activities and pursue his literary ambitions as a freelance writer.¹⁷ Langbehn, in turn, had powerful friends and sponsors such as Wilhelm von Bode in the background, who gave him the opportunity to appear as an author.

Ideally, the wealth is so large and the social status is so established that maximum independence from scientific institutions is possible. The English private scholar Henry Cavendish (1731-1810), one of the most important naturalists and richest scholars of his time, was the prototype of the financially independent, eccentric and often interdisciplinary, universalist “Gentleman Scholars” of the 19th and early 20th century. He owned a large library, carried out numerous experiments, but avoided contact with institutions and colleagues and had no interest in publishing his results. He was completely fixated on his studies, lived in isolation on his estate without any social ambitions.

But not all those rejected by the scientific community are as self-absorbed as Cavendish. Most thirst for scientific and social recognition. They are tempted to make themselves heard through self-financed and published publications or through paid advertisements. Some have created publishers, journals, series of editions or even encyclopedias specifically to publish their articles and theses. With the self-publishing platforms, YouTube channels, blogs and book-on-demand options of the Internet age, the opportunities for academic outsiders to present themselves seem to have grown significantly today. However, this in no way guarantees seriousness — on the contrary: self-published material is widely regarded as a flaw in the scientific community, while established publication sites and citation cartels continue to exist that keep scientific outsiders at bay.

The current peer review process, the review of research proposals and journalistic contributions by anonymous academic colleagues, also has a thoroughly disadvantageous effect on the innovative capacity and diversity of the scientific community, because they are often competitors of the applicant. It goes without saying that in this way and in the shadow of anonymity, it is easy for established scientists to sabotage and exclude outsiders and newcomers: “You can be sure that some of the most groundbreaking work would never have appeared in the past if it had been peer reviewed according to today's standards. ”¹⁸

Then as now, some of the rejected people lost themselves in parascientific communities and anti-science positions. Without corrective contacts with academic colleagues, they delve into absurd theories. Others are moving into areas of popular science. A few of them can celebrate major successes in the media and on the book market with populist or sensational theses — and then use the symbolic capital they have acquired in order to achieve a certain degree of recognition in academia. In many cases, those rejected by the scientific community were and are driven by the motivation to compensate for the rejection experienced as an insult or even to take revenge for it in a certain way. This explains the sometimes extremely radical content positions and the polemical aggressiveness of language, although this verbal radicalism may be regarded as a specific form of toxic masculinity, for example as a substitute for unexpressed physical aggression:

Spengler is the type of inhibited, lonely and socially isolated thinker who manages to make a monumental work in the midst of his depression. There is hardly a case where the current psychological compensation argument would be more plausible than here: The impotent, fearful and inhibited Grübler creates a vision of the world with bossy language that transcends everything and makes every personal contingency appear meaningless.¹⁹

Academic outsiders such as Lagarde and Nietzsche adepts such as Langbehn and Spengler were able to celebrate great successes in Germany more than a hundred years ago — they played a decisive role in shaping the cultural discourse of the time. But their intrinsic motivation, the core of their business model, was based on managing resentment. As poisonous outsiders, they popularized cultural pessimism, anti-Semitism, and hostility to science. It was also a fatal long-term effect of Langbehn's and Spengler's writings that they pushed Nietzsche into the far-right field of discourse and thus prepared for his misuse by fascism.

In the universe of academic idiots and scientific outsiders, Nietzsche also shone as a lonely star. After moving to Basel, Nietzsche became stateless in 1869. From the winter semester of 1875/76, he is also unemployed; the University of Basel gave him leave of absence for health reasons. He had already read through the publication The birth of tragedy Isolated in the philological community, where his approach was considered too artistic. After leaving the circle of Wagner followers and following the final departure from academic teaching due to health reasons and retirement by the University of Basel, Nietzsche led an independent life as an academic outsider and free spirit. He commutes between Italy, France, Switzerland and Saxony and lives quite sparingly in order to be able to finance journalistic projects with his pension: “The ideal of life that, as a young professor, he had praised in his Basel lectures 'On the future of our educational institutions, 'of being able to live alone and in dignified isolation now seems to be fulfilled. '”²⁰

He travels and publishes extensively, but remains without much public response; only a few friends and insiders know his writings. Gentleman scholar Nietzsche endures his Splendid insulation with Stiff Upperlip, and takes comfort in the conviction that you won't be understood until 100 or 200 years from now.²¹

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Article image: Photo of a Swiss mountain landscape by Christian Sährendt

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sources

By Trocchio, Federico: Newton's suitcase. Brilliant outsiders who embarrassed science. Frankfurt 1998.

Janz, Curt Paul: Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. III. Munich 1979.

Felken, Detlef: Oswald Spengler. Conservative thinker between empire and dictatorship. Munich 1988.

Gerhardt, Volker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Munich 1995.

Planck, Max: Scientific self-biography. Leipzig 1948.

Podach, Erich F.: Design around Nietzsche. With unpublished documents on the history of his life and work. Weimar 1932.

Sieferle, Rolf Peter: The Conservative Revolution. Five biographical sketches. Frankfurt am Main 1995.

Victory, Ulrich: Germany's prophet. Paul de Lagarde and the origins of modern anti-Semitism. Munich 2007.

Summer, Andreas Urs: Between agitation, religious advocacy and “high politics.” Paul de Lagarde and Friedrich Nietzsche. In: Nietzsche research Vol. 4 (1998), pp. 169—194.

Stern, Fritz: Cultural pessimism as a political threat. Bern 1963.

Vuketits, Franz M.: Outsiders in science. Pioneers — guideposts — reformers. Heidelberg 2015.

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footnotes

1: See in detail my article about Spengler on this blog (link).

2: Fritz Stern, Cultural pessimism as a political threat, P. 52.

3: Cf. Ulrich Sieg, Germany's prophet, p. 168 ff.

4: Cf. Andreas Urs Sommer, Between agitation, religious foundation and “high politics”.

5: Victory, Germany's prophet, PP. 355—358.

6: star, cultural pessimism, P. 148.

7: Cf. victory, Germany's prophet, P. 299.

8: For this episode, see Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche, pp. 96-113 and Erich F. Podach, Figures around Nietzsche, P. 177-199.

9: Ibid., p. 197.

10: Vuketits, Outsiders in science, P. 35.

11: Federico Di Trocchio, Newton's suitcase, P. 22.

12: Ibid., p. 244.

13: Max Planck, Scientific self-biography, P. 22.

14: Di Trocchio, Newton's suitcase, P. 100.

15: Ibid., p. 23.

16: Cf. victory, Germany's prophet, P. 73.

17: Cf. Detlef Felken, Oswald Spengler, p. 25 ff.

18: Vuketits, Outsiders in science, p. 36 f.

19: Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Conservative Revolution, P. 106.

20: Volker Gerhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 48. Cf. About the future of our educational institutions, 5th presentation.

21: Cf. Gerhardt, Friedrich Nietzsche, P. 57.

Splendidly Isolated with a Stiff Upper Lip

Nietzsche and the Tragedy of Academic Outsiderhood

“Keep a stiff upper lip,” they say in England when you want to call on your interlocutor to persevere in the face of danger and to maintain an upright posture. Advice that is certainly often helpful. Such a stoic position must be sought all the more as an academic outsider who, on the one hand, sets himself apart from the scientific mainstream, but on the other hand is also dependent on his recognition. Nietzsche himself, but also many of his admirers, found himself in such a delicate situation. Based on several such outsider figures (in addition to Nietzsche himself, such as Julius Langbehn and Paul de Lagarde), Christian Saehrendt develops a typology of the (perhaps not always quite so) “brilliant isolation” of academic nonconformism.