I. Foucault — the thinker of our time

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

III. What comes after postmodernism?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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literature

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

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

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

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

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

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footnotes

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

2: Ibid.

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

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

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

6: Preface, 5.

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

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

9: Why I'm so smart, 8.

10: Ecce homo, Morgenröthe, 2.

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Discourse, Power and Delusion

Michel Foucault's Nietzsche Interpretation Revisited

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

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Part II: Nietzsche's Critique of Schopenhauer

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V. The Fight Against Nihilistic Pessimism

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

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

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

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VI. Will to Life or Will to Power?

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

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

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

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VII. Yes or No?

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

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

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

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VIII. Atheism and Amoralism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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X. Conclusion: War of the Roses and Patricide

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

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

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

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

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Sources

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

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

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

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

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

Ders.: Kleinere Schriften. Frankfurt am Main 2006.

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Source for the Article Image

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

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Footnotes

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

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

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

18: Der Antichrist, 7.

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

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

21: Nr. 38[12].

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

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

24: P. 415 (§57).

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

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

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

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

29: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, 357.

30: Ecce homo, Unzeitgemäße, 2.

31: Schopenhauer, Kleinere Schriften, p. 583.

32: Nr. 10[5].

33: Warum ich so weise bin, 4.

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

35: Jenseits von Gut und Böse, 56.

36: Ecce homo, Vorwort, 4.

37: Ecce homo, Also sprach Zarathustra, 6.

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

The Educator’s Mark

Schopenhauer's Omnipresence in Nietzsche's Philosophy II

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

Part I: From Disciple to Critic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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III. From Educator to Philosophical Opponent

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

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

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IV. Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer

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

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

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Link to part 2.

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

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Sources

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

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

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Source for the Article Image

Photograph by Schopenhauer dated 3/9/1852, link

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Footnotes

1: Rückblick auf meine zwei Leipziger Jahre.

2: Brief v. 11.07.1866; Nr. 511.

3: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 1.

4: Die Geburt der Tragödie, 16.

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

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

7: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 4.

8: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 2.

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

10: Schopenhauer als Erzieher, 8.

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

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

13: Fragment Nr. 26[462].

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

The Educator’s Mark

Schopenhauer's Omnipresence in Nietzsche's Philosophy I

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Photo credit Item image

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

Age-Old Rage

The birth of Modernity out of the Spirit of Resentment

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

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I. Nietzsche, Lagarde, Langbehn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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III. Typology of the scientific outsider

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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sources

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

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

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

Gerhardt, Volker: Friedrich Nietzsche. Munich 1995.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

6: star, cultural pessimism, P. 148.

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

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

9: Ibid., p. 197.

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

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

12: Ibid., p. 244.

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

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

15: Ibid., p. 23.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Splendidly Isolated with a Stiff Upper Lip

Nietzsche and the Tragedy of Academic Outsiderhood

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

I. The “golden loot”

The golden loot. — Many chains have been put on man so that he will forget to act like an animal: and indeed, he has become milder, more spiritual, more joyful, more prudent than all animals are. But now he still suffers from wearing his chains for so long that he lacked pure air and free movement for so long: — but these chains are, I repeat again and again, those serious and meaningful errors of moral, religious, metaphysical ideas. Only when the chain disease has been overcome, the first major goal has been fully achieved: the separation of humans from animals. — We are now in the midst of our work to remove the chains and need the utmost care. Nur the refined man May freedom of mind to be given; to him alone approaches making life easier and anoints out his wounds; he may first say that he is responsible for Happiness Live for the sake of no further goal; and on everyone else's lips his motto would be dangerous: Peace around me and pleasure in everything close to me. — In this motto for individuals, he remembers an old great and moving word, which allen was considered, and that has stood above the entire human race, as a motto and landmark, on which everyone who adorns their banner with it at an early stage — on which Christianity was the basis. Still, it seems Is it not timethat it all People may be like those shepherds who saw the sky illuminated above them and heard that word: “Peace on earth and good pleasure for people in one another.” The time of individuals.¹

With this aphorism, Nietzsche ends the second part of the second volume of Human, all-too-human, which is overwritten with The Wanderer and His Shadow. Looking back, Nietzsche describes this book as the document of a major personal crisis:

Back then — it was 1879 — I resigned my Basel professorship, lived like a shadow in St. Moritz over the summer and the next winter, the sunniest of my life, than Shadows in Naumburg. This was my minimum: “The Wanderer and His Shadow” was created in the meantime. Undoubtedly, I knew shadows back then...²

It is easy to see that a transformation is taking place in the second volume of his first large collection of aphorisms. The first volume of the “Book for Free Spirits”, which was published in 1878, is still entirely in the light of an enlightened and individualistic intellectual libertinage. The first edition is dedicated to the enlightener Voltaire, who had died a hundred years earlier. In the two supplements to this book — Mixed opinions and sayings And just The Wanderer and His Shadow —, which initially appeared as separate books in 1879 and 1880 and were only published as one book in 1886 together with the first volume, it does in fact strike a different, 'darker' and more thoughtful tone. Self-reflectivity is increasing, the style is becoming more paradoxical. Nietzsche increasingly becomes the doubting “hammer” of his later writings.

However, this final aphorism is now remarkably 'light'. In the first section of the aphorism, up to the second indent, he clearly represents the program of enlightenment humanism. Humans should overcome the animal within themselves and become “milder, more spiritual, more joyful, more prudent.” Zarathustra's ideas of “self-overcoming” and “superman” are suggested here, but without the “dark” twist that Nietzsche would later give them.

This is followed, up to the next indent, by the thesis, which could actually be described as Nietzsche's “basic view” and to which he should remain loyal from early work to late work: that in order to realize his very own potential, man must free himself from the “chains” of traditional metaphysics and morality, which have so far oppressed him and allowed him to remain in a state of animality.

This phrase is surprising, as those “errors” justify themselves precisely by creating a break between animals and humans. The biblical story of the fall of sin already tells of how this break in the world came about. Nietzsche diametrically reverses this familiar perspective here — how is he able to justify that?

Until the next indent, however, there is no answer to this obvious question, but a new twist in Nietzsche's argument by citing another of his core theses: that not everyone should be allowed to liberate themselves spiritually equally in their own sense. This life without moral ties should be reserved for “refined people.” His motto is — this is also a typical Nietzsche stylistic device — a variation of the Christmas Annunciation, as it is still read every year in churches on Christmas Eve.

At the end of the aphorism, this is quoted, although again slightly varied. In the classic wording of the Luther Bible, with which Nietzsche was of course very familiar — here in the 1912 version, which largely corresponds to him — the slogan is: “Glory be to God in the highest and peace on earth and to people! “(Luke 2, 14) It is a collective prophecy of the “multitude of heavenly hosts” (Luke 2, 13) to the shepherds as representatives of the common people.

However — and Nietzsche may have known this — the original Luther Bible follows a reading of the original Greek text that is now considered obsolete. The latest version of this translation from 2017 is therefore somewhat different: “Glory be to God in the highest and peace on earth among people of his good will. “This is therefore no longer a promise of mercy and peace to really all people, but only a promise of peace to those who share God's “goodwill.”

If you leaf forward one chapter in the Gospel of Luke, it becomes clear how this restriction could be meant, because it says in the famous hymn of praise to Mary (translated from 2017): God's “mercy lasts for and for those who fear him. He exercises violence with his arm and disperses who are arrogant in their heart's mind. He knocks the powerful off the throne and elevates the lowly. He fills the hungry with goods and lets the rich go out empty-handed.” (Luke 1, 50-53) The New Testament is therefore not necessarily about a shallow 'God loves all people, 'but a revolutionaries Message: God only “loves” people who believe in him and who are not “arrogant.” In particular, the rich and powerful are excluded here, as in countless other places in the book. — From this perspective, Nietzsche's first reversal of blessing sounds very “arrogant”: The free spirit only wants to yourself Live in peace and harmony with things that him surround.

This also raises questions again. Exactly why is it not yet time for this solution? What would have to happen so that it could be set up as an ideal? And how can it be explained that Nietzsche, on the one hand, proclaims a break with all previous ideals, but at the same time puts them into perspective, insofar as he even approves of the utopian goal of Christianity? — The fact that Nietzsche adopts this goal is underlined by the fact that he uses this formula — “Peace on earth and people to please one another! “— completed a postcard which he sent to his student and confidante Adolf Baumgartner on 23.12.1878.³

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II. Peace or Good to each other!

Two estate fragments from the 1880s illustrate that Nietzsche will answer the sensitive questions that this aphorism raises but leaves open by distancing himself from the goal of Christianity more than here. “Peace and good pleasure for people” now appears to him as the slogan of “decadence,” which expresses itself in the inability to resist others, in tolerance, compassion and tolerance. This morality of weakness should now be replaced by an ethic of strength and toughness, which in no way has “peace” and “good pleasure in one another” in mind, except in the sense of the first slogan.⁴

He now aggressively represents amorality:

“Illness makes people better”: this famous statement, which has been encountered throughout the centuries, in the mouths of the wise as well as in the mouths and mouths of the people, makes one think. In view of its validity, one would like to allow oneself to ask: Is there perhaps a causal link between morality and illness at all? The “improvement of man”, on a large scale, for example the undeniable alleviation of the humanization of the European within the last millennium — is it perhaps the result of a long secretly eerie suffering and misjudgment, deprivation, atrophy? Has “the disease” made the European “better”? Or to put it another way: is our morality — our modern tender morality in Europe, with which one might compare the morality of the Chinese — the expression of a physiological Decline?... One does not want to be able to deny that every passage in history where “man” has shown himself in particular splendor and power of the type immediately assumes a sudden, dangerous, eruptive character in which humanity goes bad; and perhaps it has in those cases where it Wants to seem different<er>, simply lacked the courage or subtlety to delve into psychology and extract the general sentence there as well: “The healthier, the stronger, the richer, more fertile, entrepreneurial a person feels, the more “immoral” becomes.” An embarrassing thought! You definitely shouldn't hang on to it! But assuming that you run forward with him for a short, brief moment, how astonished do you look into the future! What would then pay off on earth for Theurer than just what we are demanding with all our might — the humanization, the “improvement,” the growing “civilization” of humans? Nothing would be more expensive than virtue: because in the end, you would have Earth as a hospital: and “Everyone's Nurse” would be the ultimate wisdom. Of course, you would then also have that much-sought after “peace on earth”! But even so little “pleasure in one another”! So little beauty, exuberance, risk! So few “works” for which it was still worthwhile to live on earth! Ah! And absolutely no more “thats”! All big Works and deeds that stood still and were not washed away by the waves of time — were they not all great immoralities in the deepest sense? ... ⁵

The rule now is: either peace or “Pleasing one another.” When people behave peacefully when they are weakened, they cannot experience authentic mutual pleasure.

This looks like an attempt at the aphorism The Wanderer and His Shadow to back up argumentatively, at least retrospectively. Christianity failed to achieve its ideal because it made two adversarial demands. Of course, this not only makes it “not yet” realizable, it is never realizable and not even suitable as an ideal. Only the individual requirement of the individual to come into harmony with himself and to value his immediate environment can be regarded as such. But Nietzsche does not want this to be addressed to everyone, but only to strong natures, who are also worth affirming themselves. The weak should calmly deny themselves and live in discord with themselves and their environment — their nature predestines them to do so anyway.

The original revolutionary meaning of the Christmas Blessing only reinforces Nietzsche's reservations. This is obviously about what Nietzsche said in On the genealogy of morality is described as “slave morality”: The strong should be held down and tamed in order to make general peace possible. But Christianity fails to recognize that this only creates a boring, grey, “nihilistic” world in which there is nothing more to affirm about humans. Instead of transcending the animal in humans, people are transformed into pets.

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III. Un-Christmassy — all-too-Christmassy?

There is certainly something to Nietzsche's thoughts. Everyone knows social contexts in which everyone is terribly nice to each other, but in fact no real interpersonal resonances can arise, precisely because these include conflict and honesty. They often have a dull, stuffy atmosphere, like at a family party. Many probably experience Christmas in exactly the same way, as the epitome of Christian lies and hypocrisy. Let these people love themselves first and come to terms with themselves before they give others their “compassion”!

But the Nietzsche from The Wanderer and His Shadow It's not as easy as the later one. This is not about naturally strong individuals, but apparently those who have been “ennobled” in an educational process and have therefore truly become master of their secret desires and urges; who are “strong” in the sense that no remnant of unsublimated animality has remained in them. For whom, in Freud's sense, where “it” was, has become “I.” Only they could be truly peaceful with others without having to lie to themselves. So they are peaceful with others not because they should, but because they really want to. However, if this ideal is imposed on everyone, even those who are not yet ready for it, it only leads to hypocrisy and inner conflict. You're nice to everyone, but in reality you're full of aggression — for which you then hate yourself.

In this aphorism, however, Nietzsche still considers it possible and even desirable for all people to “refine” themselves in this sense and be at peace with themselves and their environment in such a way that real peace could reign in the world. Only then could people truly value each other. And peacefulness and appreciation would no longer be something that you would have to morally decree, but what would result from this enlightened, authentic consciousness agreed upon with yourself.

In the end, that would be Nietzsche's “happy message” at Christmas time: Respect, compassion, charity and all other ideals of Christianity cannot be dictated or demanded morally; they must arise out of genuine self-affirmation and self-control. True morality must come from within. Christianity deceives people in Nietzsche's account by promising such morality without any effort of its own. All you have to do is get rid of the 'bad people, 'and then everything is good. But peace can only spread around themselves and truly appreciate others, anyone who has found inner peace through their own efforts and who values themselves. — But is that so anti-Christian at all and doesn't Christianity rather remind Christianity of its own core? In any case, it is a very different message than the one you usually hear at Christmas.

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footnotes

1: Human, all-too-human II, The Wanderer and His Shadow 350.

2: Ecce homo, Human, all-too-human 1.

3: Letter number 785.

4: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1888 23 [4].

5: Subsequent fragments 1886 4 [7].

“Peace Surrounds Me”

An Unusual Christmas Message

In our last article before the break at the turn of the year, Paul Stephan explores a Close reading A remarkable aphorism of Nietzsche, in which he expresses himself with the famous Christmas blessing “Glory be to God in height and peace on earth and to people! “discusses. As when unwrapping a gift that has been covered several times, he tries to reveal the different layers of meaning in this text in order to make Nietzsche's exact positioning clearly stand out. The reader may decide for himself whether you end up holding a glowing truth in your hand or the box remains empty. In any case, we wish all our readers with Nietzsche: “Peace on earth and good pleasure for each other! ”

“[...], was it a comedy, that's how he wanted to play along. He was still free. ”

Kafka, The process

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I. Kafkaesque

In Woody Allen's movie Play It Again, Sam From 1972, there is a scene in a museum in which the protagonist Allan somewhat clumsily addresses a woman who is absorbed in looking at a painting. He tries his luck by asking her what the picture means to her. Instead of looking at him, she describes in a sonorous monologue her fascination with the existential pessimism that the painting has for her. In his different kind of fascination, Allan does not address the flood of dark philosophems and simply asks whether the lady happens to have time for a date on Saturday. She replies — apparently her existential pessimism is more serious — that she cannot on Saturdays, she would commit suicide on that day. Allan is not discouraged by this and asks somewhat desperately whether a meeting could then be set up on Friday. — One of the following scenes shows the two naked in an apparently post-coital situation in bed. Shy and nervous, Allan asks how she found sexual intercourse. Her answer: “It was Kafkaesque. ”

In this passage, Allen's film profoundly shows how Franz Kafka's inheritance collapsed into a phrase. In a jargon of absurdity¹ It functions as a kind of marker for the vocabulary of a negative worldview, which, thanks to its automatic fluency, skips over into inappropriate situations in a context-insensitive way. “Kafkaesque” connotes the fundamental absurdity of life. While in Kafka the absurdities of life usually express a gloomy surreal hopelessness, Allen's film points out that existential absurdities may well take a different direction. Sex instead of suicide. The following sections aim to promote this Nietzscheanization of Kafkaesque in a philosophical way. For a poetic approach with a similar thrust, reference is made to the work of Wilhelm Genazinos, which describes the “overall strangeness of life” in humorous detail.

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II. Kafka's Wound

Kafka is one of the key witnesses of modern philosophy, which despairs of modernity. His work is regarded as a collection of evidence for the dark truth of the “managed world” (Adorno). The fact that art must serve as a guarantor of this truth can, however, be regarded as an indication that philosophy alone no longer dares to say what is. But as a volunteer maid of art, thinking only appears at first glance in a new modesty. Philosophy as a queen maker reserves the right to have the last word on what art actually does best. This role of hermeneutical decipherment is also predestined for the development of works of art in modern times under the convention of the unconventional, which descend into ever more cryptic originals. Philosophy becomes a priesthood of aesthetics. Through the detour of art, she regains the consecration of metaphysical truth. Modern art also benefits from this, whose manic enigmatics can now imagine that it is of transcendental origin. A tongue-in-cheek reference to the show of the show ranges from Plato ion up to Sigmar Polkes: “Higher beings ordered: paint the upper right corner black! ”

In addition to Heidegger, it was Adorno in particular who wanted to save philosophy about the interpretive sovereignty of significant works for the truth again. After an attempt to valorize itself as an understanding, not just positivistic, intellectual science, as a form of interpretation of art, becomes new. In addition to Beckett and Schönberg, for Adorno Kafka, from whose work he wants to derive legitimacy, it is the modern world In bulk to defame it as the demiurgic hell of the “existing”.

The tragedy of Adorno's philosophy is that her stupendous sensibility is manipulated by her dogma of world pain. Her negation of abstract worldviews does not protect her from once again propagating a deeply resigning worldview, which is transmitted indirectly through repeated patterns of interpretation that interpret what is as a great misfortune overall. Adorno thus instrumentalizes Kafka as a confirmation of his gnostic² prejudices. He thus disguises himself with an enriching look at Kafka's work. And this despite the fact that he made it more accessible with sentences like this, which testify to his great aesthetic sensitivity: “Every sentence speaks: interpret me, and no one wants to tolerate it. ”³

With a socio-psychological approach, Kafka's wound could be understood in a more metaphysical way. It quickly becomes clear: Kafka had Daddy issues, eExemplically readable in The verdict in the form of Georg Bendemann or also in Letter to Father. The conflict is easy to understand: Kafka's father came from very simple backgrounds, the son of a butcher from a village of 100 people, who then sought his fortune in Prague and founded a gallantry shop there with the help of his wealthy wife. As a successful entrepreneur who wanted to and did it, he had no sympathy for a son who wanted to live for literature alone.

Kafka's father problems become philosophically demanding when interpreted in terms of cultural history. The figure of the father then figures as an educational authority that continues the act of birth in extended dimensions. The father as the complementary mother introduces society and cultural spaces. His authority thus appears not only as a diffuse form of imperious power, but as a superior pattern of competence. Seen in this light, Kafka's work is not indicative of the world of bureaucratic forms of rule, but is also a sign of the abysmal effects that occur when the connection between generations is no longer conveyed through traditions that can achieve sufficient plausibility for descendants. Kafka's diary is a hodgepodge of evidence of a placeless existence:

Without ancestors, without marriage, without descendants, with wild lust for ancestry, marriage and descendants. Everyone reaches out to me: ancestors, marriage and descendants, but too distant for me.⁴

I'm more insecure than I've ever been, I just feel the violence of life. And I'm pointlessly empty. I'm really a lost sheep at night and in the mountains, or like a sheep running after that sheep. Being so lost [...].⁵

I'm completely empty and pointless, the passing electric has more vivid meaning.⁶

When authorities, as plausible patterns that can be imitated and varied, are only experienced as alienating powers, the learning of a halfway extensive coming to the world fails: “My life is hesitation before birth. ”⁷

Kafka's work thus shows the first phase of this termination of a cultural tradition⁸ as a result of a generational process that was characterized by two world wars and resulted in the prevailing mood of universal helplessness.

In the second phase, the Joseph Ks are mobilized by more aggressive reddish brown heresies, which can name the alleged culprits for his plight and show him radical ways out. Dostoyevsky's scariest novel The demons (1872) narrated this basic tension, which was to become so dominant for the 20th century, in a prophetic deep psychology. It is exactly the preform of this tension that the monkey Rotpeter in Kafka's story A report for an academy describes in the following words: “No, I did not want freedom. Just one way out; right, left, wherever; [...] . ”⁹

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III. Nietzsche's possible notes on Kafka

There are no explicit records of Nietzsche in Kafka. However, it is said from Max Brod, Kafka's childhood friend, that his first acquaintance with Kafka took place in an intensive discussion, during which Kafka criticized Brod's advocacy for Schopenhauer with a reference to Nietzsche.¹⁰

Nevertheless, Nietzsche allows us to deepen a socio-psychological view of Kafka's work by taking a step towards a metaphysical perspective. It does not describe Kafka's literature as supposed theology in the sense of modern Kabbalah¹¹ read, but as an excavation site for philosophical archaeology that clarifies the trace effect of cultural concepts. With this view, two paradigms of suffering can be distinguished in Kafka's dark narrative universe. His two major works of novels may represent this. This is how thematized The castle Implies the platonic remoteness of being, which starts from a melancholy distance between the earthly world and the eternal good. Despite all traces and attempts at rapprochement, the best remains inaccessible. The sirens are silent. The novel The process In turn, you could read as an update of the Augustinian doctrine of hereditary sins — which moralizes Plato's distance from being — in the guise of modern bureaucracy. An inexplicable sense of guilt determines life like an anonymous force. All efforts in a bureaucratic process to obtain information about the character of this guilt, clarification and justice ultimately fail. The Kafka wound is therefore not an indication of the “managed world” (Adorno), but the trail of powerful metaphysical traditions that massively shape basic understandings and moods in the modern age.

If you follow this reading, the unnecessarily masochistic of Platonic Augustine existentialism in Kafka — presumably conveyed primarily by Kierkegaard — presumably conveyed primarily by Kierkegaard — is revealed in a variety of details. For example, when the starving hunger artist is juxtaposed with the “joy of life” in the form of a panther — “that noble body equipped with everything necessary to just about tearing it apart”: “He lacks nothing. ”¹²

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IV. Beautiful mystery

Kafka's works, however, are more than mere footnotes to Plato or Augustine. My suggestion is to read his literary work as an implicit existentialism that highlights the contingency of being in a modern way.

For a positive connotation of existential contingency, Nietzsche has found the liberating perspective of understanding life as an “experiment of the discerning.” However, this requires that you learn to say goodbye to the central ontological paradigms of Western culture. There is no being as a central center of origin that radiates to the margins and there is no justifying Advent¹³, who will one day be in a better world. Not a philosophy of history, not an entirely different one. The “non-identical” (Adorno) and the feeling of “abandonment” (Heidegger) are chimeras that arise from the fact that the contingent is unnecessarily resubstancialized into an emergency, against which inaccurate aggression is then released again. Kafka's poetic project could be combined with Nietzsche's philosophical project in the idea of an Apollonian transfiguration:

Could we ourselves an incarnation of dissonance think — and what else is a human being? — so this would dissonanceIn order to be able to live, you need a wonderful illusion that covers a veil of beauty over your own being.¹⁴

Kafka's Apollinism, however, is latent second-level Apollinism. His prose shows ways of making a minimal residual effort to the unlivable dissonance with the world through its portrayal as an unlivable dissonance. The explication of hermeneutical perspectivism is central to this. In Kafka's texts, the puzzle world is objectified through failed objectifications of the protagonists. Often, entire systems of understanding are continued, their autopoietic¹⁵ Dynamics contrast with the situation they are responding to. There is no confirmation. The whole thing is the strange thing that makes reflection fail: “Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” (Beckett) What is more bizarre than Gregor Samsa, who mutates into a “tremendous bug” but is primarily concerned about the inconvenience that his absence from employment causes? In this way, Kafka's texts look like legends that do not explain the inexplicable with the gesture of explanation. Indirectly, the uncanny is thus transformed into something strange. A world that is too incomprehensible becomes more understandable by understanding its understanding as remaining incomprehensible. Each sentence speaks from an ordinary point of view, but everything remains unusual.

This not only continues the eternal conversation with and about the overall puzzling nature of the world, but also makes it possible, because its questionability is now more prominent due to the inadequacy of understanding. In these attempts to implicitly transform the disharmonious into the enigmatic, Kafka's works are, from a cultural functionalist point of view, representations of provisional attempts to merge horizons. Their irritations harmonize because they illustrate an understanding that becomes understandable when not understood. Demonstrated insanity creates an irony to make sense, but this must be the case. Kafka's prose is an exculpatory propaedeutic for the dissonance that we are. It transfigured the glorification. Contingency is felt in the ambivalence of an underlying mood of “beautiful stranger” (Eichendorff).

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V. The tired wound

Kafka's enigmatic objectifications of the enigmatic also have cultural-philosophical significance for Nietzsche readers. In an in-depth way, they explore the idea of being doomed to transfiguration. In addition, they show traces of what it means to no longer be obscured by God's shadows. It is not Kafka's wound, but the mysterious nature of Kafka that stimulates awareness of the attractive mystery of life called for by Nietzsche in the medium of philosophy, a little too cocky and slogans. Explication of the enigmatic stimulates mental vitality. Something interesting can now be found in everything. The futility of understanding is converted into a license to poetize. Through Kafka's art, the enigmatic character of the world becomes clearer as an opportunity for plural participation in the expression of hermeneutical diversity. Freedom can be when understanding becomes a game through failure. Especially without a king's message, the individualized couriers of the modern age are no longer miserably senseless at the mercy of their talk of reports. It is not an oath of service that obliges them to live, but an increased availability for the outrageous events tempts them to tell an encouraging story of the eternal novel World and a new engagement on their stages.

This transformation of the uncanny life process into an unforeseeably interesting mystery has the effect of cultural therapy peripety¹⁶. Kafka narratively shows what Nietzsche philosophizes about. In the midst of the fictionalization of permanent self-charges, which are based on an incomprehensible sense of guilt (cf. The process) and paranoid uncertainty (cf. The building) and the latent idea of a depressing, irrevocable distance to be fulfilled (cf. The castle), there are unKafkaesque passages here and there in Kafka that suggest emancipatory changes in the Platonic Augustine powers. The self-feeling of being a nobody without authority from the very top is released from the urge for redemption through grace and recognition, not to mention from the heroic desire to win and revolutions. Kafkaesque could become the contingency of existence for an honest “will to serve life” (Thomas Mann), to which the absurd was conveyed as a nice arbitrariness and possible beginnings of victories over banality. Nothing must, everything can. Angelus Silesius's well-known slogan would have to be reversed: Man, become irrelevant. An idea of a cocky contingency that honors chance as a source of opportunity is conveyed, for example The trip to the mountains:

“I don't know,” I shouted without a sound, “I don't know. If no one comes, then no one comes. I've done no harm to anyone, no one has done anything bad to me, but no one wants to help me. No one at all. But that's not the way it is. Except that no one helps me — otherwise no one would be pretty. I would really like — why not — to go on a trip with a company of no one. Into the mountains, of course, where else? ”¹⁷

Also for the paranoid mole in Kafkas The building Are there phases in which he lucidly distances himself from his incessant “defense preparations”: “Until, gradually, with complete awakening, disillusionment comes, I barely understand the haste, deeply inhale the peace of my home that I have disturbed myself, [...] . ”¹⁸

Kafka evaluates Kafka most clearly in the parable prometheus The values of the West. Prometheus, an ancient Christ on the cross, experiences a resurrection through the healing power of time, causing “the whole tragic Prometheia of all discerning people”¹⁹ Like a sandcastle on the seashore, disappears in the waves. No wound distracts from the puzzle of mere existence anymore:

The legend tries to clarify the inexplicable; [...] Four legends report about Prometheus. After the first, because he had betrayed the gods to humans, he was forged into the Caucasus and the gods sent eagles that ate from his ever-growing liver. [...] After the fourth, people became tired of what had become baseless. The gods got tired, the eagles. The wound closed tired. What remained was the inexplicable rocky mountains.²⁰

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sources

Adorno, Theodore W.: Notes about Kafka. In: Collected works 10/1: Cultural Criticism and Society. prisms. Without a mission statement, Frankfurt am Main 1977.

Kafka, Franz: narratives. Stuttgart 1994.

Ders. : Diaries. 1910-1923. Stuttgart 1967.

Oschmann, Dirk: Skeptical anthropology. Kafka and Nietzsche. In: Thorsten Valk (ed.): Friedrich Nietzsche and the literature of classical modernism. Berlin 2009, pp. 129—146.

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footnotes

1: Analogous to the “jargon of authenticity” that Adorno emphasized in Heidegger and his epigones.

2: Editor's note: “Gnosis” means the conviction that the world in which we live is not the creation of God, but of a subordinate, vicious “demiurge.”

3: Adorno, Kafka notes, P. 255.

4: Kafka, diaries, p. 402 (January 21, 1922).

5: Ibid., p. 236 (November 19, 1913).

6: Ibid. (November 20, 1913).

7: Ibid. p. 404 (January 24, 1922).

8: Editor's note: The implantation of the early form of the embryo resulting from the fertilized egg into the lining of the uterus.

9: Kafka, narratives, P. 202.

10: Cf. Oshman, Skeptical anthropology. Kafka and Nietzsche, P. 129.

11: Editor's note: Mystical tradition of Judaism.

12: Kafka, narratives, P. 235.

13: Editor's note: In addition to the first advent of Christ, the term “Advent” describes his return.

14: The birth of tragedy, Abs. 25.

15: Editor's note: “Autopoiesis” describes the process of self-creation and maintenance of a system.

16: Editor's note: In literary theory, the turning point of an action.

17: Kafka, narratives, P. 22.

18: Ibid., p. 468.

19: The happy science, Aph 300.

20: Kafka, narratives, P. 373.

Riveting Strangeness

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Remarks on Kafka's Work

Franz Kafka died 100 years ago. The following text is an attempt to update his work with a socio-psychological perspective inspired by Nietzsche. His thesis: Kafka narratingly shows what Nietzsche philosophizes about. Michael Meyer-Albert wants to promote the logic of a non-naive world enlightenment in the fictions of one of the most important authors of modern times: affirmation of life instead of suicide.

Editorial note: We have explained some difficult technical terms in the footnotes.

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I. Kafka, “the greatest theorist of bureaucracy”

Kafka sympathized with the Socialists. Nietzsche dreamed of the reign of political genius, which he missed in his contemporary politics, so that there are many state-critical places in his work, especially in Zarathustra. It was precisely this book that Kafka appreciated, about which Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in their monumental work A thousand plateaus 1980 write: “Kafka is the bureaucracy's greatest theorist [...] . ”¹ This is particularly evident in his two novels The process and The castle.

But for Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka is no critic of bureaucracy. Rather, they note in 1975 in their book about Kafka: “What makes Kafka so dangerous is precisely the power of his non-criticism.” (p. 84)

Their joint work has a project character. It starts in 1972 with the Anti-Oedipus ends 1991 with What is philosophy?, is in between A thousand plateaus — and the important book about Kafka: For a little literature. Kafka also plays an important role here in general, as does Nietzsche. They combine both as challengers of the modern state.

Like Nietzsche, they are sharp critics of the state and, like Kafka, they do not simply want to spell this out conceptually, but to present it in the way they write themselves; especially the A thousand plateaus have something Kafkaesque, describe something extremely bizarre, namely the rule of the state, in a bizarre way. At the beginning of Kafkas The trial If the main character K. is arrested but does not know why, K. loses his grip on the ground as a result, he no longer determines himself, and is thus deterritorialized. Every person in the modern state is faced with a power that dominates him; he therefore does not belong to himself. In castle It says: “The senseless appeals to the head, to the secretaries, lawyers, scribes began, usually he was not received, and if he was received by chance [...] [,] he was rejected extremely quickly and never received again.” (p. 239)

You can come up with explanations for this and come to terms with them. But what happens to people cannot be explained with such explanations, whether lawyers explain the law to them or politicians describe their actions or sociologists portray society. It is not self-evident that people take the state for granted. How does one state representative say to the other about K.: “[...], he admits that he does not know the law and at the same time claims to be innocent. ”²

On the other hand, political and social powers force people to function in a certain way, which gives them support in a certain sense, so that life continues as usual. K. comes in trial They do not go to jail, but are forced back to work in the bank and thus reterritorialized.

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II. “Make a war machine out of thinking”

Kafka thus demonstrates the absurdity of life in the modern state, to which he sees himself at the mercy of; that you cannot even bring up the critical concept that you do not understand in this way. You just have to present it soberly — Kafkaesque — which is ultimately much more revealing of the law. As explained in trial a priest: “[M] an doesn't have to believe everything to be true, you just have to think it's necessary.” (p. 160)

Nietzsche sees this in a similar way to Kafka: “It is better to know nothing than half know many things! It is better to be a fool on your own than to be a sage at someone else's will! ”³ Do not adopt the wisdom of experts, who use scientific stories to make the absurdities of modern statehood forgotten, but rather make various rhymes with the absurd themselves.

In contrast to the prevailing bureaucratic thinking, there is only one thing left for Deleuze & Guattari, namely “Make a war machine out of thinking, that is a peculiar company whose exact procedures can be studied with Nietzsche [...] . ”⁴ Because: “But the worst thing is the small thoughts. Truly better done bad than thought small! ”⁵ Nietzsche is a skeptic of modern sciences who at most interpret nature differently but cannot explain it, because explanation as such is only an illusion in that you replace an effect with something else, the cause, i.e. simply one thing with another, no matter how hard you try to find something that connects the two.

Nietzsche questions the supposed certainties and thus shakes political and social obligations. Deleuze & Guattari describe this as a war machine, which they also notice in Kafka: “Kafka deliberately destroys all metaphors, all symbolisms, every meaning and every designation.”⁶, so that the meanings that every state regularly enforces in order to be able to guide the thinking of its subjects. How does Nietzsche write in abatement: “Most people sometimes feel that they are living in a web of illusions. But few realize how far these illusions go. ”⁷

The scenario in Kafka's stories and novels shows the absurdity of bureaucratically controlled reality. What a crime is determined by law, for example still homosexuality or abortion in many countries, which even in Germany only remains exempt from punishment under certain conditions — exactly the absurd situation in trial: “Where was the judge he had never seen? Where was the high court he had never reached? “(p. 165) And most people recognize that, whether as fair or as positive legislation.

The execution machine in the Penal Colony Write the verdict into the victim's skin with needles, which the victim begins to recognize on his skin as words after hours: “Sense opens to the dumbest. It starts around the eyes. It spreads from here. [...] Nothing else happens, the man just starts deciphering the writing, he sharpens his mouth as if he were listening. [...] But our man deciphers them with his wounds.” (p. 108) Nietzsche On the genealogy of morality provides the template: “You burn something so that it stays in the memory: only what doesn't stop hurting stays in the memory [...] . ”⁸ That is when morality and scientific knowledge are the result of violence.

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III. Nietzsche: “There is no such general thing! ”

Scientific knowledge is based on the fact that it represents the world linguistically adequately, similar to how a picture shows a state of affairs, with the assumption that an image does not alienate the facts or possibly make sense of it in the first place. Deleuze & Guattari disagree: “Thinking is like a vampire, it has no image to make a model or a copy of it. ”⁹ The world is not easy to describe linguistically. As is well known, vampires have no reflection. Whether with Kafka or Nietzsche, language has the ontological status of a phantom: It says what is; but in doing so it does not say what is, but only ever what should be linguistic. It always turns what is into something different, something linguistic.

For Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka himself has a vampiric character. They note: “He wakes through the nights and locks himself in his office coffin during the day [...]. Kafka-Dracula has his escape line in his room, on his bed [...] . ”¹⁰ The opening scene from The process reflects Kafka's life situation of gaining free time to write through contract work. This is how life takes place at night, but the day is a grave.

The state determines the worldview of its subjects. So Zarathustra spoke: So “[...] the state is a hypocrite; [...] it likes to talk with smoke and roar — that it makes you believe [...] it speaks from the belly of things.^“11 In this way, the state pretends to know how things are, always and even more so today. And Zarathustra continues: “For he certainly wants to be the most important animal on earth, the state; and people believe him too.” (ibid.) Kafka doesn't believe him, certainly not that the state speaks “from the gut of things.” Rather, he speaks the language of bureaucracy.

Deleuze & Guattari spell out what Nietzsche suggests aphoristically:

It may be that, whether spiritual or secular, tyrannical or democratic, capitalist or socialist, it There has only ever been one state, the hypocrite state, who talks with smoke and roars. Nietzsche explains how he [...] does it: by virtue of an unprecedented terror, in contrast, the old system of cruelty, the primitive forms of training and education were child's play. [...] In the end, the earth becomes a madhouse.¹²

At the turn of 1887/88, Nietzsche describes how the state succeeds without the subjects noticing it: The state is the

Organized immorality [...]/How is it achieved that he a large quantity Do things to which the individual Would never understand each other? /— by dividing responsibility — command and execution/— by Interim the virtues of obedience, duty, patriotism and princely love [...]/The Artifices, to enable actions, measures, affects which, measured individually, are no longer “permitted” — are no longer “tasty” either [...].¹³

Since the state shares the functions of leading and executing, the executors no longer have any responsibility for what they do and commit terrible acts for which they could never be responsible for themselves. In trial It says: “Being bound even to the receipt of the law through one's service is incomparably more than living freely in the world. The man comes to the law first, the doorkeeper is already there.” (p. 160)

Kafka shows how it is possible that people do not notice this. This is how Deleuze & Guattari write:

The famous lyrics in trial (plus the stories In the penal colony, During the construction of the Great Wall of China etc.) present the law as a pure empty form, without any content and without any discernible subject matter: It only appears as a verdict, and this only becomes apparent in a penalty.¹⁴

The law only affects people through its effects. In doing so, the state claims to represent the common good. How does Nietzsche comment: “'The good of the general requires the dedication of the individual. '. But lo and behold, it giveth No such general thing! ” ¹⁵

In any case, there are no longer any substantive provisions of the general interest or the general public. Universalism can only be defined formally. Deleuze & Guattari write about this: “According to Kant [...], the law no longer originates from a pre-existing good that gives it content, but it is only pure form that determines the good as such: What the law proclaims is good, and in the same formal conditions under which it proclaims itself. ”¹⁶ Kant's legal principle is based on the general validity of laws, which is only due to their form and not to their content: Laws must apply generally. What they say in terms of content does not make them laws. In fact, you have to obey them because they are valid, which is based on force, not because they are right or just.

What Nietzsche writes about this is no longer surprising: “State is the coldest of all cold monsters. It also lies coldly; and this lie creeps out of its mouth: “I am the state, I am the people. '”¹⁷ In doing so, the state claims to represent the general good. The state determines what the people are. In doing so, he claims that the people are not a construct created and determined by him, but are natural.

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IV. “Substitution of love by a love letter”

But its mechanical engineering is responsible for state power. The bureaucracy works like a machine to which people are connected. Deleuze & Guattari write in 1975: “What makes you afraid (or happy) about Kafka is [...] the American technocracy machine and the Soviet bureaucracy machine and the fascist total machinery. ”¹⁸ The state and the machines on which it relies pose a threat to humans. In addition to bureaucracy, the focus is on law, which does not protect people but threatens them. In Anti-Oedipus It says: “No one has shown more impressively than Kafka that the law has nothing of an immanent, natural-harmonious totality, that it acts rather as an abolished formal unit, [...].” (p. 255) The rule of law also makes a Kafkaesque impression.

In fact, the individual can only withdraw from this. Nietzsche has already had a similar view: “Goes Yours Paths! And let people and peoples go their own way! — dark paths truly, on which even One Hope no longer glows! ”¹⁹ Nietzsche urges people not to participate in politics, not least because their paths only appear Kafkaesque. Deleuze & Guattari comment on this:

The established powers have occupied the earth and created popular organizations. The mass media and major popular organizations such as parties or trade unions are reproductive machines [...]. The established powers have driven us into an atomic, cosmic and galactic battle at the same time. Many artists have been aware of this situation for a long time, sometimes even before it was really there (for example Nietzsche).²⁰

In fact, Nietzsche predicts the battle for Earth rule in the coming century. And I already know what that amounts to Zarathustra: “State where the slow suicide of all — 'life. ' ” ²¹ The quick suicide takes place on the battlefields, the slow one in the office or in the family. Kafka is both attracted and repelled by women; because he is afraid of the family, marriage is the law after all, a contract that is supposed to be the basis of all love relationships in the 19th century and yet kills pleasure.

This is how Kafka flees from the institution of marriage. Deleuze & Guattari remark: “Substitution of love with a love letter? Deterritorialization of love. Substitution of the dreaded marriage contract through a Devil's Pact. ”²² Not to marry, rather to write, frees love from the shackles of the family and thus also from the compulsory state organization that involves people into the family. Why is Gregory's sister crying in The Metamorphosis? “Because he didn't get up and let the authorized signatory in, because he was in danger of losing his post and because then the boss would pursue his parents again with the old demands? ”²³

In The verdict (1913) the son obeys and commits suicide at the father's behest. In Kafka's works, the family appears as a place of submission, sacrifice, and suffering. How can you escape it? By no longer writing in a way that is socially accepted, but in such a way that the connections are difficult to understand because they are designed as intricately and absurdly as reality presents itself to a cool eye. that rhizome can be understood as a maze of linguistic signs, so that you are not understood but involves someone in a chaotic fabric of text: Kafka's lover, Kafka's reader, Kafka's enemies, namely bureaucrats and scientists. Deleuze & Guattari write: “The letters are a rhizome, a network, a spider web. [...], and its source of strength lies far away in what his letters deliver to him. He only fears two things: the cross of the family and the garlic of marriage. ”²⁴ The introduction to A thousand plateaus Has the title rhizome, a text that was also published separately.

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V. Kafka: “The court doesn't want anything from you”

Auch Zarathustra propagates people outside the state and thus also beyond the family, in which he is only ever a serving cog in the wheel that can be replaced. In The Metamorphosis It turns out that the parents are not as dependent on the son as they led him to motivate him to work hard. The superman does not arise in the state and not in the family. Nietzsche proclaims:

Where the state ends, that is where the human being begins, who is not superfluous: that is where the song of the necessary begins, the unique and irreplaceable way. Where the state ceasing“Look at me then, my brothers! Don't you see him, the rainbow and the bridges of Superman?²⁵

In the community, even if it is only that of concert-goers, people are only neighbors, not unique and not irreplaceable, but one among many.

How do you get to where you are human? Through an experimental philosophy, like that of Nietzsche, and by transforming yourself with Kafka, i.e. becoming an animal. Being a person or being a subject is not beneficial. Deleuze & Guattari write:

We just think that Kafka experiments Logs that it only Experiences reportedwithout interpreting them, without exploring their meaning [...]. A person who writes is never “just a writer”: he is a political person, and he is a machine person, and he is an experimental person (who stops being human in order to become an ape, or a beetle, dog, mouse, any animal [...]).²⁶

Gregor evades family and work by turning himself into a beetle. He makes of himself something different from what the state requires of him. He exceeds himself by spreading chaos, as Nietzsche demands:

Woe! The time is coming when man no longer throws the arrow of his longing beyond the person and has forgotten the tendon of his bow how to whizz! I tell you: You still have to have chaos in yourself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.²⁷

Kafka still has chaos in that he is not a critic of the state, but simply a reporter who soberly states how he affects people, what thoughts K. has in trial or Gregor in the Metamorphosis does. For Deleuze & Guattari, transformation, becoming an animal is an escape from social conditions, a political act when politics only has the purpose of asserting the interests of the state, but when it has no meaning for humans. Deleuze & Guattari see Kafka's writings as a political answer: “For Kafka, the essential thing about animals is the way out, the escape line, even without moving from the spot, even if you remain in a cage. Not freedom, but a way out. Not an attack, but a living escape line. ”²⁸

Nietzsche anticipated this situation: “Oh my brothers, is now Not everything in Rivers? Didn't all railings and walkways fall into the water? who held Still thinking of “good” and “bad”? ”²⁹ There are no longer any supreme ethical values, only those enacted by the state and the law, creating a situation for people from which they can only flee, and that by turning into animals, because people under the direction of the state are not people who would still be essential with Nietzsche. They are irrelevant, so you have to be different from them.

Becoming an animal is an ideal means of escape. Deleuze & Guattari write:

Becoming an animal is a motionless migration on the spot, which can only be experienced and understood in intensity [...]. There is nothing metaphorical about becoming an animal. It is not symbolism or allegory.³⁰

In this respect, it has neither a bureaucratic nor a scientific truth. No, there has never been anything like that! Or Kafka describes what is the case every day when people either get sick or go crazy, as Deleuze & Guattari did in their project Capitalism and Schizophrenia Show off. Going crazy appears as a similar escape line as becoming an animal.

It was the time when the second women's movement picked up steam. Instead of becoming an animal, there is the option of becoming a woman, which for Kafka in The castle develops a different perspective. Deleuze & Guattari write:

All together testify in their desire — in that which they themselves fulfill and in that which they awaken in others — the deep identity of justice, desire, and young woman or girl. The young girl is like the court: It is unprincipled, pure coincidence. “It picks you up when you come and it releases you when you leave”^[31]. In the village under the castle, the saying goes: “Official decisions are as shy as young girls.”³²

The judiciary is as unpredictable as capricious young women who notoriously evade their admirers and constantly cause them difficulties.

But Deleuze & Guattari recognize this as an escape line for men, becoming women, even during the time of the bourgeois women's movement. They attest to the most masculine writers such as D. H. Lawrence or Henry Miller just such an inclination. Politics is then no longer party politics, not even citizen protest, but lines of escape from such organizations and transformation to create confusion: become a woman! Or does that mean becoming human when, from a feminist perspective, humanity is embodied by women rather than by men? Beyond criticism of patriarchy, the fact that women give birth to children speaks for this. If women are more lovable than men, should the latter therefore emulate the former? Would that transform men?

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sources

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari: Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia Vol. 1 (1972). Frankfurt am Main 1979.

This. : Kafka. For a little literature (1975). Frankfurt am Main 2019.

This. : Capitalism and Schizophrenia. A thousand plateaus (1980). Berlin 1992.

Kafka, Franz: The castle (1926). Berlin 2010.

Ders. : The process (1925). Frankfurt am Main 1960.

Ders. : The Metamorphosis (1915). All stories, Frankfurt am Main 1970.

Ders. : In the penal colony (1919). In: All stories. Frankfurt am Main 1970.

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footnotes

1: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 291.

2: Kafka, The process, P. 11.

3: So Zarathustra spoke, The leech.

4: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus. P. 518.

5: So Zarathustra spoke, From the compassionate.

6: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 32.

7: Subsequent fragments 1870 5 [33].

8: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph II, 3.

9: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 519.

10: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 42.

11: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the big events.

12: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus, P. 247.

13: Subsequent fragments 1887 11 [407].

14: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 60.

15: Subsequent fragments 1887 11 [99].

16: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 60.

17: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

18: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 18.

19: So Zarathustra spoke, Boards, 21.

20: Deleuze & Guattari, A thousand plateaus. P. 471.

21: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

22: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 41.

23: Kafka, The Metamorphosis, P. 62.

24: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 42.

25: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

26: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 12.

27: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

28: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 49.

29: So Zarathustra spoke, Boards, 8.

30: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka. P. 50.

31: Kafka, The process, P. 161.

32: Deleuze & Guattari, Kafka, P. 88.

Fleeing the State: Kafka and Nietzsche’s Human

Or: Becoming-woman after Deleuze & Guattari

Kafka and Nietzsche are united by their confrontation with the state and bureaucracy. Deleuze & Guattari, whose works are based on both, develop an apolitical response to the fatal political situation, namely transformations after Kafka, an expansion of themselves to Nietzsche, which can be understood as escape lines from a patronizing society.