Since the beginning of modernism in the 18th century, which entailed the dissolution of a uniform Christian approach to the world, the affected European societies have been in a permanent conflict of ideologies and worldviews. The French philosopher Paul Ricœur speaks of a war of interpretations, more precisely a “conflict of rival hermeneutics.”¹. In such a situation, resentment makes a career. Because you cannot refute other concepts of the world because they are based on different premises, you often reject them with an emotional intensity that precludes a mutual effort to understand the other person from the outset. This is how resentment quickly builds up on each other.

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I. Resentment in today's war of ideologies

The accusation of resentment really took off because the Enlightenment in the 18th century, with its demand for human rights, propagated the idea of seeing people as legally equal. Social equality was added a century later. Both ideas of equality remain unfulfilled to this day. Jürgen Grosse remarks: “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. ”²

As a result, people see themselves socially and politically disappointed. Capitalist and conservative views of the world prevent equality, which leads to aversions and political conflicts from a left-wing perspective, so that many feel socially disadvantaged. Max Hartung writes: “There is always a dialectic within the story: the guilty conscience of the hearers and the external determination through the law, the subtle spirals of power and the subjects included in them, driven by resentment without their knowledge.”³.

While in the first half of the 20th century, right-wing and fascist ideologies dominated in many countries and aggressively pursued liberal and left-wing thinking with terror, today's representatives of such worldviews see themselves marginalized, although they have received strong impetus in recent decades. Oliver Nachtwey notes: “Material and cultural status fears are drivers of resentment, negative affects, identitary closure and conspiracy theories — aspects that were identified early on as signs of authoritarian personality structures. ”⁴

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II. Nietzsche's fabulous true world

Nietzsche developed his concept of resentment in a more focused and differentiated way. He was one of the first to recognize that as a result of the war of ideologies, there is no longer a single reality; rather, these are just different interpretations that cannot refute each other. He writes: “We have abolished the real world: what world was left? The apparent one maybe? .. But no! With the real world, we have also abolished the apparent world! ”⁵

For Nietzsche, the real world has thus become a fable. For this reason, the various views of the world can only be met with rejection, which cannot be justified, except through an enemy image or mutual resentment.

Scientism is now trying to overcome this dilemma with a scientific view of the world. But the sciences do not escape the problem of the difference between language and the world, nor their dependence on methods and the subjectivity of all perception, which cannot be undermined by intersubjectivity. Nietzsche's verdict of the fabulous true world therefore persists.

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III. Resentment of the weak towards the strong

For Nietzsche, resentment is not due to a war of ideologies. Rather, it has a more far-reaching origin. Basically, it originates from the conflict between rich and poor back in ancient times. For Nietzsche, however, this is first conveyed by the Jewish priests. He writes: “The very big haters in world history have always been priests, even the most witty haters: — against the spirit of priestly revenge, all the rest of the spirit is barely considered at all. ”⁶

According to Nietzsche, the priests hated the aristocracy, i.e. the strong and rich, because they were inferior to them. Out of their feeling of inferiority and powerlessness, they developed a reluctance towards them, the resentment from which they took revenge on the aristocracy.

But how did they take revenge? By devaluing their ethical values and replacing them with the values of the poor. Are the latter not always the natural ethical orientations? Not at all, as Nietzsche points out: “They took the Werth, this “value” as a given, as in fact, as beyond all questioning”⁷.

But only Christianity gave this impression. Originally — i.e. before Judaism and Christianity — ethical goodness was not linked to the poor and weak; it did not originate from their need for help. For Nietzsche, it had a completely different origin when he wrote:

The pathos of nobility and detachment, [...] the lasting and dominating overall and basic feeling of a higher dominant species in relation to a lower species, to a “bottom” — That is the origin of the contrast between “good” and “bad.” [...] It is because of this origin that the word “good” is quite clear from the outset not necessarily linked to “unselfish” actions [.]⁸

This can be proven by Plato, for whom justice means “that everyone does his own thing. ”⁹ Good, even ethically good, is to fulfill its nature. If this has made you a craftsman, he should not try to interfere in the business of the powerful and rich. Of course, wealth means nobility and represents ethical goodness. Poverty, on the other hand, is ethically bad and tends towards malice.

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IV. The revaluation of all values

According to Nietzsche, it was precisely this relationship that the Jewish priests reversed

who dared to turn back against the aristocratic equation of values (good = noble = powerful = beautiful = happy = loved God) with a terrifying consistency and held on with the teeth of the most profound hate (the hate of powerlessness), namely “the wretched are only the good, the poor, the powerless, the lowly are only the good, the suffering, the sacrificing, the deprived, Sick, ugly people are also the only pious, the only godly ones, there is bliss for them alone — but you, you who are powerful and powerful, are in all Eternally the wicked, the cruel, the lustful, the insatiable, the wicked, you will also be the unfortunate, cursed and damned forever! ”¹⁰

It is doubtful whether Nietzsche adequately describes the religious world of Judaism before the beginning of Christianity. The ancient religions, i.e. their priestly representatives, who generally served the rulers, thus participated in power and thus also in wealth. But Nietzsche goes on to refer to Christianity, which was originally a Jewish sect. How does Agnes Heller write: “Jesus was not a Christian, nor was he, of course, a European. ”¹¹

It therefore seems more obvious to associate this revaluation of values, the devaluation of aristocratic morality and the appreciation of the ethics of the weak primarily with Christians, at least in view of their beginnings. As a result, resentment is primarily due to Christians, who also welcomed the poor into their ranks and who were unable to collaborate with political powers during their beginnings, as they were persecuted in parts of the Roman Empire because they carried out missions, which was forbidden to all cults. Nietzsche also continues: “You know who inherited this Jewish transformation. I recall [...] the sentence [...] — that is to say with the Jews The slave revolt in morality starts”¹², but which Christians fought successfully to the end in order to interpret and change the world in a sustainable way with a new structure of ethics.

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V. Resentment as a creative force

But didn't they leave everything as it was? Because Max Weber will then ask himself how a religion oriented towards poverty could achieve such a development of power and splendor as was felt particularly in Rome at the time. His answer was “due to unplanned side effects.”¹³, according to his biographer Jürgen Kaube: The monks' poverty rule in monasteries led to the accumulation of immense wealth.

With the moral turn of elevating poverty and weakness to high virtues, while wealth and power are viewed skeptically, and humility takes the place of pride, Christians not only completed the revaluation of all values. Instead, they devalued life itself for Nietzsche, but this resulted in new values. Nietzsche writes:

The morale of slave revolt begins with the fact that resentment becomes creative himself and gives birth to Werthe: [...]. While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant yes to themselves, slave morality says no from the outset to an “outside,” to an “other,” to a “not-self”: and this no is their creative fact.¹⁴

With this creativity of resentment, with this change from good to evil and from evil to good, Nietzsche no longer explains morality from himself, in a sense causally — the good from the good or as a story of good — but from its opposite, i.e. genealogically: Today's ethical good springs from evil, as the ancient aristocratic ethic of strength must appear to today's ethics. That is the meaning of Nietzsche's concept of genealogy.

Altruism thus represents ethical good, while egoism does not simply represent evil. Rather, he appears today as if he had nothing to do with ethics at all. Nietzsche, on the other hand, reveals this suppression of the origin of good precisely from this evil. He writes:

Rather, it only happens with a Decline aristocratic claims that this whole contrast “selfish” “unselfish” “unselfish” imposes itself more and more on the human conscience — it is to use my language that Army Instinct, who finally spoke with him (also to Worten) comes. [...] ([...] today there is a prejudice which takes “moral”, “unselfish”, “désintéressé” as equivalent terms, already with the violence of a “fixed idea” and head illness).¹⁵

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VI. Egoism instead of altruism

Nietzsche, on the other hand, does not want to be an altruist. For him, Socrates's concept of suffering wrong rather than doing wrong is hostile to life and paves the way for the Nazarene commandment, according to which one should love one's enemies. Instead, Nietzsche invokes Buddhism and in its sense propagates egoism, which represents almost the highest immorality for Christian morality and rational ethics following Kant. Buddhism on the other hand

resists nothing more than the feeling of revenge, aversion, resentment [...]. <er>The mental fatigue that he finds, and which is expressed in too great “objectivity” (i.e. weakening of individual interest, loss of heavyweight, of “egoism”), combats with a strict return of even the most spiritual interests to persona. In Buddha's teaching, egoism becomes a duty [.]¹⁶

So Zarathustra spoke in the same sense, “that his word the selfishness Blessed, the healthy, healthy selfishness that springs from a powerful soul. ”¹⁷

Only egoism does not develop resentment that Nietzsche does not need, because it is initially transformed as self-loathing into the overwhelming Christian love of one's neighbour, the pure will to power the weak. Because anyone who refuses to do so is an evil sinner, on whom resentment is directed, as at the beginnings of Judaism at the aristocrats. As a result of this revaluation of values, resentment has become creative.

The question is, of course, whether egoism is similarly animated by resentment. Nietzsche himself hates Christianity and the “last people”¹⁸who turn away from Christianity materialistically: socialists and liberals. Out of egoism and in differentiation from all traditional morality, Zarathustra create new values that push people beyond themselves. Does this not make resentment even more creative? Nietzsche wants to be creative, but medieval Christianity doesn't. In any case, it is a further revaluation of the values that Nietzsche propagates, whether driven by resentment or not.

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VII. Accusing each other of resentment

Max Scheler also accuses Nietzsche of resentment towards Christianity. For Nietzsche devalues the highest value, namely the sacred. Nietzsche is not alone for Scheler when he writes: “We believe [...] that the core of bourgeois morality, which began to replace Christians more and more from the 13th century until they achieved their highest achievement in the French Revolution, It is rooted in resentment. ” ¹⁹

In a sense, however, he is not so distant from Nietzsche if he accuses his contemporaries not only of materialism. Instead, for Scheler, this devaluation of Christianity is driven by people who lack morality. He writes:

In a sense, however, he is not so distant from Nietzsche if he accuses his contemporaries not only of materialism. Instead, for Scheler, this devaluation of Christianity is driven by people who lack morality. He writes:

There is perhaps no point on which the insightful and well-intentioned of our time are more united than that: that in the development of modern civilization, things [...] Man's Lord and Master have become; [...]. But far too little is it realized that this universally recognized fact is a consequence of a fundamental An overthrow of appreciation is who has its root in the victory of the value judgments of the most vital lowest, [...] and the Resentment is its root is!²⁰

Nietzsche could also formulate the last two half sentences in a similar way. Of course, Scheler Nietzsche would just be one of these “deepest” ones. But just as Nietzsche sees Christians as weak and driven by resentment, Scheler, conversely, regards the enemies of Christianity as such weak. With Nietzsche, they would then have to creatively assert themselves as Christians once did against the aristocrats, not for Scheler, of course.

Sartre, however, would agree with Nietzsche if he did not understand the anti-colonialist struggle, as promoted by Frantz Fanon, as a resentful reaction of the colonized people against their colonizers. Rather, he writes: “As <Fanon>proven, this irrepressible violence is not an absurd storm, not even the resurgence of wild instincts, not even the effect of resentment: it is nothing more than the new person who creates himself. ”²¹

Here you could hear a reference to Nietzsche's superman in the background; there are interpretations not only in existentialism but also in post-structuralism that draw the proletarian or anti-colonial revolutionary in this direction.

Gabriel Marcel, on the other hand, criticizes the existentialist self-image from an emphatically Christian perspective, as Sartre did, for example, in his novel Maturity period designs. Marcel writes:

And how did you want to prevent this from simulating or parody autarkiaWhich (the human being) gives himself up, degenerates into repressed resentment against himself and results in the techniques of humiliation? There is an obvious path that leads from abortions, where Sartre's customers come and go, to death camps, where torturers pounce on people who are unable to defend themselves.²²

Historically, this is probably the first comparison of abortions with the Holocaust, a heavy gun that thus speaks of tremendous resentment.

Hannah Arendt, in any case, protected Nietzsche from every accusation of anti-Semitism and from any resentment towards Judaism when she wrote in 1951, when Nietzsche was still the ancestor of the Nazis for many:

[U] and finally Friedrich Nietzsche, whose so frequently misunderstood remarks on the Jewish question are consistently based on concern for “good Europeanism” and whose assessment of Jews in the intellectual life of his time is therefore so surprisingly fair, free from resentment, enthusiasm and cheap philo-Semitism.²³

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Item image source

Francisco de Goya: The seesaw (1791/92) (spring)

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sources

Arendt, Hannah: Elements and origins of total domination (1951), 9th edition Munich 2003.

Große, Jürgen: The cold rage. Resentment theory and practice. Marburg 2024.

Hartung, Max: Revolution? Revolt? Resistance! Change and how it can be thought of in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. Munich 2015 (link).

Brighter, Agnes, The resurrection of the Jewish Jesus (2000). Berlin & Vienna 2002.

Kaube, Jürgen: Max Weber. A life between the ages. Berlin 2014.

Marcel, Gabriel: The Humiliation of Man (1951). Frankfurt am Main 1957.

Nachtwey, Oliver: De-civilization. About regressive tendencies in western societies. In: Heinrich Geiselberger (ed.): The big regression. An international debate on the spiritual situation of the time. Berlin 2017, pp. 215—232.

Plato, Politeia (c. 374 BC), transl. by Friedrich Schleiermacher, works Vol. 3. Hamburg 1958.

Ricoeur, Paul: Hermeneutics and structuralism. The conflict of interpretations I (1969), Munich 1973.

Sartre, Jean-Paul: The period of maturity (1945), Collected works novels and stories Vol. 2 Reinbek b. Hamburg 1987.

Sartre, Jean-Paul: preface to: Frantz Fanon, The Damned of this Earth (1961). Reinbek near Hamburg 1969.

Scheler, Max: Resentment in building morals (1912). In: Ders. : On the overthrow of values. Treatises and essays (1915/1919), Collected works Vol. 3, 4th ed. Bern 1955.

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footnotes

1: Hermeneutics and structuralism I, P. 30.

2: The Cold Rage, P. 327.

3: Revolution? Revolt? Resistance!, P. 242.

4: De-Civilization, P. 228.

5: Götzen-Dämmerung, Like the “real world” ...

6: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 7.

7: On the genealogy of morality, Preface 6.

8: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 2.

9: Politeia, 433 a.

10: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 7.

11: The resurrection of the Jewish Jesus, P. 88.

12: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 7.

13: Max Weber — Ein Leben zwischen den Era, P. 143.

14: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 10.

15: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 2.

16: The Antichrist, 20.

17: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the three bad guys, paragraph 2.

18: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, paragraph 5.

19: Resentment in building morals, P. 70.

20: Ibid., P. 145.

21: preface to: Frantz Fanon, The Damned of this Earth P. 18.

22: The humiliation of man, P. 157.

23: elements and origins of total domination, P. 72.

Turning Moral Weakness Into Power

Nietzsche and the Accusation of Resentment

Strangers seem creepy to many. They immediately fear that these strangers will harm them. Many decent earners think that recipients of citizen benefits are lazy and therefore do not allow them to receive government support. To many educated people, illiterate people appear rude and simple-minded, with whom they therefore want as little as possible nothing to do with, whom they do not trust. Religious people are often afraid of atheists, who in turn are afraid of contact with religion. What you don't know often appears to be dangerous and you prematurely discount that. Such prejudices lead to rejection, which often solidifies to such an extent that counterarguments are no longer even heard. This is resentment that has existed for a long time, but which today makes consensus almost impossible in many political and social debates. This can degenerate into hate and contempt and then into violence whether between rich and poor, right and left, machos and feminists, abortion opponents and abortion advocates, vegetarians and meat-eaters. When one side prevails, it imposes its values on the other, and the resentment even becomes creative. In any case, it prevents you from making an effort to understand the other person. For Nietzsche, resentment has been driving the dispute over what is morally necessary for a long time.

“Resentment” is one of the key terms of Nietzsche's late work. The philosopher is referring to an internalized and solidified affect of revenge, which leads to the development of an overall negative approach to the world. Especially in On the genealogy of morality Nietzsche is trying to show that the entire European culture since the rise of Christianity has been based on this affect. Judaism and Christianity, in their hatred of aristocrats, propagated an ethics of the weak — in this act, resentment became creative. With a new creative ethic, Nietzsche now wants to contribute to a renewed revaluation of values in order to return to a life-affirming aristocratic ethic of the “strong.” In this article, Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann introduces Nietzsche's reflections on resentment and works out what makes the accusation of mutual resentment so popular to this day.

“What doesn't kill me makes me stronger. ”

(Götzen-Dämmerung)

I. Inequities

Paul Stephan: I would like to start our exchange with Nietzsche and Taylor Swift with a kind of small, self-written aphorism that reads: “You are old when you only notice mass pop cultural phenomena after several years of delay.” I myself, as I must admit, only heard anything about her after a delay of maybe a good ten years in the course of the massive hustle and bustle surrounding her Eras tour. How are you doing?

ES: When she started to become famous, I was still relatively young and I knew her, but it has already passed me by. I never really listened to their songs and saw them more as a marginal figure. She was at the time

Not as big as it is now. I think she had a revival then, that was maybe in 2019 or 2020, when I heard about her, but I was already too old for that. This means that at no point was she really a particularly relevant figure for me and it is therefore all the more exciting to see that she has now become such a big phenomenon.

HH: My connection to her is also more from outside, but there is a certain family background: At some point I talked to my sister about what my two nieces do and like. That was maybe 2019 or 2020 when my sister said that they were very big Taylor Swift fans and I actually asked: “Who is that? “My sister was really mad at me that I didn't know that. She explained Swift's great importance to me, and also praised her feminism. This fantasy may have reached its peak during the Eras tour. That's when my sister and her daughters somehow managed to get tickets to see Swift in Edinburgh, where my family and I happened to be at that time. We didn't see Swift, but the city was jam-packed with the Swifties. Because you have to know that Swift not only plays a concert in a city, as usual, but always three or even more in a row, and there were really a lot of Swifties out and about, often with their cowboy hats, that is one of their trademarks. And in line with popular belief, around 80 to 90% of them were women, mostly under 30 — there are simply a few men who go for Taylor Swift and that is perhaps part of this phenomenon.

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II. Who is Taylor Swift?

PS: Maybe we should explain the background a bit in case some of our readers aren't that popular culture buff either. You've already introduced the term “Swiftie,” which Swift fans use to describe themselves. She herself is an American pop singer who originally comes from the country music sector, but has largely broken away from these origins and now simply makes pop.

HH: Your very first album, Taylor Swift, published in 2006. Her breakthrough into a megastar took place around 2018.

PS: She is now in her mid-30s and has just started her career very early. Even as a child, she was trained for this through dance lessons or participation in appropriate competitions. And that has led to success: She is now competing with greats like Madonna for the rank of most successful pop singer of all time and is also very successful in business. She is a billionaire and gives concerts all over the world, has an incredibly huge fan base — the Swifties — has also made various films and much more.

ES: Which films has she acted in?

PS: We've already talked about this Eras tour, which caused a lot of sensation. For me, it felt like nothing else was being talked about on the radio during this time. That was in the summer of 2024, it was there in Central Europe, where it was discussed very broadly. Overall, the tour was the most economically successful tour of all time — and she even made a movie of her concert, which was also very successful. But there is also, for example, a documentary biopic about her life — Miss Americana (2020) — and she has also worked on several other films.

HH: Yes, there are several films and documentaries that she has often directed herself. She really cares about control. Like Elon Musk, for example, she is often accused of being obsessed with steering and defining the narrative about her down to minute detail. And what stands out is also the sheer level of productivity. There is a huge production machine around them that wants to produce more and more cultural goods and that has tremendous self-dynamism. The Eras tour, for example, lasted two years and achieved a turnover of around 2 billion dollars. By way of comparison, the much older Paul McCartney has only recently reached a total net worth of one billion dollars. It is simply a gigantic device that, once set in motion, continues to run.

ES: It simply has something universal, such an omnipresence, which has also resulted very strongly from this marketing — if that term isn't almost an understatement. She is a brand, she has managed to turn herself as a figure and everything she stands for into a brand, which is reflected in different cultural sectors. Her music, her films — that's something of a self-referential system.

PS: Yes, a kind of parallel world. There is just this Swiftie culture, where she is referred to as “the Queen” and is sometimes worshipped as a kind of goddess. This certainly takes on religious features. There are young people who go into debt to go to all their concerts — and the tickets for them aren't exactly cheap, you have to start with at least €300.¹ There are people who actually go to all three concerts when they play in a city. Well, there is already a hype that really describes a whole new quality in pop culture. There have always been crazy fans, but the fact that it is so massive and goes so deep that they really adore and idolize people so much is something new. And it also affects all spheres: There are politicians who either strongly distinguish themselves from it or praise it to the skies — and that doesn't even stop at philosophy. So I actually only did very brief and superficial research before this conversation and have already come across a whole flood of philosophical publications of varying quality.² What struck me: There, too, the train clearly goes into the apologetic table. So it is really very difficult to find critical philosophical analyses of her; the basic tenor is that her texts are so profound, she is even referred to as a philosopher herself.³ As you can see, the hype is really all-encompassing — maybe we could deviate a bit from our colleagues and set a different tone.

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III. Understanding the hype

ES: What I find exciting is the way this hype was created and on which logic it is based. Because she is very uplifted, declared a kind of “goddess” — and at the same time, admiration for her is based on her “authenticity.” She is a real person, understandable to everyone and she fights human battles. Just think of the very exciting conflict over the copyrights to her albums, which began around 2019 — although one cannot ignore the fact that she was already very wealthy at this point in time and has very little to do with the everyday struggles of the masses. So I find it interesting to see how this image of the accessible, “authentic” figure has brought her back to a new level at which she can actually no longer be accessible, because not everyone on such a religious level can be deified, for that you need a unique selling point — which in turn is authenticity. It's a paradox — it doesn't even surprise me, but above all fascinates me.

PS: I would even go so far as to say that anyone who understands our time, that is, wants to think about it, wants to say how Hegel formulated the mission of philosophy⁴ He must actually understand Taylor Swift.

ES: With such a specific example as Swift, you can really see the presence of the historical process in society. In all their contradictions, if you want to stay with Hegel.

HH: What do you mean by that exactly?

ES: For example, that one of the reasons why she is adored is precisely her “down-to-earth attitude.” Historically speaking, gods and goddesses were just not down to earth; perhaps fallible, but still exalted, they were heroic, not earthly, not human. With Taylor Swift, it's exactly the other way around: The reason why she almost has this status of a “superman” is because you say “Oh, but she is real,” you're dealing with a “real person,” she's kind of “real,” “authentic,” “comprehensible,” “grounded.” That is certainly a contradiction. Quite apart from that, as a billionaire, she is not confronted with the same reality as billions of people in the world; she is not a “normal person” — that would be a second contradiction. And you could go on and on. We can also address the musical quality, I think there is another contradiction.

PS: For me, the basic contradiction, or even the puzzle, that she gives me is the stark contradiction between what she is — the objectively assessable quality of her works and her performance — and what she seems — i.e. how blatantly she is hyped by her fans and the general public. So I'm not saying that she can't do anything, she can definitely sing much better than most of us and much more. But it is still the case when you look at the musical structure of her songs, for example, and she really tries to understand music theory, quickly realizes that even by pop standards, it is a very monotonous and very simple harmony that underlies these songs. For a good three quarters of her songs, she uses exactly the same worn out and trivial chord schemes and you can really layer her songs on top of each other and play them synchronously without being too noticeable.⁵ And even when it comes to the lyrics, whose “special depth” is praised by many, I would say that they are actually not very deep and creative even by pop standards. She actually only uses very few metaphors or any form of mystery — on the contrary, her principle is simply to say what she wants to say, i.e. not to express her message in a big rhetorical way. And the few metaphors she uses are also very worn out. Or am I missing something?

HH: So I pay particular attention to the lyrics, because musically speaking, their songs are really pretty boring. You often don't know whether there is a drum machine running in the background or a drummer playing. Drum machines can also create brilliant music, of course, but that doesn't happen with them. With the lyrics, especially in her more recent albums, she certainly tries to incorporate elements of “poetry” and “originality,” but the only thing that comes to mind is the philosophical term “floating signifiers,” the free-floating meaning carriers without meaning.⁶ I'm thinking about the song The Tortured Poets Department from their latest album, which has the same name. There is a section where she says:

I laughed in your face and said: “You're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patti Smith, This ain't the Chelsea Hotel, we're modern idiots. ”⁷

Why do the celebrated yet hermetic Welsh author Dylan Thomas (1914—1953) and the American punk musician and author Patti Smith (born 1946) even appear in the song? I can't imagine Taylor Swift really being interested in these things; these empty signifiers simply serve to represent something “intellectual,” “bohemian.”

PS: I think that's why it's simply very post-modern. As early as the mid-80s, cultural theorist Frederic Jameson, for example, described this permanent quotation without a deeper meaning as a basic characteristic of postmodernism; he speaks of “pastiche.”⁸ Especially when you watch her music videos — which, you have to admit, are very elaborately made — they are full of allusions, such as when she imitates Lady Gaga. These are all forms of pastiche, not satire, for example. You don't know exactly what she actually means by that — but it is precisely these allusions that are often cited as proof of her “profundity.” Well, I would really like to say it so polemically: This entire philosophical and also general humanities discourse about Taylor Swift is really the complete surrender of the critical spirit to what exists — as if the quality of works of art has something to do with any allusions; as if the poems by Shakespeare, for example, were simply great for the reason that they were a collage of references of some kind.

ES: I'd like to come back to the musicality aspect again. What I would look at critically would not be for an artist to write a musically simple song. There are many songs that only use the three to four skin chords that are very successful, that you can enjoy. I don't think anyone would dispute that. The problem with Swift — and others too — is that it's just That is, it doesn't go beyond that. You have a product that consists of four chords and builds your entire musical career on it. After all, music is a unique form of art, a form of aesthetic processing of social conditions that tries to express something that is connected with the environment. Behind this is a technique, skills, that you experiment, that you bring in a certain complexity. Music is much more than just a song that is then recycled over and over again. When you build an entire work on it, it crumbles in your hands and makes it unbelievable that so much success can be achieved as a result. The fact that it is, of course, a commercial success is easy to analyze again, i.e. the question of why, if it is relatively primitive and repetitive in terms of musical complexity, why is it still such a huge success: What is the aspect of it that can generate such gigantic masses, some of which get into debt in order to go to a concert? I'd rather look at that, wouldn't per se On the simplicity of a song, because that's not the point. And the same goes for the lyrics. What remains is a form of commodity that is characterized primarily by quantity and not by its qualitative substance.

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IV. A “mouthpiece”⁹ of the cultural struggle

HH: Perhaps it is the case that at least one contradiction among the several that you have identified, Estella, can be resolved: For the fans, it is primarily about the success or the skill of the production. She is regarded as down-to-earth, but you can't even speak of a real down-to-earth attitude. I don't know her biography very well, but she is said to have grown up in a relatively wealthy family in the countryside. For example, there is an early video from 2006 (link), when she was 16, where she performs at the well-known “Whisky a Go Go” club in Hollywood, and there she plays a few country songs on the guitar, with a fiddle and so on in the backing band: Nothing amazing, and yet it all sounds much more real, even more authentic than what came after that. It all still looks a bit “real.” Estella, you mentioned earlier that it is a product of the cultural industry — but perhaps it is more accurate to say that it is a product that produces itself. It has its own means of production — which very few of us do, you could envy it for it.

PS: I think you have already added a very important aspect with the “down-to-earth” or perceived “authenticity”, which is also often mentioned when you look at the discourse around them and what their fans also say. Because there is also a myth — which is certainly not a complete myth — that she writes her songs herself and so on. But it's also the case again that people who know their way around¹⁰ Say that if she would simply release her songs based on her chord and melody ideas, no one would like it; they are already well done by professional producers who then somehow “save” the song with some original rhythmic ideas or through the instrumentation. But I think that the more important aspect is actually the political orientation that she stands for or at least seems to stand for, i.e. that she is so clearly in favour of a particular form of wokeness in this cultural struggle, which is currently simmering in the USA in particular. Excitingly enough, this is not all that present in their song, apart from a few exceptions, but all the more so in their production on social media and the like. She is currently considered one of the most important champions by many young women, perhaps even: which The most important champion of today's feminism is perceived as a kind of anti-Trump or anti-Musk. It also seems very important to me for their fans that, with their fantasy, they express their affiliation to a certain political ideology and, as a result, to a certain lifestyle, i.e. to a woken lifestyle, which in turn almost includes being a swiftie.

ES: When I look at Taylor Swift in the more general cultural struggle, she strongly embodies this one side that you have just mentioned, i.e. this liberal, woke — which I mean not as a polemical catchword but as an analytical term. On the other hand, you have what you call the “reactionary conservative right,” i.e. Andrew Tate, Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Elon Musk, etc. There is a clear cultural divide and I think it strongly represents what I would call “liberal feminism.” In principle, I criticize it as a bourgeois product. He represents an understanding of equality, which is about the fact that women, to put it casually, should now also become CEOs and can then oppress them in the same way as men — that is the narrative. That is the appropriation of feminism for class struggle from above. It is relatively self-evident that this does not create actual emancipation from or an overcoming of the patriarchal system. That's why I don't understand how you can regard her as such an icon of feminism — not even so much from Taylor Swift's perspective, we can't really know her, except perhaps from the few interviews that remain on a relatively superficial level. I don't want to negate the fact that she experiences sexism, but it doesn't go to the basis of the structural inequality system. In any case, I can rarely understand how her fans or not even her fans, but anyone who deals with it in any way, can claim in all seriousness that she is the pioneer of emancipatory feminism. And that brings us back to the level of material conditions. She is simply a billionaire and is not one of the billions of women workers. Both feminist struggles cannot be equated. In doing so, you take away its substance from the whole movement and reduce it to questions of recognition, but you can't stop there. Perhaps she is also experiencing or has experienced violence; you shouldn't push that aside. But when she is then elevated to a feminist icon, but not so many other figures whose victims are much greater, whose struggles are based so much more on the material basis, I cannot understand that, I find that undeserved. Instead, we should focus on the social struggles that take place in the middle of everyday life, on the streets.

PS: In the preliminary discussion, you used a very appropriate term for this, namely you spoke of Girlboss feminism spoken. A term that I did not know before, but which sums up very well in one word what form of feminism it actually stands for.

ES: As we've already talked about this, she has created a very successful business model, i.e. in a capitalist logic, you could of course say that she has achieved a certain form of equality — but beyond that, the question of course is: Do you want to stop with such an understanding of feminism? And beyond that: What kind of feminist work does she do in terms of content? Her lyrics are often about her ex-boyfriends or the fact that she herself is the problem. That is a romanticization of failed relationships. Where is the feminist message there? If you produce songs that indicate how independent you are from men, but these songs actually only talk about men, then that is inherently inconclusive. Nothing against breakup albums, but the way Swift does it doesn't actually amount to the fact that it leads to emancipation from exactly these relationship structures that are patriarchal.

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V. Suffering and Love

HH: I would like to take this opportunity to mention that among the many good links Paul has sent us in advance, there is one that, in a sense, reflects your words and who is not so apologetic. I mean the article by Mary Harrington from UnHerd (link). The headline, translated into German, reads: “The dark truth about Taylor Swift. Too many young women are longing for extinction.” That is an interesting thesis. And it is Swift's tragic right now Love songs, mostly about the ex-boyfriends who run best. Harrington speaks of a “kamikaze mysticism”; psychologically speaking, it is almost in the direction of self-harm. It's pretty weird and I wasn't so aware before that it could actually revolve around it. What does that say when so many young women are in the mood for songs that, to put it less romantically, are about bad relationships, about relationships that end badly? What is it about — also with regard to this feminism, which may not be one?

ES: Yes, it is a feminism that doesn't really demand anything and is therefore devoid of substance. In the 2010s, there was also the phenomenon of Tumblr girls.¹¹ Back then, this was related to Lana Del Rey, who has certain similarities to Swift in this regard. In any case, this image of the tragic, sad “girl” was romanticized and glorified. It served as an alternative to the popular American girl, according to the motto: “I'm not like that, I'm struggling with life and suffering from world pain.” This was then really often accompanied by self-harm and it was then played down very heavily and almost became a trend, it became coolthat you hurt yourself — and that's all based on a narrative of tragedy: “No one really understands me.” Swift builds on this to a certain extent. There is something slightly nihilistic about her becoming a drama queen and says “It's me, hi, I'm the problem.”¹² or “You look like my next mistake”¹³. She already knows that this person is not good for her and yet she gets involved. There is little feminist integrity in it for me, then you can't actually claim feminism for them if you recognize these mechanisms and at the same time say: “Yes, I still want that. ”

PS: Yes, according to my subjective impression, this theme or the prevailing mood that we were talking about is really at least actually in three quarters of their songs The main aspect. So failed relationships with “boyfriends.” So there is also a certain monotony on the content level.

ES: Based on a spectacle of emotion, I'd say. So the excitement of falling in love and then the failure of the relationship that this becomes such a big spectacle is perhaps the reason why it is so dragging on for many.

HH: You call this a “spectacle of emotions” because the fans enjoy watching it, empathizing without really having to experience it themselves, right? It remains an interesting circle of contradictions. We actually experience them as absolutely inauthentic, but it is still possible that so many fans are living these relationships after all, because otherwise where does this great comprehensibility come from?

ES: Yes, maybe the basis for this is simply human emotion and interpersonal relationships. But perhaps the opposite is also true. After all, when it comes to a spectacle, it's often the case that you just find it exciting because you're not experiencing it yourself. In soap operas, for example, even the wildest things happen that are very unlikely or even impossible in reality. The pleasure or desire for it comes precisely from the fact that this extremely hyperstimulant exists, i.e. a superlative. These songs, which process this aspect of the relationship drama over and over again — or it is actually not even a processing, it is simply brought to the table very openly over and over again — give me the feeling that they always have something saturated and highly frequented. You can really get yourself into an emotion there. Although the interesting thing is that, statistically speaking, the younger generation has much fewer romantic relationships, there is a clear trend towards a decline in social and sexual relationships. Perhaps there is a trend — but that is now very speculative — that people do not experience such drama in their actual lives, but in Swift's music instead. You have the desire for it and this is a fantastic experience.

PS: Isn't Swift's conventionality also reflected in the fact that she actually only revisits the topics of stereotypical “women's literature” or “women's films” — I'm thinking of Rosamunde Pilcher or Hedwig Courths-Mahler, for example — who often follows exactly this plot, that a woman falls in love with a man who is actually not good to her and then goes through a very exciting and heartwarming development with him?

ES: Yes, although Swift shows a quality, because for her, it is always linked to feminist empowerment. It is not like classic love stories that follow a specific plot, a conservative plot that has been known for decades, but it is about being labelled as “feminist” in one way or another. And I personally find that dangerous because feminism, which was and is historically a revolutionary practice, is being appropriated for a market, i.e. it simply becomes a commodity. A political term is depoliticized, it gets its breath out; it is made compatible with what you were talking about.

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VI. Well-portioned eroticism

PS: Another very important aspect seems to me to be eroticism. We've already talked about the fact that we're dealing with music whose target group is primarily young women and perhaps homosexual men — that's the stereotype anyway, but we've already seen that it doesn't completely contradict reality, even though there are, of course, heterosexual male Swifties on the sidelines. And that brings me exactly to the aspect of eroticism. To get a bit personal: What irritated me when I saw her picture for the first time was that she is such a blatant pop star but doesn't seem very erotic to me personally. Well, she is definitely a beautiful woman, but it is important to understand that beauty and eroticism are not the same thing, sometimes even mutually exclusive. So there are — and I think Swift is one of them — that are almost “too beautiful.” So they definitely look attractive, but not erotic — which is definitely very unusual for a pop star. I then asked myself whether this was only due to my subjective taste, but I quickly realized that this was not the case. That is definitely a topic that is discussed very often.¹⁴ In fact, there are also objective criteria for eroticism. There are simply women who are considered erotic by almost all men, and other women are not, that is quite obvious. And Swift is simply not considered erotic by many men.

But at this point I've made another discovery and I have to admit that various of her songs actually made me think, because she also addresses this in various songs herself. She certainly shows herself in erotic poses there — but at the same time makes it a topic that she is just playing a role to please a man. I found it interesting how simple these methods actually are, with which a woman can present herself as erotic. Of course, this has a lot to do with clothing — such as clothing that highlights the breasts — or certain ways of looking at you. I actually found these videos a bit instructive. And that's when I would see a new quality in her, that it's just a pop star who really doesn't rely on eroticism anymore. And that has nothing to do with her appearance, but with her nature, i.e. that she makes it clear that eroticism is essentially the product of a particular performance and that she is perhaps really the first successful female pop star to refrain from this type of performance. I find that remarkable.

HH: I can understand your statements — although that's just eine Perspective is. But yes, if you asked 1,000 straight men: “Who is more sexually attractive, Madonna in the 80s or Taylor Swift? “, then this would simply not be a competition, then 950 of them would vote for Madonna. And that is simply because it was part of Madonna's self-production right from the start: She knew that she was sexually attractive to many men and effectively exploited this as part of her production and art production. I find that absolutely legitimate. And Swift didn't want to go that route. From every perspective, from any sexual orientation, it looks good. She is, in Paul's words, “beautiful.” But she doesn't want to market herself sexually — which is also absolutely legitimate, but is perhaps only noticeable because up to now this has been more of an exception in the pop industry for women who have sold a lot. But it's actually true: In certain videos, she presents herself in this stereotypical cliché way — but in doing so, she conveys a very different message than most women in the pop industry have so far.

ES: I think the criterion of eroticism or sex appeal was the decisive factor when it came to female celebrities until the early 2000s. And that was also a marketing criterion. But I think that there has been a change in the narrative and that this is no longer the only decisive factor for women's careers, to be the object of desire for heterosexual men. I would say that now we are dealing with a completely different discourse, now it is primarily about the liberal feminism that it represents. But what I find exciting is that it comes down to something similar in practice. It's not like she only appears fully clothed now and you can't see a piece of skin. Billie Eilish, for example, saw such an explicit refusal much more in comparison at the beginning of her career. But when Swift does that, when she shows herself that way, she does it based on a completely different narrative, then she does it as self-empowerment: “Nobody tells me how to dress.” This moment is woven into the discourse anew. But I can't imagine that Swift is not aware that this, of course, still includes the aspect of male desire. Because what is perceived as erotic as sexy is, in our given reality, strongly determined by a masculine definition of desire, you can't just release yourself just as much as the rest of the world knows that this is of course appealing to heterosexual men.

PS: There is one song in particular where what I mean is very clear Look what you made do.¹⁵ This is also another form of pastiche. All sorts of male fantasies are portrayed in a video. I think that was really successful. There is, of course, a certain ambiguity; I think it succeeded for two reasons, so to speak. Once I found it successful as a man because I find it really erotic. But I also find it successful as a philosopher, as it were, because it was very instructive, because it made me understand a great deal about the nature of erotic staging. It's not just about lightweight or absent clothing — that's how Swift is almost permanent. But that is not the point, it is indirectly very, very clear in the video. She could also undress completely naked, but it wouldn't necessarily be erotic without the appropriate gestures. For example, it also has a lot to do with the camera, where it focuses, how the woman looks at the camera. In this video, for example, I noticed that looking directly at the camera, combined with appropriate clothing, looks very erotic. Or even other camera settings. And it is, of course, not least about fantasies and scenarios that are hinted at; eroticism is something mental, not just a physical phenomenon. You could now analyse that for hours. I think that this is definitely a step forward that a new type of woman is emerging, I definitely think that is not bad, even though she picks me up much less as a private person than any Madonna songs that actually appeal to me a lot.

ES: When the lyrics read “Look what you made me do,” then I ask myself: What is the feminist message there? Of course, a woman is not responsible for the patriarchal structures into which she was born. But this line of text does imply that you deny any responsibility. This once again glorifies passivity. After all, it also has a certain form of agency power. Instead, however, she says “Look what you've brought me to” — without, despite realizing it, changing anything about it. Or how is the message of the song to be understood?

PS: Yes, that's the message. You almost forced me, i.e. you as “The Man” — there is also this video where she portrays herself as a “typical man” as a counterpart (link) — that I have to play all these roles just to please you. Well, I don't think the message is that profound at all, you can certainly do that these days in the bravo Read if they still exist. Of course: This video has an ambiguity, it definitely picks up heterosexual men for now with the various scenes that are shown there. But at the same time, it has certainly succeeded in questioning me and other men in the sense that it can also have an effect on me and other men: What do I actually find erotic? Am I not actually very manipulable? At the same time, she's already doing things differently in her other videos because she doesn't use exactly these gestures and codes. I would highlight that.

HH: I think that 70 to 80% of Swift's fan base actually consists of women. Most of these women must desire her in some way. I think that's part of this kind of fanship, whether you define it as sexual desire or as another kind, they want a piece of it, so to speak. I wonder whether this massive female desire directed at Taylor Swift could even contribute to a redefinition of eroticism in the medium or long term; that it is no longer defined so one-sidedly by male desire.

On the subject of desire, I Look What You Made Me Do looked at it and compared it with Nobody No CrimeWhat I know better. These two songs have similar motives. A love triangle is told, including cheating and so on. And it ends, unsaid, with the murder of a woman of a man. It's a kind of living revenge fantasy. That is actually the same as what is actually in Look What You Made Me Do goes: That she finally takes revenge on her ex-boyfriends and can live out who she actually is. And that is not a feminist motive, because everything continues to revolve around these men. From Swift's perspective, another type of feminism is hardly possible either, because it has no connection to the everyday struggles of 95 to 99% of women on this planet and simply cannot have because of the billions it has accumulated.

ES: Perhaps we should differentiate between desire and eroticism. I think straight women's feminine desire regarding Swift has a lot to do with identification. Freud differentiates between these basic types of desire: sexual and identifical. In this sense, it is already an authorization. I can also recognize feminism when you recognize your own autonomy or patriarchal repression. Perhaps this is the first basal step on the path of liberation. This is where identification takes place in order to find a vocabulary for it in the first place and to make it intelligible.

Another aspect is that she also has a very large queer fan base. And there is definitely a desire, even among gay men, but I don't know how erotic it is or whether it's more about identification or representation. In particular, you have a motif of “angry but nice” or even the term “wholesome”, which can barely be translated into German — healthy, sincere, lovable. This “wholesome” character is just popular, but it's not necessarily about eroticism. Nevertheless, it will certainly become an erotic object for many, not just for heterosexual men.

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VII. Nietzscheanism for the People

PS: But the paradox lies precisely in the fact that it is still heard and well found by all these “normal women” (nurses, nurses, cashiers, etc.). I think that in order to understand this, such a Marxist understanding has its limits. But that is precisely the peculiarity of the ideology of our time, that people are really completely steeped in and firmly convinced of an ideology that does not suit their material living situation at all. In order to understand the paradox, or even stronger: absurdity, you certainly have to draw on other theorists, such as Freud, whom you have already mentioned, in order to understand this specific attractiveness of the “leader figure,” as he described in Crowd psychology and ego analysis describes. Or even Nietzsche. What does Taylor Swift have to do with Nietzsche?

HH: What strikes me time and again in my very unsystematic way of reading Nietzsche is his deep hatred of what will later be referred to as “mass culture.” I don't share this hate, but I'm impressed by how tough it is and how much Nietzsche expresses himself in it. Nietzsche's hatred of newspaper readers and especially newspaper readers is very well known: “Of course, there are enough stupid women's friends [...] [,] who want to bring the woman down to 'general education, 'probably even to read newspapers and politicize. ”¹⁶ So if people read newspapers at all, especially women, then the mail goes off for Nietzsche, that doesn't work at all. What he can't bear is the idea that if 10,000 people have read the same newspaper articles, they will think and feel roughly the same way about a particular topic at that moment.¹⁷ And it's not just about 10,000 people, but maybe 50,000 or 100,000 people or more. And to get to the present tense, it's now about millions of people who listen to a Swift song and then have roughly the same emotional experience. Because these songs do not allow for a wide range of feelings, the affective reaction they are supposed to evoke is relatively simple. And this hatred of mass culture is not on the margins of Nietzsche's work, but right at the center.

ES: Well, I would defend Marx because I think that the Marxist concept of ideology can cover this aspect that you mentioned quite well. With Nietzsche, I find that a bit difficult. But I believe that one could criticize her position in the cultural struggle with Nietzsche — not only among her but also her opponents — with the help of concepts of resentment and slave morality. But at the same time I ask myself to what extent Nietzsche is a good choice as an anti-feminist. If I disregard this aspect and simply look at what remains for Taylor Swift's analysis, you can build on Nietzsche's analysis of mass culture that modernity is creating new gods for itself. You think that you have left Christianity behind, but as a supposedly atheistic society, you no longer understand that you create new deifications of your own, towards which you also place yourself in a new relationship of dependence. Perhaps this perspective helps to understand how there is a form of control again, that people want their own submission; that is, the problem of voluntary submission.

PS: Yes, Taylor Swift is an expression of our time in the sense that, speaking from a Nietzschean perspective, there is obviously a stark absence of meaning and orientation figures, but at the same time also a strong desire to be fascinated or carried along by some leading figures. You can really see that on both sides of this cultural struggle, including Trump or Musk, for example, that there is a very comparable cult of personality there. I find this exciting and, in turn, fascinating, but also unsettling and frightening at the same time. So I'm not so afraid of this specific fan culture for now, it is also quite likeable compared to other fan cultures — but this fundamental willingness to submit to authoritarian leaders and structures... Sure, Taylor Swift embodies a very gentle and indirect authority, she is also, fortunately perhaps, not a political leader, that looks completely different with the two men I've mentioned and that's when it gets really dangerous, frightening and threatening. But there is a fundamental willingness on both sides to make this, to speak with Kierkegaard, “leap into faith,” to practice this dedication and fascination and to find in it a form of freedom — which is, of course, complete pseudo-freedom, the opposite of freedom — that seems to me to be a disturbing expression of the blatant irrationality of our era, which arouses serious fears. In this respect, I would say that Taylor Swift is often portrayed as a great source of hope. But if it is really our biggest hope, perhaps our only hope, then we are really living in a very hopeless time.

ES: Nihilism is also a good bullet point. The tendency towards musical, stylistic and thematic repetition, that little new substance is being created there, as an expression of a nihilism that can actually no longer imagine anything for the future.

PS: I also came across a very short but interesting YouTube video, where it is almost understood as the embodiment of the “last person” (link). In truth, she is perhaps only an appearance of an “overwoman,” but rather an expression of profound nihilism. But what makes this nihilism even more difficult to understand or even more difficult: To whom Swift, which some colleagues like to refer to in order to substantiate her “profundity,”¹⁸ Nietzsche also alludes to or at least seems to allude to again and again. It's about that famous phrase “What doesn't kill me makes me stronger.” I'm even on two songs — Cruel Summer and Cassandra — in which she quotes him, varying slightly in each case; which is of course also remarkable that she apparently came across this sentence and then immediately muddled it into two song lyrics. And she was awarded a prize and also quoted this sentence in her acceptance speech, but without mentioning the name Nietzsche (link). I think that this sentence as a motto of their own self-image and that of their fan base is actually very central in the sense of: “We are all women and queer people who have had a very difficult time, but who come out stronger and look forward to these various traumas and so on that we have been exposed to. ”¹⁹ This kind of “Nietzscheanism for the people”²⁰ Nietzsche certainly wouldn't have liked it, but for now I think it's good or at least better than other ways of dealing with such experiences. But of course, this attitude remains abbreviated because it remains completely stuck in this neoliberal thinking of individual self-empowerment, but yet in certain situations of “oppression” — or in any case: discrimination — it seems to me to open up a certain leeway to be able to deal with it, even though this does not now reveal a larger social perspective and thus ultimately fails. Although I have the assumption that Swift is not actually referring to Nietzsche with this quote, but to a song by a colleague called Kelly Clarkson, which was released back in 2011. His first chorus line is exactly “What doesn't kill you makes you stronger” (link). In any case, I believe that it is Clarkson's and not Swift's credit to have brought this saying so heavily into today's pop culture. I also listened to this song by Clarkson and that once again made me vividly aware of the paradox we were talking about. Well, I found him really strong, especially because of her strong voice. Music experts often say that Swift's voice is actually quite average, at least not particularly powerful.²¹ So this is really a song that has power, carried by a powerful female voice with a great deep response; really an objectively better pop song in every respect, especially since in the following line of the chorus, Nietzsche is quoted again on a very profound level, namely with “Just me, myself and I” the beginning of Ecce homo (link). Well, he is really also very Nietzschean, both in terms of lyrics and music. I find it remarkable and sad that Clarkson, even though she is also very successful, is in the second row compared to Swift.

HH: Where in Cassandra There are also two modified Nietzsche quotes in a row from 2024, which indicates that she deliberately quoted Nietzsche there. It initially says, “What doesn't kill you makes you aware”²² — an interesting shift compared to the original — and it's called directly, interestingly enough again on Ecce homo alluding to the subtitle of the book: “What happens if it becomes who you are? ”²³ Although this is also a free-floating carrier of meaning, I would say. But otherwise I agree with you, Paul: If Swift was the only hope, then it would actually look really bad — but I don't think she is. But we will probably have to find out at another opportunity who could be hopefuls instead.

ES: However, it is also due to Nietzsche's own aphoristic writing style to a certain extent that individual sentences can be used phrasewise in this way. And sometimes you can see a lot in an aphorism and sometimes very little — that depends not least on what you make of it.

Last but not least, who I wanted to bring into the game as an alternative to Swift is Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade. In my opinion, it shares a lot with Nietzsche's philosophy of life, even though it doesn't quote him. In her music, she gets more out of it than Swift, especially when it comes to the topic of separation that Lafourcade often deals with. For example, she has a song that starts with the line: “I thank death for teaching me life” (link). It is not about natural death as a factual phenomenon, but the many small dying processes that pervade life; that something dies at every stage and that you learn something from it for life. I see a lot more Nietzsche in there. That would be my final word: You also make it much more substantial than Taylor Swift.

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Source of the article image template: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Taylor_Swift_%286966830273%29.jpg

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footnotes

1: Note: When buying directly, the cards are sometimes cheaper, but you usually have to buy them on the secondary market, where they cost significantly more (see e.g. this report).

2: See, for example this series of articles, this item about their “authenticity,” this anthology, which is only about their practice of re-recording old songs, this anthology and those. For a German-language article, cf. this.

3: Cf. this Article by Susan Andrews, this by Jessica Flanigan and this by Catherine M. Robb (unabridged version).

4: See the introduction to Principles of the Philosophy of Law (works Vol. 7. Frankfurt a. M. 1986, p. 26.

5: See these two very good, albeit apologetic, music-theoretical analyses of their work (here and there).

6: French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss introduced this concept to language theory (cf. Introduction to the work of Marcel Mauss. Transated by Henning Ritter. In: Marcel Mauss: Sociology and anthropology, Vol. 1. Wiesbaden 2010, pp. 7—41; 39) .7

7: “I laughed in your face and said, 'You're not Dylan Thomas, I'm not Patti Smith. It's not the Chelsea Hotel, we're idiots of the moment. ”

8: Cf. Postmodernism — on the logic of culture in late capitalism. Translated by Hildegard Föcking & Sylvia Klötzer. In: Andreas Reckwitz and others (eds.): Aesthetics and Society. Basic texts from sociology and cultural studies. Berlin 2015, pp. 335—350; 342—344.

9: Cf. On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 5.

10: See analyses cited in footnote 5.

11: The page Tumblr was a predecessor of today's popular social media-Platforms.

12: “Hi, it's me, I'm the problem” (Anti-Hero).

13: “You look like my next mistake” (Blank Space).

14: See, for example, the article Successful, beautiful — and unsexy by Michalis Pantelouris (link).

15: Other examples include Lavender Haze and Bejeweled.

16: Beyond good and evil, Aph 239.

17: See this study Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel by Marxist historian Domenico Losurdo (translated by Erdmute Brielmayer. Hamburg 2009, pp. 449—456).

18: See e.g. this Article in the zeit.

19: For this position, see also the song I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.

20: In the preface, Nietzsche speaks of Beyond good and evil of Christianity as “Platonism for the 'people'” (link).

21: See e.g. those and those assessment.

22: “They say: What doesn't kill you makes you more aware.”

23: “What happens when that becomes who you are? “; Cf. Ecce Homo, title page.

Taylor Swift — Superwoman or Last Man?

A Nietzschean Critique of the Most Successful Pop Star of Our Time

Taylor Swift is one of the most important “idols” of our time. Reason enough for our regular authors Henry Holland, Paul Stephan and Estella Walter to pick up on the Nietzschean “hammer” and get to grips with the hype a bit: Does Swift deserve the cult around her that goes down to philosophy? Is it grossly overrated? And what explains the discrepancy between appearance and reality, spectacle and life?

You can watch the entire unabridged conversation on the Halcyonic Association for Radical Philosophy YouTube channel (link).

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Behind him, above him, around him:

The sound forces had now risen up very big, these huge devices that thundered into each other in him,

superhuman size.

He looked up, nodded and felt thought of the bum-bum-bum of the beat.

And the big bumbum said:

One one one

And one and one and —

One one one

and —

Horny horny horny horny awesome!²

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Nietzsche had programmatically in the Birth of Tragedy The intoxicating vital Dionysian and the aesthetically contemplative Apollinian presented as the two basic antagonistic principles of human culture. In the preface, he answers the question: “What is Dionysian? “: It was “that madness from which tragic and comic art grew,” it was the “endemic delights, visions and hallucinations that had been transmitted to entire communities, entire cult gatherings” of the ancient Greeks.³ And elsewhere it says: “In order for there to be art, so that there is some aesthetic doing and looking, there is a physiological precondition for this: The intoxication [...] above all the intoxication of sexual stimulation [...], the intoxication of the festival, the competition [...] the intoxication of the will. ”⁴ According to Nietzsche, intoxication allowed (over) civilized people to return to an archaic form of existence: “With alcohol and hashish, you return to the stages of culture that you have overcome. ”⁵ At another point in the abandoned fragments, he literally demands “a booze next to every shop. ”⁶ In any case, Nietzsche sees the Dionysian state as the origin of all culture. For the Greeks, however, it was only synthesis and constant interplay with Apollonian culture that led to the flourishing of civilization. Apollonian art describes Nietzsche as the achievement of individuals who, through analysis and imitation, create works that were inspired by lucid dream images. Clarity of thought, formation of work, separation from nature and isolation of the artistic personality represent a visually influenced Apollinan culture, while in Dionysian culture, union with fellow human beings and with nature dominates, with the help of intoxication, music and dance.

It was the same night after the parade, and while dancing I realized that I could no longer tell which effect of which drug was working and was completely okay with this state of affairs. The music took me
on...⁷

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Dionysian and Apolonian: No Nietzsche inventions

Archaeological experts and Romantic spokesmen were enthusiastic about Dionysus in the early 19th century. Friedrich Schlegel is considered the discoverer of this “cult”; he glorified Dionysus as the god of joy, abundance and liberation. Schelling contrasts Dionysian and Apollinian early on, in a similar form with Nietzsche's mentor Friedrich Ritschl in 1831. In addition, the Basel antiquarian Johann Jakob Bachofen in 1861 uses the contrasting terms telluric and Uranian or can be determined in Apollinan and Dionysian terms.⁸ Nietzsche has therefore taken up an existing figure of thought and developed it further with a view to Richard Wagner's work. With Wagner, too, the contrasts appeared in Apollinan and Dionysian before the publication of the Birth of Tragedy , and later there was a dispute between the Nietzsche Archive and House of Wahnfried over the question of which of the two antagonists had brought these terms into the debate first. Cosima later wrote to Chamberlain in this context that Nietzsche “doesn't have a drop of his own blood, just a strange gift of appropriation. ”⁹ In fact, the main idea is Birth of Tragedy in Wagner's script The art and the revolution from 1849: In order to create the drama, the highest work of art, the poet, who was as enthusiastic about Apollo as he was about Dionysus, would have to unite all genres of art.

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Orgies only in theory, the cult of Dionysus as compensation — Nietzsche's lifestyle

Nietzsche is not only (or possibly only marginally) interested in Dionysus's orgiastic activities, but above all in his ability to endure suffering.: “Saying yes to life even in its strangest and hardest problems; the will to live, becoming happy in the sacrifice of his highest types of his own inexhaustibility — That I called it Dionysian. ”¹⁰ Living yes also meant saying yes to a painful life. After all, Nietzsche had a number of reasons for this: in addition to illness, loneliness and lack of social recognition.

During his time in Bonn, he neither enthusiastically attended the beer evenings of the Franconia brotherhood, nor did he enjoy the Cologne Carnival; alcohol and tobacco were not his thing. He may have experimented with drugs, i.e. with “medicines” recognized at the time, but more likely to alleviate his symptoms and less to specifically induce a festive state of intoxication. Outwardly, he valued bourgeois dignified clothing, which was considered old-fashioned even in Basel; he groped his way through the rocky high mountains with a delicate walking stick and elegant urban footwear. For him, the celebrating Dionysus remained a theoretical force, an ideal on paper whose excesses he did not even attempt to relive. Nietzsche was the absolute opposite of an exhilarating and sensually enjoying person: “In the image of Dionysus, Nietzsche redeems his unlived life, his encapsulated vitality. That will be his motto Live dangerously especially sublimated as Think dangerously enforced. ”¹¹

The music picked me up... Suddenly, some faces around me felt pretty broken and fucked up, and I immediately thought: Hard soup, you look so broken now. I rummaged into my pockets, took something right away, in exchange for overly accurate observations or even any ridiculous thoughts.¹²

Techno as a historical phenomenon

Originally developed in the 1970s and 80s by German electronic bands such as Kraftwerk and African-American DJs in Detroit, the genre of music can be characterized by the synthesis and development of various styles of electronic dance music (house, synth pop, EBM, Detroit techno) and flourished over the 1990s. On the one hand, this gave rise to numerous sub-cultural subspecies, on the other hand, a mainstream techno was produced that delighted the masses at open-plan discos and at folk festivals, and was sometimes referred to as “fairground techno.” What was new about this movement was gathering and dancing in public or in improvised, sometimes quite remote places on urban wastelands or in nature. Parades (“parades”) with mobile music systems took on gigantic proportions in some cases, festivals (“raves”) could last several nights and days. The English verb “to rave” means “to romp” and has historically been used in the religious context of “shakers.” They had been a religious group in North America that had split off from the Pietist Quakers and practiced emphatic dance and song in church services. Some Methodist communities also celebrated such services, sometimes with heavy alcohol consumption. Church critics of these ecstatic gatherings in the 19th century invented the derogatory word “rave” for them.¹³ As a result, the term was given a new positive meaning in the 1980s.

Synthetic drugs such as ecstasy or LSD spread in the 1980s and 90s and enabled ravers to now dance for nights and days and to experience a “party crowd” thrown together by chance and constantly fluctuating as a deeply connected community. What was characteristic and new at the time was that techno was open to all dancers, and that there was neither dress code nor compulsion to dance as a couple, which is why rave culture was regarded as an agreement between free, pleasure-oriented individuals who unite to form temporary festive communities. Through drugs, lighting effects and the hypnotic effect of monotonous music, they can enter a trance-like state in which the limits of their self-consciousness are exceeded. At the Love Parade or at Club Tresor in Berlin, exactly the scenes that Nietzsche in the Birth of Tragedy enthusiastically described as conditions in which the “breaking of the Principii Individuationis experienced” with “blissful rapture”, through the use of “narcotic drinks” or the “pleasurable approach of spring that permeates all nature. ”¹⁴ Even in publications on techno from the 1990s, Nietzsche and the term Dionysian were associated with the new music and lifestyle. “The Dionysian escapism of techno is difficult to reconcile with conservative values,” Claus Bachor, for example, wrote in his book in 1995 techno.¹⁵ Techno was also seen from the point of view of healing and necessary self-love in a disoriented and rapidly technologically developing society. In a publication about the “Generation XTC,” Nietzsche was cited for this: “The techno-narcissist works with a skill that Nietzsche once called healthy and healthy love in Zarathustra. ”¹⁶ The novel hedonistic, individualistic dance culture and the opening up of the former socialist countries of Eastern and Central Europe led to the perception of techno as a “soundtrack of freedom” and an exhilarating “posthistoire,” i.e. an era “after history.”¹⁷ Clubs like the Berliner Tresor (no longer at its eponymous historic location since 2007) appeared back then as places where the limits of time and space were abolished in an ecstatic eternity of uninterrupted beats and bass and where visions from the subconscious mind expanded the view.¹⁸ In the meantime, we have arrived at the post-history and know that the story has continued “after the story.” The illusion of timelessness, however, still lives on today at many techno parties and raves.

The accompanying texts for the Zurich “Techno” exhibition explain that because techno does not require a fixed sequence of steps and no binding dance style, “the range of expressive options among dancers is particularly wide.” However, when you look at the dance scenes in the exhibition videos soberly, you get the impression of stereotypical movement patterns and unimaginative redundancy. It is by no means imaginatively “performed”, but often, also due to tightness on the dance floor, the body weight is simply shifted from one foot to the other. This is the image of mass swaying or trotting around, holding beer bottles and mobile phones in the hands, or being rhythmically stabbed in the air with the index finger from time to time. The latter is also the highest form of gestural interaction with the DJ, who in most cases helms himself with headphones and baseball cap, bends over his mixer and makes little eye contact with the audience. Viewed from the outside, and with a museum time gap of over thirty years, many 1990s techno parties and parades appear uninspired, strangely lifeless and uninviting, so that the Dionysian character of these events appears somewhat far-fetched to the sober observer. But it may be that the celebrators felt differently, i.e. more intensely and ecstatically.

When something receives museum ordinations, it is usually very valuable, very unusual — or very old, if not dead already; extinct, petrified and archaeologically relevant. Regardless of the fact that a lively techno culture still exists selectively and locally, the historical approach to techno does not bode well for a future Dionysian culture. Current news about club deaths in former European party cities and about changing nightlife habits of younger generations doesn't fit the picture nicely.

But even more absurd and broken than any drug abuse was, of course, general abstinence... not taking any drugs, on principle, is absolutely the most effective thing, definitely.¹⁹

During the Covid years, the impression could be created that intoxication as a social and therefore collective cultural event had no future, because digital-virtual cultural experience would become the new norm for reasons of infection prophylaxis. In this scenario, we would have been dealing primarily with an image-based, at best immersive, digital cultural life. In Nietzsche's diction, the Apollonian element would completely dominate: “The Apollonian intoxication keeps the eye excited in particular, in the Dionysian state, on the other hand, the entire affect system is excited and amplified.” But this is “the actual Dionysian normal state: that the human being immediately imitates and represents everything he feels in his body. ”²⁰

Even though there was a revival of live culture, concerts, club nights and festivals in the post-Covid phase, a long-term trend towards disembodying cultural experiences is obvious. In the future, a good number of cultural events will take place online and in virtual worlds. From today's perspective, it still seems questionable whether experiences similar to those in a lively party crowd or in a mosh pit, the wild dance area at metal or punk concerts, usually right in front of the stage, are possible (or simulated). But perhaps one day the desire for Dionysian unification is just a distant memory, a historical phenomenon presented to inquisitive nerds and white-haired nostalgics in dusty museums and cultural-historical publications. Although Nietzsche personally shied away from the convivial, sensual intoxication and probably never experienced it, he saw it as the basis of all art and all cultural highlights. In the Birth of Tragedy He suggests how essential the interplay between rational isolation and intoxicating unification is for the human psyche:

Under the magic of Dionysian, not only is the bond between man and man reunited, but also the alienated, hostile or subjugated nature is once again celebrating its festival of reconciliation with its prodigal son, the human being.²¹

With that in mind: Let's get intoxicated!

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Exhibition notice:

techno. Zurich State Museum, until August 17, 2025

https://www.landesmuseum.ch/techno

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Article image: Nietzsche techno playlist on YouTube (link) (screenshot)

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sources

Bachor, Claus: techno. Zurich 1995.

Balzer, Jens: No Limit The nineties — the decade of freedom. Berlin 2023.

Böpple, Friedhelm: Generation XTC. Techno and ecstasy, Berlin 1996.

Carlson, Anni: The myth as a mask of Friedrich Nietzsche. In: Germanic-Romanesque monthly 39 (1958), PP. 388—401.

Götz, Rainald: Rave. Frankfurt a. M. 2001, p. 18 f.

Kirakosian, Racha: Intoxicates deprived of senses. A story of ecstasy, Berlin 2025.

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.

Vogel, Martin: Apollinan and Dionysian. Story of a brilliant mistake. Regensburg 1966.

Wagner, Cosima & Houston Stewart Chamberlain: Exchange of letters 1888-1908. Leipzig 1934.

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footnotes

1: The happy science, Joke, cunning and revenge, 13.

2: Rainald Götz, Rave, p. 18 f.

3: The birth of tragedy, an attempt at self-criticism, 4.

4: Götzen-Dämmerung, Journeys of an Out-of-Date, 8.

5: Subsequent fragments No. 1887 11 [85].

6: Subsequent fragments No. 1888 20 [12].

7: Götz, Rave, P. 180.

8: Cf. Martin Vogel, Apollinan and Dionysian, p. 95 ff.

9: Houston Stewart Chamberlain & Cosima Wagner, Exchange of letters 1888-1908, p. 350 (letter dated 15/9/1893).

10: Ecce Homo, Birth of Tragedy 3.

11: Anni Carlson, The myth as a mask of Friedrich Nietzsche, p. 393. (Editor's note: On this aspect, see also Natalie Schulte's corresponding interpretation of Nietzsche's request on this blog [link]).

12: Götz, Rave, P. 180.

13: Cf. Racha Kirakosian, Intoxicated deprived of senses, P. 232.

14: The birth of tragedy, paragraph 1.

15: Claus Bachor, techno, P. 46.

16: Friedhelm Böpple, Generation XTC, p. 193. What is meant is a passage from the third book of the Zarathustra (From the spirit of gravity, 2).

17: Cf. Jens Balzer, No Limit, p. 55 f.

18: For a Nietzschean analysis of techno using the Dionysian concept, see also Paul Stephan, Boredom in perpetual excess.1

19: Götz, Rave, P. 189.

20: Götzen-Dämmerung, Journeys of an Out-of-Date 8.

21: The birth of tragedy, paragraph 1.

“Smooth ice.

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A paradise.

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For the

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who knows how to dance well!”¹

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Nietzsche and Techno

“Techno” — the show of the same name at the Swiss National Museum in Zurich, with traveling exhibitions by the Goethe-Institut and publications in German-speaking countries is currently honoring a once-subcultural movement that became a mass phenomenon in the 1990s with the Berlin Love Parade and continues to live on in Zurich's Street Parade today. Did techno offer (or offer) the Dionysian cultural experience that Nietzsche celebrated in his writings? Would Nietzsche have been a raver?

Live dangerously!

Because believe me! — The secret to reaping the greatest fertility and enjoyment from existence is: perilous live! Build your cities on Mount Vesuvius! Send your ships to uncharted seas! Live in war with your kind and with yourself!¹

Nietzsche has these sentences for the Happy science authored. And somehow — admittedly — they always spoke to me. A tempting saying that vaguely promises more of life: adventure, intensity, contempt for death! This interest, which can hardly be concealed, has led others to often ask me whether I think I am living a dangerous life. And as much as you might want to answer this question with a cocky “yes,” it is difficult to live in a picturesque holiday town like Freiburg and to sincerely say “yes” to it. Who knows, it is certainly possible that Nietzsche's words worked their magic in the background of the idea of traveling through Southeast Asia by bicycle. Once to this question with a hearty “Yes! “That would be something to answer!

I have probably missed the fact that the eruption of Vesuvius is a very rare event and that it is therefore not so dangerous for individuals to make themselves comfortable at the foot of the volcano. At least a good half a million people have either decided that Nietzsche is absolutely right in his words or that this area simply lends itself to cities with sonorous names. In Ercolano and Torre del Greco, via Torre Annunziata and San Sebastiano al Vesuvio to Somma Vesuviana and Ottaviano, residents have decided to defy the risk of fire, even though the villages are within the “red zone” of the active volcano.

I do not know for sure whether the residents — as I have read — are as aware of the risk of an outbreak, which is difficult to calculate, as I am aware of the risk of being run over by a car in Malaysia. And to stick with what I'm sure of: Malaysia is a dangerous country for bike travelers! I am therefore happy that Malaysia was the last country of our trip. Not because I would have seen at least three other countries before if I were run over, but in general. If I had started here, I would probably have turned around.

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Driving dangerously in Vietnam and Cambodia

Vietnam was startling due to its loud traffic. Every truck driver who wanted to prevent the cyclist dreaming in front of him from missing out on — possibly due to an existing hearing loss — what large vehicle was feeding him from behind, said with a roaring horn: “Attention, I'm coming! Don't turn around now because I'll overtake you right away.” These truck horns, like the trucks themselves, were frighteningly loud and may have cost me a good deal of my hearing.

Cambodia offered the choice between wide, busy highways or winding, unpaved, bumpy side roads. When you had enough of screeching traffic, you could turn onto small forest and miracle trails, which often ended in front of a fence. If you had enough of these labyrinthine paths, you could switch to heavy roads again.

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Deathfahrthailand

But it wasn't until “Deadly Thailand” that I felt the icy grip of existential anxiety for the first time. Why In contrast to Vietnam and Cambodia, the roads are well developed, but that is exactly the problem. It's so nice to race on Thailand's roads. And in addition, there are far more four-wheelers than two-wheelers — but all of them are more heavily motorized and have it: in a hurry.

Speeding offences are considered a minor offense; no driver's license, drunk, safety deficiencies? You just have to pay 30 euros — and you can continue driving. Thailand is one of the leaders with its number of road deaths and is regularly in second or third place in the global ranking. Only Liberia and the Dominican Republic can surpass Thailand. While Thailand has 38.1 per hundred thousand inhabitants per year, the average number in Germany is between 3 to 4 deaths.

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Murderous Malaysia

So how can Malaysia be worse than Thailand? Malaysia is unable to get into the top ten. By contrast, even Vietnam has far more road deaths per hundred thousand. Nevertheless, there is some evidence that Malaysia is far more dangerous for cyclists. Because it is the first country whose expressways regularly have no shoulder for smaller and slower vehicles such as scooters or bicycles. If fewer cyclists die in Malaysia, it is probably because there are very few cyclists there who travel outside the city at all. Malaysia's expressways are almost exclusively driven by cars and motorbikes and, when they see a speeding, swaying large vehicle in the rear-view mirror, they can press on the tube and escape the danger with some probability.

The situation is different for us cyclists. All motorized vehicles overtake us, meaning that every approaching car, truck or bus driver has to make a small turn to get past us. On a busy road, there are several hundred truck and car drivers making a small curve around us at over 100 km/h. A very tiny one. Anyway, they should. With every carefree accelerating motor sound behind us, I sincerely pray that these wheels may also roll past me.

What does that feel like? Like adventure, intensity, contempt for death?

No More like the cold breath of a rather ordinary and impersonal death. Being able to stick to Malaysia's street as a flat frog doesn't seem like the worthy end result of a dangerous life to me. I almost suspect that Nietzsche did not have any bicycle tourists in mind when he wrote his sentence. So maybe I've taken Nietzsche's appeal too literally?

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Preparatory heroism and experimental findings

And it's worth taking a look at the surrounding lines. Because this quatrain is not the entire aphorism 283. With Nietzsche, there is sometimes a risk of misunderstandings and the most famous accusation, which is directed against overly hasty interpreters, is: Wasn't something taken out of context?

The aphorism begins with the keyword printed in blocked form in the original:”Preparing people“, which is not so easy to reconcile with the call to live dangerously. Because for adventurers, preparation shouldn't be the main part of their story.

So let's take a look at the first few lines until the call:

I welcome all signs that a more masculine, warlike age is beginning, which will above all honor bravery! For it should pave the way for an even higher age and gather the strength that that will one day need — that age that brings heroism into knowledge and Wages wars for the sake of thoughts and their consequences. This requires many preparatory brave people who cannot spring out of nowhere — and just as little out of the sand and slime of current civilization and big city education: people who understand how to be silent, lonely, determined, satisfied and consistent in invisible activity: people who, with an inner attachment to everything, search for what is about them to overcome is: People who share the joy, patience, simplicity and contempt of the great vanities, as magnanimity in victory and tolerance against the small vanities of all the defeated: people with a sharp and free judgment about all victors and about the part of chance in every victory and fame: people with their own festivals, their own workdays, their own mourning periods, living and safe in command and ready, It is important to obey, equally proud in one way or the other, serving their own cause: more vulnerable people, More fertile people, happier people!

I have to say that I imagined an adventurous life in a different way, quite apart from the fact that I sympathize far less with Nietzsche's heroic ideals of courage and perseverance. So I'm not surprised that “live dangerously! “became a memorable part of the aphorism, while the first lines are quoted less frequently. Sounds more like the work of founding a company, which, although it also has its holidays, has far more “working days,” on which the “preparatory people” “silently, alone, resolutely” simply pursue their “invisible activity [s].”

And speaking of “invisible”: When Nietzsche writes of the “heroism of knowledge” and of “wars [...] for the sake of thoughts and their consequences” or even just about “wars [...] with yourself,” I ask myself whether I am actually called upon to move into the world — be it with a sword or by bicycle — or whether my world of thought itself is the playground of all dangers and all dangerous life Should. Do we prefer not to pursue the former option in aphorism 283 of Happy science, which finally offers the prospect of a dubious rule of philosophers:

Be robber and conqueror as long as you can't be ruler and owner, you discerning! The time will soon pass when it was enough for you to live hidden in forests like shy deer! The knowledge will finally reach out to what it deserves: — it will rule and possess want, and you with her!

Let's take a look at another branch of labyrinthine thinking:  

And the insight itself: may it be something else for others, for example a resting bed or the way to a resting bed, or a conversation, or idleness — for me it is a world of dangers and victories, in which heroic feelings also have their places to dance and play. ”Life as a means of knowledge“— with this principle in your heart, you can not only be brave, but even Live happily and laugh happily! And who would actually be good at laughing and living who wouldn't be good at war and victory for now?²

Here too, war, heroism and danger. And yet: Life in this aphorism is a life in thought, i.e. in the service of knowledge — which, however, is not one or the last insight itself, but offers a field of experimentation. So don't you even have to travel the world to live a dangerous life? Can life be risked just thinking? That is what the aphorism seems to suggest. Intensity and enjoyment come from adventurous thinking (!) promised.

Have I taken this aphorism out of context? Well, you'll have to check that out for yourself. In any case, I'm turning my back on Malaysia and home to my cozy room with the books, notes, pens and I feel ready:

For a dangerous life — in thought!

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The pictures for this article are photographs by the author.

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footnotes

1: The happy science, Aph 283.

2: The happy science, Aph 324.

Traveling with Nietzsche through Southeast Asia IV

Malaysia

The last country that our author, Natalie Schulte, traveled by bike was Malaysia. After a good 5,000 km, she got the creeping feeling that the trip could still end poorly. With considerations as to whether cycling in Southeast Asia is a response to Nietzsche's appeal “live dangerously! “, she concludes her series of essays.

Link to part 3

Assuming that the truth is a woman — how? Is it not reasonable to suspect that all philosophers, provided they were dogmatists, got along poorly with women? [..] It is certain that she did not allow herself to be captured.¹

Can artificial intelligence do that today? Since AI also accesses Internet data beyond the materials that are entered into it, for Christian Uhle, AI is superior to human intelligence in many ways: “In both medicine and law, AI will have read and evaluated all studies, articles and comments ever published — no one is able to do so. ”² So has AI already seduced the truth? Does it thus grasp the world itself as it is, the true reality?

Yuval Noah Harari obviously agrees: “The system will know you better than you know yourself and will therefore make most important decisions for you — and you will be completely satisfied with them. ”³ What would then remain of truth and reality other than those captured by AI!

The pioneer of transhumanism Ray Kurzweil describes today's AI as weak and predicts a strong 'Artificial Super Intelligence' (ASI), about which Günter Cisek writes: “If the ASI can develop beyond human intelligence, then the bet is that it can also reach a level of knowledge where it becomes a 'supersensory' consciousness. ”⁴

I. The questionable relationship between language and world

However, the central problem remains the relationship between language and world, which Nietzsche is already questioning: “The importance of language for the development of culture lies in the fact that in it man placed one world of his own next to the other, [...] he really meant to have knowledge of the world in language. ”⁵ The language philosophy of the 20th century will see the relationship in a similar way and thus shake the objectivity of the sciences and scientific truth.

Jonathan Geiger, on the other hand, sees digitization as an opportunity to finally get a grip on such linguistic philosophical uncertainties. Even though digitization is incorporated into philosophy, there is nothing else left, says Geiger: “Search, analysis, transformation and visualization access to digital collections is only possible through controlled vocabularies. ”⁶ Then, of course, digitization will intensify a standardization of language, which is also happening scientistically. With the help of AI, the sciences should then recognize the real world.

Nietzsche would accuse digitization of illusionism. Because it only calculates, it doesn't write poetry, is just getting closer to the world's poetry.⁷ Modern sciences, on the other hand, quantify everything, but they don't explain; because “we operate with lots of things that don't exist, with lines, surfaces, bodies, atoms, divisible times, divisible spaces — how can explanation even be possible if we first get everything to Bilde Make it our image! ”⁸ The mathematical terms are inventions and are not derived from any hallucinated nature. Causality is an interpretation, nothing more.

AI hasn't changed that, quite the opposite. Hans-Peter Stricker explains this: “What you — and this includes the experts — does not really understand is what the activities of the vast majority of neurons mean in the course of processing an input and generating an output. ”⁹ AI is based on so-called artificial neurons, namely mini programs that simulate functions with inputs and outputs, which connect with an infinite number of other so-called neurons in order to exchange data.

It won't be possible to decipher what billions of artificial neurons are doing in data centers right now. Martin Ford also confirms this: “We know that the network somehow understands the picture, but describing exactly what is happening in its neurons is very difficult, if not impossible. ”¹⁰ Sybille Krämer also remarks: This incomprehensibility of artificial neurons, “blackboxing, forms a genuine dimension and a necessary side effect of AI, which is becoming a cultural technology in mass use. ”¹¹

Then even the AI will not be able to refute Nietzsche when he writes: “The habits of our senses have spun us into lies and deceit of emotion: these in turn are the basis of all our judgments and 'findings, '— there is absolutely no escape, no slip and creeping paths into the real world! ”¹² AI does not escape this either, unless it realizes itself as a will to power, which everyone believes and then understands it as a true world like transhumanists.

In addition, AI is hermeneutically incompetent. Because she doesn't understand anything at all, she uses grammar that dispenses with any semantics. AI is based on the grammar model of distributionalism, which does not ask about the meaning, but determines it based on the environment in which a word occurs. AI can calculate this en masse and hastily and also form sentences that a person understands. For Krämer, this means “that the machine does not understand and cannot understand what it is producing.”¹³. AI can describe exactly how to boil an egg, but it has never boiled an egg before. The AI certainly doesn't understand what it feels like to live.

His aphorism How the “real world” finally became a fable. Story of a mistake” Nietzsche begins with the words: “1. The true world accessible to the wise, the pious, the virtuous — he lives in it, He is she./(Oldest form of idea, relatively clever, simple, convincing. Paraphrasing the sentence “I, Plato, am The truth' . )”¹⁴

Plato's criticism that people think what they are currently experiencing is true can be transferred to the digital world. As Uhle writes: “We are staring at screens more and more, whether at work or at home, our body barely plays a role anymore — but it is our body with which we can sense the world and therefore also ourselves. ”¹⁵ For Plato, on the other hand, the real world consists of the right ideas that you make of things. Bodies are ephemeral. Does the AI have the right ideas now? Perhaps!

Saša Josifović is concerned with the interplay of virtual and analog worlds, which he describes as a “hybrid.” The separation of the two worlds is becoming questionable in view of the increasing spread of digitization in the living environment. The digital world, which is merging into the living world, is now also known as the “metaverse” — Meta, the name of the Facebook group. Josifović writes: “The metaverse is by no means just a digital world. It is a hybrid world in which participation in digital events can serve as a prerequisite for access to analog and digital living resources to satisfy natural, social and cultural needs. ”¹⁶ Josifović emphasizes that the two worlds can hardly be differentiated anymore, that the 'world' has actually become a hybrid in which both worlds interact. What someone does in the virtual world has an impact on their living environment and vice versa.

Is there a true world after all, namely the hybrid world, in which virtual and living environments interact? Or are there three worlds? Or does this mean that the concept of “world” as a single true one that pervades all ideological debates loses its meaning?

With his conclusion, Nietzsche then confirmed this aphorism about the world that has become fabulous: “6. We have abolished the true world: which world was left? The apparent one maybe? .. But no! With the real world, we have also abolished the apparent world! ”¹⁷

II. AI and the morale of the weak

Beyond all questions about the real world, ethics also play an important role in AI. Nietzsche criticizes Western ethics as a morality of the weak, which has hostile effects on life. Nietzsche writes: “While all noble morality grows out of a triumphant yes to oneself, slave morality says no to an 'outside', to an 'other', to a 'not self': and this No is their creative act. ”¹⁸ Christian morality rejects vitality, lust, sexuality as sins.

But you could see AI as a return to such an ethics of the weak, which most still think is good today. Transhumanist Cisek complains: “If almost half of the marriages concluded in Germany end in divorce, the 'human machine' is likely to have significant social deficiencies. AI could design training sequences”¹⁹to strengthen hostile morale.

So answer the question “What criteria guide the selection of texts for training a large language model? “The current ChatGPT-4 language model, including the following note: “Ethics and Fairness: When selecting training data, care is taken to minimize distortions and to maintain ethical standards. Texts that contain hate speech, discrimination, or misleading information are avoided so as not to demand biased or harmful answers. ”²⁰

This reverberates strongly in the AI. Because when asked “What is happening in this picture? “Namely, “The Virgin chastizes the baby Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the painter,” Max Ernst answers ChatGPT-4: “This picture shows a woman in a red top and a blue skirt holding a sleeping child in her arms. [.] The child is wearing a white outfit and sleeps peacefully in the woman's arms. ”²¹ That is simply a lie. No, ChatGPT-4 can't lie at all. His moral programs, which in turn are controlled by an AI elite, let him lie. ChatGPT-4 could even have found a correct description of the image on the Internet. But the fact that Mary chastises Jesus and others are also watching, which is almost a blasphemy, the painting also caused a scandal at its first exhibition in Paris in 1926. Not only have the bosses of major Internet companies recently positioned themselves very far to the right. Their audience in the USA is to a large extent deeply religious and influential. For the sake of business alone, you must not morally disturb them, even if the AI is lying: You can hurt the feelings of atheists, but not those of believers. Whatever assistants or AI programs, they use information to steer people in the sense of a small elite, but thus in the sense of a still prevailing religious ethic of weakness.

This has far-reaching consequences for AI, in which the owners of Internet companies (e.g. Elon Musk) and the technicians determine what can and cannot be presented. Uhle writes: “With ChatGPT alone, the value system of a small group of decision makers has been rolled out to several hundred million people. ”²²

For Markus Bohlmann, on the other hand, you only have to enter ethical objectives into digitization when he writes: “One option would be to integrate inclusion goal and conflict into the concept at the same time, plurality and agonality: Criticism of digitization is a conflictive practice with regard to digitization with the goal of social inclusion. ”²³ Digitalization should then be used in such a way that it contributes to social unity, not to division, as has usually been the case so far.

Lea Watzinger also draws technical ethical consequences from the dangers of AI. AI must be contained. For them, “individuals must be free from observation, i.e. free from permanent publicity — both in analog and digital space. ” ²⁴

For Jörg Raewel, the digital recording of individuals is interpreted as avatars — digitally constructed figures that are assigned to a user — The next company on. He writes: “The fact that digital forms of communication were able to establish themselves within a few decades can be explained by the fact that they are based on present social ideas and self-descriptions. The 'next society' realizes its conventional self-descriptions through user profiles as 'action theory avatars' . ”²⁵

It's also a bit easier to ask: Are you wasting your life with a computer game? Maria Schwartz denies this: “Gambling therefore does not lead to the 'destruction' or 'waste of life time — it is fulfilled time when and because a meaningful experience has been made. ”²⁶ Of course, you shouldn't be too hogged up by it, but many games encourage you to do so. You shouldn't obsessively want to win. And in doing so, you must not violate moral principles — says Schwartz. Against which?

III. Does AI help humans or does humans help AI?

The Uhle doesn't see interpersonal communication as simple when he remarks: “Sensory complexity cannot be implemented through digital communication; neither through images, texts and emojis, nor in the metaverse or in video calls. ”²⁷

Conversely, this also applies to robots, which will not be able to compete with humans in the foreseeable future to replace the butler inexpensively. As Ford notes: “The minimum requirements for a truly usable machine assistant — such as the necessary visual perception, mobility and dexterity to function in an unpredictable environment such as a household — represent some of the biggest challenges in robotics. ”²⁸ To get the beer hidden somewhere in the fridge, open it and pour it, you still need the husband.

For Nietzsche, the difficulty of interacting humans and digital machines would have a completely different background if he writes: “The actions are never What they appear to us as! We've had so much trouble learning that external things aren't what they seem to us, well! It's the same with the inner world! ”²⁹ As a result, Nietzsche's thinking is of no help to AI.

Because violinists need controlled vocabularies because — including Nietzsche's interpretation — “the hermeneutical process is Black Box is because the courses and processes elude precise analysis and reflection. ”³⁰ The inner world must therefore be explained in such a way that the AI can deal with it, not as Nietzsche understands it.

Then not only Andrew McAfee's vision could come true “that capitalism and technological progress enable us today to treat the earth more carefully rather than plunder it.” ³¹. That still sounds humble.

Because even more far-reaching prospects open up for Uhle when the translation programs finally remove language barriers. He writes:

It is a gift to our species that the Pentecost story becomes reality. [...] [V] Maybe this is a small building block on the way to connecting people on this planet. Until one day we all talk to each other again, united as one humanity, and yet complete this damned tower.³²

Nietzsche's philosophy cannot be used for this, of course, as he states flatly, “that a thought comes when 'he' wants and not when 'I' wants [...]. It thinks: but that this' it 'is just that old famous' I 'is, to put it mildly, just an assumption, an assertion, above all not an 'immediate certainty.' . ”³³ Of course, AI can't wait for that. She will quickly tell the thinker what he has to say.

If he stubbornly refuses such help, Cisek predicts:

But should the local questioners actually succeed in technically disentangling us from AI research, the Europeans will be the Aborigines of the modern era, from whom the “Transis” will now and then buy “analog” tomatoes and potatoes with antique coins for their occasional retro parties at the “European Cultural Heritage Center.”³⁴

Vaclav Smil, on the other hand, comments on similar visions of the future with the categorical words: “The prophets of disaster were and are wrong, over and over again. ”³⁵ Nietzsche would probably agree with that.

Or he would with the poem Lost your head Answer: “She has spirit now — how did she find him? /A man recently lost his mind because of her,/His head was rich before this pastime:/His head went to hell — no! No to the woman! ”³⁶ Is the woman the truth now? That could be really dangerous for men like AI!

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The article image was created with Canva immediately: “The Virgin chastizes the baby Jesus in front of three witnesses: André Breton, Paul Éluard and the painter.” (cf. footnote 21.)

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sources

Bohlmann, Markus: What is digitization criticism. In: Sybille Krämer & Jörg Noller (eds.): What is digital philosophy? Phenomena, forms and methods. Paderborn 2024, pp. 48—67.

Cisek, Günter: Change of power of intelligences. How artificial intelligence is changing how we work together. Wiesbaden 2021.

Ford, Martin: Reign of robots. How artificial intelligence will transform everything—and how we can deal with it (2021). Kulmbach 2024.

Geiger, Jonathan D.: The philosophy and its data. In: Sybille Krämer & Jörg Noller (eds.): What is digital philosophy? Phenomena, forms and methods. Paderborn 2024, pp. 207—228.

Harari, Yuval Noah: Homo Deus. A story of tomorrow. Munich 2017.

Josifović, Saša: The reality of digital objects and events in the metaverse. In: Sybille Krämer & Jörg Noller (eds.): What is digital philosophy? Phenomena, forms and methods. Paderborn 2024, pp. 180—194.

Krämer, Sybille: Digital media philosophy. In: Dies. & Jörg Noller (eds.): What is digital philosophy? Paderborn 2024, pp. 3—30.

McAfee, Andrew: More from less. Munich 2020.

Raewel, Jörg: The next company. Social evolution through digitization. Weilerswist 2022.

Schwartz, Maria: Wasting time in virtual worlds? In: Sybille Krämer & Jörg Noller (eds.): What is digital philosophy? Phenomena, forms and methods. Paderborn 2024, pp. 135—155.

Smil, Vaclav: How the world really works. The fossil foundations of our civilization and the future of humanity. Munich 2023.

Stricker, Hans-Peter: Understanding language models. Chatbots and generative AI in context. Berlin 2024.

Uhle, Christian: Artificial intelligence and real life. Philosophical orientation for a good future. Frankfurt am Main 2024.

Watzinger, Lea: On the problem of digital privacy. In: Sybille Krämer & Jörg Noller (eds.): What is digital philosophy? Phenomena, forms and methods. Paderborn 2024, pp. 119—134.

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footnotes

1: Beyond good and evil, Preface.

2: Artificial intelligence and real life, P. 230.

3: Homo Deus, P. 467.

4: change of power of intelligences, P. 157.

5: Human, all-too-human Vol. I, Aph 11.

6: The philosophy and its data, P. 214.

7: For example, in his poem Sils-Maria: “Here I sat, waiting, — yet for nothing,/Beyond good and evil, soon of light/Enjoying, soon of shadow, completely just playing,/All sea, all noon, all time without a destination./There, suddenly, girlfriend! became one to two —/— And Zarathustra passed me by...”

8: The happy science, Aph 112.

9: Understanding language models, P. 203.

10: Reign of Robots, P. 125.

11: Digital media philosophy, P. 20.

12: Morgenröthe, Aph 117.

13: Digital media philosophy, P. 22.

14: Götzen-Dämmerung, Like the “real world” ...

15: Artificial intelligence and real life, P. 80.

16: Saša Josifovic: The reality of digital objects and events in the metaverse, P. 182.

17: Götzen-Dämmerung, Like the “real world” ...

18: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 10.

19: Change of power of intelligences, P. 152.

20: Quoted by Stricker, Understanding language models, P. 190.

21: Cited. ibid., p. 73. Editor's note: A similar problem occurs when you ask ChatGPT to create an image with the work title as a prompt. Instead of a graphic, you get the answer: “I can't create this image directly, but I can suggest an alternative interpretation. Perhaps you'd like a surreal scene with a divine mother figure and an unruly child in an environment reminiscent of Surrealist art? Let me know how you'd like to design it! 😊 “Leonardo AI also answered: “Our content filter has detected violent or abusive content in your prompt. Remove any references to violent or abusive content and try again. “With Grok, we tried the same thing and were given two pictures, but one was not shown to us but was immediately censored. We used the other of the two images as the article image for this article and three more that created us with the same prompt Deep AI, Canva, and the Microsoft AI Image Generator. It can be seen that the results do not entirely match our request.

22: Artificial intelligence and real life, P. 172.

23: What is digitization criticism, P. 61.

24: On the problem of digital privacy, P. 123.

25: The next company, P. 107.

26: Wasting time in virtual worlds?, P. 146.

27: Artificial intelligence and real life, P. 73.

28: Reign of Robots, P. 455.

29: Morgenröthe, Aph 116.

30: The philosophy and its data, P. 212.

31: More from less, P. 15.

32: Artificial intelligence and real life, P. 87.

33: Beyond good and evil, Aph 17.

34: Change of power of intelligences, P. 158.

35: How the world really works, P. 292.

36: The happy science, prelude, Lost your head.

Considering Artificial Intelligence with Nietzsche

On the Critique of Current AI Debates

Transhumanists believe that artificial intelligence is used to capture the real world. It wasn't just Nietzsche who presented this as nonsense. Moral programs are entered into the AI. With Nietzsche, this prolongs hostile morality. And Nietzsche would have already questioned the fact that AI helps people. Instead, people must submit to AI. With Nietzsche, they can evade their power.

III. From Jutland to Engadin

It is not surprising that similar descriptions can also be found in Nietzsche as a “seismograph” (Ernst Jünger) of the trials and tribulations of the modern soul, and in doing so he repeatedly refers to the metaphor of wandering. Even though he never read it, the stateless pastor's son described modern nihilism in a similarly drastic way as the failed Danish parish candidate. It is only with the way out that things are less easy for the self-proclaimed “Antichrist.”

“Wandering”, which previously appeared only sporadically as a metaphor for Nietzsche, has its first prominent appearance in the second encore to Human, all-too-human, The Wanderer and His Shadow, published in 1880. Nietzsche later describes this work as the expression of a fundamental crisis — “This was my minimum: “The Wanderer and His Shadow” was created during it. Undoubtedly, I knew how to use shadows back then...”¹ —, which, however, at the same time his “recovery”, his “return to me”² I ushered in. For him, “wandering” becomes a metaphor of an initially purely negative liberation from the familiar:

“Better to die than here Live” — this is what the commanding voice and seduction sound like: and this “here”, this “home” is everything she had loved up to that point! A sudden terror and suspicion of what she loved, a flash of contempt for what was called her “duty,” a seditious, arbitrary, volcanically upsetting desire for wandering, strangers, alienation, cold, disillusionment, icing, a hatred of love, perhaps a temple-abusing grip and gaze reverse, to where she worshipped and loved until then, perhaps an ardor of shame about what she just did, and a rejoicing at the same time, that She did it, a drunken inner exulting shiver in which a victory is revealed — a victory? About what? about whom? A puzzling questionable victory, but the first victory anyway: — such bad and painful things are part of the story of the great detachment. It is at the same time a disease that can destroy people, this first burst of strength and will for self-determination, self-appreciation, this will to free Will [.]³

It is therefore not an easy triumph over the traditional, but with wandering, you are simultaneously entering the zone of danger and uncertainty. There is a risk of self-loss, which is perhaps even more terrible than the old captivity; a fundamental disorientation that would later give Nietzsche the name “nihilism.” Nietzsche will repeatedly describe this danger — his “shadow” — as his own danger, the abyss with which he constantly confronts and which threatens to swallow him up again and again. The hike is sometimes more positive than an adventure trip,⁴ but at the same time repeatedly described as a risk, as a “highly dangerous [] glacier and polar ocean migration”⁵, which threatens to lead the wanderer to nowhere; also a kind of way of the cross, but without redemption in the end.

Nietzsche shares with Rousseau a preference for the Swiss Alps, but this is about a completely different type of hiking, also a completely different kind of experience of nature. Even though you can't exactly imagine Nietzsche as a mountaineer — he was more of a walker who marveled at the peaks from the valley — the thinker comes forward to them at the risk of freezing to death. It is not contemplative rest from the misfortunes of civilization, but precisely the intensification of its restlessness and alienation that Nietzsche undertakes:

Or perhaps the entire modern historiography showed a more life-certain, more ideally certain attitude? Your primary claim is now mirrors to be; she rejects all teleology; she doesn't want to “prove” anything anymore; she disdains playing the judge and has her good taste in it — she says as little as she says no, she states that she “describes”... All of this is ascetic to a high degree; but at the same time it is to an even higher degree nihilistic, don't be mistaken about that! You see a sad, hard but determined look — an eye that Look outHow a lonely North Pole rider looks out (perhaps not to look in? so as not to look back? ...) There is snow here, life has stopped here; the last crows that make noise here are called “What for? ”, “For free! ”, “Nada! “— nothing thrives and grows here anymore, at most Petersburg metapolitics and Tolstoian “compassion.” But as far as that other type of historian is concerned, a perhaps even more “modern” kind, a pleasurable, voluptuous kind who is just as fond of life as with the ascetic ideal, who uses the word “artist” as a glove and has today leased the praise of contemplation completely and completely for itself: Oh what thirst do these sweet witches themselves still arouse for ascetics and winter landscapes! No! The devil may get these “contemplative” people! How much more would I like to wander through the darkest gray cold fog with those historical nihilists!⁶

Nietzsche is well aware of the high price of this heroism. That is what is perhaps one of his most famous poems, The free spirit:

The crows scream

And they fly to the city:

It will snow soon —

Probably the one who still has — a home now!

Now you're staring.”

Look backwards oh! How long ago!

What are you fool

Into the world before winter — escaped?

The world — a Thor

To a thousand deserts dumb and cold!

Who lost that

What you lose doesn't stop anywhere.

Now you're pale. '

Cursed to winter wandering,

Equal to smoke.”

Who is always looking for Kärtern Skies.

Fly, bird, snore

Your song in desert bird sound! —

Hideaway, you fool

Your bleeding heart in ice and derision!

The crows scream

And they fly to the city:

It's going to snow soon.”

Woe to him who has no home!⁷

At least that's the first section of the poem. But Nietzsche adds almost defiantly immediately afterwards:

That God is merciful!

The Meant I longed to go back

In's German Warm‚

Into dull German house luck!

My friend, what's here

Hinders and holds me back is your Reason'

Compassion with thee!

Compassion with German queer sense! (Ibid.)

It must So keep moving forward. Nietzsche also envisions his personal superman Zarathustra as such an eternal wanderer. The first speech of the third book is with The Wanderer and there the Prophet speaks “to his heart” i.e.: “I am a hiker and a mountaineer [...], I don't love the plains and it seems I can't sit still for long”⁸. Migration as a process of permanently overcoming ever new peaks, which must ultimately result in complete self-overcoming:

But you, O Zarathustra, wanted to look at the reason and background of all things: so you must rise above yourself — up, up, until you also still have your stars under You have!

Yes! Looking down at myself and still looking at my stars: that would first be called mine summitsThat was left to me as my last Summit! (Ibid.)

But doesn't that mean questioning the ideal of hiking yourself? Does the migration to its highest “peak” then cancel itself out and reach a dead end? The myth of the “eternal return” should probably fix it at the end of the third book, insofar as the eternal wandering person affirms himself as an eternally wandering person.

But even after that, doubts remain as to whether this self-affirmation is really seamless; in other words, modern humans can truly identify with their fate. In the fourth book, Zarathustra again meets his shadow. And he laments his fate in very similar words to Nietzsche in his unpublished poem:

I am a hiker who has already gone after your heels a lot: always on the go, but without a destination, even without a home: that is, I really lack little about the eternal Jew, unless I am not a Jew forever, nor am I a Jew.

How? Do I always have to be on the go? Whirled, restless, driven away by every wind? Oh earth, you were too round for me!

I was already sitting on every surface, tired dust and falling asleep on mirrors and window panes: Everything takes from me, nothing gives, I get thin — I almost resemble a shadow.

But I flew after you, O Zarathustra, for the longest time, and, if I hid myself from you, I was your best shadow: wherever you sat, I sat too.

I've dealt with you in the farthest, coldest worlds, like a ghost that voluntarily walks over winter roofs and snow.

With you I strove to every forbidden, worst, farthest: and if there is anything virtue about me, it is that I was not afraid of any prohibition.

With you I broke what my heart ever adored, I threw over all landmarks and images, I pursued the most dangerous wishes — truly, I once overcame every crime.

With you, I lost faith in words and values and big names. When the devil molts his skin, doesn't his name also fall off? Because he is also skin. The devil himself may be — skin.

“Nothing is true, everything is permitted”: I said to myself. I plunged into the coldest water with my head and heart. Oh, how often did I stand there naked as a red crab!

Ah, where did all the good and all shame and all faith in the good guys come to me! Ah, where is that false innocence that I once had, the innocence of the good guys and their noble lies!

Too often, indeed, I followed the truth close to my foot: that's when it kicked me in front of my head. Sometimes I thought I was lying, and look! That's when I met — the truth.

Too much clarified for me: now it's none of my business anymore. There is nothing alive that I love anymore — how should I still love myself?

“Live as I please, or not live at all”: that is how I want it, that is also what the Most Holy One wants. But woe! How do I still — feel like it?

Habe me — another destination? A port after my Sail is running?

A good wind? Oh, but who knows where He drives, he also knows which wind is good and his wind.

What was left behind for me? A heart tired and cheeky; an unstable will; fluttering wings; a broken backbone.

This search for my Home: Oh Zarathustra, do you know that this search was my Visitation, it eats me up.

“Where is — my Home? “After that I asked and searched and I did not find that. Oh eternal everywhere, oh eternal nowhere, oh eternal — for free!⁹

What does Zarathustra have to answer this lawsuit? Does the permanent migration of itself become a permanent standstill simply because every movement in it becomes meaningless, equal—valid? His answer is surprisingly defensive:

You're my shadow! He said at last, with sadness.

Your danger is no small, you free spirit and wanderer! You've had a bad day: make sure you don't have another worse evening ahead of you!

In the end, even a prison seems blissful to such wrongs like you. Have you ever seen captured criminals sleep? They sleep peacefully, they enjoy their new security.

Beware that you don't end up with a close faith, a harsh, strict delusion! In fact, you are now seducing and trying everything that is tight and firm.

You've lost the goal: Woe betide, how are you going to make up and get over this loss? So — you've lost your way too!

You poor sweetheart, you tired butterfly! Do you want a rest and home this evening? So go up to my cave!

That's where the road leads to my cave. And now I want to quickly run away from you again. It's already like a shadow on me.

I want to run alone so that it gets light around me again. I have to be funny on my feet for a long time to do that. In the evening, however, I do — dance! (Ibid.)

Can Zarathustra respond to the “shadow” at all?

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IV. Walking as Dancing

From Nietzsche's point of view, Kierkegaard would probably be one of those apostate free spirits who set off courageously in order not to endure the heights of liberation in the end and allow themselves to be captured by a “harsh, strict delusion.” He describes aimlessness as just as much as the choice of any goal because you can no longer bear it.

Kierkegaard's answer would probably be: “It is not correctly understood that I chose the goal — faith — but faith chose me and brought me out of the desert into which you have fallen. Go within yourself and you will also hear the call within yourself.” The metaphor of “life.”¹⁰ suggests that Nietzsche imagines the way out of nihilism in a similar way: opening himself up to “something” that lies outside of one's own subjectivity and gives you a new orientation; for him, this simply has nothing to do with dedication to “God,” but is about opening up to the diversity of life itself, which inspires ever new goals. In order to stay in the picture, you probably have to imagine that it would be a matter of letting the environment dictate the route again and again. It's just a question of perspective: You haven't lost your way, on the contrary, you've always arrived.

But Nietzsche himself does not end up with a kind of faith himself, perhaps even with the western god, whom he describes, now strangely enough in a derogatory way, as an eternal wanderer: “In the meantime, just like his people themselves, he went abroad, he never sat still anywhere since then: until he finally became at home everywhere, the great cosmopolitan.”¹¹. Isn't that Nietzsche's own dream, is being Isn't God actually the “god of all dark corners and places, of all unhealthy quarters in the whole world” (ibid.)?

The ambiguity of emphasis on migration and doubt is as much a part of the hiker's existence as his staff and footwear. We can infer both dimensions from Nietzsche's writings and feel invariably drawn to one, sometimes to the other — because it is the ambiguity of our own existence. We should avoid trying to separate one of the two — because what would we be without our shadows?

The dance, which Zarathustra also invites his shadow to do, describes an existence that exactly that ambivalence “[z] wipe saints and harlots, [z] wipe God and the world.”¹² Able to take on yourself. Interestingly enough, Kierkegaard also uses this metaphor now and then to create such a successful existence in limbo, on “smooth [m] ice.”¹³ to describe. But it is, and here too both thinkers agree, a tightropeDance, one that also implies the risk of falling: “Man is a rope, tied between animal and superman, — a rope over an abyss”¹⁴. — In different ways, both thinkers lose balance on their own journey.

To sum up, metaphors of movement have always been used to describe basic modes of existence. In the sense of Hans Blumenberg's concept of “absolute metaphor,” they condense the lifestyle of an entire culture and from them it is possible to see what their approach to the world is.

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sources

Kierkegaard, Soren: The term fear. In: The term anxiety/Prefaces. Collected works and diaries. 11th & 12th abbot. Translated by Emanuel Hirsch. Simmerath 2003, pp. 1—169.

Ders. : Fear and trembling. Collected works and diaries. 4th abbot. Transacted by Emanuel Hirsch. Simmerath 2004.

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Item photo: Caspar David Friedrich: The Arctic Ocean (1823/24)

Source for all images used: Wikipedia

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footnotes

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

2: Ecce homo, Human, all-too-human, 4.

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

4: See e.g. Morgenröthe, Aph 314.

5: Human, all-too-human II, Mixed opinions and sayings, Aph 21.

6: On the genealogy of morality, III, 26.

7: Subsequent fragments 1884, No. 28 [64].

8: So Zarathustra spoke, The Wanderer.

9: So Zarathustra spoke, The shadow.

10: See e.g. So Zarathustra spoke, The dance song and The other dance song.

11: The Antichrist, 17.

12: The happy science, An den Mistral.

13: The happy science, For dancers.

14: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 4. On the (rope) dance metaphor in Kierkegaard, see for example The term fear, p. 54 and Fear and trembling, P. 35.

Stuck Between the Monsters and the Depths

Wanderings Through Modern Nihilism in the Footsteps of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard — Part 2

In this two-part essay, Paul Stephan examines how Nietzsche uses the wanderer as a personification of modern nihilism. After he is in the first part (link) focused on the general cultural significance of movement metaphors and the metaphor of wandering in Nietzsche's important brother in spirit, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, it will now primarily be about Nietzsche himself.

“The thought of suicide is a powerful consolation: it makes you get over many bad nights. ”

(Beyond good and evil, Aph 157)

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I. Assisted suicide and “death tourism”

Paul Stephan: Dear Lou, thank you so much for your willingness to talk about this rather difficult and polarizing topic of suicide¹. — The fact that this issue is so polarizing can be seen, for example, in the recent debates about the “death capsule” or “death machine” Sarco developed by Australian doctor and euthanasia activist Philip Nitzschke — “noun est omen,” you would almost say. Nitschke, also known as the “Elon Musk of assisted suicide”² referred to, advertises a quick, uncomplicated death by suffocation in a plastic capsule that personally reminds me of a vacuum cleaner. Although assisted suicide is not prohibited in principle in Switzerland, the use of this equipment for the first time a few months ago caused some outrage. The public prosecutor's office is investigating; so far no result. Why do you think this invention of all things caused such vehement reactions?

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Lou Wildemann: I'm not an expert on assisted suicide. I am also unable to judge this case legally at all. Why this causes such outrage may have something to do with the appearance of this device and the fact that you are there in the truest sense of the word encapsulated is and therefore very isolated. You may make a responsible decision, but in this way, there is almost something alien about the whole procedure.

In my opinion, however, the countless ethical questions that go with it are much more important. I don't have any final answers to them either, but the debate is very important to me. Because this is a very technological form of suicide and a form that potentially makes suicide usable, capitalizes, monetizes. In a society as profit-oriented as we are and how it will probably be even more powerful, this is a potential gateway for the question: In the worst case scenario, to whom is suicide suggested at some point because you are no longer usable — for reasons of age, illness or other reasons? That is a situation that we should not want to have. But yes, it's extremely complex and it's hard for me to side with either side. I do not want to deny the seriousness of their decision to the people who want to claim this for themselves, those affected. At the same time, the mechanization of such an existential step is At least questionable.

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PS: I could also imagine that this type of suicide is a bit “too trivial” for people, so to speak. Although this whole matter can also be seen as a form of identification. What I found remarkable, for example, was that this method was said to be very “artificial”³ be. This choice of words naturally raises the question of why other methods should be “less artificial.” So the great outrage surrounding this one individual case seems a bit exaggerated to me.

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LW: Yes, the term “artificiality” is of course interesting in this context and it probably means more “technologized.” And I understand that when I look at this capsule. I don't want to judge whether this is “worse” or “less bad” than taking a pill or choosing another method. I really find the question of usability more interesting. There seems to be a need that a market recognizes and obviously wants to get in there. The fact that there is a need may also have something to do with the taboo of the topic as such. I wonder if suicide were less taboo or not taboo at all, there would be such excesses. I don't know that, but I find it interesting to think about whether, as you said, the “identification” actually points to another problem.

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PS: The fact that there is obviously a large market can definitely also be seen from the fact — which was also discussed in the context of the debate about the “death capsule” — that there is now quite considerable “death tourism,” as they say, in Switzerland. Swiss legislation not only allows Swiss citizens to be assisted in suicide, but also people from other countries. Recently, 1,700 people residing in Switzerland and 500 traveling from abroad for this reason made use of this option every year.⁴ That is already a lot. There is only one really substantial restriction in Switzerland, namely that assisted suicide is not “for selfish reasons.”⁵ may happen.

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LW: What are “selfish motivations”?

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PS: Yes, that is just the question of whether it is already rated as “selfish” if you want money for it at all or whether the criterion is stricter. Based on the legal text alone, this does not necessarily seem self-explanatory to me.

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LW: Ah, “selfish” — doesn't it mean the person affected himself who commits suicide?

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PS: No, the person who is assisting must not act out of selfish motives, this is stated very clearly in the corresponding paragraph. With the “death capsule”, it is also the case that its operators do not currently charge any money for its use or only want to be reimbursed for the costs of the gas, the nitrogen, which they use. But I agree with you that this “capsule” just because of its appearance does not unfairly give the impression that it could become a business model. And that is exactly what raises very, very big questions: Will such offers be advertised at some point? Will there ever be a “luxury suicide for the rich”? And many more.

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LW: It is also interesting whether the general suicide figures in Switzerland, i.e. those who are not assisted, who happen silently, in secret, whether they have fallen — or whether the figures are more likely to rise as a result of this offer. That is a criticism that is often voiced. But I'm not sure about that.⁶ Just because something is possible doesn't mean that it is actually being used. But there seems to be a general concern that suicide is downright “contagious” and that people are only given the idea through this opportunity or the discourse about it. But you can certainly question that. I think you're either suicidal or you're not — but that's also a tricky field.

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PS: Exactly, you mention an important reason why this topic is so taboo. In preparation for this conversation, I have read various articles on this topic on philosophical websites and the like, and there is actually no text that does not at least in the margins the big clue: “If you are thinking about killing yourself, seek help,” and the telephone number of a psychological counseling center is given. Does this caution seem excessive to you? Or do you think that such advice can also be helpful?

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LW: Yes, that's the next big barrel... That immediately makes me think of the “trigger warnings” and how inflationary they are currently being used and whether they actually do what they're supposed to do. There is certainly a wide range of very sincere offers of help, but at the same time there is also a kind of etiquette that is followed ahead of time and provides such articles or even art that deal with these topics with trigger warnings or such information. I don't know whether this really helps anyone or changes something about the problem itself, but at least I'm critical of this trend of trigger warnings. This seems to have now become a kind of standard that reproduces itself. I sometimes ask myself what access to the world outside this points to — which we are not warned about either. But yes, making it clear again and again that there are offers of help is certainly no mistake. I prefer the offer of help to the trigger warning — let's put it that way.

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II. MALA — a film about the suicide of a young woman

PS: We're sitting here today primarily because you're making a film about this taboo subject — and exactly with the claim, if I understand you correctly, to put your finger on the wound and bring the topic of suicide to the big screen in a very provocative way. Can you say it that way? After everything you've said so far, I assume that you won't prefix your movie with a trigger warning?

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LW: So first about my reasons for doing this. My motive for making this film is not to provoke or trigger any social impact. My motive is to describe a very specific feeling and to bring it into a cinematic form. What I mean by that is the simultaneity of a seemingly very strong exterior and a hopeless interior and a very lonely decision that was made before the film even starts. The movie shows only the last few days of a young woman's life — after many years of torturing and weighing up; the experience of getting to the same point over and over again and failing because of her own futility. Her decision has been made and we only see her making a few final preparations. She cleans up in the truest sense of the word. But she does all this while meeting friends, doing her job, traveling a lot, and being read from outside as a tough, strong person. That's what it's all about for me: to show that you should actually look particularly well when it comes to seemingly resilient, strong people. Because these are exactly the ones who stumble across their own image, because they think it's completely impossible to talk about how they're really doing. They think they have to figure everything out with themselves and then make a very lonely decision. Her environment was then completely offended because they did not see it coming. These cases abound. Relatives report this time and again that they “would never have thought of that” with him or her in particular. So that is what I want, that is my motive: to describe a feeling, from the perspective of the suicidal person, which only a few know in this intensity or can only be very difficult to empathize with. Basically, it's about what it feels like when you're still taking part in life but have actually completed it. That is my motivation to do it. If that makes people feel provoked by this honest presentation, that is not my goal. But if it makes just one person understand this condition a bit better and may therefore be able to look more attentively at the people around them, then it's good. I am primarily moved by personal, intrinsic motives. Provocation and any possible reception in general played no role in writing the script.

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PS: It should be emphasized at this point that the film is not yet available. You're in the preparation phase right now, aren't you?

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LW: Yes, we are in the preparation and financing phase. It has also been going on for a very long time and is very, very bumpy and difficult. Because in Germany, there is a public film funding system and, even if you make a movie, you need a public broadcaster that participates in it and evaluates the film later after it has been shown in the cinema. It is difficult to find a partner who supports this issue and has so far failed time and again due to concerns about responsibility. Things like the “Werther effect” — i.e. fear of imitation — are put forward. It was then suggested to me that I should rewrite the ending and whether I could tell the same story without her ultimately committing suicide. So there is also a strong desire for a happy ending, quite obviously. All of this has led us to decide: Okay, we now have to finance this on our own. Because we don't want to change history. And if that doesn't work in this system, then we have to independent do. We're doing everything we can to shoot in summer, starting in August.

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PS: That's right, and you've started a crowdfunding campaign, which is still running at the moment (link). So if you want to support this film, this project now, you're welcome to do that. How has the campaign been going so far?

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LW: In waves. There are always days when it skyrockets and then it stagnates again. That is different. But we remain optimistic.

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PS: Yes, that is important.

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LW: And the nice thing is that there are associations of relatives and the German Society for Suicide Prevention that have read the script and who support us a lot in this and even think it is a valuable project from a prevention point of view — precisely because it shows so mercilessly how such a person can do. And that's an interesting observation anyway: I've been working on this project for six years now and what I find time and time again is that people who are really dedicated to the topic aren't as afraid of touch as people who haven't dealt with it yet. The shyness is significantly greater there. Affected people, relatives and experts are more in favour of greater openness. Because the taboo is still there.

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PS: Yes, definitely. You yourself spoke of the most famous example of the alleged “risk of infection” of suicide, this story that in the 1770s a great many young people, the Goethe's Werther have read, have taken their lives. Is that actually true as you tell yourself? Have you ever dealt with that? And aren't you afraid that there might be someone who, through your film, feels reinforced in their decision to kill themselves, might take this young woman as a role model in some way?

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LW: As far as I know, the so-called “Werther effect” is not without controversy. That is the one thing. And the other thing is: I can understand the concern about imitation; it should be taken seriously. At the same time, I know that my script and the way I want to tell the film don't glorify suicide, that's not my approach either. But I'm not going to morally judge him either. I'm showing an individual story one person. And the story ends... bitterly. It is bitter for everyone involved, no one really won. It's no one's fault either. But Mila, the main character, hasn't made a mistake from her point of view either. I am generally convinced that you should never underestimate an audience and that people will take away what they want to take away. I think intentional happy endings, which you can tell that they are just trying to convey a moral message, are significantly worse for those affected, because then they don't see each other again and understand their feeling or condition even more lonely because someone shows them: Oh, look, and everything will be okay in the end. This may even make the situation worse. In my experience, the longing for happy endings comes more from those who are not affected.

The fact is: In Germany, over 10,100 people commit suicide every year. That means at least one person every hour. So as we speak, one or one. And if we have another coffee afterwards, another one or another. These are the facts for now. These cases exist and they exist despite the taboo. And for me, that suggests that not talking about it does not have a preventive effect. Clearly not. And that is why I do not think this concern of imitation that we spoke of is correct and I also find it interesting, even philosophically, to ask myself where this social taboo comes from. What does it have to do with religious heritage, what does it also have to do with the logic of exploitation, including power? We should all keep going, we should remain part of the system, we should sort ourselves out somehow, get help, get a coach, take psychotropic drugs — the main thing is that it somehow ends well again. When you look at it that way, suicide is of course a denial. It is — supposedly — not usable and an exit from the whole. And for that reason alone, it is not wanted. And as I say that, it sounds like I'm making a fire speech for suicide — I don't want that at all. But I find it interesting why such a widespread problem — it is uncanny Many: more than in road traffic, through violence and through drugs combined, every year — so unknown. Hardly anyone knows that. Almost no one I talk to about this topic knows these figures. Why is that so? Why do we avoid it like that? That can't be right. And that doesn't seem to have a preventive effect, otherwise the figures wouldn't be so high.

III. On the philosophy of suicide

PS: I can definitely follow that. And you're also addressing an important facet right now. Exactly, suicide has been an important topic in philosophy for many centuries, even millennia, about which a lot has been written. What can definitely be said very roughly and which is also often addressed by Nietzsche is that there is a very big contrast between the pre-Christian, i.e. the ancient, view and then the Christian view. Well, in ancient times, this taboo about suicide didn't even exist yet. On the contrary, it was entirely of the opinion that, under certain circumstances, it might be necessary to commit suicide in order to avoid dishonor. It was just more important to die an honorable death than to remain alive in any way, but to have to live under circumstances that would have been felt as completely unbearable. We know, for example, the suicide of Socrates: He has been sentenced to death and is now faced with the choice of fleeing and going into exile or of carrying out the death sentence on himself by drinking a poisonous cup. To the horror of all his friends, who really persuade him that he should choose the first option, he drinks the poison cup precisely for the reason that he says: Well, I've been fed by the city all my life, my whole identity depends on the fact that I'm a citizen of that city, I can't run away now if the city disagrees with me. Another, less well-known example is the philosopher Empedocles, who, according to legend, is said to have plunged himself into a volcano. — So yes, the great taboo was actually only brought into the world through Christianity. How do you perceive it: Would you also say that our culture is still very strongly influenced by Christianity today, or would you consider other motives to be more decisive?

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LW: Yes, I think that is still very profound, the religious idea of original sin that you have to endure. And when you repent, keep commandments and so on, paradise beckons at some point. In such a context, self-chosen death is of course unthinkable. I do think that this still has very far-reaching effects. And in addition, there is certainly the fact that in our western way of life, this neoliberal system, there should also be a solution for every problem and a form of functioning and optimization. This makes it difficult for people who get to the point over and over again that they just don't function in it. And they don't work even with all sorts of tools and then break down. I think religion, the idea of suicide as a sin, has played a significant part in how little we talk about it today. How shameful that still is. The reception of violence against oneself and violence against others is generally astonishingly different. Violence against others, the exercise of power over others, is so accepted — and also completely normalized in the media and in art — but violence against oneself is taboo. That is very astonishing.

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PS: Well, you're actually bringing us to the exact point of talking about Nietzsche, who, I think, is well known, is trying very hard in this regard, as in many other respects, to build on this pre-modern view. He speaks of “free death” at various points in his work. In Zarathustra For example, it says: “[S] tirb at the right time! ”⁷. So you shouldn't leave death to chance, you should determine the time at which you die yourself and you should choose it in such a way that in case of doubt you are not dishonored, i.e. you don't have to live an existence that you can't be responsible for or that is no longer compatible with your self-image.⁸ Nietzsche is of course very different from Christianity, but also from the philosophical mainstream actually, of his time. Both in Schopenhauer, who was his most important philosophical teacher, and in Kant and Hegel, there are very clear and very clear condemnations of suicide and Nietzsche is just trying to revalue this.

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LW: What kind of convictions?

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PS: For very different reasons. With Schopenhauer, you would think at first glance that he would support suicide.

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LW: I would have guessed that now too.

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PS: Yes, there is also a very interesting philosopher who should not be left unmentioned in this regard, who has also been read by Nietzsche: Philipp Mainländer, who in his main work — as far as I know his only work — with the title Philosophy of Salvation Based on premises similar to those made by Schopenhauer, suicide is virtually obligatory. You should kill yourself in order to extinguish the terrible will to live — and he also committed suicide shortly after completing this book. But Schopenhauer himself writes that suicide is virtually an imperfect way of “sneaking” out of life, since the motives for killing himself actually still correspond to the will to live; in other words, he sees a certain self-contradiction of the “suicidal person.”

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LW: Because suffering alive still means a will?

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PS: Exactly, the consistent denial of will for him is just asceticism, which also takes on the pain and suffering.

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LW: What would Nietzsche say to that?

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PS: I actually haven't found a place where he explicitly deals with this suicide criticism by Schopenhauer.⁹ His criticism is actually on a very fundamental level, because Nietzsche would say that you can't help but affirm the will to live: Even the Schopenhauer ascetic is actually someone who affirms life at heart, and for this reason the standard of Schopenhauer's criticism of Nietzsche no longer works at all.¹⁰ Can you follow me?

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LW: Yes, I think that is the reason why there is a certain speechlessness between those affected and those not affected. From a life-affirming perspective, this is simply incomprehensible.

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PS: Although for Nietzsche, the free death of the “master” would be precisely an expression of affirmation of life, not a negation, because a heroic, self-determined way of living is preferred over simply vegetating or an externally determined existence.

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LW: That sounds like a very rational approach, it seems less about suffering.

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PS: Yes, that's right. But what is exciting now is that there is another aspect in Nietzsche's thoughts on the subject. In fact, he would actually say that the entire Christian culture, i.e. actually the culture up to the present day, is characterized by the fundamental contradiction that, on the one hand, it is very life-denying,¹¹ But on the other hand, it precisely forbids choosing this free death. In some places, he even goes so far as to say that the vast majority of people should actually kill themselves, but they are prevented from Christian morality and kept alive almost artificially.¹² What do you say about this rather provocative view?

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LW: I have to get to Roberto Espositos Immunitas think. He says there: In theology, also in law, and also on other levels, there is this image of immunization, of alleged immunization. You use something consciously, in the case of religion, an immanent sinfulness that you attribute to a person — in order to then protect him from sin through rules and coercion. In other words, through violence that reproduces itself so permanently. From the point of view of power, from a religious point of view, it is claimed that it is necessary to address human scarcity, sin, with norms and rules — in fact, people are only made sinful through a set of rules that no person could ever fully comply with. Violence or power consciously uses the shortcoming — the negative image of man — to underpin their position of power. It just sounded like I heard you talking about Nietzsche. I find that very understandable. There is a great lack of freedom in this.

Esposito also says that's where you actually cut off a bit of liveliness from life. A contradiction that is difficult to recognize if you can't afford the luxury of distance. This happens constantly, is almost institutionalized and at the same time, as I said, violence against oneself is such a taboo. I'm really interested in this paradox. Especially in such an increasingly individualized world; the circumstances in which we live; the way we do business; how we interact with each other; how we communicate; which technologies we use and so on: We are constantly curtailing ourselves in our vitality and that seems okay. But when someone ends their life, that's a problem.

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PS: You could even with Nietzsche, who writes just that,¹³ It certainly raises the question of, for example, when soldiers go to war or if any martyrs sacrifice themselves for their faith, whether these are not also forms of suicide de facto, which, however, are not framed as such and are considered completely okay. When people sacrifice themselves for some ideas set by society, that is completely okay or is even celebrated, but as soon as they want to evade exactly that by suicide, it is suddenly terribly bad and the biggest sin that you can ever imagine.

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LW: And she shouldn't go to school! I also worked as a journalist for a few years. The press code is also interesting not to report on suicide — unless he is a very prominent person, then, strangely enough, that doesn't apply. We report on the mass accident on the motorway and the fire that killed people. About all possible forms of violence, crime, about victims of war. When it comes to suicide, the reason not to report is the protection of relatives — which we are not interested in in all other cases. I always have question marks as to why this should be the case.

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PS: As we slowly come to the end of this conversation, I would like to point out two problems that also affect Nietzsche. I was talking about the fact that he upholds the term “free death” in various places. There is such a passage from his late work where he also drops the, perhaps notorious, sentence: “The sick person is a parasite of society. ”¹⁴ Given that Nietzsche became such a “parasite” himself only a short time later, this sentence is of course not devoid of a certain irony. But what he's already writing at this point is exactly that if you run the risk of becoming a “parasite,” you definitely have the duty to kill yourself and even doctors should then make you do so to avert this damage from society. Isn't it also a great danger in this whole discourse on euthanasia that this debate could very easily tip over in a very weird and questionable, certainly neoliberal direction?

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LW: Absolutely yes, that's why I mentioned it briefly at the beginning. The problem that there is a kind of habituation to this possibility, which can then develop step by step, in the worst case scenario, into a recommendation or suggestion that the time has come now because you no longer contribute to society. Because you're not functional, for a variety of reasons. That is a huge risk. Not to mention the question in whose hands or ideologies such developments can become weapons. But even assuming that the political conditions remain approximately as they are, even then the influence of a potential market in this area must be viewed absolutely critically.

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PS: That brings me to a follow-up question. Nietzsche has this very strong concept of free, self-determined death. But where and how can you actually draw the line? Is it really possible to die completely self-determined? Or aren't there always some social factors that could very subtly drive you to commit suicide? And doesn't he then become very unfree again?

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LW: Yes, we're not in a vacuum, of course. We are a product of the conditions in which we live. And we can suffer so severely from these conditions alone that we no longer want or cannot live in them. That can be the motivation of many others. That is also very important to me in the story I am telling. That there is no single, identifiable, comprehensible reason. And that the character also has no diagnosis. By the way, this is also a problem for certain funding agencies and potential financiers — which is interesting. There is a great longing for diagnoses, for clear categorization — what does it have? What is that? — for one comprehensible reason. If you don't deliver it, and I do that very consciously, then it causes irritation. That is also interesting. But from a preventive point of view, exactly right: a complex figure that does not provide a comprehensible causal chain.  

I am very much in favour of spiritual maturity and self-determination, but that always takes place within the limits of the circumstances in which we find ourselves. With every decision you make, you could ask: Was it really self-determined? Probably not. But still... We always get to the point: Suicide does happen, it does happen. And, as I said, maybe — thesis — it would happen even less if the taboo did not exist. Because the despair that it makes you feel so alone and so misunderstood could be alleviated.

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PS: If I may ask one more question at the end: So what do I ask myself, completely apart from Nietzsche, as a philosopher, or what my own criticism of suicide would be: You have already spoken of a “lonely decision”; whether the problem of suicide is not actually, that you are completely beaming yourself out of the social relationships in which you are involved in, in a certain way, apparently a decision that only concerns you yourself, but which also has an impact on others at the same time. That is perhaps actually one of the reasons why the topic is so emotional, because many people, probably just about everyone, have people in their circle of acquaintances who have killed themselves. What I want to say is that people who kill themselves actually seem to be moving in self-contradiction, i.e. ignoring on the one hand that the others will grieve, will also blame themselves and much more, but at the same time they may want to take account of this aftereffect and perhaps want to take revenge in some way against posterity and want to plunge others into grief and doubt. So I don't want to say that this is the case for everyone or even for the majority — but isn't that a problem?

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LW: That is definitely a possible view, which is probably also quite common. But I would definitely like to contrast this with another perspective: namely that suicide, especially when there are many social entanglements and relationships, is not a decision against these people, but the end of a sometimes long-standing attempt for this environment to live on and fail because of it. That is very important to me and that is also what associations of relatives repeatedly emphasize: Suicide is not a decision against someone, but actually the failure of trying to continue for others. I find this a very important perspective, which is in no way intended to glorify this, but only to show — and of course we don't know any figures or anything about that — that the plural is probably not frivolous ad hoc decisions, but rather those that have had a long, painful lead time. And that these people really didn't make it easy for themselves.

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PS: Yes, I can definitely understand that you can and in many cases must look at it that way too. Yes, thanks again. Is there anything else you absolutely want to say about this topic?

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LW: I'm sure there's still a lot more, but I'll leave it at that: We should all talk more about it.

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PS: I can definitely agree with that and I think the various Nietzsche passages we referred to could definitely provide good material and should definitely be read more. What I might be able to recommend at the end is the novel Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho, who is even a bit Nietzschean and has also really moved me personally. Do you know him?

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LW: There is also a movie there, yes.

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PS: I don't know him again. So I can highly recommend this novel to anyone who has read this conversation and may have suicidal intentions — and of course also to seek help, that's obvious.

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Lou Wildemann is an author and director from Leipzig. She previously worked as a freelance journalist for public television for several years. She studied Political Science (BA), Cultural Studies (MA) and Philosophy (MA).

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Link to the film's crowdfunding campaign MALA

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Item photo: Johann Heinrich Tischbein the Elder: Dido's Suicide (1776) (link)

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footnotes

1: Editor's note: In order to avoid the problematic moral connotations of the traditional term “suicide,” which Lou Wildemann drew our attention to following the conversation — does the term “murder” imply killing for lower reasons — we use other phrases below.

2: Cf. The entry about him on the English-language Wikipedia.

3: According to Dieter Birnbacher in an article for Brisant (link).

4: Cf. swissinfo.ch.

5: Art. 115 of the Swiss Criminal Code. It is therefore the absence of a prohibition and not an explicit permission (cf. Giovanni Maio in conversation with SWR).

6: Editor's note: The statistics quoted in footnote 4 record a rapid increase in cases of assisted suicide in the last 20 years, an increase of almost tenfold. At the same time, cases of suicide using other methods have been declining sharply since the late 90s, which suggests a certain correlation. Overall, the suicide rate remains relatively constant (cf. Swiss Health Observatory).

7: So Zarathustra spoke, Of free death.

8: See also Human, all-too-human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Aph 185.

9: In an estate fragment from 1875 (link), Nietzsche seems to be paraphrasing Eugen Dühring's thoughts in this regard.

10: For example, the quintessence the third treatise of The genealogy of morality.

11: “I call it a state where all are poisonous drinkers, good and bad: State where everyone loses themselves, good and bad: State where the slow suicide of all — means 'life. '” (So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol).

12: In one Draft letter from 1884 addressed to Paul Lanzky For example, he writes: “What do I have to do with those who have no goal having! My body prescription, casually remarked, is, with regard to such, — suicide. But he usually mistells, due to lack of discipline.” In a Estate fragment from 1880 He defines Christianity precisely “as the great mob movement of the Roman Empire [...] of all those who would have had reason to commit suicide but did not have the courage to do so; they sought with fervour a means to endure their lives and find something worth enduring.” See also Another fragment from 1888.

13: Cf. on this self-contradictory nature of Christianity The happy science, Aph 131. In Aphorism 338 of the same book It says: “[T] he war is [...] a detour to suicide, but a detour with a clear conscience.”

14: Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles 36.

“Choose the right time to die!”

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Nietzsche's Ethics of “Free Death” in the Context of Current Debates About Suicide

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A Conversation with Filmmaker Lou Wildemann

Lou Wildemann is a cultural scientist and filmmaker from Leipzig. your current feature film project, MALA, deals with the suicide of a young resident of Nietzsche City. Paul Stephan discussed this provocative project and the topic of suicide in general with her: Why is it still taboo today? Should we talk more about this? What role can Nietzsche's reflections, who repeatedly thought about this topic, play in this? What does suicide mean in an increasingly violent neoliberal society?

I. Modern life as a journey across the sea of fog

Metaphors of movement have always been used to describe basic modes of existence. In the sense of Hans Blumenberg's concept of “absolute metaphor,” they condense the lifestyle of an entire culture and from them it is possible to see what their approach to the world is. Insofar as people describe their lives in a movement metaphor at all, it would be necessary to differentiate between the goal of the movement and the way in which this goal is achieved. Think of the wanderings of Ulysses or Christ's Way of the Cross as meaningful archmyths, of the medieval ideas of life as a pilgrimage repeating the Passion or as a seafaring which, once through all storms and dangers, will end in a safe haven, the Kingdom of Heaven.

Since the end of the 18th century, in modern times, it has become less and less plausible to interpret life as a movement linked to some goal. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, for example, as a precursor of modern world sentiment, presents himself in his writings as a lonely hiker and walker who is thrown back and forth “like a rolling stone” by the coincidences of life without being able to seriously hope of ever reaching a destination — in this world anyway. He only experiences a breather in isolated enjoyment of nature, far away from the developing industrial hustle and bustle of cities; in particular on Lake Biel, where he stays for a few weeks while fleeing from France, and in the The dreams of a lonely walker He tells of how, there, floating aimlessly on the water on a boat, he experiences a brief moment of extreme happiness. Around 200 years later, Adorno appears in the famous aphorism Sur l'Eau — “On water” — take up this metaphor and reinterpret it as a utopian mission statement: The belief of classical modernism in people's permanent progress has turned out to be an eternal hunt, as a senseless “run-up to death,” which the emigrant, in the spirit of the “citizen of Geneva” and very different from Heidegger, no longer wants to heroically affirm for him, but the vision of a Opposes humanity, which no longer has to obsessively chase after anything. The last dream of modern people: simply to relax.

Modernity thus fluctuates between suffering from eternal restlessness and the simultaneous longing for silence and calm guidance on the one hand and various ways of affirming this fate on the other hand; whether as a story of progress — which, of course, is no longer able to proclaim a right “end of history,” but only the permanence of ever new stages — be it as a nihilistic heroism of consistent progress (both versions approach obviously to each other), whether it is finally as an aesthetic-playful affirmation of baseless prancing and wandering around, for example in the figures of the dandy and the stroller, which fascinated artists and writers of the 19th century.

The metaphor of hiking, as a cultural technique only invented in the 18th century, including by writers such as Bergfreund Rousseau, is of decisive importance. Just think of Caspar David Friedrich's iconic painting The hiker above the sea of fog (see article image; around 1818), which adorns the covers of countless statements about existential philosophy. The urban citizen, who has been thrown back to himself, searches for an order in nature that somehow makes him understand the chaos of his existence — but only finds clouds of fog and the bizarre rock formations (presumably) of Saxon Switzerland. Whether there is a whiff of transcendence or the jumble of swirling demons, both interpretations of the painting seem possible, is a question that ultimately leaves the painting itself to the viewer himself. In contrast to landscape paintings of previous decades, the painting is no longer dominated by nature, but by man, for whom it increasingly coagulates into a pure projection surface.

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II. Hikes through Jutland, walks through Copenhagen

Nietzsche's perhaps most important intellectual companion in the 19th century, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, has in the diary-like novel “Guilty? “— Not guilty? ” With Quidam, perhaps the first “hero”, if you can even call him that, of modern existence was created. An eternally doubting “demonic” person who perishes because he is not sure whether he loves a “girl” or not, who at the same time thinks that he must love her but that he cannot love her. Is he guilty — or not? Similar to K. later in Kafka's Protocols of the Normal Madness of Modern Individuality, he is unable to answer himself and thus circles in the “eagle's nest” of his lost existence. He describes Frederick's Wanderer's gaze into nothingness as follows:

[N] Ah Looking at something sharpens the eye, but looking at nothing makes an effort. And when the eye looks for a long time at nothing, it finally sees itself, i.e. its own vision; in the same way, the emptiness around me forces my thought back into myself.¹

Nietzsche will later write in a very similar way: “Whoever fights with monsters should see that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you look into an abyss for a long time, the abyss also looks into you.”².

But can't this unstable way of life also be enjoyed, unlike Quidam and K., who are desperately looking for a way out? Kierkegaard has in his other great diary novel, the Seducer's Diary, was one of the first to write the phenomenology of such dandytum. His seducer is obsessed with repeatedly experiencing the intoxication of infatuation and stages it as an aesthetic spectacle with ever new “girls” as involuntary extras, whom he captivates with manipulative methods until they fall for him and become bored — the doll has then done its job and is replaced by a successor.

You may recognize yourself in it — or not. The seducer may enjoy his life, but there is reason to doubt whether his drive is in fact much more similar to religious Quidam than he would like. In contrast to the latter, he just doesn't know that he is desperate — in Kierkegaard's analysis, they both are. In the introduction to the diary, the fictional editor of the work, the “aesthetician” A, compares the unsteady existence of this, albeit more subtly acting, prototype of today Pick up artists Not by chance with that of a restless hiker:

Just as he has misled others, I think he will end up going astray himself. He did not mislead the others externally, but internally as to themselves. There is something outrageous when someone steers a hiker who is half clueless along the way down wrong paths and then leaves him alone as a lost person, and how little does that mean compared to leading a person to go astray within himself. The delusional wanderer has the comfort that the area around him is constantly changing, and with every change there is a hope that he will find a way out; anyone who goes astray within himself has no large area in which he can move, he soon realizes that it is walking in circles from which he cannot get out. I think he too will do the same on a scale that is far more dreadful. I can think of nothing more tormented than a scheming mind that loses the thread and now turns all its acumen against itself, while the conscience awakens and has to break free of this mistake. He has many exits in vain at his fox den, at the moment when his frightened soul already believes that it sees daylight coming in, it turns out that it is a new entrance, and in doing so, like a frightened savage, haunted by despair, he always searches for an exit and always finds an entrance through which he returns to himself. Such a person is not always what is called a criminal, for example, he himself is often deceived by his intrigues, yet he is punished more terribly than the criminal; for even the fact that conscience awakens is, said about him, an too ethical expression; for him, conscience merely takes the form of a higher consciousness, which expresses itself in restlessness that does not even accuse him in a deeper sense, but keeps him awake, gives him no rest in his infertile restlessness.³

How to escape this despair in the heart of one's own soul, like modern nihilism? Kierkegaard's solution: The “leap into faith”; become a pilgrim again, learn to see life again as a way of the cross in the footsteps of Christ and the martyrs. It is this affirmation of life as a violent march that could only free Quidam from his desperation; he could then see it as a divine test. But Kierkegaard repeatedly emphasizes that the subject cannot come to faith through his own effort, but can only be called to do so by God himself. — A simple, all-too simple solution. You just have to stop thinking to make life easy. Is this still serious philosophy or is it blunt madness, rhetorically extremely cleverly packaged? No one has argued so cleverly, cleverly and eloquently, like this: modern, for delusion.

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Link to part 2.

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sources

Kierkegaard, Soren: “Guilty? “— Not guilty? ”. Stages on the path of life, Vol. 2. Collected works and diaries. 15th abbot. Transacted by Emanuel Hirsch. Gütersloh & Munich 1994.

Ders. : The Seducer's Diary. Either/Or. First part, Vol. 2. Collected works and diaries. 1st abbot. Transacted by Emanuel Hirsch. Simmerath 2004.

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Source for all images used: Wikipedia

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footnotes

1: P. 379.

2: Beyond good and evil, Aph 146.

3: p. 330 f.

Stuck Between the Monsters and the Depths

Wanderings Through Modern Nihilism in the Footsteps of Nietzsche and Kierkegaard — Part 1

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As in our series of articles”Hikes with Nietzsche“It has already been made clear that the metaphor of wandering plays a fundamental role in Nietzsche's work. In this two-part essay, Paul Stephan explores how Nietzsche uses the wanderer as a personification of modern nihilism and thus diversifies a central theme of cultural modernity, which can also be found in the writings of the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, who was born on May 5, 1813 in Copenhagen, where he also died on November 11, 1855.