Just no fuss. Dancing and intellectual reflection, they seem to be mutually exclusive. No one will dispute the claim that philosophical and technical ideas are the last thing that makes you a good dancer — but is that so? “The Germans are too clumsy,” postulated an acquaintance with whom I spoke about the topic. Nietzsche would probably have agreed to this. In an exceptionally beautiful aphorism, he wrote about the Germans' enjoyment of art:

When the German really gets into passion (and not just, as usual, in the goodwill to passion!) , he then behaves in the same way as he must, and no longer thinks about his behavior. But the truth is that he then behaves very clumsily and ugly and as if without tact and melody, so that the audience has their pain or their emotion and nothing more: — unlessthat he lifts himself up into the sublime and delighted, [...] — towards a better, lighter, southerner, sunnier world. And so their cramps are often just signs that they danse Would like: these poor bears, in which hidden nymphs and forest gods live their nature — and sometimes even higher deities!¹

Is that the reason why the worse half of humanity is so often struggling and is plagued by complexes and discomfort? — That's another story...

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I. Dancing on the Internet: Unmanageable Landscapes

The topic seems more timely than ever. This shows the omnipresence of dancing people on social media. Transmitted primarily from the USA, but also affected by it, from all over the world. You can see: “Humanity” is dancing. Anyone who delves a bit deeper into the subject matter comes across choreographies, performances and insights into dance studios; comes across “battles” with stimulating interjections. Movement takes on military form. — Nonsensical next to that: Twerken for the Salvation of Souls. Not a bad joke for many anymore.

The Internet is celebrating its K-pop stars such as the Bangtan Boys (BTS), founded in 2010, or the one born in 1996 Jennie Kim by the also South Korean band Black Pink. It is known from them that these subjects of the “idols” industry go through intensive dance training, which, of course, fairly shamelessly copies US music and dance style trends. American choreographers and record labels are probably working on the so-called “acts” at least around three corners. Dance instructors discipline their clients not only to perfection but also to express themselves freely. Their success undoubtedly speaks for a nerve that they immediately hit emotionally with a mostly female audience. The appearance is favorable, comprehensible everywhere and subject to hardly any social or socio-structural controls.

I can't hide that I was not unimpressed by some trends myself. For example, the dance performance of Disney star Jenna Ortega born in 2002 in the Netflix series Wednesday (2022), the song that dates back to Lady Gaga's at the time Bloody Mary (2011) and the words: “I tell them my religion's you [.] [...] We are not just art for Michelangelo to Carve/he can't rewrite the aggro off my furied heart”²How an alleged autistic woman who plays them dances.

Musically, although less dance-wise, the hype surrounding and early death of XXXTentacion with his sad electro ballad has also Moonlight Many are anything but left cold. Even the almost violent dance choreographies of Jade Chynoweth, the Viva Dance Dance Studio from South Korea, as well as King Kayak & Royal G's brute performance toward Oil it The Afrobeat star Mr. Killa or the very danceable Amapiano classic Adiwele by Young Stunna, in which “the flex,” i.e. the flaunted bragging, and dance seem to intertwine, compelled me some respect.

Unimaginable but true: Dance is advancing to The The form of expression and art of our decades and is perhaps even more, a sign of the anthropology of globalized capitalism. Its increasing importance is derived from various factors, with the most opaque and least edited probably being art, aesthetics, and philosophy.

Undoubtedly, one of his recipes for success is his general accessibility: What has a body can dance and does not require education or professional equipment. The second undeniable element, both for social media and for the advertising industry, in which we repeatedly see dancing bodies (admittedly with products that have nothing to do with it), lies in the fact or appearance of transmitting authentic emotions or affects — for the less subtle, sex and presumption.

Is that so? It's less banal than you might think. Who sexualizes or desexualizes? The hip swing is the symbol of human sexuality; only a stone could remain motionless. — Does the term “sex” even appear in Nietzsche, for example? — And yet a dance can be completely harmless, like an aphorism from Human, all-too-human shows how viewing a work of art produces an immediate surplus of pleasure. The text as a stimulant:

Books that teach dancing. — There are writers who, by presenting the impossible as possible and speaking of the moral and ingenious, as though both were just a whim, a desire, produce a feeling of excessive freedom, as if a person stood on the tips of his feet and had to dance for inner pleasure.²

Even though attempts are made again and again to dedovetail the dance, the solution is likely — as is so often the case — an ambivalent one. One thing is clear: When in doubt, you dance alone in the neoliberal Pleistocene. — Life is what you make it!

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II. Technology, Dance and Pop Culture

Electronic music significantly changed dance behavior almost globally. In particular, the technical intensification of bass and the invention of the rhythm machine can be regarded as the most important and substantial interventions. These are technical innovations that reduce, ration and equalize — establish a mere relationship with the naked organic body, less an intellectual or cordial one, such as a symphony orchestra or band.

Nietzsche would probably have known more about this than he knew. The forms of illuminated cold crowds that we know from today's club culture with their electronic cult could not yet be known to him. The dance conventions of his time are only beginning to emancipate themselves. Ballroom dancing, folk dancing and ballet dominate the corresponding social fields. Mass culture and exotic pop greats such as Josephine Baker — although variety shows are already gaining in importance in the second half of the 19th century — are only just beginning to become emblems of an emerging popular cultural mass base. As far as I know, Nietzsche did not comment on the variety show.

He writes about Dionysia and Saturnalia, intoxication and theatre. He is looking for the anthropological, the instinctive, and the intense. Let's follow the Dionysian trail: The whole world a dance hall? A ballroom dance, going to work in the morning, then motionless like the stars in the sky and dancing yourself into bed in the evening? The world, the puzzle image of a dove? Dancing hall of the living? How could stars dance? — The well-known and already taunted Nietzsche quote about the chaotic celestial body is central in the Preface His Zarathustra — more specifically, his speech about the “last man.” Following this, the famous tightrope walker in an accident appears. The sentence explains internal chaos as a condition for achieving a highest ideal. The time is decisive: “Woe! There will come a time when humans will no longer give birth to a star. Woe! ”⁴

In the works published during their lifetime by digitized critical edition The root syllable “dance*” appears in just 69 of 3287 text sections, and only rarely in an explicitly analytical context. In Nietzsche's philosophical reflection, most prominent in the Birth of Tragedy:

Singing and dancing, people express themselves as members of a higher community: they have forgotten how to walk and speak and are on their way to flying up into the air dancing. His gestures speak of enchantment [...]. Man is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art: the artistic power of all nature, to the highest satisfaction of the original one, is revealed here under the showers of intoxication.⁵

The dance metaphor is less present in Nietzsche than many might assume, and as a whole probably coincides with the concept of “Dionysian,” the phrase for reflectless, irrational affirmation of life, the physical overcoming of thought:

In Dionysian Dithyrambus, man is stimulated to the highest increase of all his symbolic abilities; something sneezing is urged to express itself, the destruction of Maya's veil, oneness as the genius of the species, indeed of nature. Now the essence of nature should express itself symbolically; a new world of symbols is necessary, first of all the bodily symbolism, not just the symbolism of the mouth, the face, the word, but the full dance gesture that rhythmically moves all limbs. Then the other symbolic forces, those of music, in rhythm, dynamism and harmony, suddenly grow impetuously. In order to grasp this total unleashing of all symbolic forces, the human being must already have reached the level of self-alienation that wants to express itself symbolically in those forces: the Dithyrambic Dionysus servant is therefore only understood by his kind!⁶

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III. Symbol of what? Talk for what?

Since we're talking about symbolism, we have to become semiological for a moment: What does a gesture, a movement mean? Decoding the string of an ordinary dance is extremely difficult, and its elements — like hardly any other encodings — are both anthropologically and culturally determined. Even on TikTok, every trend carries a gestural string that, even in frame-by-frame analysis, transports very unclear content, with the form of a social relationship among people appearing to be the most prominent dimension; for example, the practice of imitation or classification. The semiological problem is decisively linked to the immediate transitions, which we call movement, which, as in a symphony, separate the good dancer from the bad dancer. It is similar to the arrow paradox of Zenon of Elea, according to which a movement consists of an infinite number of points of standstill and is therefore questionable how it could even exist. In our case, it raises the problem of whether the individual gesture is the meaningful element of the dance or its change, without which dance as a movement would be impossible.

Nietzsche later put in Human, all-too-human this semiotic dimension is explicitly open:

Sign and language. — Imitating signs is older than language, which takes place involuntarily and now, with a general suppression of sign language and developed control of muscles, is so strong that we cannot look at a moving face without innervating our face [...]. The imitated gesture led the imitator back to the sensation it expressed in the face or body of the imitated person. This is how you learned to understand yourself: [...]. Conversely: Gestures of pleasure were themselves pleasurable and were therefore easily suitable for communicating understanding [...]. — As soon as you understood yourself in gestures, a symbolism of the gesture: I mean, you could communicate using a tone-sign language, so that you sound first and Sign (to which he added symbolically), later only produced the sound. — [...] [W] First the music, without explanatory dance and mimus (sign language), is empty sound, through long habituation to that juxtaposition of music and movement, the ear is schooled to immediately interpret the clay figures and finally reaches a level of quick understanding where the visible movement is no longer at all requires and the sound poet without the same understands. [...]⁷

Dance is therefore double-coded, self-referential. Behind the code is a code of the conventions of a corresponding media and social field. As far as the side of reflection is concerned, dance has two dimensions: freestyle and practiced movement. The great dancer probably has both, but is ultimately in line with the freestyle. Behind this is the idea of the talented genius who finds the form of a direct transistor just for the sake of expressing his feelings — Poetry of the movement. In addition, speculatively and in the spirit of Nietzsche, dance expresses the unspeakable in a different, visual and subjective code. A second well-known quote that shows this semiotic dimension of the body also comes from the first book ofthe Zarathustra. Nietzsche's prophet proclaims that he “would only believe in a god who knew how to dance.” Interestingly enough, from a passage that About reading and writing acts: “Of everything written, I only love what someone writes with his blood. [...] I hate reading idlers. [...] Another century of readers and — the spirit itself will stink. ”⁸

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IV. Dancer, why can't you speak?

As you can see, there are a lot more questions here than answers. Perhaps reference may be made here recently to Elfriede Jelinek, who with her production A sport piece (1998) brought social movement organizations closer to fascism. There is certainly something to that, because as every good insurance agent knows: “The less you know, the better it sells.” Is this interpretation sustainable? As part of an increasing militarization of the social sphere, its effects can be seen in sports, the gym, and dance, which speaks its silent language and is not always understood. Deleuzes' control company in no way overcame Foucault's disciplinary society,⁹ But connects with it: Anyone who speaks of control society must ask who should give up the dancer's patron? It is clear who is disciplining him. The dancer wants his own lock, the drill, the authority of the dance teacher. But who controls? — The path leads back: It is the gaze again, the reflection. Because the view on social media is anonymous but gives its judgments automatically controlled by likes, shares, references by admirers and haters, it takes the form of a multi-eyed phantasm that could be described as “common will.”

Since this will is the least real and exists only as a collective and unsystematic, as a familiar implantation — as a supposedly necessary generalization of what dance is, should and can express, especially what it should look like — it presents itself as a protective mechanism against fear (the fear of loss of control), which is called the idealistic smaller or larger communities in their real body, dancing self-Feeling should protect, that is.

In short, the Argus Eye watches over the dancer, but by becoming his own eyeball. (Normal case of training and discipline.) Since it is no longer difficult to let go, the reflection is only suspended.

On the other hand, Nietzsche's cheerful dance songs, which most recipients probably didn't remember, were not among the strongest of modern poetry, incredibly romantic and innocent. So is Zarathustras Dance song Not really one — and The other dance song¹⁰ At the end of the third book, a negligible lyrical effusion anyway — but a small reflection on life, “a song of dancing and ridicule on the heavy mind”:

I looked in your eye recently, oh life! [...] [S] you laughed poettically when I called you unfathomable. “That is the speech of all fish, said you; what them It is unfathomable. [...] “[...] But when the dance was over and the girls had gone away, he became sad.¹¹

Perhaps this idealization of dance is memorable and valuable for our consciousness in the end because it shows that it can also be different.

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Jonas Pohler was born in Hanover in 1995. He studied German literature in Leipzig and completed his studies with a master's degree on “Theory of Expressionism and with Franz Werfel.” He now works in Leipzig as a language teacher and is involved in integration work.

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Footnotes

1: The happy science, Aph 105.

2: “I'll tell them that you're my religion. [...] We're not just art — carving out for Michelangelo [/] — he can't describe the anger from my angry heart. ”

3: Human, all-too-human I, aph. 206.

4: So did Zarathustra speak, preface 5.

5: The birth of tragedy, Paragraph 1.

6: The birth of tragedy, paragraph 2.

7: Human all too human I, Aph 216.

8: So Zarathustra spoke of reading and writing.

9: Editor's note: In the text Postscript on the control companies Gilles Deleuze put forward in 1990 the thesis that what Foucault had described as “disciplinary societies” — i.e. societies such as the modern ones of the 18th, 19th and 20th century, in power is carried out primarily through individual methods of discipline (drill, training, education...) — had been replaced in his present by the type of “control society,” which is less about individually internalized discipline, but the technical based surveillance of the population to punish border crossings. This apparently entails greater scope for individual freedom, but in reality it is no less repressive.

10: So Spoke Zarathustra, The Other Dance Song.

11: So Spoke Zarathustra, The Dance Song.

The Monkeys Dance Inexplicably. Nietzsche and Contemporary Dance Culture

Reflection, Movement, Misery

In addition to hiking, dancing is one of the most prominent soldiers in Nietzsche's “moving [m] army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms.” Based on Nietzsche's reflections on the art of movement, Jonas Pohler explores the paramount importance that it plays in our present day. Is the effect of dance primarily sexual? What does dance have to do with technology? What symbolism is the dancing gesture able to convey?

Of animals as monsters

Long before I even set off for Southeast Asia, I dealt with the topic of “wild animals.” It was unclear which secluded areas, jungles and swamps we would dive into. So I was concerned with the question of how best to fight a crocodile, what to do in the event of a snake bite, or which would be the most dangerous animal on our journey. According to my research, to my own astonishment, the elephant was high up. This sluggish pachyderm with melancholy eyes and dark circles, which remind me of long awake nights, can mutate into a monster in the appropriate mood. This mood in male elephants is triggered by a testosterone surge, which initiates the reproductive phase known as musth. Musth is derived from the Persian mass (fattening), means something like “under drugs” or “in intoxication” and describes the behavior of the elephant during this period of several months. He is so aggressive that he not only attacks male rivals, but also mammals or innocent objects. So it's no wonder that the thought of suddenly facing a fat elephant on a winding jungle trail with a black secretion running down its temples (a clear sign of the Musth phase) made me shiver. Nevertheless, this knowledge did not deter me from working my way further into the strange thicket of detailed articles.

Good conversation

I plunged into a realm of incredible stories, most dangerous encounters, deadliest poisons, and unusual rescues. And soon after, I had an interesting experience. Rarely has my newly acquired knowledge been as popular in society as it was at that time. For years I had battered my environment with philosophical ideas, tried to get them excited about the difference between “transcendental” and “transcendental,” for the synthetic unity of apperception as a condition of knowledge, or for the secrets of ontological difference. And I would have simply had to tell them something about animals in order to cast a spell on them.

Besides, I have no excuse that it took me so long to learn this. Numerous philosophers complained about this suffering in their works, others complained to their audience. Nietzsche did not remain silent on this topic either. In aphorism 41 of Morgenröthe He even sides with the audience. He writes that philosophers, like religious natures, have always tried “to make life difficult for practical people and possibly to spoil them: darken the sky, extinguish the sun, suspect joy, devalue hopes, paralyze the working hand.”¹. In addition, like artists, philosophers have a bad character and are “mostly indiscriminate, moody, envious, violent, unpeaceful” (ibid.). As if all that wasn't enough, the philosophers also had a third bad quality, and that was the joy of “dialectical [s], the desire to demonstrate,” with which they would have “bored many people” (ibid.).

Nietzsche — we know it — wasn't read enough either, at least not before he fell prey to spiritual abduction, as we Nietzsche researchers say reverently. But he did everything right: he has numerous animals, tigers, snakes, flying animals, camels, lions, cats, eagles, just to name a few.

Tigers

Perhaps, at the beginning of Birth of Tragedy There isn't really much talk about, say, tigers. Tigers and panthers are the Dionysian companion animals during the parade.² But little by little, the tiger gains a character in Nietzsche's philosophy. The tiger is the animal whose center is a great will: tension under pressure, always ready to jump, fight, reach the goal. The tiger, a loner, a predator, cruel and violent.

Despite Nietzsche's preference for the amoral, the tiger doesn't always get off well. Zarathustra, in any case, explains that he doesn't like tiger souls: “He still stands there like a tiger that wants to jump; but I don't like these tense souls, my taste for all of them withdrawn is fiend. ”³

And who, like a tiger, is waiting for the big goal, everything for which Save an act, he runs the risk that he will not succeed in exactly this act. The higher people, whom Zarathustra has been advising for a while, take themselves too seriously in exactly this way. They think that one attempt is everything: “Shy, ashamed, clumsy, like a tiger who failed to jump: well, you higher humans, I often saw you sneaking aside. A throw failed you. ”⁴

There are now only a few tigers left in Southeast Asia. They have already died out in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. The only glimmer of hope is Thailand. But luckily we won't meet anyone. And the only clue to elephants is occasional road signs warning motorists about pachyderms crossing the road. One day, the local population in a village terrified us: We were just about to get dinner when they urgently warned us not to drive through the streets at dusk anymore. The radio reported that a horde of wild elephants is currently roaming the area. Foolhardy (and hunger) nonetheless drives us to search, but after we still haven't found a food stand ten minutes later with a queasy feeling and increasingly anxious looks at the cracking jungle on the right and left of the road, we hurry back to the hostel and comfort our empty stomachs with instant noodles. Fortunately, the danger of dangers remains a phantom for me even this evening.

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Unexpected danger

Much more dominant, as we know after a few days, is a far less exotic animal: the dog. There are numerous dogs in Thailand. They are our absolute favorite pet. There are also a number of wild barkers as well as small and large packs. Thailand's roads (just like Vietnam and Cambodia) rarely have a sidewalk. Life takes place on the streets. Early in the morning, we meet the dogs when they go out patrolling with their legs apart on the side strips that are still empty as masters of the trail. At noon, they lie snoozing in narrow shade. The only things that can get them out of their slumber and into a short, intense sprint are: cyclists. In the afternoon, the Klaeff concerts announce our arrival to the respective hostel owners. Your barking is our constant companion.

The biggest danger is that they come straight at someone shot unseen, as they were previously in the shade. The shock tempts you to turn the handlebars around and make a daring turn into expressway traffic. The second risk: being bitten by them. In fact, the dogs barely seem to know what to do with us once they've caught up with us or even overtaken us. Other motorised two-wheelers simply do not give them such victorious experiences. Her barking becomes more subdued, a raised hand makes her jump away as if from a blow. Only at a safe distance do they announce the claim to power of their local gang again. And then finally, after two or three more loud barks, they troll themselves: “We've shown it to them,” the leader of his gang whispers on their way back.

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A dog's life

Not only in Southeast Asia is the dog much more common than the tiger, but also among Nietzsche. The proverbial life of dogs is miserable and pathetic and, by the way, is quite similar to the lives of many dogs in Thailand. In turn, Nietzsche is concerned with dog life in a figurative sense, because, as we have already guessed with tigers, animals in Nietzsche are more often people, more precisely, types of people.

So who is the type of person who lives a dog's life? Is he perhaps even a philosophical character who, as we have seen, is sometimes not well received in human society? A lonely person, a contemplative spirit who “carelessly lets his talent shoot the reins.”⁵, according to Nietzsche, it can easily happen to him “that he perishes as a human being and lives a ghost life almost exclusively in 'pure science. '” (ibid.) Anyone who suffers from the dialectical tendency already mentioned above to “seek out the pros and cons in things” (ibid.) runs the risk of becoming “crazy about the truth at all” (ibid.), so that he “has to live without courage and confidence” (ibid.) and finally exclaimed: “No dog wants to live that longer! “(ibid.)

Nietzsche nevertheless recommends that a person who is misunderstood and excluded by society remain selectively polite when interacting with others, because “[d] he cynicism in traffic is a sign that in solitude a person himself as a dog treated. ”⁶

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The dog owner

However, it is far more common than you are others who treat you as a dog. And given some quotes from Nietzsche, one could ask whether people not buy a dog primarily in order to be able to treat him as such. The dog owner as a prime example of a person who needs to live out his anger at someone who won't fight back:

For me, these are proud companions who, in order to establish a sense of their dignity and importance, always need others who can dominate and rape them: namely those whose impotence and cowardice allow someone to make sublime and angry gestures before them with impunity! — so that they need the wretchedness of those around them to raise themselves above their own wretchedness for a moment! — This requires some a dog, another a friend, a third a wife, a fourth a party and a very rare person an entire age.⁷

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The dog character

The lonely dog — possibly a philosopher — is now someone completely different from the dog character. Both may have in common that you can insult them with impunity. But the dog character is one who needs his master. Of course, Nietzsche cannot approve such a desire for subordination; no, he is truly not to be counted among dog lovers:

For the sight of an unfree person would deny me my greatest joys; the best would be disgusting to me if someone shared it with me Should, — I don't want to know slaves about me. That's why I don't like the dog either, the lazy, sweat-wagging parasite, who only became “doggy” as a servant of people and of whom they even accuse of being loyal to the Lord and following him like his [shadow] [.]⁸

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Nephila pilipes

Just as Nietzsche, as a hiker, prefers his shadow as a companion and wanders solitary across the Sils Maria forest trails, so we leave our dog companions behind us in the wildly mountainous area of Khao Hua Chang for now. In return, we make acquaintance with another animal, which although not unknown, is an extraordinarily remarkable species of this size — a spider species, in our case the Nephila pilipes or more imaginative in English: Giant Golden Orb-Weaver Spider. The more than palm-sized copy that guards the entrance to our bungalow has a net of over square meters stretched directly above our heads. These nets are so strong that smaller birds are even caught in them and eaten by spiders, while the larger ones, after they have set off, have to go through an extensive cleaning process to remove the remnants of the web that stuck to them. Flying animals should definitely stay away from Nephila's traps.

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The tarantula

The largest spider that Nietzsche could have encountered would probably come from the wolf spider family, such as the Lycosa tarantula (Real tarantula). Although this was and is not native to Engadin, it is native to the Mediterranean region, e.g. in southern Italy and southern France and thus in one of Nietzsches preferred climate zones, as proven by numerous stays. The tarantulas, which in Nietzsche's philosophy include in Zarathustra Occurrence stands for those who preach morality but act out of resentment and envy: “Tarantula! Black sits on your back, your triangle and landmark; and I also know what is in your soul. Revenge is in your soul: wherever you bite, black scurf grows; with vengeance, your poison makes the soul spin! ”⁹ Nietzsche describes them as poisoned beings who consider themselves fair but in reality act out of dark instincts. The inclined Nietzsche reader may associate right and left-wing intellectual reading of any color with tarantulas.

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True women artists

While the wolf spider is one of the spiders that hunt cleverly without a web, ours is Nephila an artist in the art of weaving. Although her structures make a somewhat desolately chaotic impression, she has arrived in the modern age just like us humans and can also enjoy artistic freedom because of me. As we drive through the deserted hilly landscape at dawn, the networks of Nephila Palm trees like power poles on the right and left. Thousands and thousands of spiders and spider webs that catch the light.

According to Nietzsche, we humans are all entangled in our own spider webs. Through our human senses and our human powers of thought, we are locked in a way of perception that only ever makes a part of the world visible and comprehensible to us. We ourselves are the spider whose web can only catch a certain type of prey and we are blind to everything else. This is how we live in our man-made world and have no idea what it actually is beyond human perception:

The habits of our senses have woven us into lies and deceit of perception: these in turn are the basis of all our judgments and “findings” — there is absolutely no escape, no hiding and creeping paths into the real world! We are in our web, we spiders, and whatever we catch in it, we can't catch anything but what is just in our Catch nets.¹⁰

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Captive and free

Our ideas and values and ideals can also be understood as spider webs. As their thinkers and disseminators, we contribute to the networks ourselves, just as we, as people of a culture and a specific period of time, are also the “victims” of existing ones.

By letting Zarathustra recognize the homemade nature of all spider webs, of all ideas — including God — he feels liberated from them. There may still be networks, but instead of a single network from which everything can receive its meaning at all, there may be as many as on the road from Khao Hua Chang to Sichon District: “Oh heaven above me, pure! Higher! That is now your purity for me, that there is no eternal reason spider and spider webs.”¹¹.

In view of the existence of so many webs, Zarathustra believes it is appropriate to clean up thoroughly from time to time, dust off ideals and remove the old spider webs. While Zarathustra diligently cleanses his soul: “Oh my soul, I redeemed you from every angle, I turned dust, spiders and twilight away from you”¹², after we arrive exhausted in our next room, I go to spring cleaning in a very prosaic way.

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Chrysopelea ornata

But what would a trip be without at least a real fright of an animal? In Angkor Wat, I met a snake that disappeared into its hole so quickly that I don't even remember its color. The second snake makes a more casual impression. The bright pattern, which stands out clearly from the bush, makes my gaze linger a little longer on the hose, which has become entangled in the foliage. A pretty, slender snake of yellow-green color, as my razor-sharp eye can tell after a short moment. We stand or hang across from each other, looking at each other before I retreat slowly backwards.

That a priestly enemy like Zarathustra likes snakes probably comes as no surprise. In addition to his eagle, the snake is one of Zarathustra's two symbolic companion animals. It stands for wisdom and science, for the Second Coming and the Devil. Zarathustra often seems to prefer the company of his two animals over human beings, and even in comparison with higher humans, the snake has a more pleasant smell.¹³

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Life-hostile truth

But it would probably not be a Nietzsche book if it were so clear about the snake. There are black, fat snakes that hide in the Valley of Death to die and whose entire mode of existence is linked to a form of life-hostile wisdom. In a nightmarish vision, Zarathustra sees a black snake “in the throat” of a shepherd¹⁴ Crawl to get stuck there. The shepherd threatens to choke on the truth, which the snake symbolizes. The only way to survive is to bite off the snake's venomous head. Devour the truth that threatens to kill you is an appeal that is easier to implement in symbolic images than in reality, I'm afraid.

As I sit on warm stone steps in the evening and look out into the night, I wonder what character my snake might have had. In any case, the bright, hopeful green makes me optimistic. The sighted snake is the Chrysopelea ornata, in English: golden snake. If that's the name for it, it's even more the fact that it's a flightable — alright, sailable — snake that can easily overcome 30 meters by air. A flying snake is almost a dragon, I think to myself and take it as a good omen.

A thinker might accuse me of a tiny bit of superstitious spider web, I must have forgotten when I was mucking out.

The pictures for this article are photographs by the author.

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Footnotes

1: Morgenröthe, Aph 41.

2: Cf. Birth of Tragedy, Paragraph 1 & 20.

3; So Zarathustra spoke, From the exalted.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, From the higher person, 14.

5: Schopenhauer as an educator, paragraph 3.

6: Human, all-too-human II, Mixed opinions and sayings, Aph 256.

7: Morgenröthe, Aph 369.

8: Human, all-too-human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Final dialog.

9: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the tarantulas.

10: Morgenröthe, Aph 117.

11: So Zarathustra spoke, Before sunrise.

12: So Zarathustra spoke, Von der große Sehnsucht.

13: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, The song of melancholy, 1.

14: So Zarathustra spoke, Von Gesicht und Räthsel, 2.

Traveling with Nietzsche through Southeast Asia III

Thailand

Our author Natalie Schulte traveled by bicycle for nine months Vietnam, Kampuchea, Thailand and malaysia. In her penultimate contribution to the series ”Hikes with Nietzsche“ she muses on encounters with wild animals that she met or could have met on her journey. It is hardly surprising that this includes considerations about the importance of animals, as they occur in Nietzsche's philosophy.

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I. Daddy issues and manipulation

Wagner completed the works in this stately estate Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Siegfried, he continued to work there on the Götterdämmerung continued and composed the March of Homage as well as that Siegfried idyll. In that country house, however, he also reworked his devastating pamphlet Judaism in music. A few weeks after Wagner moved into Tribschen, his lover Cosima von Bülow visited him there. Cosima and Richard's first child together, Isolde born in 1865, had been able to subdue Cosima to her husband as a cuckoo child.¹ First commuting between her daughters and her husband Hans in Munich and Wagner in Tribschen, Cosima finally moved permanently to Lake Lucerne with her children. Daughter Eva was born here in 1867 and Wagner's only son Siegfried was born here in 1869. In the same period, Hans von Bülow, also a devoted Wagner fan, had agreed to divorce Cosima so that she could marry Richard in August 1870 in the Protestant community of St. Matthew's Church in Lucerne. As Wagner's representative home, Landhaus Tribschen has now developed into a meeting place for its prominent sponsors and admirers, including in particular: the Bavarian King Ludwig II, Cosima's father Franz Liszt and of course — Friedrich Nietzsche.

The friendship between Nietzsche and Richard Wagner, which was fragile from the outset and was charged with high expectations on both sides, lasted ten years and finally turned into severe aversion. More specifically, it was not an equal friendship, but a father-son relationship: Wagner served as a (substitute) father figure² and the much younger Nietzsche was much more influenced by this relationship than Wagner. Nietzsche looked up enthusiastically at Wagner's “genius” in particular at first, while Wagner also looked at Nietzsche in terms of usefulness. The hospitality that Nietzsche enjoyed in Wagner's villa in Tribschen between 1869 and 1872 and which led him to spend a total of twenty-three stays there was beneficial in this sense. The Wagners had even furnished a separate room for him in the house. Looking back, he described the time there as the happiest of his life.³ In addition, Nietzsche considers himself one of the chosen few who wanted Wagner's genius to be fully recognized early on. He is always welcome in Tribschen, even when Cosima's due date is due, Nietzsche should not postpone a visit planned long in advance, but should arrive as a lucky charm and godfather for little Siegfried. He has close family ties and is virtually adopted by Wagner, who only became a father late: “Strictly speaking, after my wife, you are the only profit that life has brought me: luckily Fidi [his son; note CS] is added, but between him and me there is a need for a link that only you can form, like the son to the grandson. ”⁴ Cosima and Richard temporarily see Nietzsche as a potential mentor and educator for their first son, who is to receive an exceptional education. It is astonishing today that the brilliant mind Friedrich Nietzsche also takes on highly mundane household tasks during his visits, such as setting up a puppet theater or decorating the parlour for Christmas, and he also runs errands and paperwork for Richard. But Nietzsche is happy to carry out these services, as they were a sign of his integration into the family and the trust of his surrogate father Richard.

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II. Worship and Betrayal

At that time, Nietzsche appeared as a devoted fan of Wagner and promoted him among his circle of acquaintances. According to Werner Ross, Wagner de facto hired Nietzsche as an academic PR powerhouse and personally ensured that he received a professorship in Basel.⁵ Wagner needed an aspiring intellectual to attest to the high quality of his musical project. The influence on Nietzsche is reinforced through family involvement. This promptly delivers: The birth of tragedy, Nietzsche's first important work, contained a preface to Richard Wagner and was explicitly dedicated to him. In it, Nietzsche portrayed Wagner as a possible new founder of a culture comparable to Greek and, as an avowed Wagnerian, at the same time distanced himself from scientific philology. Following the academic failure of his Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche is temporarily considering leaving the university in order to promote the Bayreuth Festival in lectures throughout Germany. The Wagners advise against this and rather try to confirm Nietzsche that he will remain in the philological profession of academics, because he seems to be more useful to them as a full professor.⁶ However, the negative reception of Birth of Tragedy through his Nietzsches academic peer group further scientific career — as a philologist, he is virtually ruined and thus becomes worthless as an academic key witness for Wagner. She had already tried out the erotic-platonic decoy role that Cosima played in relation to Nietzsche on the young Bavarian King Ludwig II. It was Richard Wagner himself who initiated the pen pals between Ludwig II and Cosima. In Cosima, Ludwig thought he had found a soul mate with whom he could pay homage to Wagner on a spiritual level. His disappointment was all the greater when he found out about Cosima's very prosaic and physical liaison with Wagner. His open-hearted and enthusiastic exchange with Cosima had now ended abruptly. Until 1885, he wrote only rarely, briefly and factually. It later became clear — as in the case of Nietzsche — how disparaging the Wagners, who on August 25 of all days, on Ludwig's birthday (and the later day of Nietzsche's death!) were married, thought and talked about him in Lucerne. Cosima called him a “Crétin” in her diary in 1869⁷ with “rafters in the head” (ibid.). And Cosima quotes her husband, who judged the love triangle as follows: “You are the sister of the King of Bavaria, you have joined hands to preserve my life, he of course as a foolish being, you as a good wife.” (ibid.)

According to Ludwig, Friedrich is also settled. The Wagners' forced family involvement may also explain the subsequent intense resentment, the Wagners' sense of “betrayal of the father” towards Nietzsche after he had distanced himself from Richard. The subsequent disenchantment of the Tribschen idyll was also a disturbing event for Nietzsche, and the confrontation with Wagner remained highly emotional for him until the very end. Thomas Mann has in his Considerations of an apolitical (1917) spoke of Nietzsche's “grotesque late style,” an expression of a “life tragedy in which the giggling of clinical megalomania is already audibly consistent.” This also explicitly affected Nietzsche's statements about Wagner: “His psychology of Christianity, Wagner, and Germanism, for example, was grotesque-grumpy fanatic psychology. ” (p. 338 f.) When evaluating the relationship between Wagner and Nietzsche, one should not forget that Wagner was an idealized (substitute) father figure, not an equal friend of Nietzsche. “In order to find in Wagner what he was looking for, he first had to enlarge Wagner's real personality to an ideal image,” Rudolf Steiner said in his Nietzsche memorial speech on September 13, 1900 in Berlin, and commented on the division between the two: “Nietzsche did not fall away from the real Wagner, because he was never his follower, he only became aware of his deception. ”⁸ It was impossible for Nietzsche to make a factual judgment about Wagner; he vacillated between formerly ardent love and later cold contempt. Cosima played an ambiguous and important role in this context.

In several letters to various addressees, Cosima talks about the deceased Nietzsche; her such “obituaries” are incredibly common. Cosima Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Richard Wagner's son-in-law and an influential anti-Semite of his time⁹, discussed several times in correspondence the idea that Chamberlain could write a book about Nietzsche in order to counter the flourishing reception of Nietzsche, which was extremely disgusting to both. After all, these are the “works of a madman.”¹⁰, who now reaped fame posthumously, “donated by a neglected educational canaille” (ibid.), chamberlain frothed. Chamberlain saw the increased veneration of Nietzsche in the art scene and in the educated middle classes around 1900 as a true “epidemic.”¹¹, which cannot be stopped by a book, a counternote. Against this “delusion” (ibid.), “there is not much you can do with opposition. You have to isolate what is still intact, let the disease let off steam and then be at hand with something positive.” (ibid.) With regard to Nietzsche's personality, Cosima points out: “Race also speaks here. It was of Slavic origin. ”¹² Both posthumously denounce Nietzsche and his world of thought as something sick, contagious, foreign — more betrayal of their former “son” by this “terribly nice family” is hardly imaginable.

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III. Visiting the museum

In 1931, the city of Lucerne bought the Am Rhyn family's country house and soon after converted it into the “Richard Wagner Museum”¹³. In the following years and decades, a number of pieces of furniture, instruments, works of art and documents were purchased or permanently borrowed by the museum, so that today a rough idea of the original furnishings of the house is possible. On the ground floor, especially in the lake-view living room, you can once again see antique and richly decorated furniture. There are several works by Franz von Lenbach on the walls, depicting Cosima and her first husband Hans von Bülow. The original furnishing of the rooms was even more magnificent. Wagner had a striking preference for expensive and tactilely attractive fabrics such as velvet and silk as well as for extravagant clothing. Thanks to the extensive sponsorship of the King of Bavaria, Wagner was able to achieve this obsession (which was possibly fetishist-sexually or transvestitally motivated)¹⁴ Live fully in the rooms of Villa Am Rhyn. Silk slippers in the collection still bear witness to this today. However, the jewel of the permanent exhibition is Wagner's Paris Érard grand piano (built in 1858), to which he had close ties. Wagner had it sent to him several times during moves, but one day had to sell it out of necessity — in order to buy it back after a few years when it was “liquid” again. After several and extensive restorations, it is still used today when concerts take place on the occasion of public museum tours.¹⁵

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IV. Wagner's anti-Semitism

The intellectual climate in Wagner's house, whether in Lucerne or later in Bayreuth, was characterized by anti-Semitism. Wagner not only revised his pamphlet in Tribschen about Judaism in music, Cosima too, influenced by a conservative Catholic upbringing and by the anti-Semitism of her first husband, barely missed an opportunity to incite against Jews. “Exchanging nasty things about the Jews, laughing at each other in disparaging, was a recurring situation between Cosima and Wagner,” summarizes Sabine Zurmühl in her biography of Cosima Wagner.¹⁶ For a long time, Wagner's anti-Semitism barely played a role in the Wagner Museum's permanent exhibition. In recent years, the Lucerne city parliament has called on the museum, which is a municipal institution, to examine Wagner's anti-Semitism and its own founding history, which was still carried out in a Wagner-uncritical zeitgeist. The history of the house, the person Richard Wagner and the role of the city of Lucerne will be examined by an independent project group. In the new special exhibition Taboo Wagner? Jewish Perspectives Wagner's anti-Semitism has been explicitly addressed since April of this year. The aim is to discuss how Wagner and his anti-Semitism affect Jews today and to what extent his work can therefore be regarded as a taboo.

sources

Wagner's Érard Wing. At: Richard Wagner Museum, online: https://www.richard-wagner-museum.ch/geschichte/fluegel-von-erard/

Alschner, Stefan: Why is that? Richard Wagner's pink dressing gown. In: DHM blog, 11.05.2022. Online: https://www.dhm.de/blog/2022/05/11/wozu-das-denn-richard-wagners-rosa-schlafrock/

Bermbach, Udo: The woman who towered over Richard Wagner. In: NZZ, 13.08.2023. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/die-frau-die-richard-wagner-ueberragte-ld.1750646

Borchmeyer, Dieter: Nietzsche, Cosima, Wagner. Portrait of a friendship. Frankfurt am Main 2008.

Gohlke, Christian: The Fairytale King's sister thought he was a “Crétin”. In: NZZ, 31.05.2021. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/cosima-wagner-und-ludwig-ii-die-schwester-des-maerchenkoenigs-ld.1626954

Janz, Curt Paul: The law about us. Friedrich Nietzsche's Wagner Experience. In: Thomas Steiert (ed.): The Wagner case. Origins and consequences of Nietzsche's Wagner critique. Bayreuth 1991, pp. 13—32.

Man, Thomas: Considerations of an apolitical. Frankfurt am Main 1956.

Pretzsch, Paul (ed.): Cosima Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain in correspondence 1888—1908. Leipzig 1934.

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

Steiner, Rudolph: Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time. Dornach 1963.

Zelger Vogt, Marianne: Delusion without peace. When a mother denies her own daughter. In: NZZ, 29.06.2023. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/wahn-ohne-frieden-als-cosima-wagner-die-eigene-tochter-verleugnete-ld.1744651

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footnotes

1: Cf. Zelger bailiff, Delusion without peace.

2: Cf. Yanz, The law about us, P. 21.

3: Cf. Borchmeyer, Nietzsche, Cosima, Wagner, P. 13.

4: Cite. ibid., p. 34.

5: Cf. The Wild Nietzsche, or the Return of Dionysus, P. 52.

6: See ibid., p. 43.

7: Gohlke, The Fairytale King's sister thought he was a “Crétin”.

8: Rudolf Steiner, Friedrich Nietzsche, a fighter against his time, P. 178.

9: Chamberlain laid with his Basics of the 19th century presented a compilation of Wagner ideas and theses by Arthur de Gobineau and concluded that the “Germanic race” was destined to lead the world. By 1915, there were eleven editions. A popular edition was distributed 100,000 times among German soldiers.

10: Paul Pretzsch (ed.), Cosima Wagner and Houston Stewart Chamberlain in correspondence, p. 613 (Bf. v. 9/3/1901).

11: Ibid., p. 612 (from March 9, 1901).

12: Ibid., p. 502 (Bf. v. 6/1/1897). (Editor's note: On Nietzsche's alleged Polish roots, cf. also Paul Stephan's related article on this blog.)

13: For more information about the museum, cf. whose website.

14: Cf. Stefan Alschner, What's that for?

15: Cf. Wagner's Érard Wing.

16: Sabine Zurmühl: Cosima Wagner — a contradictory life (Cologne 2022). Quoted by Udo Bermbach, The woman who towered over Richard Wagner.

Abonimably Married, With Children

Nietzsche as the Wagners' house friend in the “Tribschen Idyll”

Richard Wagner lived on Lake Lucerne for six years. In April 1866, he was able to rent the Landhaus of the Lucerne patrician family Am Rhyn, which had been built in a beautiful scenic location on the Tribschenhorn. Nietzsche had been a frequent guest there at that time and enjoyed the family connection. For him, it was an episode that shaped him throughout his life, so that the confrontation with Wagner — in its entire range from unconditional adoration to rude rejection — can perhaps even be regarded as the heart of his thinking. Today, the building houses the Richard Wagner Museum. His current special exhibition focuses on the composer's anti-Semitism.

In memory of Abu Sayed and all the nameless people of the July 2024 Revolution

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I. A chronicle of the July Revolution

After Bangladesh, then still East Pakistan, fought independently from its occupying power Pakistan in 1971 and became a sovereign nation, the government under Rahman established a quota system for the civil service sector, which particularly favored veterans who had fought in the Revolutionary War and some minorities. The system remained intact for decades — albeit with fluctuations — and was expanded to include their descendants after the original freedom fighters died slowly. The civil service sector, as here in the West, is, of course, associated with better working conditions and higher positions, so that in effect entire families moved into privileged positions within Bangladeshi society, while the majority of the population was forced into ever more precarious working conditions. Public criticism of the quota system grew and repeatedly led to protests across Bangladesh, but was vehemently continued during the autocratically led and corruption-riddled government periods of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina (1996-2001 & 2009-2024), who belonged to her father's party, the Awami League. After Hasina promised to abolish the quota system under pressure from the protests, it was reinstated in June 2024 by a decision of the Supreme Court.

What happened next is likely to have surprised the whole of Bangladesh and beyond, including everyone involved themselves: Peaceful protests by a group of students in Dhaka against the court decision quickly became a national, student-led insurgency that drove thousands of students onto the streets. Hasina initially reacted to the protests by calling everyone involved as Razakars denounced — a militia that had worked with the Pakistani military at the time of the War of Independence — and thus equated it with traitors to the Bangladeshi liberation struggle. What developed over the course of time can probably be described as ping-pong between, on the one hand, the mobilizations of resistance struggles, ranging from individual existing student groups to broad masses of students, and state-police repression including regime-related student cadre organizations on the other. On July 16, student Abu Sayed, one of the organizers of Students Against Discrimination-Movement, standing on the street with open arms shot dead by police. The outrage over his brutal murder radicalized the uprisings, the crowd of protesters grew into a mature and remarkably well-organized network that was able to resist repression both through police and militia violence as well as closure of dormitories, curfews and the complete shutdown of the Internet, up to Hasina's shoot-on-sight command, which was supposed to lead to several massacres. Hasina, who was no longer able to withstand the pressure of the uprisings supported by public opinion despite brutal attempts at repression, agreed to negotiate. However, the organized crowd, which in the meantime had also joined large sections of the working class, for example from the textile and transport industries, had only one demand at that time, namely Hasina's resignation and a rebuilding of the government. She fought back with further killings until finally, on August 4, over a million people marched to Hasina's residence, but only found an empty house there. A day later, on August 5, Hasina resigned as prime minister after more than 15 years in power from exile in India. The consequences of their leadership in just this one month are disastrous: the death toll is estimated at 1,400 people — many of them massacred beyond recognition so that identification was impossible — the number of injured is over 20,000. Nevertheless, Bangladesh, despite all the losses, is cheering, because the end of the Hasina regime is something that many would no longer have dreamed of in their lifetime.

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II. The The will to power And the revolutionary

The speed and spontaneity of the events, the extent of violence and bloodshed, the dimension of organized revolutionary resistance and its ultimate success are remarkable and require an attempt at explanation. In the hodgepodge of Nietzschean concepts, one immediately notices the The will to power in the eye. Nietzsche, who understood the world neither dialectically nor teleologically, is rather based on material power relations to which “an inner world [must] be attributed.”¹ and which express themselves in everything alive. They are the will for positive, i.e. self-affirming and always complete, complete, power. As such, he does not lack anything, he is self-sufficient, has neither a singular origin nor an appearance on which he would depend. This means that the material forces are realized in their expression and only through this. “This world is the will to power — and nothing else. And you yourself are also this will to power — and nothing else.”²to let Nietzsche speak. But we must not be led in the wrong direction by Nietzsche's jargon; the will to power should not be imagined as a metaphysical totality similar to God, “it is the principle of the synthesis of forces. In this synthesis, which relates to time, the forces go through the same differences; in it, the different is reproduced.”³. We have it with difference to do that gives the quantitative forces their respective qualitative diversity, i.e. the fullness or multiplicity of material reality. It is in the relationships of these forces that the decisive factor for life lies; life emerges from them or, more accurately, they are life itself. Because we must not forget that the will is an inner one, which is the real multiples Reproduces on his own without having to create an artificial, external opposition from which he would have to draw on. It is a creative force in itself, never ceases to produce, to improve, to revolutionize, driven by desire to will.

What happens when this will to power becomes reactionary, total, negative and repressive, subject to standstill instead of becoming eternal, can be clearly seen in the material conditions. Human modernity is characterized by global exploitation patterns that cannot be eradicated even long after the alleged disappearance of European colonialism. Rather, they flow viscously across the globe in the neocolonial hangover, where they find their own sophisticated mechanisms of both material and cultural appropriation and appropriation. The so-called global South became a productive factory, a place of surplus value production through exploitation for the rest of the world and, even more, an outsourced battleground for geopolitical interests. The consequences are being felt by billions of people: environmental disasters, expulsion and dispossession, precarious and life-threatening working and living conditions, starvation, unjustified, sometimes life-long detentions, political repression, torture and wars, including genocides. Where Nietzsche conceptualizes the world as a fundamentally productive, enriching, relatively free and heterogeneous force through the will to power, you see it as tremendous self-destruction up to and including annihilation — you see the one who has turned against himself The will to nothing, who is busy cutting off both legs.

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III. The Bangladeshi will for liberation

For the major powers, Bangladesh plays a central role in the region and Hasina's regime offered strategic advantages. On the one hand, Bangladesh lies between the two competing giants India and China, both of which are fighting for control of South Asian territories, and on the other hand, the USA depends on India as an ally against China. While Hasina toyed with them all, but was supported above all by India and the USA, there is a different tone among the Bangladeshi population, because for the masses, those major states mean forces of imperialism lurking around the corner, which express themselves in conflicts over water resources, anti-Muslim and Bangladeshi violence on the part of India under the right-wing Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the supremacy of multinational, western corporations. It should come as no surprise that such a situation in Bangladesh under Hasina, a prime minister notorious for electoral fraud, corruption and an iron hand against any form of opposition, i.e. oppressed its own population and at the same time sold the country to imperial powers, would lead to ever stronger revolts. Because rebellion against totality lies in the nature of Willens zur Macht, revolutionary is inherent in him. Foucault's reflections in his analysis of the 1979 Iranian Revolution echo this:

Uprisings are part of the story, but in a way they escape it. The movement by which an individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says: “I no longer obey,” and is willing to risk life in the face of a power considered unfair, seems irreducible. That is because no power is able to make them absolutely impossible.⁴

Time and again, it is clear that where a balance of power is consolidated until no more movable difference seems possible, the will to power erupts like hot lava that melts the petrified soil. Every attempt to make life impossible leads to the emergence of an even more radical counterforce, which is making its way to liberation. This is also the case in Bangladesh. The court decision to continue the quota system may have served as a trigger, as a last push that caused the magma to shoot above the surface. In any case, July 2024 marked the decisive moment in history, which drove the crowds to where the risk of death was preferred over the compulsion of obedience and the fighting spirit of isolated groups spilled over to the masses. Because, as Palestinian writer and resistance fighter Ghassan Kanafani said, “to liberate our country, to have dignity, to have respect, to have our mere human rights; these are things as essential as life itself.”⁵. What provokes the fighting spirit is therefore by no means a simple question of mere survival, but of what gives life value, a desire so essential that it has a universal effect and brings entire populations to a collective will despite, or rather precisely because of, their differences. After all, it is precisely the difference that is worth fighting for in a totalitarian, absolute regime, and so is the revolutionary form of organization “diverse, hesitant, confused and obscure even for itself.”⁶. Bangladesh's political landscape is thwarted by such divergent axes of different religions, ideologies and classes, and accordingly the network of groups and movements was not a unification, but a clash driven by the collectively experienced impossibility of the prevailing conditions.

Gilles Deleuze describes such forms of organization of desire as rhizomes, a decentralized system of roots that grows in all directions, “[can] take on a wide variety of forms, from branching in all directions on the surface to compaction.”⁷, and its power lies in this flexible relationship, which has no central leadership power. It is moved less by a utopian idea of not yet, but rather a spontaneous outbreak of a heterogeneous beacon that resists the intolerable and knows how to adapt to the repressive backlash. At universities, in factories and on the streets of Bangladesh, the desire for a life of dignity and respect sprang up, as is usual for grassroots movements — because a truly liberating revolution can only come from below, where the material, real difference operates. Only a minority can be revolutionary. This does not mean a quantitative outnumber, but the marginal sub-systems, deviations, the diversity and the majority of a ruling regime that is outside of dominant supremacy. Minorizeto take away its supremacy from it and transfer it into the process of becoming, where it itself becomes a sub-system. A revolution is never complete when one majority is replaced by another, but only when the minority has become the inner principle of society. The July uprisings must also be understood in this sense, and it is in this sense that Shadik Kayem, one of the leading students, should say the final word:

We wanted to build a democratic Bangladesh where people could live in freedom and dignity... We developed ideas together and helped each other organize the movement and motivate students. I'm not saying that this or that person is the leader of the movement. I say that all students and masses who have helped and participated in us are the heroes.⁸

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sources

‍ABC's Richard Carleton interviewing Ghassan Kanafani, 16/10/1970. Online: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-19/abc-richard-carleton-interviewing-ghassa/104368218.

Chandan, Khan & Md Shahnawaz: A chronicle of the July Uprising, n.d. Online: https://thegreatwave.thedailystar.net/news/a-chronicle-of-the-july-uprising.

Deleuze, Gilles: Nietzsche and philosophy. Translated by Bernd Schwibs. A series of passages. Munich 1976.

Deleuzees & Felix Guattari: A thousand plateaus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia II. Translated by Gabriele Ricke and Ronald Voullié. Berlin 1992.

Ghamari-Tabrizi, Behrooz: Foucault in Iran. Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment. Muslim International. Minneapolis 2016.

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image sources

Item image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abu_Sayed_holding_flag.png #

Figure 1: https://www.newagebd.net/post/country/242084/yunus-to-visit-abu-sayeeds-family-in-rangpur

Figure 2: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_victory_celebration_of_Bangladeshi_student%27s_one_point_movement.jpg

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footnotes

1: Subsequent fragments 1885 36 [31].

2: Subsequent fragments 1885 38 [12].

3: Deleuze, Nietzsche and philosophy, P. 56.

4: Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran, 70. Freely translated by the author.

5: ABC's Richard Carleton interviewing Ghassan Kanafani. Freely translated by the author.

6: Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran, 61. Freely translated by the author.

7: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 16.

8: Khan Chandan & Md Shahnawaz, A chronicle of the July Uprising.

Historic Uprising in Bangladesh

The Will to Revolution

For a total of 20 years, Bangladesh was ruled by an iron, authoritarian regime under Sheikh Hasina, the daughter of the first president since the country's independence from Pakistan, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. But within a very short period of time, nationwide uprisings of such violence broke out in July 2024 that they overthrew Hasina after just one month and drove him into exile. How did this victory come from below and how does Nietzsche help us The will to power and continue his elaborations by Foucault and Deleuze to understand this historic moment?

Across the border

Ca Khẩu Quốc Tế Mộc Bài, or “Moc Bai” for lazy tongues, crosses the border into Cambodia. My friend and I got up early, even earlier than usual in case of delays at the border crossing. The glowing yellow sun is emblazoned in the sky every day, is burning down at noon and under no circumstances should you let it get so far that your own “hot [] heart [...] [n] oh heavenly tears and thau drizzle”¹ consumed, so we usually strapped 5 liters of water onto our luggage rack.

You would think that such a man-made line between one country and the other would be invisible and apart from the large number of officials at the transition, not much of the world would change. As we are surprised to find out, this is not the case. After the ups and downs of Vietnamese coastal areas, the many crowded villages and cities, and the towering mountains, the country is suddenly far and flat in front of us. A gigantic sky stretches from horizon to horizon in the bright light of the dawning day.

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Upward flowing flows

What would Nietzsche have said about this flat country? Because despite the promising names, we will see neither the Cardamom Mountains nor the Elephant Mountains. The country remains a pancake for us, which is true for more than 2/3 of the country. A large part is only so few meters above sea level that during the rainy season, the river changes its flow direction, no longer flows to the sea but to Lake Tonle Sap, which promptly swells from an already considerable 2,500 km² to up to 20,000 km². Lake Constance, for comparison, is only 536 km² in size.

Nietzsche's desire for conversion would therefore have had a nice figurative equivalent. And who knows what a funny divine spirit was at work when he flattened Cambodia's middle with a magnificent paw. Shouldn't a free spirit, traveler and adventurer in the Nietzsche sense feel at home there too, who “[m] with a bad laugh [...], which he conceals, finds spared by some shame: [d] he tries to make these things look like when You reverse them”²? ... But Nietzsche didn't exactly love the level.

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Of heights and challenges

It would not have been enough contrasting for him, because the contrasts of landscape could never be enough for him, as well as for his philosophical prophet Zarathustra: “I am a hiker and a mountaineer, he said to his heart, I don't love the plains and it seems I can't sit still for long. ”³ The telling blissful islands on which Zarathustra stays with his friends are not only naturally by the sea, but also house an entire mountain ridge and a “sad black lake” (ibid.). It should go from the highest altitude to the deepest depths, because life in its full fullness can only be experienced by those who are able to span the most extreme contrasts. On the other hand, anyone who just wants to be “comfortable” in their lives doesn't understand much about happiness, according to Nietzsche: “Oh, how little do you know about Glücke of man, you comfortable and good-natured! — because happiness and misfortune are two siblings and twins who grow up with each other or, as with you, with each other — Stay small! ”⁴

We know that according to Nietzsche, no challenge is ever big enough and if there were no high mountains, we would have to scoop them up ourselves to climb them. And indeed, this shoveling together could be required of us in a godless world. Because after we — also according to Nietzsche's philosophy — took the sponge “to wipe away the whole horizon.”⁵, it is now up to us to happily grab brushes and put islands with mountains on the back line.  

In any case, we cyclists through Cambodia do not see any mountains. We see the big lake, whose surrounding wooden buildings are stuck on piles in the reddish brown mud of the slum area. We see tropical steppes, and “[b] oshaft evening sun views”⁶, which squint through black palm trees, we see the yellow, red, green stubble steppe and the blue dome of the sky above us. I've never seen so much sky, so many sunrises, so picturesque clouds.

Leaning plane

No, you can't call this landscape uninspired. So what words would a Nietzsche cycling on a bicycle have written if not this one: “Since Copernicus, humans seem to have fallen onto an inclined plane — they are now rolling away from the center point — to where? In nothing? In's'pierced Feeling his nothingness? ”⁷

If we want to forget for a moment that riding a bicycle under burning sun rarely gives you the feeling of rolling downwards, unless into “nothing,” then we can voilà “turn around” the inclined plane, replace “rolling” with “pedaling” and these lines evoke in me the image of a cyclist in Cambodia. By the way, Nietzsche wrote nothing about landscapes in this section, but about humanity, whose grandiosity has been offended by science. The insults have become even more famous since Nietzsche, he himself is sometimes added, otherwise it is conventional when we are prepared to follow Freud's slightly self-enamored self-stylization, as we know: Copernicus: “We are not the center of the solar system,” Darwin: “We are not an image of God, but the closest relative of the ape,” and Freud: “We are not the master of our own psyche ' According to Nietzsche, the interesting thing is not so much the insult as such, but that we are proud of it. That we have honest respect for the honesty that so disparages us. That is an extremely sublime religious feeling: “How small a person is,” what “nothing a person is.” Science and religion have a common ground, their root in the ascetic ideal, which denies, disregards and rejects earthly, human life.

Nirvana and nihilism

And where we have just arrived at 'nothing' and religions: Buddhism is present everywhere in Cambodia. The monks' robes dipped in the colorful orange of the morning sun immediately catch your eye. We meet monks alone or in groups on the street, in cafés and, of course, as if they had been painted by an artist, on the harsh, grey walls of Angkor Wat. However, not everyone seems as averse to life, at least not to earthly pleasures and addictions, as a few smoking monks suggest. Nevertheless, as Angkor's numerous etiquette signs tell us, a woman should avoid touching one of them as much as possible so as not to contaminate it. Well, we are used to the misogyny of religions, be it Christianity, Judaism, Islam or even Buddhism, over there. As a woman, it is a little harder for me to regret that humanity began to wipe the canvas with a large sponge a few hundred years ago...

Yet you can't help but feel a bit melancholy about the loss of transcendence when you roam through the jungles and temples of Angkor. More than 1,000 temples are located in the approximately 200 km² area. Angkor Wat itself is the largest temple complex in the world. The first were built around 700 AD, the last around the 13th century, when the center of the Khmer Empire slowly shifted to Phnom Penh.

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Ephemeral deities

If you scramble up the large, black steps of Baksei Chamkrong, which seem to be made for a giant, you can hardly help but feel that you have shown yourself adequately to the dignity of a god, as Shiva, to whom the temple is dedicated, may have already chosen his victims himself among pilgrims who have crashed on the stone steps. From the heights of Phnom Bakheng, you can look at the tops of the jungles, listen to the sounds of the animals, admire the smoky streaks of sunlight that travel through branches and leaves. High spirituality, self-discipline, striving, the old hard walls seem to challenge, whisper, ask: “Who are you to be able to climb my height? '

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Des Thaus Trosttropfen

I stand high up and think that an elitist spirit is fluttering around me. All around me, I see all the tourists flocking through the hallowed halls of the Tomb of the Old Gods in their colorful “am on vacation” gagarobe. I feel there was a narcissistic moment with Nietzsche when he only wanted to grant individual freedom to himself and his ilk: “[E] s is a first-rate emergency that commands and demands here. The rest of us are the exception and the danger, — we need defense forever! — Well, there's really something that can be said in favor of the exception provided that it never wants to become the rule.”⁸

But I'm afraid that I too am not the child of the spirit that he would have liked to see in his esoteric circle. After seven days in the lofty heights of the past, we cyclists will get back on our bikes, continue exploring the bare plain and won't long for mountains. At the very first crack of dawn, we head towards the Thai border, and soon it is time for a new crossing. Lo and behold, this morning, as we set off from Sieam Reap, there is a soft fog over the fields, as if Cambodia wanted to comfort us that there are only tombs of gods in this country too. And I feel as if I hear a voice whispering softly:

A drop of Thau's? A haze and scent of eternity? Don't you hear it? Don't you smell it? My world has just been perfect, midnight is also noon, —
Pain is also a pleasure, curse is also a blessing, night is also a sun — go away from it or learn: a wise man is also a fool.⁹

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Link to part 3 (Thailand)

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The pictures for this article are photographs by the author.

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footnotes

1: So Zarathustra spoke, The song of melancholy, 3.

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

3: So Zarathustra spoke, The Wanderer.

4: The happy science, Aph 338.

5: The happy science, Aph 125.

6: So Zarathustra spoke, The song of melancholy, 3.

7: On the genealogy of morality, 3rd abh., para. 25.

8: The happy science, Aph 76.

Traveling with Nietzsche through Southeast Asia II

Cambodia

Our author Natalie Schulte spent nine months cycling in Southeast Asia and reports on her travel experiences with and without Nietzsche in a short series of essays. This time it's about the vast plain of Cambodia and the temples of Angkor in the middle of the jungle.

(Link to part 1 on Vietnam)

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

(Subsequent fragments 1882)

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

(The happy science, Aph 106)

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I. From art to life

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

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

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

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II. Distracting comfort, sincere appearance

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

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

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

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III. Carmen versus Isolde

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

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

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

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

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

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IV. Music of Self-Affirmation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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sources

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

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

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

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

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

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footnotes

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

2: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

3: Cf. The happy science, Aph 283.

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

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

6: Birth of Tragedy, 5.

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

8: The happy science, Aph 89.

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

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

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

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

13: See. The happy science, Aph 370.

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

15: Beyond good and evil, Aph 254.

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

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

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

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

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

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

22: Cf. Bob Dylan's famous song.

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

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

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

26: So Zarathustra spoke, About overcoming yourself.

“Music, your advocate”

Nietzsche and the Liberating Power of Melody

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

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

I. Standing

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

II. Sitting

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

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

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

III. Walking

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

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

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

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

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

IV. Migration as emigration

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

V. Wandering as overcoming

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VI. Hiking as flies

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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sources

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

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

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

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Source of the item image.

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footnotes

1: The happy science, Aph 366.

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

3: The happy science, Aph 301.

4: The happy science, Aph 329.

5: The happy science Aph 280.

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

7: The happy science, Preface, paragraph 3.

8: The happy science, Aph 380.

9: Ecce homo, preface, 3.

10: Ibid.

11: Morgenröthe, Aph 534.

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

13: Morgenröthe, Aph 534.

14: Ibid.

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

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

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

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

19: Ecce homo, preface, 4.

20: So said Zarathustra, The Recovered, 2.

21: So Zarathustra spoke before sunrise.

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

23: So Zarathustra spoke before sunrise.

On Dubious Paths ...

An Outline of Nietzsche's Concept of Wandering

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

arrival

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

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

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Rolling language family

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

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

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Flowing traffic

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

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Transport individualists and ghost drivers

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

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“This today, that tomorrow”

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

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Imagination from the first floor

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

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Bridges made of confection

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

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Link to part 2 (Cambodia)

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The pictures for this article are photographs by the author.

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footnotes

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

Traveling with Nietzsche through Southeast Asia I

Vietnam

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