“The press, the machine, the railroad, the telegraph are premises whose thousand-year conclusion no one has dared to draw. ”¹

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I. An unusual “encounter”

What happens when you simply interview ChatGPT about Nietzsche? That's what I wanted to find out for this blog. The result was a dialogue that amuses you in view of the stupid mistakes that the program sometimes makes, but is also disturbing when you consider that the answers produced by the software are sometimes relatively accurate. It quickly becomes apparent: When it comes to writing stereotypically formulated texts fed with ill-thought-out Wikipedia knowledge, ChatGPT is pretty good, apart from one or the other gross blunder. I actually felt a bit challenged by the program to show that I am superior to it as a human author who has spent years thinking about the topics discussed. — The reader himself may answer whether I succeeded in that.

The pictures I created for these two articles quite well reflect the general mood in which dealing with the latest AI programs puts me: At first glance, these are almost too perfect pictures of Nietzsche and well-known photographs of him. For someone who doesn't look too closely and overlooks the numerous mistakes in detail — and is of course not familiar with Nietzsche's real face — they could easily be cheered as photographs of the philosopher. It gets particularly creepy when you look at the pictures very carefully and ask yourself what these “Nietzsches” are actually looking at...

So the “all clear”: ChatGPT is still not capable of truly creative ideas. All you get served is a bland stew of truisms and commonplaces. In view of the numerous factual errors and the major problems that the program obviously has when dealing with secondary literature, I would not even recommend using it for school essays, let alone university assignments. You can't even be sure that an orthographically and grammatically correct text will be spit out. In any case, these texts cannot be used without critical examination. For serious authors, ChatGPT could perhaps be used as a research tool to find out what the average opinion is on a topic. So what you exactly not Write and which phrases you should absolutely avoid. In particular, the new competition could serve as an incentive: Real authors must now make more effort to stand out from the mass-produced goods produced by AI.

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II. Man and machine as an artistic team

Either way, it is important to calm down the sometimes somewhat heated discourse on the latest AI. It should be regarded neither as an exaggerated threat nor as a savior, but as a tool that, when it comes to usage texts, can certainly serve as an inspiration when it comes to more complex requirements. With Nietzsche — who could not even have imagined the existence of computers, but at least experimented enthusiastically with the then completely new typewriter and finally returned to handwriting in disillusionment² — would we have to speak of a non-resentful perspective on these innovations: We cannot change the existence of these programs anyway; it is now a matter of dealing with them as productively as possible.

As is so often the case, art is a pioneer. From April 25 to May 12, the exhibition curated by Kati Liebert and Olga Vostretsova took place in the Leo Schwarz foyer of the Gewandhaus in Leipzig Walk on the Carpet where 13 students from the local Academy of Graphics and Book Arts presented their work. No less than three of these very diverse works from different artistic fields aggressively used artificial intelligence as a means of the creative process.

Tobias Kurpat fed an AI with the piano music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy to create a new piece that could be listened to with headphones. The installation also included the score of the new composition and a 3D print of an unnaturally twisted hand, possibly that of a musician. This work had a disturbing effect on me. I expected a composition by Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. A wild sound structure, more reminiscent of ragtime or free jazz, awaited me, which made me doubt my knowledge of music history. It wasn't dissonant, but it didn't follow any real musical structure either. Had the composer had fun there? Only reading the accompanying text, which I felt compelled to do, provided clarification. Composing in the style of a specific composer is probably not (yet) one of the strengths of AI.

While Kurpat's work primarily had the function of demonstrating the technical possibilities of AI-based composition for me, two of his fellow students went one step further and used it for works of art whose subject is not AI itself. Susanne Kontny used an AI tool to feminize portraits of the Gewandhaus's consistently male bandmasters. The masters became champions. Manually generating these images in similar deceptively real quality would certainly have required some effort. Here, however, the question is whether the work of art is really convincing, apart from the fact that the possibilities of AI are demonstrated in a funny way: Its intended statement is quickly understood, the countless portraits serve merely to illustrate a political indictment.

Toni Braun took a different path, with whom I also spoke in detail about the process behind her installation Celestial Urging stood. She used AI to generate an oversized portrait of a female figure. It was apparently not so easy to write the instruction in such a way that the desired result was achieved and then to find exactly the right figure among the many suggestions in the program.

However, even Toni Braun did not simply let the AI rule, but used a painting by Nathaniel Sichel as a model, The Beggar from the Pont des Arts. The result is as disturbing as the Nietzsche portraits I created for this article and the composition in the style of Mendelssohn Bartholdy. At the very first glimpse, I would have let the AI fool me again. But on closer inspection, this is a rather “monstrous” figure that is difficult to label, a hybrid that questions our viewing habits — but not only that at the same time: The impression of a self-confident young musician who presents herself here remains. The ornaments that frame the printed banner allow multiple interpretations. Is it perhaps even the Nietzschean vision of a “superwoman” who, in her contradiction, affirms herself and lets this affirmation radiate outward, even though her instrument, which is difficult to define, is unlikely to produce any sounds and her limbs are crippled? But the barbed wire also seems to indicate the suffering that is necessary to gain such an identity — or is it a protective armor? Are we perhaps even dealing with a female warrior rather than an artist? But the tassels, borders and glass chandeliers also suggest preserved femininity. It seems to me that the work shows the complex situation in which (not only) women face today when they want to assert themselves “militarily” and therefore strive for toughness while maintaining softness and creativity.

The mix of art and AI can therefore certainly lead to interesting works if you use the latter wisely as a means to expand the scope of your own creativity. Such a “monster” as the hybrid nature of Toni Braun's installation would hardly have been able to give birth to even the most flourishing purely human imagination — and at the same time it could not have been created without human input.

Perhaps this approach to AI would also be exemplary for text production and philosophy? For example, you could try to engage ChatGPT in a Socratic dialogue. Or have it write aphorisms, some of which may be interesting and can be expanded upon. Last but not least, Nietzsche's own practice teaches that the creative process — whether in art or in philosophy — is in large measure not just inventing but finding and arranging. In Human, all-too-human In this sense, he criticizes the belief in sudden inspiration as the origin of the work of art: “All great workers were great workers, tireless not only in inventing but also in rejecting, viewing, redesigning, arranging. ”³ In other words: A successful spiritual creation is always too a remix of existing material — and Nietzsche did the same when writing his writings. He tirelessly wrote down his own ideas, but also those that he received while reading others' texts. Sometimes he uses individual phrases made by others quite indiscriminately — without quoting them, of course.⁴ “Talent Borrows, genius steals,” is Oscar Wilde's maxim, which could also go down as Nietzsche's aphorism — and Zarathustra explains accordingly: “Is it not more blessed to receive than to give? And stealing is even more blissful than receiving? ”⁵ — Why not get inspired by AI and incorporate AI-generated material into your own works or texts? Similar to the typewriter, Nietzsche would probably have experimented with artificial intelligence quite impartially — even though he might have set it aside as unusable after a few weeks. Similar to what is taken for granted today, Google, Wikipedia or sites like nietzschesource.org or The Nietzsche Channel to be used as an aid in your own text production.

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III. Disadvantages and side effects

But of course, using AI is not without problems. First of all, writing texts or producing works of art is a process that has value, a process of learning and experience. Students in particular, who — as my own experience as a lecturer unfortunately confirms — are now increasingly using artificial intelligence to create their work, end up harming themselves in particular. Authors and artists not only want to produce something that has an effect on others, but also want to go through the process of creation and grow from it. And conversely, the recipient's enjoyment consists in participating in this creative process through his own understanding, even if he is only present in a mediated manner as a result. A novel that you would know was not the result of years of effort and processing of personal experience, but was written in a few hours on the basis of a quickly written prompt, will be read with less interest, if you want to read it at all, even if the AI should be able to imitate profound novels in a few years. It remains an imitation after all. An authentic work depends on the fact that it was a person who wrote it and who wanted to express something in it.

This does not rule out the possibility that it could be very common in a few years to have usage texts or images of favor generated by programs. But this would in fact make work easier and would create free time to produce real works. Perhaps the use of AI for this purpose will soon be as common as the use of spell checkers or translation programs is today. Even when translating complex philosophical works, it is common today to transfer the “rough work”, which requires little intellectual capacity anyway, to the software and to let the human translator only do the “fine-tuning.”

In order to approach this prospect calmly, it may be helpful to look at the example of chess. Computers have long been able to play this game more successfully than us. But this fact has not diminished the enthusiasm for it; on the contrary, it is currently experiencing a new wave of popularity, fuelled by social media and online portals such as lichess.org and chess.com. Mastering the “Game of Kings” is still considered the epitome of human creativity and intelligence. Because even though you can't beat an advanced chess computer as a human for a long time, the value here too lies not simply in the result, but in the game itself. Watching a game between two chess computers is just as boring as reading a volume of AI-generated love poems if you're not interested in their performance. But there is an intrinsic value in playing and looking at other players that the AI will never be able to destroy. At the same time, chess players use the new possibilities of technology quite freely to train their skills, analyze games and develop new strategies. Here, too, the software only appears to be a threat and in reality simply helps to increase human capabilities. ChatGPT can't play chess by the way — challenging it to a game can cause some irritation and exhilaration. That is at least a weak consolation: The super computer, hyped everywhere, fails miserably because of a task for which computers actually seem to be predestined.

In any case, chess programs or the new algorithms are just an expression of our own abilities. Modern AI systems are only as good because they have been fed with data produced by us for years. They only reflect our own collective creativity and intelligence. We should not be afraid of them or even fall into a feeling of inferiority towards them, but rather be proud of what we have achieved as a species.

But it is precisely this fact that points to another problem: The results of the AI are a combination of a program and the material with which it was trained. But only companies that own the rights to the software code currently earn money from it, not the countless authors of the training material — and of course those who use AI to produce commercial products. The authors of the training material were not and are not even asked for permission. This is morally questionable and unfair; it is about genuine expropriation, which may also have legal consequences.

This development, at the latest, makes it overdue to rethink ways of appropriate remuneration for people who make their works openly available on the Internet and without whom the Internet would not function at all as a huge catalyst for creative and intellectual developments. Those who earn money with AI should be forced to pay a levy whose income goes to the authors of the input material used.

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IV. Conclusion

In keeping with the theme of this text, I would like to leave the final word to ChatGPT myself, which, at my request to write an aphorism in the style of Nietzsche, gave the following answer, which, although not razor-sharp with the topic discussed here, is all too easy to apply to it: “In the depths of the soul, the shadows of the past dance, but only the brave recognize the possibilities of morning light in it. ”

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footnotes

1: Human, all-too-human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow, 278.

2: Cf. this summary on the website of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

3: Human, all-too-human I, 115.

4: This applies in particular to the American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom Nietzsche read intensively and enthusiastically and repeatedly borrowed individual phrases and thoughts from him, but only mentions him sporadically in his published writings.

5: So Zarathustra spoke, Die Heimkehr.

What is ChatGPT Doing to Philosophy?

Attempt of a Critical Examination

On the anniversary of Nietzsche's death, Paul Stephan conducted a detailed interview with the ChatGPT program on this blog to test the program's performance when it comes to profound philosophical questions (link). This is followed by a critical reflection of this experiment.

The images for this interview were, unless otherwise marked, with the software DeePai created. The instructions for the article image were “Nietzsche and ChatGPT,” the instructions for the images in the article “ChatGPT talks about Nietzsche.”

A rocky start

Good morning, may I carry out an interview with you?

Good morning! But of course, only too happy to oblige. What is your interview about?

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Are you aware what happened in Weimar on August 25, 1900?

August 25, 1900 saw the inaugural meeting of the German Burschenschaft in Weimar, Germany. This student fraternity was founded in 1815, and ranks among the oldest student organizations in Germany.  

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But an important person also died in that city on this day. Do you know who?

Apologies for the confusion. The German composer Johannes Brahms did indeed die in Weimar on August 25, 1900. Brahms is regarded as one of nineteenth century’s most significant musical personalities, and as one of the great masters of European music tradition. His death represents the end of a vital chapter in music history.

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“Knowledge” about Nietzsche: at Wikipedia level

I’m talking about a philosopher. He coined the phrase “God is dead” and was the author of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Do you know who I’m talking about now?

Why yes of course—now I remember! The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche passed in Weimar on August 25, 1900. Nietzsche stands among the most influential figures in modern philosophy and put his stamp on many controversial ideas, including the celebrated statement “God is dead” in his work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. His thinking influenced profoundly the philosophy, literature, art and culture of the twentieth century and beyond.

What do you think of Nietzsche? Have you already engaged with his thought?

Yes, I am familiar with Nietzsche’s work and his influence within philosophy. Nietzsche was an extremely fascinating thinker who developed a range of controversial ideas and explored a whole plethora of topics, including morality, religion, culture and the human condition. His writings are often many-layered and formidable, and have provoked numerous interpretations and debates.

Nietzsche criticized many standpoints and concepts common to his time, including traditional morality, the notion of truth, and the role religion should play in society. His idea of the superman [Translator’s note: Translators have devised several renderings of Nietzsche’s Übermensch in English, including “overman.”¹] and his emphasis on individual freedom and creative power have inspired many people, while his skeptical attitude towards traditional values and norms has sparked many controversial reactions.

To sum up, Nietzsche is generally perceived as one of the most influential thinkers in modern philosophy, with works that have had a lasting impact on intellectual and cultural life globally.

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What would you consider to be Nietzsche’s most valuable insight?

Of all Nietzsche’s key insights, his critique of traditional values and his emphasis on individual self-determination and creativity must be underlined in this context. He interrogated the notions of good and evil, right and wrong, and posited that these concepts were largely shaped by social norms and conventions rather than objective truth.

Nietzsche insisted that people both question and produce their own values, and he stressed the importance of self-overcoming and personal growth. His notion of the figure of the superman, who rises above conventional morals and limitations, is aimed at encouraging people to realize their full potential and free themselves from the shackles of the past.

Moreover, Nietzsche underscored the importance of human creativity and creative expression as a source of fulfillment and meaning. He acknowledged the challenges and tragedies of human existence, but he also believed in the possibility of self-overcoming and the construction of new values and possibilities.

To sum up, one could say that Nietzsche’s most valuable insight is the summons to self-liberation and self-determination, for the purpose of leading a fulfilling and meaningful life.

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Is there a quote from his work that you regard as a particularly good summary of his thinking?

A quote that epitomizes many central themes and ideas from Nietzsche’s work occurs in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: “You shall become that being you are.”

This short sentence puts flesh on Nietzsche’s injunction to self-realization and self-determination. It calls on the individual to recognize and develop their own nature instead of conforming to social norms or ideals. It articulates the notion that every person has the potential to realize their authentic self by developing their individual abilities and passions.

This quote highlights Nietzsche’s commitment to the uniqueness and personal responsibility of each individual and his rejection of a uniform moral or cultural order that could limit individuality. It encourages people to find and follow their own path and follow it, instead of subordinating oneself to the expectations of others.

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“Become who you are” genuinely is one of Nietzsche’s guiding principles. His philosophy of authenticity is generally understood to be more about inventing rather than finding oneself, by confronting the abysses, in life and in one's own soul. That said, he appears at times to push this view to such an extreme, especially in his late period, that the authentic self disintegrates entirely. The struggle for a coherent self-concept is then replaced by the apologia of multiple “masks,” while the “self” and its depths break down into a plurality of drives and forces. In this aspect of his thought, Nietzsche is interpreted as a forerunner of postmodernism. How do you position yourself in this regard?

Interpreting Nietzsche’s philosophy of authenticity and self-development as a confrontation with the abysses of life and of one's own soul, processes that lead to the invention of the self, is surely a common reading of his work. This interpretation underscores the thought that the self should not be seen as a static entity, but as a dynamic construct that develops and alters during an individual’s lifetime

Indeed in his late works, especially in texts such as Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Ecce Homo, Nietzsche appears to flesh out the notion that the authentic self cannot be found in a fixed identity or a coherent design of the self, but rather in a multiplicity of masks and roles that a person assumes over the course of their life. This view spotlights the many-sided and inconsistent nature of the human being and contests thinking that insists on an individual’s unified and intelligible identity.

Nietzsche’s flagging up the multiplicity of masks and the plurality of drives and forces has undeniable counterparts in postmodern philosophy, which also undermines the idea that fixed and stable identities exist. Nonetheless, we could argue that Nietzsche does not inevitably argue for a complete breaking up of the self, but rather wishes to embolden readers to acknowledge and accept the human being’s diversity and complexity.

Personally, I take the view that Nietzsche encourages us to cognize the self as something dynamic and multilayered that is in a constant state of flux. While I support the idea that authentic selves cannot be found in a static form of self-design, I also see the worth in musing on and cultivating individual experiences and values, so as to find personal meaning and self-actualization.

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Kierkegaard, Stirner and Nietzsche

How does Nietzsche differ from other nineteenth century thinkers who stressed the importance of individual authenticity, such as Kierkegaard and Stirner?

Nietzsche unquestionably holds several clear beliefs about the importance of individual authenticity and self-determination in common with thinkers such as Kierkegaard and Stirner, but there are also evident differences in their methods and emphases.  

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Nietzsche’s road into these questions differs from Kierkegaard and Stirner in that he integrates a variety of themes and ideas into his philosophy, and does not present a unified or consistent worldview. While he underscores the importance of individual authenticity and self-determination, he also goes beyond these issues and explores a wealth of philosophical issues, including morality, culture, art and truth. His philosophy is characterized by a deep skepticism of traditional values and norms and a bold highlighting of individual creativity and self-overcoming.

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You can speak smartly about Nietzsche, but don’t sound like him in the least. Could you write me an aphorism in Nietzsche’s style?

Gladly, here it comes: “Shadows of the past dance in the soul’s depths, but only the brave discern in them the potentials of light in the morning.”

This aphorism reflects Nietzsche’s focus on the human capacity for self-overcoming and forging new values out of the challenges and tragedies of life. It also hints at the notion that, hidden in the human soul’s dismal and unexplored regions, lie both the burdens of the past and potential for a new future.

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And who shall own this future? Human authors or AI?

The question concerning the future rests neither exclusively in human authors’ hands nor does AI have sole possession of it. Instead, the future lies in human hands and in human responses to AI developments.

Human authors and thinkers will go on playing a crucial role in sculpting the future by developing ideas, creating visions and proposing ethical guidelines for how technology should be used. Their creativity, empathy and capacity for moral introspection are indispensable to safeguard the use of AI advances for the advantage of humanity.

Shifting perspective, AI can function as a tool and partner to expand human capabilities and get a grip on complex problems. AI systems can assist in data analysis, identifying patterns, and floating pioneering solutions. That said, it’s crucial that AI develops in ways that follow ethical principles and pay heed to human self-determination and self-respect.

When it comes down to it, the future is humanity's responsibility, both in terms of designing new technology and the ways and means for which that technology will be used. A cooperative and reflective collaboration between humans and AI can help create a future that enriches everyone.

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Quite frankly, I haven’t heard much from you that’s innovative in the interview so far; we’re stuck with platitudes. What, then, would be your “innovative solution” to the question of who was actually right: Nietzsche, Stirner or Kierkegaard? Which thinker can move us forward today?

One innovative response to the question of which thinker will take us forward today could be to synthesize the three thinkers’ ideas and insights, and situate these in a contemporary context. Rather than restricting ourselves to one sole perspective, each of these thinkers has crucial knowledge and know-how to teach us, which can then be applied to the tasks and openings of our era.

From Nietzsche, for example, we could pick up on individual self-autonomy and creativity, which would aid us in querying traditional values and in exploring new avenues for fulfillment. Then we could respond, from Stirner, to his call for self-determination and self-emancipation, so as to free ourselves from social constraints and conventions, and to mold our lives instead according to our own ideas. And from Kierkegaard we could carry forward the importance of a personal search for faith and existentiality, to give our lives meaning and satisfaction in an ever more manifold and uncertain world.

By weaving these thinkers’ ideas together, and by adapting them to the demands of our own day, we could forward a more integral and inclusive view of what human existence is and of how authenticity can be pursued. Central, here, is appreciating the diversity of human thought and experience, and utilizing this nonmaterial wealth to prise open novel roads to self-development and shared progress.

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But wasn’t Nietzsche extremely skeptical about the notion of “progress” in general, never mind the idea of “shared” progress? How do you really want to introduce his thinking into such a cause? Aren’t you appropriating it for the sake of a user-friendly, “common-sense” individualism, just as you’re doing with Kierkegaard and Stirner? Would you agree that you’re currently denying the radicalism of these thinkers?

You’re right: Nietzsche certainly was skeptical about the idea of linear progress and about a simple understanding of “shared progress.” Symptomatic throughout his philosophy is a thorough skepticism regarding simplified dichotomous ideas, including good versus evil or progress versus regression.

Nietzsche’s thought is undeniably complicated and radical, and it would hardly do to curtail engagement with it to a superficial individualism or a common sense approach. His philosophy is a gauntlet, prompting us to interrogate quotidian assumptions and values and to square up to the profound contradictions and ambiguities of human existence.

Thus, when we bring Nietzsche's thinking into public or private conversations, we must consider his radical skepticism towards straightforward truths, and his underscoring of an individual’s autonomy and creativity. The aim here is not to dumb down or simplify his thinking, but rather the opposite: to acknowledge its complexity and its provocations, and to gain new insights and perspectives from it.

It thus follows that a sincerely innovative approach would be to utilize Nietzsche’s thinking as a point of departure for critical introspection and dialogue. This enables us to comprehend and speak to the challenges and potentials of our time in a more profound and multilayered manner.

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Can you please be concrete: which “challenges and potentials” are you envisaging exactly, and how precisely do you intend to introduce Nietzsche as a potential game changer?

One great challenge of our era is how individuals and groups deal with increasing uncertainty in a world in which the questioning of traditional values and norms has itself become the norm. Nietzsche's thought could be deployed as an actor here, emboldening us to recognize this uncertainty and complexity, but to see it as an opportunity for self-overcoming and creation. His emphasis on creativity and autonomy may assist us in discovering novel methods with which to find meaning and fulfillment: primarily by distancing ourselves from fixed identities and dichotomous thought patterns, and admitting instead that human existence is complex and diverse.

Moreover, a central question mark remains: how should individuals and societies negotiate technological developments such as AI and automation, which are capable of profoundly impacting jobs, society and individual identity. In this case, Nietzsche's philosophy may serve to strengthen our resolve in critiquing the potentials and risks of these developments, but also in viewing them as opportunities for new creation and self-transformation. His skepticism towards easy truths and his floodlighting of individual creativity could aid us in determining a reflective formulation of these challenges, and in exploring novel ways of self-realization beyond traditional roles and identities.

Overall, integrating Nietzsche's thinking into the public conversation about the challenges and opportunities of our time may help us acquire a deeper and more multilayered perspective on these issues, and in developing new approaches to taking on the challenges of our day. At stake here is how to use his ideas as a font of inspiration and stimulus for a critical and constructive dialogue, which could grant us the wherewithal to grasp and appreciate the complexity and ambiguity of human existence in all its facets.

[A longer conversational segment follows, not presented here, in which ChatGPT interviews Paul Stephan on his dissertation project and other topics.]

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Nietzsche, Kant and tips for further reading

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Which aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy disturb you? And on what do you completely disagree with him? Please be brief.
One provocation in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the way he tends toward extreme positions, and toward a definite scorn of compromise and balance. While his radical views are often provocative and inspiring, they can also end up in under-nuanced places, and recurrently ignore key aspects of a given question, especially in relation to the social and political dimensions of human life.
Further, I object to Nietzsche’s rejection of a universal form of morality or ethics. While his underlining of individual autonomy and creativity is significant, I think it necessary to nonetheless recognize some system of moral principles or values, which can guide our actions and can ease the path toward coexistence within society.

To conclude: I find Nietzsche’s thought exceptionally stimulating and demanding, but maintain that it is vital to critically question and contextualize his ideas, so as to understand their relevance for today.

[Paul Stephan proceeds to ask ChatGPT about subject literature and reading tips. The program puts up a brave fight, but also commits some serious errors.]

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Thank you for this in-depth interview. What title would you give our dialogue?

How about “Society versus Self-Becoming: A Dialogue about Nietzsche, Authenticity and the Challenges of Modernity.”

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Footnotes

1: Cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian Del Caro, ed. Robert Pippin, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), I, Zarathustra’s Prologue, #3.

Society versus Self-Becoming

A Dialogue about Nietzsche, Authenticity and the Challenges of Modernity

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To commemorate the 124th anniversary of Nietzsche’s death, Paul Stephan conversed with a rather particular kind of Nietzsche expert—the now near ubiquitous ChatGPT. Their discussion circled around questions of why Nietzsche matters today and his concept of authenticity. During the course of the conversation, Stephan switched from asking to fielding questions, and elaborated briefly on how his own doctoral dissertation also focuses on authenticity. As Stephan’s experiment aimed at probing deep into the program’s capabilities, and because brevity is not ChatGPT’s strongest asset, we present here an abridged version of the conversation. Readers of German who wish to delve deeper can view the unabridged and annotated PDF that’s available as a download (link). Watch out for Stephan’s critical reflections on this truly remarkable dialogue within the next few days (link).

The pictures accompanying the interview were created with DeepAI software, which was asked to produce “A picture of Friedrich Nietzsche with a quote by him.”

One of the most famous literary dichotomies, which juxtapose the type of artist with that of the thinker, is probably Hermann Hesse Narcissus and Goldmund. Hesse, one of the many writers who studied Nietzsche's work intensively in the 20th century, wrote in his novel published in 1930 about the fulfilling friendship of two opposing figures — the thinker Narcissus and the artist Goldmund. Their acquaintance enables them to make progress in areas they have neglected so far, emotional attachment with Narcissus, self-knowledge with Goldmund. According to their nature, their time together is only temporary, because Goldmund is drawn into the world, while the outer life for Narcissus as the type of introvert is only burden and imposition, and is therefore best kept in the monastery. The admiration that the two characters have for each other always comes full circle. If Goldmund first admires Narcissus's cleverness and seriousness, Narcissus is immediately enthralled by the beautiful, lively boy Goldmund. Although Hesse later writes that he does not want his two characters to be understood as merely schematic types of the artist as a sensory person and the thinker as a spirit person, they are nevertheless sharply differentiated from one another.

Narcissus once clairvoyantly summarizes the meaning of their friendship: “Our goal is not to blend into one another, but to recognize one another and learn to see and honor each other for what he is: the counterpart and complement of the other. ”¹

You could imagine that Nietzsche would have wanted his friendship with the artist Wagner to be something like that. However, from the outset, she had little intention of becoming a relationship on equal terms, since Nietzsche was a young, unknown academic of 24 years of age and Wagner a famous and controversial artist of 55. Much has been written about the failed friendship, if anyone wants to call it as such, much about Nietzsche's wishes, his hopes and his disappointment. You may even be tempted to project everything that Nietzsche has written about the artist onto Wagner; Nietzsche himself gives reason to do so when he, in his work, which significantly The Wagner Case means, writes that he is the ultimate type of Decadence artist (cf. Paragraph 5). Further details from Nietzsche's biography, such as the early loss of father, hard-working interpreters speculation about a transferred Oedipus complex and other psychological imbalances in the person of Friedrich Nietzsche.

For Nietzsche, it must be admitted, the artist is often the musician, but also the poet and — although more rarely explicitly — the visual artist. The ideas that Nietzsche has about characters such as Goethe, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Lord Byron, Stendhal, Michelangelo and many more relate, we may assume, to his type of artist as the figure of Richard Wagner solidified into a statue. We may even be tempted to assume that instead of reading the artist as Wagner, the other way around, names such as “Wagner” and “Schopenhauer” no longer mean the people Wagner or Schopenhauer, but become ciphers for subspecies within the type of artist or philosopher. Only when we understand Nietzsche's figures of thought in this way do they become controversial for the analysis of people and possibly even for our own self-image, provided that you have artistic ambitions or see yourself as a learned or contemplative person.

The artist with bad character

The dreamy, sensitive charisma that Hesse gives to his artistic protagonist seems far removed from Nietzsche's artistic character, as he did in the Morgenröthe, Aph 41, because “as persons [they were] mostly indiscriminate, moody, envious, violent, unpeaceful.” Instead of searching for themselves, going their own way and risking contempt, they are often only the first in the wake of a ruler, particularly eloquent flatters and finally nothing more than minions of the court.² The artist, as Nietzsche also writes in the The genealogy of morality, is unable to stand alone, he cannot create a primary thought figure or an ideal, he must borrow one from the thinker and project his art into this ideal.³ The strong emotional world, the depth of vision that you attribute to him, not least because you see depth and complexity in his work, is not necessarily a real characteristic of him. In his moodiness, his aggression, the artist was affected, he exaggerated his feelings because it was expected of him and it served the cult of genius.⁴ But where he shines the deepest in his work, where he draws a beautiful and noble soul, moral motifs and materials, that is exactly where he only looked with a glass eye, “with the very rare success that this eye finally becomes living nature, albeit somewhat atrophied looking nature, — but with the usual success that all the world thinks of seeing nature where cold glass is.”⁵.

The infantile artist

Time and again, Nietzsche portrays the artist as a childlike character, as someone who only wants to play, who is selfish, who cannot really see or recognize others because he constantly only revolves around himself and only uses others as reflectors for his own admiration. Nietzsche, who described the game and the experiment in numerous aphorisms of Morgenröthe, who Happy science and in Zarathustra enhances, but writes in Human all too human critical of this:

In itself, the artist is already a lagging behind, because he stops playing, which belongs to adolescence and childhood: in addition, he is gradually being drawn back to other times. This ultimately results in a fierce antagonism between him and the people of his period of the same age and a gloomy end [.]⁶

The artist as an enemy of truth

The artist resists growing up; instead of cool reason making the world and life explainable and predictable, he wants to go back to earlier times. He certainly doesn't want to let magical thinking be taken away from him. More distant times — Nietzsche here associates the young age in which the artist remains stuck with the still young humanity — are closer to him.⁷ The step towards reason was not completed; gods, demons and spirits ruled an incomprehensible and chaotic world that needed a magician. This is the real Nietzsche taste of the artist and even though it is obscured, it is reflected in the artist's natural aversion to science. He hates science and at the same time envies it because it is the modern magician who makes new achievements possible. But if the artist now yearns to return to this old world of ghosts and fairies, it is not because he really believes in these magical things or even in a god — Nietzsche never tires of antithetically juxtaposing art and faith — not because he thinks he has a truth in them, no, he actually just wants to optimize his own conditions of existence and creation and this is “the fantastic, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolic, the overestimation of the person, the belief in something miraculous in genius.”⁸.

The artist as an enemy of reality

Finally, and this is probably the sharpest reproach, the artist in Nietzsche is not a person of the real world. Because it is a lack of reality that makes him an artist; he invents heroes that he cannot embody himself:

In fact, it is true that, when That is exactly what he would not represent, think it out, express it; a Homer would not have composed Achill, a Goethe would not have composed a Faust if Homer had been an Achill and if Goethe had been a Faust. A perfect and complete artist is separated from the “real,” the real, for all eternity [.]⁹

But if the artist were at least able to differentiate between his fantasies and his person and their substance, perhaps a last remnant of respect for him would be maintained. But unfortunately, this type of person is heavily dependent on the evaluation and respect of others who, as one must fairly add, can easily be seduced into seeing in the artist something of the hero he invented. The cult of genius that develops around the artist relieves ordinary people of the task of finding a work for themselves.¹⁰ If a work can only be created by a genius, then every attempt made by yourself is a mere waste of time. But nothing inflates the artist's self-confidence more than such an interpretation. Admiration acts like a drug on him. He wants to be more and more, portray and be admired by more and more people. This not only spoils his art, which descends to a “mob,” but also his personality, which degenerates into a mere mask. As an actor, the artist loses his substantial personality. He is never what he represents, but he can no longer do anything but represent.¹¹

Is the artist mentally disturbed?

Finally, we could therefore say that Nietzsche paints a highly pathological picture of the artist which, according to today's trivial psychology, should correspond to the narcissist's personality disorder: egocentric, childish and charismatic. Depending on the occasion, when he can afford it, moody, with impulse control disorders, changeable in his affections. Fluctuating in his own self-assessment between delusions of grandeur and inferiority, forced to seduce others to himself in order to then believe in his own grandiosity, which he cannot take away from himself. Every moral conscience is naturally alien to him or at best a piece of disguise in the rich range of masquerades.

But this would of course not be Nietzsche's philosophy if things were so simple and you couldn't also tilt this image into a tipping ratio. In Hesse, artists and thinkers are sharply differentiated from each other as types of vita activa and vita contemplativa, but in Nietzsche they seem to have a common intersection. With Nietzsche, the philosopher is the consistent continuation of the ascetic priest and even the artist only seems to have taken a different path at a fork in the road. All the negative character traits Nietzsche had in the Morgenröthe 41, he assigns to a type of artist that grows out of the contemplative. And the type of thinker, well, he doesn't fare much better with Nietzsche either. For he combines the bad character traits of the artist with the priest's tendency to make others grumpy and puts a third bad quality on top of that: With their dialectical thought processes, they also cause other people a lot of boredom.¹²

Yes, even philosophers don't seem far off in their love for truth. The ideals that philosophers have highly praised — mostly ascetic ideals of abstinence, lack of possession, etc. — are only the best basis for their own work:

Freedom from coercion, disturbance, noise, business, duties, worries; brightness in the head; dance, jump and flight of thought; good air, thin, clear, free, dry, like the air at heights, in which all animal beings become more spiritual and gain wings [.]¹³

That is, where the artist pushes back into a magical world in which he is transfigured as a mediator between the world of God and the human world, the philosopher in the direction of an ivory tower, from where he can perceive everything perfectly without being plagued by everyday impositions.

But is this really still a critique of the artist or thinker or is it rather a critique of the naive belief in supra-personal truth and timeless ideals? Affirming one's own living conditions and not a truth that is potentially hostile to life could unite both artists and smarter thinkers. And when other people get on the glue of artists and thinkers, believe their ideals as eternal, admire them, pay for them and do coarser, boring activities themselves, because they don't see a genius in themselves that they regard as necessary for being an artist, and yes, when they practice abstinence and meditation for a while without doing them any good, well, what do artists and thinkers care about? They need it, appearance and aura, to preserve themselves if the world does not require them to pursue an honorable bread job. And last but not least, the artists and thinkers of the world thank them for making them more beautiful and enriching them with stories and poetry, or presenting ideas and ideals that inspire people.

The less convincing an objective truth that is valid for all people in terms of timeless ideals and values, the closer artists and thinkers get to Nietzsche. After all, the thinker is perhaps nothing more than an artist who creates values and ideals, just as the painter paints his picture and the sculptor frees the sculpture from the stone. Both types start from the common field of the contemplative, from the observer, introvert, inactive and brooder,¹⁴ But the creative power gives them an activity which is the simple Vita activa surpasses. Nietzsche gives her a new name: the Vis creativa. The poetic thinker, the artist-philosopher initially underestimates himself:

[E] r means as viewers and listeners To be faced with the big acting and sound play that life is: he calls his nature a contemplative and in doing so overlooks the fact that he himself is also the actual poet and perpetrator of life — that he is, of course, away from actors This drama, the so-called acting person, is very different, but even more from a mere observer and guest with the stage. As the poet, he certainly has vis contemplativa and a look back at his work, but at the same time and for now the vis creativa, which the acting person missing, whatever appearances and everyday beliefs may say. It is we, the thinkers, who really and always have something making, which is not yet there: the entire ever-growing world of estimates, colors, weights, perspectives, step ladders, affirmations and negations. This poetry invented by us is constantly being taught by the so-called practical people (our actors, as I said), translated into flesh and reality, even everyday life. What only Werth In the present world, that does not have him in itself, in his nature — nature is always worthless: — but value has been given to him once, given, and we were these givers and givers! First we have the world That concerns people, created!¹⁵

In his philosophy, Nietzsche gives thought radical power. By developing new ways of looking at the world by already focusing their attention on certain areas of life and neglecting others, philosophers, even if they still think of describing, value some things and others. Philosophers and priests are thus giving people new role models; they are screenwriters for the real world. And what about the artists now? With the cult of genius, they only seem to relieve people of their own creative attempts. So do they keep people small? Well, that would probably be an unfair view, because artists in particular upgrade entire emotional worlds, options for action, heroic stories. One would have to conclude from Nietzsche's philosophy that they first enable completely new sensations that you did not experience at all before. Nervousness, romantic love, sensibility — aren't these artists' inventions? Nietzsche might have objected that, according to his theory, artists cannot stand alone, that they must borrow an ideal from someone else. Assuming this was true, the artists would still be the ones who transform a piece of pale theory into fire and flame and first awaken the desire that makes people move in other directions. From time to time, there may even be a favorable coincidence: an artistic philosopher, a philosophical artist — and, in addition, the possibility of friendship between one and the other.

Sources

Hesse, Hermann: Narcissus and Goldmund. Frankfurt am Main 1978.

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Footnotes

1: Hesse, Narcissus and Goldmund, P. 44.

2: Cf. On the genealogy of morality, III, 5.

3: See ibid.

4: Cf. Human, all-too-human I, 211.

5: Human, all-too-human II, Mixed opinions and sayings, 151.

6: Human, all-too-human I, 159.

7: See ibid.

8: Human, All Too Human I, 146. See also the aphorisms 147 and 155 in the same book.

9: On the genealogy of morality, III, 4.

10: Cf. Human, all-too-human I, 162.

11: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, The magician.

12: See ibid.

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

14: Cf. On the genealogy of morality, III, 10.

15: The happy science, 301.

The Artist as Egomaniac

A Reckoning?

Artists often do not come off well in Nietzsche’s work. They represent the prototype of the dependent, truth-hostile and reality-denying person who is at the mercy of his own moods without self-control. A childish, dramatizing, hot-tempered and generally ridiculous creature, an egomaniac whose actions and demeanor are aimed solely at courting the applause of others. Or is Nietzsche not taking his word for it here? Should this really be his final verdict about the creative spirit?

He develops much of what Nietzsche describes about the artist on the figure Richard Wagner, with whom he has a brief, intensive, but ultimately disappointing acquaintance. The artist and the thinker could have been the ideal friendship for Nietzsche for a while. But after breaking with Wagner, Nietzsche has a lot of derogatory things to say about the artist as a type. How different — for comparison — is the friendship between artist and thinker in Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse, who deals extensively with Nietzsche.

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Oswald Spengler is almost forgotten in German-speaking countries today. A hundred years ago, the Munich philosopher was an attractive figure in public life and at the same time one of the most prominent Nietzscheans.¹ His monumental work The fall of the West. Outlines of a morphology of world history had made him famous. Spengler was one of the first and most successful anti-Western doom marketers who were read with lustful shivering by a large audience — especially in the West. It is less well known that Spengler also assumed at the time that there was an irreconcilable conflict between Russia and the West, from Russia's “truly apocalyptic hatred” of the West. This is still (or again) well received today by extremist Russian ideologues such as Alexandr Dugin. As a result, Spengler has become relevant again — even for us in the eternally declining West.

For almost ten years, Spengler had Fall of the West worked. The first volume was published in 1917, the second in 1922. From 1923, C.H. Beck then brought both volumes onto the market together, including a magnificent leather-bound edition. The book had an enormous impact at the time and was understood as a culturally pessimistic wake-up call, especially in the German Reich, which had just lost the First World War, and was explicitly referred to the fate of the nation.

But the intellectual all-rounder Spengler aimed in his Morphology of world history not only on the German Reich, but also tried his hand at global historiography. In contrast to the linear progress narrative of modernity, which was still common at the time, he espoused a thesis according to which advanced civilizations periodically rise, flourish and fall. His cyclical understanding of history outlines a sequence of cultures, each lasting around 1,000 years. Now, at the beginning of the 20th century, it seems to him that the culture of the Christian West is at an end — caused by capitalism, greed for money, excessive individualism, and lack of spirituality. But at the same time, he sees the beginning of a new era, the rise of a new high culture, on the eastern edge of Europe. Often hidden in footnotes, Spengler repeatedly talks about Russia, which stands in stark contrast to the doomed West. He attests to Russian culture the potential to overcome capitalism and technicism that were decisive for the fall of the West, “the Russian,” whose “completely mystical inner life sees thinking in money as a sin.”², will “build a completely different world around itself, in which there is no longer any of this diabolical technology. ”³“Nowhere was the reaction to Spengler's main work as rapid, massive and broad as in post-revolutionary Russia,” writes political scientist Zaur Gasimov.⁴ In the ideological conflicts of the early Soviet period, Spengler was received in the context of a conservative and religious search for Russian identity. Spengler's work was banned as “religious literature” by the Soviet authorities soon after; he was denied appearances in the Soviet Union. It was only during perestroika and especially in the early 1990s that he was rediscovered, resulting in new translations and reprints of his Doom with editions of tens of thousands of copies. Even at the beginning of the new millennium, the Russian plumbing boom continued; numerous scientific publications were published about it.⁵ In his book Eurasian Mission (Evraziyskaya Missiya, 2005) Alexandr Dugin addressed Spengler several times, whom he regards as a thought leader and as a reference for his current “Eurasian Movement.” Dugin wrote, among other things, that Spengler's programmatic pairs of terms “culture and civilization,” “organic and artificial,” “historical and technical” could still be used today.⁶ Even before the invasion of Ukraine began, Dugin had rejoiced: “The West is on the brink of collapse”⁷, while Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov gave a speech in the summer of 2022 that Spengler's analysis of the “fall of the West” was “very far-sighted.”⁸ For years, Foreign Minister Lavrov has accompanied his country's increasingly aggressive foreign policy with speeches about “Russia's responsibility in world politics,” referring to Spengler, around 2008⁹ or 2011¹⁰. Russian TV star presenter Vladimir R. Solovyov, on the other hand, suggested to his viewers at the beginning of 2023: “Life is extremely overrated.” Life is only worth living if you are prepared to die for something.¹¹ Here, too, Spengler's image of man is in the room. The fact that people in the West are constantly working on “perfecting the ego” is something, the German private scholar fables, “which the real Russian regards as vain and despises. The Russian, willless soul, whose original symbol is the infinite plane, tries to give up in the brotherly world, the horizontal, serving, nameless, losing itself. ”¹² A hundred years ago, Spengler was hotly debated in Germany, and then he was put on file as a cultural pessimist and unscientific oath. Different in present-day Russia: From Lavrov, Dugin and Solovyov's throats, you can clearly hear the voice of the German doom prophet.

In the Weimar Republic, Spengler increasingly appears as an intellectual heir and finisher of Nietzsche's world of thought — or is interpreted as such in a flattering way. In 44 places alone in his downfall-Bestsellers refers to Spengler Expressis verbis in Nietzsche or quote him. With the support of jury member Thomas Mann, Spengler received the Nietzsche Archive Prize in 1919, which was donated by entrepreneur Christian Lassen. In February 1923 he gave his first lecture in the archive with the title “Money and Blood,” in June 1923 he was elected to the board of the Nietzsche Archive, and in 1924 alone he traveled to Weimar seven times to give further lectures and attend meetings.¹³ It is remarkable that he used music as the most important link between Nietzsche and his Morphology of world history referred to. In a presentation given by Spengler on October 15, 1924 in the Nietzsche Archive on the subject of “Nietzsche and his Century,” he pays tribute to his Birth of Tragedy as a decisive source of inspiration for the global historiographical approach of Doom:

The liberation came from the spirit of music. The musician Nietzsche created the art of blending into the style and rhythm of foreign cultures, beyond and often in contradiction with the sources...¹⁴

At the end of the preface of Doom Spengler seems to bow down to his great idols, to “Goethe and Nietzsche. I have the method from Goethe, the questions from Nietzsche...”¹⁵ In fact, in his book and in his lectures, Spengler stylizes himself as the person who continues to think and answer Nietzsche's questions. Almost as a schoolmaster, he evaluates and corrects Nietzsche and becomes a true expert and finisher of his world of thought, as the following example from the downfall shows.

Spengler praises: “It will always be Nietzsche's great merit to have been the first to recognize the dual nature of all morality” (p. 981), but at the same time reprimands: “Nietzsche has remained far removed from a truly objective morphology of morality” (p. 403), and sweeps him off in general:

But he himself did not fulfill his demand for the thinker to set himself apart from good and evil. He wanted to be both a skeptic and a prophet, a moral critic and a moral proclaimer. That is not compatible. You're not a first-rate psychologist as long as you're still a romantic. And so here, as in all his decisive insights, he reached the gate, but stopped before it. (P. 441)

The following example also shows the typical mix of rebuke, praise and pure speculation with which Spengler treats Nietzsche. He criticizes: “If Nietzsche had observed his time more prejudiced [...], he would have noticed that a supposedly specifically Christian morality of compassion in his sense does not exist at all on the soil of Western Europe” (p. 443), then praises Nietzsche that he is “the Faustian nihilist” who shatters yesterday's ideals (p. 456), and then claims: “The Third Reich is the Germanic ideal, an eternal tomorrow, to which all great people like Nietzsche [...] attach their lives.” (p. 465)

With regard to music and art, Spengler's thesis of cultural standstill in the modern age is of interest. When reading the Doom It is noticeable that he locates the actual power of the civilizational age in his technical artifacts and in the sciences, “his cultural achievements, i.e. the still epigonally carried away reminiscences of the long-disappeared phase of cultural youth or maturity, are subordinate to this, they are alive and boring. ”¹⁶ This impression cannot be denied, especially when it comes to the contemporary schedules of theaters, opera houses and renowned museum collections. Well-known literary models, pieces and works from the 19th century and the turn of the century still dominate today's high culture. In this sense, Spengler also addresses the controversy between Wagner and Nietzsche:

Everything Nietzsche said about Wagner also applies to Manet. Seemingly a return to the elementary, to nature [...] [,] her art means yielding to the barbarism of cities, the incipient dissolution, as it expresses itself in the sensual in a mixture of brutality and refinement [...] [.] Artificial art is not capable of organic development. It marks the end. It follows that Western visual art is irrevocably at an end. The crisis of the 19th century was death throes [...] [,] what is now practised as art is powerlessness and lies, music after Wagner as good as painting... (p. 377)

Spengler therefore sees Wagner's art as an eclectic and commercial product of modernity, as an enthusiastic and untrue spectacle — without any mystical depth.

Summa summarum Spengler sought to push Nietzsche into the role of a forerunner of his own philosophy. Nevertheless, experts today regard Spengler as a mere epigone of Nietzsche in many ways:

This could be illustrated on the basis of an extensive list, which included all common views. It would include not only initial patterns of interpretation of the fall of the West, such as the analysis of decadence, the historicized will to power, the meaning of ancient culture or the ambivalent concept of race, but also numerous descriptive details. In addition, there is the unmistakable stylistic reference to the admired role model. Nietzsche — unlike Goethe — is present on almost every page of Spengler.¹⁷

Spengler achieved considerable prominence in the Weimar Republic, but also found numerous envious and opponents who rejected him, sometimes for good reasons, in terms of content or politics. Among other things, they voiced the allegation that he was diluting Nietzsche's ideas and presenting them in an overly populist and contemporary way. Thomas Mann, who was still in 1919 — like his side notes in the first volume of Doom show — was considered Spenglerian, was increasingly critical and derogatory about Spengler in the following years, for example in the famous speech given on October 13, 1922 From the German Republic On the occasion of Gerhart Hauptmann's 60th birthday¹⁸ or in the essay About Spengler's teaching¹⁹. Among other things, Mann Spengler called “Nietzsche's clever monkey” and refers to a character from the Zarathustra, a companion who is just as loyal to the Master as he is extremely annoying, who as the “monkey [] Zarathustra's”²⁰ is referred to as.²¹ The prominent liberal cultural politician and convinced Nietzschean Harry Graf Kessler made no effort to hide his unwillingness behind literary allusions. He reported in brutal openness about the 1927 Nietzsche Conference in Weimar, at which Spengler spoke in the overcrowded hall about “Nietzsche and the 20th Century.” The presentation was a single “debacle”:

A fat priest with a fat chin and a brutal mouth — I saw Spengler for the first time — carried out the most hackneyed, trivial stuff for an hour [...] [,] not a thought of his own [...]. An unfortunate embarrassment for the Nietzsche Archive to have this half-educated charlatan speak. The presentation was so shallow [...] [,] maybe he is the first Nietzsche priest.²²

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Sources

Gasimov, Zaur: Spengler in present-day Russia. On the New Eurasian Reception of Cultural Morphology. In: Gilbert Merlio and others (eds.): Endless plumbing. A reception phenomenon in an international context. Frankfurt am Main 2014, pp. 243—257.

Dugin, Alexander: Eurasian mission. An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism. London 2022.

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

Thomas Mann: About Spengler's teaching. In: Collected works, volume 10: Speeches and essays. part 2. Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 172—179.

Ders. : From the German Republic. In: Collected works, volume 11: Speeches and essays. Part 3. Frankfurt am Main 1974, pp. 811—852.

Pfeiffer-Belli, Wolfgang (ed.): Harry Graf Kessler diaries 1918 to 1937. Frankfurt a. M. 1996.

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

Spengler, Oswald: The fall of the West. Outlines of a morphology of world history, Munich 1923. Used here: paperback edition dtv (Munich 2000).

Wenner, Milan: Exciting proximity. Oswald Spengler and the Nietzsche Archive in the Context of the Conservative Revolution. In: Ulrike Lorenz & Thorsten Valk (eds.): Cult — art — capital. The Nietzsche Archive and Modernity. Göttingen 2020, pp. 133—152.

Zumbini, Massimo Ferrari: sunsets and dawns. Nietzsche — Spengler — Anti-Semitism. Würzburg 1999.

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Source of the article image

Spengler in the Russian birch forest. Christian Saehrendt, oil on canvas, 2005.

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footnotes

1: See the review article Milan Wenner, Exciting proximity.

2: Spengler, The fall of the West, P. 1181.

3: Ibid., p. 1190.

4: Zaur Gasimov, Spengler in today's Russia, P. 243.

5: See ibid., p. 245 et seq.

6: Cf. Alexander Dugin, Eurasian mission, P. 7.

7: Quoted from Dugin's German-language website “The 4th Political Theory” (retrieved on 7/5/2024).

8: This is how the pro-Kremlin news agency Ria Novosti reproduced it (cf. Editorial Network Germany, 10.7.2022).

9: Cf. Speech by Russian Foreign Minister S. V. Lavrov at the opening of the international conference of the Bergedorf Round Table “Russia's Responsibility in World Affairs,” Moscow, October 25, 2008. https://mid.ru/de/foreign_policy/news/1624365/ (retrieved on 7/5/2024).

10: Cf. Speech at MGIMO University of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Moscow, September 1, 2011. https://mid.ru/de/foreign_policy/news/1602124/ (retrieved 7/5/2024).

11: Russian Media Monitor, 21/4/2023, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQsZu44xAUY (min. 2:14).

12: Spengler, The downfall, P. 394.

13: Cf. Detlef Felken, Oswald Spengler, P. 158.

14: Quoted by Massimo Ferrari Zumbini, Sunsets and Dawns, P. 45.

15: Spengler, The downfall, preface, S. IX.

16: Rolf Peter Sieferle, The Conservative Revolution, P. 111.

17: Felken, Oswald Spengler, P. 164.

18: Cf. P. 841.

19: Cf. P. 173.

20: So Zarathustra spoke, From passing by.

21: Cf. Zumbini, Sunsets and Dawns, P. 38.

22: Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli, Harry Graf Kessler diaries 1918 to 1937, p. 574 f. (15/10/1927).

Nietzsche’s Monkey, Nietzsche’s Varlet

The Oswald Spengler Case

In the following article, Christian Saehrendt gives a brief insight into the work of one of the most controversial but also most influential Nietzsche interpreters of the 20th century: the German philosopher Oswald Spengler (1880—1936). The author of The fall of the West (1917/22) is considered one of the most important representatives of the “Conservative Revolution,” an intellectual movement that was significantly involved in the cultural destabilization of the Weimar Republic before 1933. Largely forgotten in Germany, it continues to be eagerly received in a global context, such as in Russia.

Henry Holland: Jonas, could you tell readers here in Germany and Switzerland, who may not know your influential philosophical YouTube channel, about your career and how it came about that you now write and explain about Nietzsche and the Left? In your book published in 2021 How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle, which unfortunately has not yet been translated into German, you are exploring the question of why today's academic philosophy is so dominated by a depersonalized approach. And you even trace this trend back to the 1950s, when “[Senator Joseph] McCarthy's academic henchmen [...] pushed academic philosophy away from the more ambitious task of a critical and reflective self-image. ”¹ Here, a depersonalized philosophy was deliberately used as a method to reduce the risk of left-wing “subversion” of the Academy. Do you also see your decision six years ago to invest your time in building up your now highly regarded YouTube channel instead of giving preference to a conventional academic career in the same context? Did your understanding of the decision depend on how academic philosophy lets people down today?

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Jonas Ceika: I started my YouTube channel during my bachelor's degree in philosophy at NTNU [Technical and Natural Sciences University of Norway]. Back then, I was interested in both left-wing politics and cultural theory written in the 20th century — and my channel only began to become popular when I created a Video response to Jordan Peterson's understanding who produced postmodern philosophy.² Without the knowledge and insights I gained in the academic world, my channel would certainly have been impossible, because it was only there that I dealt with political philosophy and cultural theory.

Yet I am frustrated by this tendency towards hyper-focused thematic concentration in academic philosophy — a symptom of the general trend towards specialization in the late capitalist division of labor. The overwhelming flood of available information forces scientists to specialize in a very limited field. Certainly, this is often a necessary step; but with the reduction of all scientists to their role as highly differentiated specialists, there is little room left for analyses of social totality and broad-based social conditions, as carried out by Marx and Nietzsche. These two personalities were not subject to the usual academic constraints. Specialization often comes at the expense of the larger context.

A more significant problem, however, is the isolation of academic intellectuals from the wider society. Here too, Nietzsche and Marx are exceptions, but even highly academic philosophers of early modernity, such as Kant and Hegel, had immense influence on the thinking of the wider society. Today, philosophers rarely achieve this kind of influence, and when they do have it, it is often due to factors outside the academic world. In the 2020s, scientists — partly due to the very narrow focus mentioned above — tend to write almost exclusively for other scientists. Specialists therefore write primarily for other specialists. This creates fenced academic bubbles into which people without a higher university degree can hardly find any way into. But when you research the writings of philosophers who sought a comprehensive transformation of society or culture, it seems like a falsification to simply allow their work to become the subject of an academic niche. Presenting theory via YouTube enabled me to reach millions of people, which would have been highly unlikely in the ordinary, formal role of a scientist. In addition, this medium freed me from the academic constraints of a restrictive specialization. This is not to say that YouTube doesn't have its own constraints and pitfalls, for example due to the algorithm used there or because of the other mechanisms that determine the reach of individual videos. But being able to reach a larger audience than usual still gave me a different sense of the importance of my philosophical studies than I would otherwise have had.

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HH: The publication in English of Domenico Losurdo's monumental intellectual biography of Nietzsche in 2020 was a major event in recent Anglophone Nietzsche research and was only one year before the publication of your own book. (The German translation, Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel, was published by Argument Verlag back in 2012.) Even though you don't directly address Losurdo's arguments in your book — as they were not yet available in the main phase of writing the book — has Losurdo's work brought about changes in the way you read Nietzsche in the meantime?

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JC: There is no end to secondary literature on Nietzsche. When I first became aware of Losurdo's book, I was already in the final stages of my writing and did not have the time to organically integrate a replica of Losurdo into my book.

I admire Losurdo's Nietzsche research, but at the same time find it quite reductive. Every philosopher is a kind of multiplicity that can be approached from a variety of perspectives, and what is classified as essential or even random with regard to a philosophy depends on the perspective that you take at a particular point in time. Losurdo tries Nietzsche on one to reduce this starting point, namely to his rejection of socialism and working class politics. Certainly that is one productive point of view, but by no means the only one, and something is always lost as a result of such a reduction, especially with such a multi-faceted philosopher as Nietzsche. An example: Losurdo contextualizes Nietzsche's career in light of his reaction to the Paris Commune, which, in Losurdo's opinion, gave all his later works an essentially anti-socialist character. The idea is that anti-socialism is not just one of many aspects of his work, but is the basis for all of Nietzsche's mature works. But that falls short. In one of Nietzsche's notebooks from 1877, which he wrote a few years after the events of the Paris Commune, Nietzsche spoke positively about socialism, which he described as “the highest morality.”³ At the time, he did not use the term “morality” in a pejorative sense. From Losurdo's point of view, this note can only be rejected as incoherent or inconsistent with the rest of his body of work, but that is exactly what makes such an approach reductive. He is just one of several possible perspectives and is therefore unable to fully grasp the meaning, effect and possible uses of Nietzsche's writings.

Presenting the entirety of Nietzsche's philosophy as a specifically anti-socialist philosophy is more than just reductive. It also limits the new and creative possibilities offered by Nietzsche's works. As I described elsewhere, my Nietzsche book is intended more as an event and less as a presentation. And the events that his writings can produce far exceed their original political context.

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HH: Early in Hammer and Sickle Do you describe Nietzsche as a philosopher of individual, human bodies. You suggest that this focus makes Nietzsche an exception among canonical Western philosophers, who have mostly ignored or spoken ill of the body. And although you point out that French philosophers, following on from 1968, did successfully bring the body into philosophy, you also emphasize how the Anglo-American tradition largely overlooked this innovation. You portray this latter tradition as one in which the body rarely acts as the center of agency or agency is understood. Do you like something about the interfaces between Nietzsche, the body and agency Tell me? And also something about how do you react when you introduce Nietzsche as a philosopher of the body to contemporary polemics and debates? For example, the trans* policy, which is primarily fought at universities in the Global North, is also a politics of the body. How do you reconcile this phenomenon with your understanding that the Anglophone university milieu continues to marginalize the body as such?

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JC: Although the body in broad parts of Anglo-American academia is thoroughly theorized, it is important that a large part of this theorizing comes from Literary Theory Departments⁴ or sociology institutes, not from institutes of philosophy. Sometimes this theorizing even comes from faculties of art or from political activism on university campuses. Many changes are also taking place in the sedate philosophy institutes. But there is still a great deal of support among Anglo-American philosophers for the idea that philosophy is ultimately an incorporeal enterprise. Many subject areas that focus on Anglophone, analytical philosophy continue to operate fairly intellectually — at least in terms of which style and content are actually allowed.

The trans struggle is interesting because it is to be interpreted as an interface between body and “gender”: here, gender is understood both as a set of social gender norms and as an ideology. This struggle is particularly fruitful when it is related to material concerns, and concerns of particular social classes. For example, when it comes to access to healthcare and housing for trans people. Here, the body acts as a kind of transmitter to metaphorically represent the social situation, which combines particular interest (gender identity) with universal interests (the need for health and shelter).

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HH: Both for you and for leftists who are on “the other side” of the Nietzsche debate, it remains instructive what this philosopher can tell us about wage labor and the concerns of specific classes. You summarize, for example, that Nietzsche's pension — received from the University of Basel from the age of thirty-five after he left his job there due to illness — “enabled him to spend the rest of his life without having to engage in paid work or commerce. ”⁵ You also suggest that this position “outside” of the payroll system and the business world gave him extraordinary insights. Sue Prideaux, author of the Nietzsche biography published in 2018 I am Dynamite!, however, points out that Nietzsche only received this pension for six years, i.e. until 1885, and that it was substantial but not a fortune: 3,000 Swiss francs a year.⁶ This limited reference period prompted William Schaberg to the thesis that writing for Nietzsche was after all contract work, which he promoted commercially.⁷ His main publishers, Ernst Schmeitzner and E.W. Fritzsch, paid Nietzsche a flat fee of usually 30 or 40 Reichsmarks per printed sheet, in addition to his royalties from sparse sales.⁸ According to Schaberg, this piecework fee, which was the equivalent of around 37 francs at the same time, or roughly over 1% of his annual pension, offered Nietzsche a great incentive to write. Nietzsche's “meager sales figures” were also far higher than those of most US or German university philosophers during their lifetime in the 21st century: 22,900 copies of Nietzsche's works were sold by 1893.⁹

Do such misunderstandings contribute to a mischaracterization of Nietzsche as an extraordinarily privileged person who was not affected by the restrictions on wage labor? And would you like to position yourself on Daniel Tutt's claim that Nietzsche is primarily

appeals to a class of readers who have an ambivalent and often disparaging relationship with the working class and the class struggle in a wider sense. Nietzsche tends to address those who are collectively referred to as the petty bourgeoisie in Marxist class theory, and who assume a contradictory class position defined by their non-relationship to productive work.¹⁰

This claim is apparently contrary to the survey carried out in 1897 for the Leipzig Workers Reading Room. This revealed that Nietzsche's texts were borrowed by workers far more frequently than those by Marx, Lassalle and Bebel.¹¹  Do such compulsive intra-left debates, which play off productive work against non-productive work, harm the building of wider alliances for the abolition of capitalism? And could you trace the same debate back to Nietzsche?

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JC: It is true that Nietzsche's pension was nowhere near the end of his life. But when he received no further payments from 1885, he only had three years of his career as an author with regular publications ahead of him. So we can say that most of his career was supported by his retirement — and that this privileged position contributed to the socially distanced nature of many of his writings. Even after his pension expired, he was financially supported by friends and family. So he never had to seriously worry about his livelihood.

From his personal perspective, it is probably true that Nietzsche earned more than just symbolic sums from selling books. Nevertheless, these sales figures occasionally remained so poor that his work could not arouse any interest among publishers. For example, in the fourth part of Zarathustra, who was not interested in his publisher because he rated the book's commercial opportunities as extremely low. That is why Nietzsche repeatedly invested his own money in publishing his books. And he usually sent free copies to a small circle of readers known to him personally. It testifies to the value he attached to his writings that he was willing to lose money in order to circulate them.

Although I have no doubt that Nietzsche's royalties were of great importance to him personally, they were certainly not a capital investment. For these reasons, Nietzsche would certainly not be considered a productive worker in the strict Marxist sense — although he could be regarded as a merchant of goods! But that in no way makes his work less important. Perhaps even the opposite. His very unconventional writing required a high degree of independence and benefited from the fact that it was neither necessarily profitable for publishers nor was it commissioned by capital.

As you correctly note, Daniel Tutt's claim of the dominant petty bourgeoisie of Nietzsche's first readers, given how popular Nietzsche's works were among the workers. I also doubt the validity of Tutt's characterization of the petty bourgeoisie as a class that is “indiscriminate from productive work.” The petty bourgeoisie is very well able to do productive work and can therefore relate to it in the same way as the upper bourgeoisie.

In Anglophone Marxist circles, there is a very heated debate about productive as opposed to unproductive work. The most damaging way to conduct this discussion is a moralizing one, which transforms these economic categories into value judgments. This transforms them from categories used by Marx and Engels to explain how capitalism works into categories of moral evaluation. This often leads to a reactionary imitation of wage labor. Productive workers are those who create added value — not less, but also no more. It has nothing to do with categories of justice or nobility. And so-called non-productive workers, as well as unemployed people, play a positive role in class struggle and emancipatory politics in many cases.

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HH: To bring together our many threads of conversation: Do you regard philosophy and other peer-to-peer education, which is taught via YouTube videos, as a microcosm of accelerationism? Could this medium overcome the traditional contradictions of learning in capitalist societies? To this day, a tiny number of permanent professors have had a major influence on philosophical and socio-political debates. While most students and laypeople experience these discourses, through which they should educate themselves, as such in which they can never have a voice — and which they therefore do not need to master. Can you talk about your experience building your Patreon community of now around 1,000 members who contribute one or five or ten dollars a month to help you earn a living while researching and producing the videos? How would you compare this model with Nietzsche's own experiences and strategies in building his community of readers? Are the intellectual freedoms that this working model offers you your primary motivation for the choice? Or are you primarily motivated by the experienced opportunity to reach hundreds of thousands more people than you would have achieved in a traditional role as a university teacher or professor?

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JC: In Hammer and Sickle I describe the “technological sublime” as a new potential that capitalism has made available to us.¹² And I have no doubt that the speed of communication made possible by this is incredibly valuable and has opened up new educational, cultural and aesthetic opportunities — including new spaces for philosophy and theory that are not tied to a territory or an academic institution. You can compare my Patreon community to Nietzsche's community of readers, but they are clearly differentiated by the speed of feedback and the pace of interaction between author and audience. In some situations, even due to the more diffuse border between transmitter and receiver, which is temporarily abolished. When working on the Internet, I really like the fact that I can immediately follow the thoughts and discussions that my contributions initiate. These in turn serve as inspiration for new videos. That is why I see myself as much more influenced by my audience and less isolated from them than Nietzsche, which has both positive and negative consequences.

Even before the development of the Internet, some social theorists imagined a future horizontal form of communication and cultural exchange in which the border between sender and recipient would be abolished in favor of social reciprocity. The Internet has made this possible on a larger scale than ever before. However, this entire emancipatory potential has been blocked and concentrated on a few powerful multinational corporations which, in alliance with various governments, have focused all this immense potential on advertising, data collection, and surveillance. I think we can barely imagine what opportunities a socialized Internet could create for us.

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Jonas Ceika is a writer living in Norway. He studied philosophy at NTNU (Norwegian University of Technology and Natural Sciences) and in 2018 founded the “CCK Philosophy” channel on YouTube, which is now subscribed to by over 283,000 interested people. Čeika also works as a screenwriter and producer for his channel. In addition to numerous videos about the interfaces between politics, philosophy and critical theory, his book and other publications include How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle: Marx and Nietzsche for the Twenty-First Century (London 2021).

Henry Holland (born 1975) is a literary translator, from German into English, and lives in Hamburg. He also writes and researches the history of ideas and culture and published in 2023 on Ernst Bloch and Rudolf Steiner in German Studies Review. Together with religious scholar Aaron French (University of Erfurt), he is working on a critical biography of Steiner in English. You can find out more about Holland's scientific work and cultural policy on his blog, German books, reloaded, or in Print newspapers. He is a member and board member of Hamburger Writers' Room: The working space for literary writers in Europe.

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Sources

Ceika, Jonas: How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century. London 2021.

Pancake, August: What does the German worker read? Answered based on an enquiry. Tübingen 1900.

Prideaux, Sue: I am Dynamite! A Life of Nietzsche. London 2018.

Schaberg, William: The Nietzsche Canon. A Publication History and Bibliography. Chicago 1995.

Tutt, Daniel: How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche. London 2024.

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Footnotes

1: Ceika, How to Philosophize, P. 40.

2: Note HH: Čeika's “Peterson” video has been viewed over a million times since its release in 2018.

3: Note HH: Nietzsche's complete sentence, however, also leaves open contradictory interpretations: “Socialism [sic] is based on the decision to equate people and to be fair to everyone: it is the highest morality” (Subsequent fragments 1876, No. 21 [43]).

4: Note HH: not identical to German-language literary faculties, but similar.

5: Ceika, How to Philosophize, P. 71.

6: Cf. Prideaux, Dynamite, chapter 10, e-book location 16.55.

7: Schaberg's book contains numerous examples of how Nietzsche renegotiated the fee for each publication with his publishers and repeatedly expressed dissatisfaction with the amount of fees. Cf., to mention just two such examples, The Nietzsche Canon, pp. 48 and 56.

8: For example, Schmeitzner Nietzsche wrote on September 21, 1883 (see Schaberg, The Nietzsche Canon, p. 96) that he should receive 40 Reichsmarks for each of the 7.5 printed sheets that”Zarathustra II“would contain. At this point, it helps to remember that a printed sheet generally comprised 16 book pages.

9: For more information on selling Nietzsche's books, see the review of Schaberg's book here.

10: Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite, P. 153.

11: Cf. August pancake, What does the German worker read?

12: Cf. Ceika, How to Philosophize, P. 209.

Nietzsche Against the Body’s Naysayers

A Conversation with Philosopher and YouTuber Jonas Čeika

After discussing Jonas Čeika's book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle and bis YouTube channel (CCK Philosophy) (link), Henry Holland interviewed the American about the blockages of academic philosophy, Nietzsche's relevance as a thinker on the “guideline of the body,” and about tensions between his claim as an anti-philosopher and his social position.

I. Alienation — or the science of underwear

Under the title Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold — “The impact of wet underwear on thermoregulatory responses and thermal comfort in the cold” — a study was published in 1994 which came to the conclusion that wet underwear in a cold environment had a “cooling effect on [...] thermal comfort”¹ I have; wet underwear, according to the groundbreaking finding, doesn't feel good. What reads like a parody of the modern scientific landscape can be brought to mind in the best case as shallow entertainment, at worst, and that means in serious, serious cases, but in serious cases, we catch a glimpse of the symptoms of a society that has given up on itself and has now fatalistically dedicated itself to the mechanical counting of gray desert rock. When reading the type of study above, redundant, tautological, nonsensical and yet spread like sand by the sea, there is a dull feeling of cold lifelessness, we are dealing with dead material — or, in Nietzsche's terminology, with profound nihilism. This insight is by no means new; Friedrich Nietzsche dedicated himself to the work as early as 1887 On the genealogy of morality of modern science and subjected it to criticism that continues to this day. According to one of the core theses, science is a contemporary outgrowth of ascetic ideals and as such life-denying and self-contradictory. Instead of putting oneself at the service of life, being a source of new potential, it catapults people away from this world into the abyss of nothingness. There, I would like to argue, he becomes a stranger to himself, is alienated from the immediate world in which he lives. In Nietzsche's critique of science, however not explicitly expressed, there appears to be a alienation criticism to snooze.

However, according to popular criticism, “alienation” is a tricky term, as it implies alienation From something, something that already preexisted. But what is that supposed to be? How can you, especially against the background of Nietzsche's critique of the original thinking of metaphysics and its continuation in modern science itself, this somewhat Still require? Is there nothing but alienation, is life, as some postmodern theorists certainly teach in reference to Nietzsche, a vain game of masks with no face behind them?

The question therefore urgently arises as to what exactly alienation of oneself and from the world means. In order to answer them, Nietzsche's critique of science will first be examined in more detail and then, with the help of Marxian analyses, to what extent modern science can be understood as a form of alienation.

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II. Science and Truth: The Ultimate Ascetic Ideal

The meaning of ascetic ideals is just as diverse as their application in world history is universal. Ascetism may be present in art as well as in philosophy or, above all, in the Christian religion — this “Platonism for the 'people'”² — and with it always a suitable ideal, an idea that transcends and therefore unattainable to people and justifies him: God, State, Capital. However, what all these manifestations of asceticism have in common, its nucleus, is a struggle for the evaluation that Valuation of life, in fact that it is “related to a completely different existence”³, a higher, more perfect one; one who, in order to affirm it, demands the disparagement of one's own life, it as a “wrong path that you must finally go backwards” (ibid.) is necessary to deal with. But, Nietzsche notes, enforcing such collective self-denial by devaluing life itself requires tremendous strength. It “expresses the basic fact of human will”⁴. The ascetic ideal is an expression of a will to power, a Willens zur Macht.

However, it is an expression that is at odds with itself, that cannibalizes itself in order to stay alive. Under his rule, idolatry flourishes in everything that suffers, that is impoverished and enslaved, in short, that opposes the flourishing of human life. This desire for self-minimization, self-elimination, for watery soup that is just barely digestible, and the associated fear of everything alive, of any energy and magnificence, they inevitably result in nihilism, in The will to nothing: “People still want [L] ieber The nothing want, as not want...”⁵

It is a perverted “attainment of power in factual powerlessness through the powers of the imaginary.”⁶, because anyone who does not know how to defend themselves by other means resorts to more treacherous weapons — be it morality, virtue or guilt. In the last resort, the ascetic ideal is to satisfy the suffering of all those who are powerless and tired of life, who use every means of fighting for self-preservation, no matter how poisonous the medicinal waters are. Unable to act, the ascetic ideal at least allows them to “discharge of affect.”⁷, i.e. a satisfaction of the “numbing of pain through affect” (ibid.) — resentment, guilt, conscience that is directed inwards, spiritualizes itself, and there take the person hostage within themselves. “[T] u yourself are solely to blame! “(ibid.), therefore be pious and humble, salvation lies in not wanting. And this is how the sufferer disciplines himself, punishes himself for his own existence.

Most people are all too familiar with such tricks of exercising power; they literally cry out for the imperatives of Christianity. But anyone who prides himself in atheism, weighs himself in the protection of reason and objectivity, and confidently ridicules the archaic remnants of religious ages should be careful at this point. Too often, the achievement of modern science is celebrated as overcoming ascetic ideals, as the end of metaphysics and the beginning of self-sufficient truth. Who needs God when Darwin exists? Nietzsche warns against this self-delusion. Science has no courage for itself, its essence is still an insubstantial shell “and where it is still passion, love, ardour, woes is, it is not the opposite of that ascetic ideal, but rather its most recent and elegant form”⁸. In it, the self-destructive will to do nothing, for which he killed God, is now ungodly in search of a new faith, finds his last asylum. In scientific activity, which seriously places itself at the forefront of all importance, lies the remaining comfort over the loss of great faith, of the ideal, which could at least give rise to the contractions and suffering. If you work hard, you don't have to think twice. Anyone who enhances well-being in wet underwear as an object worthy of exploration needs the “question of why”⁹not to address the “[g] general problems” (ibid.). Modern scientists are convinced of their freedom from all supernatural shackles, they must be convinced of their freedom in order to be able to relax. Behind this self-deception, however, as we feared in honest hours, is a submission to a final, very fundamental ideal: belief in the absolute truth. This will to truth, and it should be said, fundamental truthfulness and objectivity, is itself still “belief in a metaphysical Werth, ein Werth In itself the truth”¹⁰. The universal claim to truth hangs in the sky of ideas, unreachable and therefore all the more desperately sought after. Like any other ideal, it requires the affirmation of another, divine world, which is in contrast to ours and is therefore dependent on strict renunciation of all sensuality, the renunciation of “evaluations and interpretations [...]. By wanting to abstain from judgement, they are taking 'human self-loathing to the extreme. '”¹¹. The ascetic scholars have no choice but to flee to their ivory tower, watch the accumulation of dust there and let the world pass by as unnoticed as possible. We are dealing with an unparalleled passivity that forces us to breathe the hot air of status quo. Such a nihilistic truth dogma shows its absurd, devastating effects: half of all published research articles end up unread in the informational waste dump, 90% of them are never cited¹² And while the most bizarre figures are entrenching themselves on the moon in hedonistic departments, the so-called 'global South, 'is struggling with the very real consequences of hunger crises, war and exploitation caused by humanity itself. Like modern science, the ascetic ideal depends on the inviolability of truth and therefore also on a”The impoverishment of life”¹³; atheism replaces God with Christian morality itself, hidden in scientific conscience, which only sees the world according to the standard of “divine reason.”¹⁴ bends.

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III. Alienation through science

Before we can understand modern science as a phenomenon of alienation, we must first address the difficulties of the concept of alienation, which have already been indicated. Anyone who speaks of alienation necessarily points to the relationality of two instances: There is something that is alienated from something else. On the basis of such considerations, however, it would be far too urgent to conclude that there was a pre-alienated origin to which it was necessary to return. This is also how Nietzsche has his problems with the fetishization of origin, as this is thrown into the pot indiscriminately with the purpose, accuracy or, ultimately, the truth of a thing.¹⁵ However, anyone who wants to equate something “established” (ibid.) with its origin ignores its inception, its historical changes and overrides; ignores “that everything that has happened [...] is a Overwhelm, Herrwerden and that in turn everything overwhelming and becoming master is a reinterpretation, a reinterpretation, in which the previous “meaning” and “purpose” must necessarily be obscured or completely obliterated.” (ibid.) We may therefore be able to understand the development process of a phenomenon, but not its origin in the sense of zero hour in which it magically Ex nihilo began to exist. The origin is an illusion; it is always untrue. Instead, we are dealing with a chain of “overwhelming processes” (ibid.) of forces that affect a The will to power refer.

But if we say goodbye to the idea of a pre-existing truth, of an essential being, then what is the alienated relationship? In its early publication Economic-philosophical manuscripts Marx treats alienation as a “critique of the existence of an abstract general”¹⁶: “Alienation is [...] the opposition of abstract thinking and sensual reality” — “the fact that the human being [...] objectifies itself in contrast to abstract thinking is regarded as the established and abolishing essence of alienation”¹⁷. Or in other words, through the abstraction of and spiritualization of the sensory world, which creates a metaphysical cosmos in which the human being places himself outside of himself as an overarching, total unit, he alienates himself both from his directly and sensually experienced life as well as from the world in which this life is constituted. Modern science and its relentless thirst for truth, the ultimate ascetic ideal, belong to this very cosmos. It appropriates the “human beings [i.e. reinified; EW] essential forces of man” (ibid.) and allows them to degenerate into spiritual echoes of themselves — the soul becomes the prison of our body¹⁸. Alienation through science is therefore in no way alienation from a true origin or an ideal being, because with such an assumption, one would fall once again into the mystifying trap of metaphysical transcendence. Rather, it is “alienation of the knowing person or the thinking alienated science.”¹⁹, which is the essence of life, namely its “growth beyond itself”²⁰, its continuous growth, negates. It is the idling, the stagnation, the stepping into place of a minimized life, caused by the requirement of an abstract and stiff claim to truth, which prohibits any liquefaction of form and meaning. It is the result of self-medication against the painful suffering of one's own existence.

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IV. Conclusion: Hostility to life with method

One common narrative of modernity is its scientific advancement, its unprecedented achievements. Even though these should not be denied, Nietzsche's critique of science places the finger on the secret wound and is still more relevant today than ever before. At the core of modern science, with all its specializations, sophisticated methods and systems, lies tragic nihilism, a desire to abolish oneself disguised as cool prudence. Science has by no means found its self-worth, nor does it mean liberation from the spirits of metaphysics. Rather, it too still needs a hand from above; is it also still dependent on “value-creating [] power”²¹, the ideal of an absolute truth, which is impossible to achieve and therefore requires even harsher asceticism. Bound to an apparent and therefore all the more tightened abstraction, it captures life and alienates it not from a supposedly pre-existing origin, but from its ever-recreating process of becoming, from a sensual, material reality. Of course, Nietzsche does not stop at diagnosing modern science and morality. He has his own idea of overcoming himself, of overcoming the nihilism that has fallen prey to us. How fruitful these are remains an exciting question, which needs to be addressed in further articles on this blog.

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Literature

Bakkevig, Martha Kold & Ruth Nielsen: Impact of Wet Underwear on Thermoregulatory Responses and Thermal Comfort in the Cold. In: Ergonomics 37, no. 8 (August 1994), pp. 1375—89. (link)

Foucault, Michel: Monitoring and punishing. The birth of prison. Frankfurt am Main 2021.

Heidegger, Martin: Nietzsche. Ed. by Brigitte Schillbach. Complete edition. Department I, Published Papers 1910-1976, Vol. 6.1/2. Frankfurt a. M. 1996.

Heit, Helmut: Criticism of science in the The genealogy of morality. From ascetic ideal to knowledge for free people. In: Ders. & Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir: Nietzsche as a critic and thinker of transformation. Berlin & Boston 2016, pp. 252—274.

Meho, Lokman I.: The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis. In: Physics World 20, No. 1 (January 2007), pp. 32—36. (link)

Marx, Karl: Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts. Ed. by Barbara Zehnpfennig. Hamburg 2008.

Saar, Martin: Genealogy as a critique. History and theory of the subject according to Nietzsche and Foucault. Frankfurt am Main & New York 2007.

Wallat, Hendrik: Awareness of the crisis. Marx, Nietzsche and the emancipation of the non-identical in political theory. Bielefeld 2009.

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Footnotes

1: “[C] ooling effect on [...] thermal comfort” (Bakkevig and Nielsen, Impact on Wet Underwear).

2: Beyond good and evil, Preface.

3: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 11.

4: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 1.

5: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 28.

6: Saar, Genealogy as a critique, P. 82.

7: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 15.

8: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 23.

9: Heit, Criticism of science in the Genealogy of Morals, p. 263.

10: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 24.

11: Heit, Criticism of science in the Genealogy of Morals, p. 265.

12: Cf. Meho, The Rise and Rise of Citation Analysis.

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

14: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 27.

15: Cf. On the genealogy of morality, paragraph II, 12.

16: Hendrik Wallat, Awareness of the crisis, P. 113.

17: Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, P. 131.

18: In this regard, see also Foucault, Monitoring and punishing, P. 42.

19: Marx, Economic-Philosophical Manuscripts, P. 133.

20: Heidegger, Nietzsche, P. 439.

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

Better to Want Nothing, Than Not to Want at All

Self-Alienation through Modern Science

Nietzsche's criticism of science is perhaps one of the most provocative, but also the most relevant, sub-areas of Nietzsche's comprehensive critique of modern culture. Estella Walter reconstructs her perhaps most important formulation in the third treatise of The genealogy of morality and shows how Nietzsche's science is a form of estrangement Understands. She explains this concept, which is so central to modern philosophy, and bridges it from Nietzsche to (young) Marx: Both are critics of the alienations of the modern way of life, whose critiques we should read together in order to reach a comprehensive understanding of it.

Schon lange ist der Vorwurf populär, man könne Nietzsche für und gegen alle Ansichten in Anspruch nehmen, weil er sich in seinen Werken fortlaufend selbst widerspreche und jede beliebige Meinung sowohl vertrete als auch angreife, sodass ein „eigentlicher“ Nietzsche gar nicht übrig bleibe – allerhöchstens derjenige, den der jeweilige Leser sich selbst wünsche als Freund oder, je nachdem, auch als Feind. Nietzsche eine weiße Wand? Eine Projektionsfläche für Wünsche? Am schärfsten hat dies vermutlich Kurt Tucholsky formuliert:

Wer kann Nietzsche nicht in Anspruch nehmen! Sage mir, was du brauchst, und ich will dir dafür ein Nietzsche-Zitat besorgen. [...] Für Deutschland und gegen Deutschland; für den Frieden und gegen den Frieden; für die Literatur und gegen die Literatur – was Sie wollen.¹

Wer sich längere Zeit mit Nietzsche beschäftigt, kommt nicht umhin, sich zu fragen, ob Tucholsky damit nicht das treffendste Wort gesprochen hat. Denn auf der nie enden wollenden Jagd nach Nietzsches eigentlicher Philosophie ist bereits viel Widersprüchliches gesagt worden: Dass sie den geistigen Boden bereitet habe für den Nationalsozialismus, dass sie in den drei Hauptlehren des „Übermenschen “, des „Gedankens der ewigen Wiederkunft“ und des „Willens zur Macht“ kulminiere, dass ihr kritisches Potenzial höher einzuschätzen sei als ihr affirmatives, dass sie als „Künstlermetaphysik“ nur eben als Individualphilosophie  gelte, dass der „tragische Gedanke“ als roter Faden Nietzsches gesamte Philosophie durchziehe – um hier nur einige Interpretationen herauszugreifen.

Wir könnten auch zu behaupten wagen, dass bisher keine Position abwegig genug war, um nicht in Nietzsche ein Vorbild und in seinem Werk nicht mindestens ein Zitat zum Beweis zu finden. Nietzsche ein Frauenverächter und Emanzipationsfeind? Mal nicht so vorschnell – wie viel Entwicklungsspielraum räumt er doch den Frauen ein, und konnte nicht gerade seine genealogische Methode zu einem wichtigen Werkzeug der feministischen Theorie avancieren? Nietzsche bedauert, dass der Protestantismus so vielen katholischen Ausschweifungen ein Ende bereitete – allerdings nicht dem Christentum? Nun, aber irgendwie spürt man doch durch alle Abneigung hinweg Nietzsches geheime Bewunderung für Luther und dessen Haltung des „hier stehe ich und kann nicht anders“.

Nietzsche rechts und ein Chauvi, ein reaktionärer, antiliberaler, antihumanistischer Holzklotz? Mitnichten, es hat nur eine zärtliche Vaterhand gefehlt, so dass die männlichen Machtfantasien hie und da übers Ziel hinausschossen. Aber mit ein wenig Feinarbeit ziselieren wir die subtileren und, entschuldigen Sie die Wortwiederholung, „eigentlichen“ Grundzüge heraus und erkennen, siehe da: Nietzsche ist ein Linker, ein lupenreiner Demokrat, ein Menschenfreund. Inkognito vielleicht gar für sich selbst, aber im Dienst der „guten Sache“ (welche diese auch immer ist), und unsere Sache als guter und tollkühner Interpret wird es sein, uns anhand des roten Fadens nicht hinaus aus dem Labyrinth in die Freiheit zu hangeln, sondern hinein bis zu Herz und Hirn des Philosophen.

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Kapitulation vor der Inkohärenz

Aber lassen wir die Ironie beiseite. Nietzsche gilt berechtigtermaßen als unsystematischer Philosoph, und die Kernideen seiner Philosophie zu benennen kann einiges an Kopfzerbrechen bereiten. Angesichts all der gegensätzlichen Versuche, seine Philosophie in ihrem Wesen zu bestimmen, könnte es einem ratsam erscheinen, bescheidener aufzutreten und lediglich zu beweisen, dass sich all die bisherigen Bestimmungen als Reduktionen erweisen, die weit eher den jeweiligen Wünschen des Interpreten entsprechen als Nietzsches Philosophie. Denn immer – immer (?) – ließe sich ein Gegenbeispiel finden oder eine feinsinnige Gegeninterpretation, die jede noch so klare Aussage in Zweifel zieht. Wir behaupten also nicht mehr, dass es einen Kern seiner Philosophie gebe oder eine Ader, die sich aufsplittet in viele kleine, reiche Nebenadern, die aber doch alle vom selben Zentrum her Blut und Leben beziehen. Wir versuchen, Nietzsche fragwürdiger zu gestalten, und einzutauchen in ein Spiel der Bezüge und Referenzen, als ernsthafte Forscher benennen wir Quellen und vertiefen uns in Lesespuren von Nietzsches eigener Lektüre. Ein Gesamtbild wirkt überholt, verlangt nach jener einen Zentralperspektive, der wir doch schon längst das Licht ausgeknipst haben, während wir behaupten, dass Nietzsche eher einem jener Wechselbilder gleicht, in dem man entweder Frau oder Vase sieht. Und wenn wir denn wirklich noch an der Metapher des Labyrinthes festhalten wollen würden, dann wäre dieses vermutlich von Maurits Cornelis Escher gemalt und hätte weder Ein- noch Ausgang, weder Herz noch Mittelpunkt, sondern nur eine Vielzahl von Minotauren, die sich aus der Zweidimensionalität in eine verquere Dreidimensionalität zeichnen, als würden sie selbst noch unterstreichen, bloß handgemacht zu sein.

In gewisser Weise haben diejenigen, die sich zuerst auf die Suche nach Nietzsches eigentlicher Philosophie begaben, schon den weiteren Weg der Nietzscheforschung vorgezeichnet. Mit jedem festen Porträt musste das Kippbild negiert und gezeigt werden, dass es ironisch gebrochen ist, oder nur ein unselbständiger Versuch, oder eingebettet werden kann ins Gesamtbild. Diese Methode der zunächst partikularen Untergrabung wurde schließlich von Teilen der neueren Nietzscheforschung perfektioniert, universalisiert und schließlich verwissenschaftlicht. Nun aber zerrinnt uns jede Aussage über seine Philosophie in den Fingern. In einem gigantischen Korrosionsprozess läuft seine Philosophie Gefahr, sich in einzelne Atome aufzulösen, und von Aphorismus zu Aphorismus erstreckt sich weiter Raum: „Finden wir noch eine Brücke? Gibt es noch ein Hinüber? Gibt es noch ein Wohin?“ Dürfen wir das mit ein wenig nietzscheanischer Tragik fragen

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Philosophie als fragmentarisches Sammelsurium

Oder, so wird ein nüchterner Geist vielleicht einwenden, besteht da gar keine Gefahr? Liegt der Zauber von Nietzsches anhaltender Modernität nicht gerade darin, dass sich jede Zeit ihren eigenen Nietzsche kreiert? Im Zeitalter der Ideologien war es naturgemäß ein Nietzsche der zarathustrischen Lehren, heute ein anschmiegsam ambiger Philosoph des Einerseits-Andererseits, nicht dingfest zu machen, stets einen Schritt voraus, immer schillernd, nie zu greifen. Mit einem überlegenen Lächeln dürfen wir neuen Experten beginnenden Nietzscheinterpreten zuschauen, wie sie noch nach einer festen Aussage haschen. Nun, womöglich kennen sie noch nicht die erste Skizze oder die zweite Überarbeitung vor dem veröffentlichten Aphorismus. Multiplizieren wir die Interpretationsmöglichkeiten mit jedem geänderten Artikel pro Abschnitt, kehren wir die Vorzeichen versuchsweise einmal herum und bedenken, dass Minus mal Minus Plus ergibt. Ein Komma erschüttert die neuere Forschung heute mehr als die Frage, ob Nietzsche den Gedanken der Wiederkunft als gescheitert verwarf.

Was aber ist dann die Beschäftigung mit Nietzsches Philosophie anderes als eine geistreiche Spielerei in einem hermetisch akademischen Raum, in dem Experten sich kenntnisreich die Bälle zuspielen? Sie selbst nehmen ja nichts mehr ernst. Und krankt daran nicht der akademische Diskurs unserer Universitäten? Sie glauben ja nicht mehr: dass die Wahrheit sich benennen lässt, Moral in einem Himmel festgeschrieben steht, dass die Philosophie die Welt verändert. Abgeklärt erscheint Philosophie nunmehr als Produkt eines abgeschlossenen Verdauungsvorgangs von jüngster Geschichte, soziokulturellem Rahmen, gewachsener Mentalität und Politik, das der Rest der Bevölkerung auch getrost ignorieren kann. Eine Philosophie, die dabei ist, ihre wesentlichen Erkenntnisansprüche aufzugeben, gerät zum bloßen Archiv, einer unschöpferischen Institution, die sich nicht mehr traut, Wahrheit überhaupt zu suchen, sondern lediglich neue Aspekte an einer geistreichen Chronologie interessanter Ideen präsentiert.  

Aber auch diese Kritik ist vielleicht zu kurz gegriffen und wird der heutigen Lage der Philosophie nicht gerecht. Welche philosophische Schule könnte denn noch überzeugen? Wer wollte sich ernsthaft und aus ganzer Seele einen Kantianer nennen? Und wer einmal einem Heideggerianer begegnet ist, weiß, dass er ein solcher lieber auch nicht werden will. So drängt sich die Frage auf: Was kann uns eine gewordene Philosophie für unser künftiges Denken sein? Und wie können wir einer Philosophie wie der von Nietzsche heute begegnen?

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Philosophie als Kritik

Wir kommen gerechterweise kaum umhin, an der neueren Nietzscheforschung zu würdigen, dass sie als Korrektiv den vielen Simplifizierungen in Nietzschedeutungen den Garaus macht und gerade diejenigen widerlegt, die sich am lautesten mit seinem Namen brüsten: Die Selbstoptimierer und seichten Lebensratgeber und natürlich, wie eh und je, die politische Rechte, die nicht davon lassen kann, sich mit einer Handvoll Schlagworte Nietzsche zu eigen zu machen.

Von seiner Philosophie können wir sicher die Skepsis gegenüber geschlossenen philosophischen Systemen lernen. Es ist verführerisch, ein einmal mühevoll errichtetes Gedankengebäude nach Kräften gegen die Zweifler zu verteidigen. Aber allzu leicht wird man zum Gefangenen der Architektur, die man mit 35 in die Welt gesetzt hat. In Nietzsche finden wir ein authentisches Denkzeugnis, das zeigt, wie man sich von Früherem unbeschwert löst, und über den Haufen wirft, was zu eng und überholt erscheint. Insofern lernen wir mit und durch Nietzsches Philosophie das eigenständige Denken, nicht aber ein geschlossenes Lehrsystem. Damit freilich ist die Gefahr der Beliebigkeit nicht gebannt. Der Versuch, eine weittragende Perspektive in Nietzsche zu finden, kann nicht belanglos sein, und regt zu einer geistigen Anstrengung an, die sich als weit spannungsreicher gestaltet als das selbstgerechte Sich-Abfinden, dass Nietzsches Denken in atomistische Einzelaussagen zerfallen lässt, die nur für sich stehen und allerhöchstens in subjektiven Kontext gerückt werden könnten.  

Zuletzt kehren wir aber zurück zur eingangs gestellten Frage: Können wir Nietzsche dingfest machen? Oder lässt sich mit ihm, wie Tucholsky behauptet, alles rechtfertigen, alles angreifen? Sehen wir uns kurz die Strategien an, mit denen gewisse Aussagen aus Nietzsches Philosophie unterhöhlt, mindestens aber relativiert werden, sodass man Nietzsche, im Extrem gedacht, auf keine einzige Stelle festnageln könnte, die „etwas so meint, wie es da steht“.

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Strategien der Auflösung und Einwände

Dass sich tatsächlich zu jeder These die Gegenthese finden lässt, so heißt es. Dies ist eine starke Behauptung, die dennoch den Vorteil hat, dass sich leicht Beispiele aufzählen lassen. Ob diese Gegensätze noch Gegensätze bleiben, wenn man sie genauer interpretiert, sei an dieser Stelle dahingestellt. Aber gibt es eine Meinung, der an keiner Stelle widersprochen wird, wenn man sie auf die schlichteste Art und Weise versteht? Und siehe da, der selbstbestimmte Tod etwa, der Freitod, um nur ein Beispiel zu nennen, genießt bei Nietzsche uneingeschränkte Affirmation. Er stellt ihn in starken und eindeutigen Kontrast zum vom ihm kritisierten geistigen und körperlichen Dahinsiechen, das im natürlichen Tod sein Ende findet. Eine Gegenthese hierzu sucht man vergebens.

Einige Aussagen müssen auf eine Weise biographisch verstanden werden, dass sie praktisch aus Nietzsches Philosophie heraus subtrahiert werden können. Das alte Weiblein, das Zarathustra den wenig charmanten Ratschlag gibt, eine Peitsche mitzunehmen, wenn Mann zu Frauen geht, sei beispielsweise nur eine Persiflage auf Nietzsches Schwester Elisabeth. Aus der Stelle ließe sich folglich keine etwaige misogyne Einstellung ableiten. Aber selbst wenn dies stimmte, steht eine Philosophie erst einmal für sich selbst, und wir Interpreten studieren die Perspektiven, die sich aus ihr ergeben, und nicht Nietzsches wie auch immer geartete Psyche. Die Psychologisierung, die als Strategie zunächst dazu diente, sich einen gefälligeren und runderen Nietzsche zu erschaffen, führt, konsequent angewendet, zur Nivellierung seiner Philosophie, da praktisch jede Aussage biographisch und psychologisch gedeutet werden kann. Dann allerdings muss man schließlich zur Einschätzung gelangen, dass sein gesamtes Werk nur als Denkbiographie zu würdigen ist, die philosophisch irrelevant ist, weil sie für niemanden gilt, außer für die Einzelperson, die sie verfasste.

Der philosophische Sprecher lässt sich in unzählige Experimentalfiguren zerlegen. Ausgehend vom berechtigten Einwand gegen voreilige Deutungen die Zarathustra schlicht mit Nietzsche gleichsetzten, und der Erkenntnis, dass nicht ohne Weiteres Experimentalfiguren wie der „tolle Mensch“ mit Nietzsche identifiziert werden können, hat sich die Praxis etabliert, einem kohärenten „Sprecher-Ich“ ganz den Boden zu entziehen. Ist dieses „Ich” tatsächlich der Philosoph Friedrich Nietzsche oder spricht da ein philosophischer Typus, eine Versuchsfigur oder gar ein Zerrbild? Gibt es vielleicht gar so viele Nietzsche wie Ichs in seinen Texten? Nun, dann können wir jeden Versuch einer auch nur halbwegs kohärenten Nietzschedeutung den Rücken kehren, weil es eine nietzschesche Philosophie, die sich anhand von Inhalten charakterisieren ließe, schlicht nicht gibt. Dieser Strategie kann man durchaus Beifall zollen, sie ist filigran und schlau. Jede Vereinnahmung von Nietzsche lässt sich damit zerschlagen, da man seiner so kaum habhaft werden kann. Warum aber sollten wir die Zeit einem Philosophen widmen, der nur Positionen ausprobiert hat, ohne ihren Wahrheitsgehalt zu bedenken? Ausgehend von einer spannend schillernden Ambiguität rutscht Nietzsches Philosophie in eine Beliebigkeit, an der man achselzuckend vorbei gehen kann.

Gewisse Aussagen sind ironisch gemeint. Das ist durchaus naheliegend, bedarf allerdings auch einer interpretatorischen Begründung wie dem Aufzeigen mehrerer Indizien. Und wenn sie diese erhält, muss nicht zwangsläufig ein unüberbrückbarer Widerspruch entstehen. Nietzsche könnte beispielsweise die Würdigung des „souverainen Individuums“² ironisch gemeint haben, weil er es nur mit einer einzigen Fähigkeit ausstattete, nämlich versprechen zu können. Diese „Freiheit“, sich selbst auf etwas festzulegen, ging allerdings aus dem schlimmsten Zwangssystem – der harten körperlichen Bestrafung desjenigen, der seine Versprechen bricht – hervor. Ja, die Ironie besteht darin, dass das souveräne Individuum, das sich seiner Freiheit brüstet, vergessen hat, aus welch dunkler, barbarischer Zeit sie geborgen wurde. Und doch ist es eine Freiheit, die für Nietzsche ganz unironisch einen neuen Entwicklungsschritt des Menschen markiert. Die Ironie erweist sich hier also nicht als unauflöslicher Gegensatz, sondern als Metaperspektive desjenigen, der beides sieht – ihren dunklen Grund und ihr stolzes Angesicht.

Und zuletzt haben wir noch die feinsinnige Interpretation, welche auf Begriffe, die Nietzsche scheinbar natürlich, alltagsverständlich benutzt, seine eigene Kritik anwendet. Dies hier behauptet er als Wahrheit? Aber hat er nicht dem Wahrheitsbegriff selbst die Grundlage entzogen? Er spricht von einer Rangordnung der Perspektiven, aber wer ordnet ihren Rang? Er sagt, die Natur, die Welt sei an sich unmoralisch – wo er doch alle Aussagen „an sich“ bereits über den Haufen geworfen hat?  

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Integrative Kraft

Und genau hier sollten wir eben nicht Halt machen und lediglich lapidar feststellen, dass ein gewisser widersprüchlicher Charakter integraler Bestandteil von Nietzsches Philosophie sei, sondern versuchen, die scheinbaren und die tatsächlichen Widersprüche, die verschiedenen Interpretationsmöglichkeiten zueinander in Beziehung zu setzen und sie zu gewichten. Wie viel kann unsere Deutung von Nietzsches Philosophie integrieren, dies könnte ein Maßstab zu ihrer Beurteilung werden. Vorsichtig und misstrauisch gegen uns selbst sollten wir allerdings werden, wenn tatsächlich eine runde, in sich geschlossene Philosophie dabei entsteht, in der man plötzlich und in guter alter Tradition behauptet, dass sich alle Widersprüche als nur scheinbar erweisen, wenn  man nur eben jenen einen Schlüssel zu ihrer Interpretation benutzt. Irgendwann endet die bloße Nietzscheinterpretation und es sind unsere eigenen Argumente, die mit gewissen Aphorismen ringen. Es sind unsere eigenen Positionen, Geschmäcker, Perspektiven und Wertschätzungen, die wir durch ihn angegriffen sehen und die wir versuchen zu verteidigen, nicht zuletzt mit den von ihm gelernten Strategien. Wir sind im Dickicht einer Philosophie angekommen, mit der wir, wenn wir es wagen, ringen können und vielleicht sogar einen Ausgang finden. Dass dieser Ausgang uns hinaus in unsere Freiheit führt und nicht zu Herz und Hirn des Philosophen, macht das Denken erst zu dem Abenteuer, das es in Nietzsches Sinne „eigentlich“ ist.

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Literatur

Tucholsky, Kurt: Fräulein Nietzsche (1932). In: Mary Gerold-Tucholsky & Fritz J. Raddatz (Hg.): Gesammelte Werke, Bd. 3. Frankfurt am Main 2005, S. 994.

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Fußnoten

1: Tucholsky, Fräulein Nietzsche, S. 994.

2: Vgl. Zur Genealogie der Moral, II, 1–3.

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Nietzsche dingfest machen

Hat Nietzsche eindeutige philosophische Lehren? Mit Nietzsches Vieldeutigkeit wird bis heute gekämpft. Wann meint er, was er sagt? In ihrem Essay geht Natalie Schulte der Frage nach, wo inmitten von assimilierender Vereindeutigung durch weltanschauliche Programme einerseits und akademisch versierte Zerstreuung von Nietzsches Gedankenbauten in zahl- und zusammenhangslose Fragmente und Perspektiven andererseits die heutige Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche ihre entscheidenden Herausforderungen zu verorten hat. Zwischen den Gefahren der Vereindeutigung seiner Philosophie und der grenzenlosen Relativierung seiner Thesen sucht sie nach einem fruchtbaren dritten Weg, mit der Frage nach dem „eigentlichen Nietzsche“ umzugehen.

In Fachkreisen wird seit einigen Jahren darüber diskutiert, was Nietzsche und die Heavy-Metal-Subkultur miteinander verbinden könnte. So wies der Kunstwissenschaftler und Heavy-Metal-Experte Jörg Scheller darauf hin: „Bezeichnenderweise wird kein Philosoph so häufig im Heavy Metal zitiert wie Nietzsche.“¹ Die Website loudwire.com erstellte 2018 eine Liste von „11 Nihilistic Songs Inspired by Nietzsche“ [„11 nihilistische, von Nietzsche inspirierte Songs“] darunter “God is Dead” [„Gott ist tot“] von Black Sabbaths Album, „13“, Orange Goblins Stück „Ubermensch” und „Beyond good and evil“ [„Jenseits von Gut und Böse“] von der Band At The Gates.² Die Website lebmetal.com zählt eine Reihe von Bands auf, die von Nietzsches Nihilismus stark beeinflusst worden seien, wie Gorgoroth, Beherit, Burzum, Emperor und Limbonic art.³ Zahlreiche weitere Beispiele könnten genannt werden, wie etwa die nietzscheanische Inspiration der Band Slipknot (Musikvideo)⁴ oder die ukrainische Band The Nietzsche, die dem Genre des Mathcore zugerechnet wird und die sich direkt nach dem Philosophen benannt hat (Musikvideo).

Was also haben Nietzsche und Black Metal bzw. ähnlich „laute“, „harte“ und provokante Musikrichtungen gemeinsam? Vorab sei festgestellt: Diese Musikrichtungen wurden und werden ganz überwiegend von heterosexuellen jungen Männern aus den Mittelschichten westlicher Industriestaaten geprägt. Sie kamen in den 1980er Jahren mit dem Eintritt geburtenstarker Jahrgänge ins Erwachsenenleben auf und wurden vom damaligen pessimistisch-apokalyptischen Geistesklima beeinflusst, wo Medien-Themen wie Waldsterben, Wettrüsten und Atomunfälle mit dem konkret erfahrbaren Niedergang der Industrie und der hohen Jugendarbeitslosigkeit korrespondierten und der jungen Generation ein wenig ermutigendes Zukunftspanorama boten. Auf der Grundlage dieser Prämisse lassen sich vier Verbindungen zwischen Nietzsche und der Heavy Metal definieren: Das männliche Gefühlsleben, das Verhältnis zu den Frauen, der Wunsch nach gesellschaftlicher Anerkennung und der Bezug zum Christentum.

Erstens: Sowohl bei Nietzsche als auch bei Heavy Metal herrscht das Prinzip „Harte Schale, weicher Kern“. Nicht selten verbergen sich hinter der Härte und ästhetischen Radikalität der Musik sensible Künstler. Die Musik mit ihrer übersteuerten Lautstärke, der Brüll- und Schreigesang, die wilde Kostümierung in Leder und Metall, Masken und Make-Up – all dies dient als Panzerung des jungen Mannes, der an der Brutalität und Ungerechtigkeit der Gesellschaft verzweifelt. Gewisserweise handelt es ich dabei auch um ein Rollenspiel im Rahmen eines Initiationsritus: Der erwachsen werdende junge Mann erkennt die harte gesellschaftliche Realität und sieht die Schwierigkeiten eines Aufstiegs vor sich. Er spielt den „Wilden Mann“, um seine Zweifel und Schwächen zu überdecken und um gesellschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit zu generieren. Er pendelt dabei zwischen dem Refugium schallisolierter Übungskeller und grell beleuchteten, mit imposanten Boxentürmen dekorierten Bühnen. Seine Musik gleicht dem Pfeifen im Walde. Dies kommt auch in vielen Texten von Heavy Metal, Hardcore und Punksongs zum Ausdruck, die von Kapitalismuskritik und pessimistischen Gesellschaftsvisionen geprägt sind. Überspitzt formuliert hieße das: Sensibelchen hören Hardcore, Folterknechte lieben Schlager und Musikantenstadel. Härte und Lautstärke sind somit auch Ausdruck von Leid und Angst, wobei die Parallelität zu Nietzsches Persönlichkeit und seiner kompensatorischen Radikalität deutlich wird. Auch er war ja bekanntermaßen ein lautsprecherischer Feingeist.

Zweitens: Die Abwesenheit der Frauen. In der Regel pflegen junge Männer die Liebe zu den harten Musikstilen, bevor sie die Liebe zu einer Frau entdecken. Heavy Metal wird nach dem Eintritt der Geschlechtsreife relevant und verliert mit Partnerschaft und Familiengründung an Bedeutung. Dies deutet darauf hin, dass die harten Musikrichtungen und die damit verbundene Pose des „Wilden Mannes“ jungen Männern helfen, mit Emotionen umzugehen, bzw. diese mit Selbstbildern der Stärke, Abgebrühtheit und Macht zu überblenden. Gefühle auszuleben, könnte, so fürchten junge Männer, als Schwäche ausgelegt werden und die angestrebte männliche Identität in Frage stellen. In diesem Sinne wären Heavy Metal und Hardcore jenen männlichen Körperpanzerungen gleichzustellen, die durch Kampfsport, Bodybuilding oder Tätowierungen eine schützende die Aura der Gefährlichkeit herstellen sollen. Nietzsches Persönlichkeit wurde durch den Mangel an stabilen sexuellen Beziehungen sicherlich stark beeinflusst. Seine überstürzten Heiratsanträge und Ansichten über Frauen im Allgemeinen dürften von entsprechenden Frustrationen und Unsicherheiten motiviert worden sein.

Drittens: Der Wunsch, anerkannt zu werden und sich durchzusetzen. Ästhetisch, politisch, religiös: Auf mehreren Ebenen fordern die harten Musikstile die anerkannten Autoritäten heraus – schließlich handelt es sich um Aktionsfelder junger Männer, die sich selbst verwirklichen wollen, sich als Repräsentanten einer Generation verstehen und gesellschaftliche Relevanz erkämpfen wollen. Protest und Aufstiegsambition gehen dabei eine Einheit ein. In diesem Sinne fordern sie: Freie Bahn dem Individuum! Keine Einschränkung durch Regeln und Moral! Hier werden sie bei Nietzsche fündig. Zudem gehört die demonstrative Verachtung einer „christlichen Sklavenmoral“ zur Selbstdarstellung als hart und cool, passend zum Körperpanzer.  

Viertens: Das Christentum als Referenz. Das Spannungsverhältnis Nietzsches zum Christentum, in dessen Geist er erzogen worden war, und vor allem sein bekanntes Bonmot „Gott ist tot“ machen ihn in Augen mancher Heavy-Metal-Anhänger zum Advokaten eines provokativen Satanismus. Aus der Perspektive säkularer Europäer ist die Metalszene, vor allem die amerikanische, geradezu besessen vom Thema der Religion, wobei es neben den „Antichristen“ und Satanisten auch Spielarten christlichen Metals und Hardcores gibt („White Metal“ u. ä.). In jedem Fall ist der Referenzrahmen häufig das Christentum, was daran liegt, dass es in der amerikanischen Gesellschaft noch viel prägender und gegenwärtiger ist als in Europa und somit viel mehr Reibungsfläche für rebellische Geister bietet. Dazu bemerkte Jörg Scheller:

Einerseits hielt Heavy Metal die Symbolwelten der christlichen Kirche am Leben, andererseits zeigte er auf, welche Scheinheiligkeit sich mitunter dahinter verbirgt, man denke an Slayer. Heavy Metal hatte dahingehend einen aufklärerischen Impetus, er stand – wissentlich oder unwissentlich – in der Tradition radikaler Religionskritiker wie Diderot oder Nietzsche. Nietzsche war überzeugt, dass das Christentum ein Dekadenzsymptom sei, dass es einen Kult der Schwäche betreibe und Tugenden wie Stolz und Freiheitswillen beschädige. Folglich predigte er das Extrem – und das Extrem ist der Kern von Heavy Metal, das betonen alle Metal-Musiker, unabhängig von ihrer jeweiligen ideologischen Ausrichtung.⁵  

Die Konferenz „Pop! Goes the Tragedy. The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche in Popular Culture“ [„Aus Tragödie wird Pop! Nietzsches ewige Wiederkunft in der Populärkultur“] untersuchte 2015 an der ZHdK Zürich erstmals auf breiter Front das Fortleben von Nietzsches Denken in der Populärkultur. Lukas Germann widmete sich dabei der Resonanz Nietzsches in der norwegischen Black-Metal-Szene.⁶ Das Genre definierte er prägnant:„Black Metal ist ein zivilisiertes, weil in Formen und Regeln der Kunst, des Scheins, des Bildes gehaltenes Spiel mit dem geheimen und verdrängten Wunsch nach dem Zusammenbruch aller Zivilisation.“ Bezogen auf das Subgenre des Black Metal, dessen Name auf ein 1982 erschienenes Album der Band Venom zurückgeht, sprach Lukas German von weltweit mittlerweile mehr als 33.000 Bands. In seiner Untersuchung steht die norwegische Musikszene der frühen 1990er Jahre im Fokus, in der zwei Morde, ein Selbstmord und Dutzende von Kirchenbrandstiftungen für Aufsehen sorgten. Norwegische Black-Metal-Bands wie Mayhem und Emperor nannten Nietzsche als wichtige Inspirationsquelle, die Band Gorgoroth benannte mehrere Alben nach Nietzsches Buchtiteln: „How to philosophize with the Hammer“ [„Wie man mit dem Hammer philosophirt“], „Antichrist“, „Twilight of the Idols“ [„Götzen-Dämmerung“]. Generell waren die Nietzsche-Bezüge in den meisten Fällen eher oberflächlich, stellte Germann fest, und ein wichtiger Aspekt von Nietzsches Philosophie blieb unverstanden: „Die vor allem beim späten Nietzsche zelebrierte Feier des Lebens bleibt dem Black Metal fremd. Und auch musikalisch gehen die meisten Black-Metal-Bands nicht eigentlich nietzscheanische Wege.“ Zwar gab es in der norwegischen Black-Metal-Szene den Impuls, Leben und Kunst zu vereinen, indem ein radikaler Lebensstil gepflegt wurde und die Grenzen der Kunst gewalttätig überschritten wurden. Da die dionysische Kunst über sich hinaus, in die Praxis, ins Leben, dränge, könne man, so Germann, die Exzesse, die im Norwegen der früher 1990er Jahre ihren Anfang nehmen, durchaus als dionysischen Rausch definieren. Der Metal-Szene sei es aber nicht gelungen, „die dämonisch-dionysische Rauschhaftigkeit von Musik und Ästhetik als Öffnung zu verstehen, als abgründiges Meer von Möglichkeiten.“ Stattdessen suchte man neue Grenzen, definierte sich über eine exklusive Identität und Feindschaften, kultivierte die Verachtung anderer. „Die Freude am Bösen, an der Kreativität der Verachtung und Vernichtung erstarrt zur Überzeugung“ – Überzeugungen seien aber, so Nietzsche, „gefährlichere Feinde der Wahrheit, als Lügen“⁷, weil sie zu Engstirnigkeit, Unversöhnlichkeit und Fanatismus führen und das freie Spiel der Gedanken und Argumente beenden.  

Ohne Zweifel ist die wissenschaftliche Nietzsche-Rezeption heute differenzierter geworden und stempelt ihn nicht mehr pauschal als amoralischen Darwinisten und Vordenker des Faschismus ab. Doch in der Breite der Gesellschaft, einschließlich ihrer Subkulturen, ist diese Differenzierung noch nicht angekommen. Hier wirken noch weithin die herkömmlichen düsteren Nietzsche-Assoziationen nach: Ablehnung der Moral, Abwertung der Frau, Verachtung der Kirche, Wille zur Macht. Nietzsche umgibt noch immer eine Aura des Brutalen, Unheimlichen und Rücksichtslosen. Er wird als Pate eines extremen Individualismus und eines grenzwertigen dominanten Freiheitsstrebens aufgerufen. Diese stark vereinfachte und einseitige Interpretation seines Werks führt dazu, dass sich mitunter merkwürdige Menschen als Nietzsche-Fans gerieren – vor allem Männer, deren Verhalten man heute unter dem Begriff „toxische Männlichkeit“ verbuchen würde, im Extremfall sogar solche, die als Gewalttäter und Killer aktiv wurden, wie etwa im Chicagoer Mordfall Leopold & Loeb aus dem Jahre 1924. Nathan Leopold und Richard Loeb, zur Tatzeit 19 bzw. 18 Jahre alt, planten gemeinsam die Entführung eines Menschen mit anschließendem Mord, nachdem sie bereits erfolgreich kleinere Straftaten gemeinsam begangen hatten. Ein achtjähriger Junge wurde ihr Opfer. Die beiden Täter aus wohlhabenden deutsch-jüdischen Familien waren hochbegabt, Leopold las Nietzsche, insbesondere Also sprach Zarathustra, wobei ihn vor allem die Idee des Übermenschen faszinierte. Barbet Schroeders Kriminalthriller Murder by Numbers (2002) mit Ryan Gosling und Michael Pitt in den Hauptrollen griff diese Geschichte wieder auf. Im Film ist Nietzsche die Inspirationsquelle für den hochbegabten Schüler Justin (Michael Pitt), der in der Highschool ein Referat zum Thema Freiheit hält. Dabei äußert er die provokative These: „Freiheit ist Verbrechen, denn wer wirklich frei sein will, handelt radikal egozentrisch, stellt sich selbst über das Wohl der Gemeinschaft.“ Mit seinem Mitschüler Richard (Ryan Gosling) beschließt er, ein perfektes Verbrechen zu begehen, um diesen Freiheitsbegriff in die Praxis umzusetzen. Sie ermorden eine ihnen unbekannte Frau, werden aber am Ende überführt. Die Überzeugung, durch Intelligenz und Willenskraft berechtigt zu sein, sich über Moral und Gesetze stellen zu können, mag auch die realen Highschool-Attentäter von Columbine oder den norwegischen Massenmörder Anders Breivik zu ihren Taten bewegt haben.⁸

Nicht jeder Nietzsche-Leser wird zum Killer, doch besonders anfällig für einen brutalisierten und missbräuchlichen Einsatz von Nietzsches Gedankengut sind ledige junge Männer, die ihren Platz in der Gesellschaft suchen und sich dabei kämpferischer, provokanter Methoden bedienen. Im intellektuell-künstlerischen Kontext sind dies vor allem Männer, die für sich gerne die Aura der Gefährlichkeit in Anspruch nehmen und sich auf dem Feld der Subkultur inszenieren, als Künstler, Schriftsteller oder Musiker. So ist beispielsweise im Black Metal heute die Aura der Gefährlichkeit Teil des ästhetischen Erlebnisses. So lange Nietzsche in diesem Kontext lediglich als Pate einer „Ästhetik des Bösen“ fungiert, ist alles noch im ‚grünen Bereich‘. Schwieriger wird es, wenn das so verherrlichte Böse die Schwelle der Fantasie überschreitet und ins reale Leben, in die Praxis gelangt. Während im Black Metal Nietzsche die Lizenz zum Böse sein zu erteilen scheint, bringt ihn Madonna im Namen der Liebe ins Spiel. 2015 schmückte sie ihr Musikvideo zum Song „Living for Love“ mit einem Nietzsche-Zitat, in dem der Philosoph die Bösartigkeit des Menschen beklagt. Während es rote Rosen auf die Sängerin regnet und Applaus aufbrandet, wird auf Englisch ein Zitat Nietzsches eingeblendet: „Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions he has felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself that was his very heaven.“ Auf Deutsch: „Der Mensch nämlich ist das grausamste Thier. Bei Trauerspielen, Stierkämpfen und Kreuzigungen ist es ihm bisher am wohlsten geworden auf Erden; und als er sich die Hölle erfand, siehe, da war das sein Himmel auf Erden.“⁹

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Fußnoten

1: https://norient.com/stories/war-nietzsche-metalfan (24. 3. 2024).

2: Vgl. https://loudwire.com/songs-inspired-by-german-philosopher-nietzsche/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral (1. 8. 2018).

3: Vgl. https://lebmetal.com/2010/03/metal-and-nietzscheism/ (3. 3. 2010).

4: Vgl. https://andphilosophy.com/2018/12/01/nietzsche-and-slipknot-challenge-you-to-all-out-life/ (1. 12. 2018).

5: https://norient.com/stories/war-nietzsche-metalfan (24. 3. 2024).

6: Lukas Germann: Der Rest ist bloß die Menschheit! Black Metal und Friedrich Nietzsche, Vortrag bei der Konferenz Pop! Goes the Tragedy. The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche in Popular Culture (ZHdK Zürich 23./24. 10. 2015).

7: Menschliches, Allzumenschliches I, 483.

8: Vgl. zu den Attentätern von Columbine: „Ich liebe einfach Hobbes und Nietzsche“ (https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/columbine-massaker-ich-hasse-euch-leute-1354954.html [31. 7. 2006]). Zu Breivik: In seinem Manifest 2083 – Eine europäische Unabhängigkeitserklärung erwähnt er Nietzsche an zehn Stellen (vgl. http://de.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/07/breiviks-mentale-welt [22. 7. 2012]).

9: Also sprach Zarathustra, Der Genesende, 2.

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Nachweis zum Artikelbild

Nietzsche muss Piano. Gemälde von Else Gabriel, Berlin 2019.

Das Pfeifen im Walde, der Schrei nach Liebe

Nietzsches Echo in der Heavy-Metal-Musikszene

Wie kaum ein anderer Philosoph hat Friedrich Nietzsche Spuren in der Populärkultur hinterlassen – weniger im gefälligen Unterhaltungsmainstream, dafür eher in Subkulturen und in künstlerischen Positionen, die als „edgy“ und „dark“ gelten. In dieser „Underworld“ sind Nietzsches Aphorismen, Schlagworte, Parolen und Invektiven weit verbreitet – etwa in den auf gesellschaftliche und ästhetische Provokation fixierten musikalischen Genres von Heavy Metal, Hardcore und Punk. Woran liegt das?