Synopsis

Nietzsche placed himself on political issues in an extremely diverse and contradictory way. It is therefore no wonder that his thinking was subsequently adopted by a wide variety of political factions, from anarchists to Nazis. This has changed little to date, as two recent publications underline: Nietzsche — the contemporary by Julien Rochedy (2020/2022) and Praise for identity politics by Karsten Schubert (2024). While the former Front National politician and journalist Rochedy sees in Nietzsche a politically incorrect critic of left-wing identity politics and a thought leader of the right, the declared “left-wing Nietzschean” Schubert sees him precisely as an inspirer of a left. Remarkably, both are united by their strong reference to late Nietzsche and his power-theory analysis of the dualism of “master” and “slave morality” in the The genealogy of morality, from which, however, draw completely different consequences: Rochedy pleads for a new men's morality, Schubert reveals the criticism of slave morality.

Based on his own study Left-Nietzscheanism. An introduction (2020), in which he himself argues for left-wing Nietzscheanism, Paul Stephan compares these two approaches and highlights their respective weaknesses. Despite all efforts, Rochedy fails to sufficiently distance himself from historical fascism and the Conservative Revolution as its intellectual vanguard; he remains completely stuck in a particularist position. Schubert's alternative proposal of “particularist universalism,” however, suffers from the fact that he is unable to present a truly radical alternative to right-wing particularism. It remains in the same logic of identity-political cultural struggles, the simulation of politics as a spectacle of symbols, that afflicts our present day. Contemporary right and left Nietzscheanism is proving unable to present a radical alternative to existing global capitalism and even to ask the essential questions of humanity's future. They thus fall short of the level of Nietzsche's “big politics” on the “guideline of the body.” Political realism today means feeling, acting and thinking utopian and not participating in the “eternal return” of “master” and “slave morality.”

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Full article

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I. Nietzsche between the chairs of political modernity

As is well known, Nietzsche attempts in his writings to adopt an unpolitical, yes, anti-political position. Regardless of whether they are conservatives, socialists, feminists, liberals, nationalists, anti-Semites... they all get their fat off equally and become victims of “modern ideas.”¹ branded. However, this does not prevent him from repeatedly making positive proposals to solve the pressing political questions of his time or at least from outlining approaches to political utopias, which, however, remain vague and therefore ambiguous in their political content: from “superman” to wild fantasies of new social hierarchies, “a new slavery.”², up to the transfiguration of the Polish noble republic of the early modern period into an ideal anarchic state.³ Paradoxically, Nietzsche thus becomes highly compatible with almost all political ideologies of modernity: Because he distances himself equally from everyone, everyone projects their own ideas into him. You have to think of a coveted — or rather: desiring — woman; or in the words Nietzsche puts in the mouth of the feminine figure of “life”: “[I] her men always present us with their own virtues — oh, you virtues! ”⁴ Nietzsche as a seducer.

In recent times, the broad debate has been dominated by a relatively “moderate” image of Nietzsche as an individualist and critic of all ideologies — which, however, once again adapts him very much to the current post-modern zeitgeist, which the “great stories” Jean-François Lyotard spoke of as early as 1979,⁵ declared abolished and prefers to stick to pragmatic realpolitik in the name of values that are as non-binding as possible. Nietzsche as a “tame and civilized animal, [...] Hausthier”⁶ of the left-liberal mainstream. The “outdated” of yesteryear became the contemporary of today.

On the other hand, it is more exciting — and possibly: closer to Nietzsche's own intentions — to target Nietzsche for radical political projects that are directed precisely against this mainstream. How plausible is that? What potential does Nietzsche's writings have in this regard? And does Nietzsche lead us more to the right or to the left in this regard?

I myself have a two-volume book with the humble title in 2020 Left-Nietzscheanism. An introduction publishes that seeks to answer exactly such questions on the basis of an examination of Nietzsche's own writings (volume 1) and his history of influence, right and left (volume 2). There I tend to hold back with an unequivocal position of Nietzsche, but refer to the potential that he could have for left-wing theory and practice of the present day, for example in his plea for heroic individualism, in his accentuation of man's corporeality and dependence on nature, in his critique of resentful, small-minded left-wing in the form of “slave morality,” in his encouragement of departure and utopian thinking (keyword: “superman”), in his sharp diagnosis of modern nihilism culture, in its appreciation of authentic passion and carefree creativity. And much more. For me, “left-wing Nietzscheanism” cannot be an ideology — hence the indent — but rather an attitude that combines individualism and free-spiritedness with the struggle for universal values — which Nietzsche often, though not always, rejects (“universalism” — for me, in essence, being left-wing⁷). An attitude which, as the history of left-Nietzscheanism shows, can lead to a wide variety of practical and theoretical consequences, whether in the form of the anarchist approaches of Gustav Landauer and Emma Goldman, the Nietzschean Marxism of Ernst Bloch and the Frankfurt School, or the “left-Dionysm” of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists. In any case, the individualism of the left-Nietzschean actors is central, their striving for the combination of individual and collective liberation, which repeatedly brought them into conflict with the mainstream of left-wing parties and institutions.

In the meantime, two other remarkable works on the same subject have been published. What unites us is that we belong to roughly the same generation, even though our career paths are very different, and ask ourselves the same question: What follows from Nietzsche's philosophy for political theory and practice in today's social situation? And what unites us is that we are striving for answers that differ from the above-mentioned left-liberal mainstream. But that's where the common ground stops. Karsten Schubert demands in his recently published book Praise for identity politics based on his numerous articles published on this subject area in recent years⁸ Out of his “left-wing Nietzscheanism” (without a line), exactly a party for what I would describe, at least in parts, as the “resentment left.” For the French journalist, Julien Rochedy, a leading member of the National Front Youth Organization, in his book Nietzsche — the contemporary, originally published in French in 2020 and 2022 into German, it is clear that Nietzsche was a right-wing and therefore a pioneer of a completely different kind of “identity politics.”

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II. A new far-right Nietzsche from France

Rochedy's book is a fairly compact introduction to Nietzsche's thinking, a popular philosophical work that largely does not contain references and also contains factual errors in some places.⁹ It is based on the three-hour presentation Nietzsche: Life and Philosophy, which Rochedy kept on YouTube in 2019 and reached 1.5 million viewers (link). As you can see, the former leading FN official, who generally has a very strong presence on social media and has published further books in the meantime, is not an intellectual loner, but a popular and influential figure in the milieu of the young radical right, whose theses should be taken note of for this reason alone, even if you disagree with them.

The book is easy to read and captivating, especially as Rochedy repeatedly interweaves anecdotes from his life and strong statements on current issues. He retells the most important stages in Nietzsche's life and talks about the content of his writings. However, it is noticeable that he, from the Birth of Tragedy Apart from that, the writings up to Happy science Just roam casually. He can probably still do something with the Dionysian aestheticism of the first work, but little with the Untimely Considerations and with the enlightenment pathos of the first three volumes of aphorisms¹⁰, they don't quite fit into his Nietzsche image. He even claims that Nietzsche dedicated the first volume of Human, all-too-human Voltaire was meant ironically¹¹ which Untimely Considerations he dismisses as “premature considerations” (p. 35), which “are firmly based in a temporal context and are anything but “timeless” (ibid.). Nietzsche only really becomes interesting for Rochedy from Happy science and especially in his late work, for which he decidedly also includes the controversial collage edited by Nietzsche's sister and her collaborators The will to power counts. This is Nietzsche's, albeit “unfinished”, “main work” (p. 65), from which Rochedy extracts a “metaphysics of the will to power” (p. 68).¹² He also gives a particularly detailed presentation of the core theses of The genealogy of morality.

Rochedy's guiding principle: You should recognize the “will to power” as an essential basic principle of all being and develop a power-affirming way of life on this basis. For him, “anti-racism, feminism, progressivism and socialism” (p. 97) are nothing more than “degeneration [s] and perversion [s]” (p. 74) of the same, ideologies which promise a rule-free society but must always introduce new hierarchies. He concludes: Get rid of hypocrisy — and demands a new European sense of power, an ethic of masculinity and strength in order to be able to counter the surrounding major powers and escape “decadence” within.

Rochedy is thus decidedly based on the Nietzsche interpretation of the “Conservative Revolution,” which includes right-wing intellectuals who, during the Weimar Republic, used similar arguments against it and who once more and less openly advocated a fascist overthrow of the hated democracy, such as Julius Evola, Martin Heidegger or Ernst Jünger. But there are also clear allusions to Thomas Mann's nationalist writings during the First World War, Alfred Bäumler and last but not least Oswald Spengler, who, like Rochedy, prophesied the “fall of the West” if there was no “life-affirming” renaissance of “men's morality.”¹³.

Of course, Rochedy is trying to distance himself from the “old right.” He promotes a united Europe — admittedly in decisive differentiation from the EU's “decadent” project — and criticizes imperialism and militarism, even speaks of the “absurd violence in two world wars” (p. 111). Rochedy wants to present an alternative to communism and left-wing ideology in general, but also to post-modernism, without therefore representing a fascist position.

However, this distinction from historical fascism is rather half-hearted in view of the obvious ideological proximity to it. How does Rochedy also want to criticize him when he rejects all modern values — human rights, democracy, social justice, etc. — as phenomena of decadence and excesses of “slave morality”? He dreams of exactly the same eruption of violence and archaic masculinity controlled by civilization. In the “new Europe,” white heterosexual men should clearly be at the forefront and everyone else should be granted inferior status at best. And when you then read sentences like “Is [...] a cleanly executed Uppercut Is it necessarily less' clever 'on the opponent's chin than the verbal counterargument? “(p. 154), there are really doubts about the serious bourgeois image that Rochedy is clearly striving for in his public self-presentation. His “new Europe” must be imagined as a copy of Putin's Russia, an authoritarian democracy in which perhaps basic civil rights — at least those that serve to maintain the capitalist economy — and formally even democratic institutions continue to exist, but in reality everything is done to keep a small elite of “masters” in power.

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III. Nietzsche as a pioneer of left-wing identity politics

It is not surprising that left-wing identity politics and everything associated with it — political correctness, Wokeness, Cancel culture etc. — Rochedy is a particular thorn in the side. For him, Nietzsche is a politically incorrect person par excellence, whose “timeliness” results precisely from helping us to immunize ourselves against this ideology and to organize decisive resistance. One enemy image Rochedy repeatedly uses is the current intellectual left-liberal post-modern elite, whose alleged bodyhostility and physical neglect he repeatedly makes fun of when he writes, for example:

Nowadays, people like Plato [who is said to have been a broad-shouldered athlete; PS] in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, on Sciences Po or around Rue d'Ulm in Paris would undoubtedly be looked at with disparaging looks, because no one can believe anymore that the figure of a boxer could be more enlightened and clever than a slender sociologist or sloppy journalist with an egg-headed.¹⁴

Doesn't resentment itself speak from such sentences? — And this is just one of many examples of verbal provocation in Rochedy's book.

In any case, the doctorate in philosopher and political scientist Karsten Schubert is likely to appear to Rochedy as an exemplary member of this “elite” (which of course not It should be said that I would just like to start with Rochedy's polemic here!¹⁵). He has had a solid academic career so far and is currently working as an associate researcher at HU Berlin, with decidedly left-wing positions. His latest book Praise for identity politics In every respect, it reads as a diametrical alternative to Rochedy's theses.

It starts with the form: Schubert's book is written quite dry. His aim is not to captivate the reader with wit and polemics, but to convince him with good arguments. Schubert makes an honest effort to make a sober argument and in the book spends a lot of space on clearly defining his terms and fairly reflecting the positions of his opponents. The target group of the book is obviously an academically educated audience. His laudatory speech is surprisingly dispassionate. If Rochedy has to put up with the accusation of imobjectivity, Schubert's monograph is rather the opposite, often coming across as too instructive due to her academic style and thus missing its purpose of persuasion.

The point of Schubert's book is that he takes up numerous legal Nietzschean arguments also presented by Rochedy and also discusses them in detail in his study. However, he uses them in the sense of an avowed “left-wing Nietzscheanism”: He partially agrees with the Nietzschean critique of the universalism of modernity and, just like Rochedy, refers in particular to the The genealogy of morality and the power-theory considerations of late Nietzsche — always viewed from the perspective of Michel Foucault, arguably his most important thought leader — but picks up on these ideas to promote a redefinition of universalism. The classical universalism of Enlightenment philosophy and liberalism was in fact too blind to power relations and to the particular standpoints of individuals. Schubert now wants to overcome this limitation through a “particularist universalism,” which is about “grounding” classical universalism by repeatedly questioning the extent to which it really meets its claim and does not in fact only support the existing privileges of powerful groups. Schubert openly admits that this “left-Nietzscheanism,” in contrast to right-Nietzscheanism, is a rather loose connection to Nietzsche, based on the classics of post-structuralist theory.¹⁶

For Schubert, “identity politics” means the continuous and basically inexhaustible effort to “democratize democracy.” In the spirit of a “radical theory of democracy,” ever new oppressed groups should receive their fair share of democratic discourse and thus contribute to a continuous transformation of democratic institutions, which should become ever more inclusive. For Schubert, “identity politics” is therefore definitely the particular struggle of certain social groups (women, homosexuals, blacks, queers etc.) for more democratic participation and cultural recognition, but since these are the groups that have so far been neglected by the prevailing discourse, in this case, the particular struggle is also universal. For Schubert, not every interest policy is equally good; he distinguishes between a regressive “interest policy” that serves to expand and maintain one's own privileges — this would include the renaissance of “men's morality” sought by Rochedy — and a true progressive “identity policy,” which at the same time submits itself to certain normative standards with regard to its design and strategy. Schubert wants the real existing identity politics with his “praise,” i.e. decidedly none.”carte blanche“(p. 167), but rather develop criteria for how they can be criticized from within on the basis of their own claim — while at the same time it is clear that Schubert uses most forms of real identity politics, including language regulations (political correctness), Cancel culture and other often criticized problem areas, approves.

Against moral criticism of identity politics understood in this way, Schubert argues precisely that identity politics ultimately serves moral purposes on the one hand, but on the other hand, decisive power politics are necessary in order to enforce the concerns of the marginalized groups even against the will of a privileged majority. He makes no secret of the fact that identity politics in many cases means taking something away from members of privileged groups — but this is precisely necessary in line with the goal of “democratizing democracy” in order to overcome the much more serious oppression of disadvantaged groups. Schubert reflects very clearly that identity politics must therefore provoke sometimes angry defensive reactions, “resentment,” from the privileged.

What Schubert has explained in this context is the critique of “slave morality,” which for him is based on a false naturalistic understanding of “strength” and “weakness” and only serves to legitimize the privileges of the privileged. What Nietzsche calls “slave morality” is actually not a problem, but “actually forms the general core of politics” (p. 72). In truth, there are neither life-affirming masters on the one hand nor life-denying slaves on the other, but simply constellations of power to be considered soberly, whose change in the sense of a deeper democracy is important — and where planing is done, chips fall.

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IV. Beyond correct and incorrect

Schubert and Rochedy's approach to Nietzsche is remarkably similar. At first, they both interpret Nietzsche as theorists of power, based primarily on analyses of late work and, last but not least, the The genealogy of morality. Against mainstream moralism and its transparent illusions, they plead for a decisive power struggle to push their own identity: Here the white “West” with clearly defined gender role models, there the “queer” otherness. There is, of course, a central difference: Schubert firmly adheres to universalism, to the left-wing project, and Rochedy does not want to know anything about all this. In Schubert's analysis, he pursues regressive interests, not emancipatory identity politics.

As different, yes: opposite, these views may be, they are based on a shared experience that is undoubtedly also that of late Nietzsche: the devaluation of all values in a reality seen as nihilistic, against the background of which the official moralisms appear to be hypocrisy. Of course, and also in agreement with Nietzsche, neither Schubert nor Rochedy draw the consequence of cynicism: rather, they both want to stick to values, in one case decidedly particularist, in the other case universalistic. “Gentlemen's morality” is also a moral. In this general attitude, both rightly claim the title “Nietzschean” and express an attitude towards life that is likely to be widespread. A feeling of disorientation and the search for new orientation — which, from the point of view of both, can only be achieved through submission to a collective ideology and through participation in a community. Both are equally opposed to the fashionable individualism of our time and the corresponding Nietzsche guidebooks for household use.

What I am now designing myself in the book I mentioned appears to me to be a qualitatively different alternative to these two approaches. Both Schubert and Rochedy are completely in the intellectual cosmos of late Nietzsche and his metaphysics of power — however broken experimentally and in perspective. Both are realistically moving in the paths of the existing society, whose adequate ideological expression is this metaphysics. They bring about the eternal return of the struggle between “master morality” and “slave morality.” Their fight is ultimately aimed at making “their own people” a better position within the hierarchy within the existing system: here the decent European boys and girls, there the cosmopolitan queers. But these are not all well-trodden paths Role modelsthat are suggested to us by the cultural industry itself? The woke intellectual and the “brave” politically incorrect as fake opponents whose mirror fencing can only be escaped by putting the fight in a completely different kind of arena.

What both Schubert and Rochedy lack is an insight into the economic roots of alienation, in one word: Marx. In Rochedy's book, he doesn't even play a role as an antipode; Schubert must somehow unify him as a leftist, but in this process he is forced to turn the critic of capitalism Marx into the pioneer of working class identity politics, i.e. completely reinterpret him.¹⁷ Unlike Nietzsche, they are also not interested in the materialistic questions of corporeality and ecology.¹⁸ They are, in the bad sense, culturalists and thus reflect the real problem of current politics: That it is never really about the really decisive issues — economic distribution, ownership, ecology — but rather side scenes that scratch the surface, but then political discourse revolves solely around (immigration, gender language, quota regulations, norms of political correctness...). Nietzsche himself wrote:

All questions of politics, social order, education are falsified down to the ground in that they took the most harmful people for big people — that they taught to despise the “small” things, that is, the basic matters of life themselves...¹⁹

This is not to say that the topics mentioned per se They are of secondary importance, but it is important to analyze them in the overall context of capitalist world society and not against the background of the culturalist analytical framework “Nihilism vs. Saving the West” (Rochedy) or “Privileged vs. Unprivileged” (Schubert), which, in their rude, contribute little to a precise understanding of these conflicts. It is obviously not only a small minority that is affected by the oppression of women, but it is important to determine exactly which economic interests the forced opening of the labour market for women serves and what additional burdens this leads to, instead of blindly taking the side of “women back to the stove” versus “women on the labour market.” The situation is similar with global migration flows, which can only be understood as part of the continuing exploitation of the global South by the North and the simultaneous “craving” of the industries of the capitalist states for workers. If you stick to the thinking template of “closing borders” vs. “open borders for all,” you lose the opportunity here too for a differentiated and nuanced analysis of this issue — and especially the development of convincing real political strategies on this issue: The right-wing perspective ignores the fact that mass immigration certainly corresponds to a certain economic necessity and must first show how it actually imagines maintaining the prosperity of Western nations without it; which Perspective of radical left-wing liberalism suppresses the fact that it serves very specific capital interests, which must first be understood above all questions of moral or political evaluation.

This culturalist self-dumbdown is a necessary expression of the apparent powerlessness in which we find ourselves: The general framework of the capitalist mode of production in its neoliberal form is more or less accepted without question,²⁰ At best, agency is still experienced in the face of such cultural issues and moral skirmishes. In this respect, Schubert and Rochedy must equally be accused of failing to achieve their own claim to stimulate consistent power politics: rather, they are satisfied with the “small politics” set, without really the dimension of the “big politics” called for by Nietzsche, of radical utopias and alternatives,²¹ to look at. They both get stuck in what Nietzsche did in Zarathustra as the “noise of great actors”²² describes and admonishes: “They all want to go to the throne: it is their madness — as if luck were sitting on the throne! ”²³

You don't have to be a conspiracy theorist to see in exactly this opposition of “political incorrections” and “woken” a spectacle that ultimately benefits one person in particular: the truly powerful. A banal example: Current feminism is just tearing itself apart in bitterly fought, often to the point of physical violence, between followers of queer feminism and traditional feminism, which starts from a biologically determined root of sexuality. In these, as you will assume, Schubert also locates himself in a very polemical and one-sided way on the side of queer feminism²⁴ — and if Rochedy were to position himself in this conflict at all, his preference should be clear. But without this dispute having been artificially instigated for this purpose, it is clear that it objectively only amounts to dividing, weakening and rendering the feminist movement unable to act. And the same mechanisms can be observed in all sorts of other areas.

On the other hand, what needs to be done would be creative and life-affirming visions of a non-capitalist (and of course also: non-patriarchal, non-racial, reconciled with nature...) life that are strong and convincing enough to overcome the isolation and cultural division that is so characteristic of our time and which lead us to address the really important questions — the so-called by Nietzsche to focus on “small things.” Nietzsche is one of them: “Nutrition, location, climate, relaxation, the whole casuistry of selfishness”²⁵, which for all People care about “basic issues of life,” which global capitalism threatens more today than ever before in history: Even in core capitalist states such as the USA and Great Britain, hunger and malnutrition — not to mention the absurdly simultaneous problem of mass obesity—are becoming mass problems again,²⁶ Ever greater resources are being expended to forcibly maintain the repressive border regimes in the face of steadily increasing emigration pressure, the consequences of climate change are becoming ever more obvious, the cultural industry is shifting the capitalist pressure to perform more and more “into” our dwindling leisure time, “selfishness” is only welcome if it is that of the rich...

I do not mean any kind of alliance policy, but rather the cognitive and, above all, emotional focus on more important issues than those dictated to us by left and right identity politics (whether the latter is a “real” identity policy or not). I dream of such a movement; left and right identity politicians are torpedoing it in equal measure.

Nietzsche writes in the Happy science clairvoyant:

When I think of the desire to do something, as it constantly tickles and spikes the millions of young Europeans, all of whom cannot bear boredom and themselves, I understand that there must be a desire to suffer something in order to derive from their suffering a probable reason to do something, to do something. Emergency is necessary! Hence the cries of politicians, therefore the many false, fabricated, exaggerated “emergencies” of all sorts of classes and the blind willingness to believe in them. This young world demands From outside Should — not luck — but misfortune come or become visible; and her imagination is busy in advance to form a monster out of it so that she can fight with a monster afterwards. If these needy addicts felt within themselves the strength to benefit themselves from within, to do something to themselves, they would also understand how to create their own, self-own emergency from within. Their inventions could then be finer and their satisfactions could sound like good music: while they are now the world with their cries of distress and therefore all too often with the Nothgefühle Fill it up!²⁷

Based on this, I would draw from Nietzsche's writings the essential lesson for our time to ask ourselves — each and every one of us in dialogue and dispute — the question of what for us real necessities are. It cannot be a question of authoritarizing what is essential and insignificant, but about entering into this process in the first place and the question Throw it up afterwards. I am, of course, confident that such a process, if it even got off the ground, would reveal certain answers that we could all agree on; major human problems that lie completely outside of what contemporary Right and Left Nietzscheanism is equally trying to praise us as the “most pressing” questions. Perhaps such a perspective would be conceivable that really lies beyond master and slave morality; a “master morality of slaves.”

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For the background of the article image, those photograph was used.

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Literature

Lyotard, Jean-François: Post-modern knowledge. A report. Vienna 2019.

Rochedy, Julien: Nietzsche — the contemporary. Dresden 2022.

Schubert, Karsten: Praise for identity politics. Munich 2024.

Stephen, Paul: Left-Nietzscheanism. An introduction. 2 vol.E. Stuttgart 2020.

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Footnotes

1: See e.g. The happy science, Aph 358.

2: The happy science, Aph 377.

3: See the latter aspect my corresponding article on this blog.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, The dance song.

5: Cf. Lyotard, Post-modern knowledge.

6: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 11.

7: A minimal definition that Schubert and Rochedy also share. — In today's language, the terms “left” and “right” are unfortunately often used arbitrarily and based on mere lifestyle issues — and then, of course, declared obsolete after they have been emptied to the point of unrecognizability.

8: I won't go into detail about these articles, as the book is largely based on them. On the author's website Are they listed.

9: For example, Rochedy uncritically shares the Nietzsche family legend of the Polish origin of the name (see p. 22 f. & my article mentioned in footnote 3), claims that Richard Wagner only changed into a “nationalist, anti-Semite and Christian reactionary” (p. 35) in 1872 and presents it in such a way that academic German philosophy was still in the 1870s from Hegelianism and not from the New Kantianism was dominated (see p. 38).

10: Human, all-too-human, Morgenröthe and The happy science.

11: Cf. P. 38.

12: In reality, Nietzsche stopped working on that “major work” and the sister's falsifications are far more serious than Rochedy admits. See the relevant notes here.

13: Cf. the corresponding article by Christian Sährendt on this blog.

14: P. 47.

15: Why should it be particularly “body-affirming” to make a desperate effort to build a boxer's figure? And unlike in Rochedy's portrayal, the current cultural elite seems to me to be more characterized by their extreme efforts at “fitness” and hedonism. It is really body affirming to free oneself from such body images. — And it is obvious anyway that Nietzsche Rochedy's ideal type of boxing intellectual did not match. By the way, the left-wing anti-fascist Jean-Paul Sartre of all people was a passionate boxer.

16: Cf. P. 69.

17: Cf. p. 25. At the end of the book, he then pleads for an extension of identity politics around the axis Class (see pp. 183—187).

18: With Schubert, these topics are only marginally present or the body only from the limited perspective of Foucault's analysis of power, which must necessarily deny his pre-social life of itself (cf. also his mentioned rejection of psychology). — Rochedy talks a lot about a return to corporeality, but it only has the “strong”, trained body in mind, even if he is about an overly naive body cult alla Arno Breker distances (see p. 143). He briefly discusses ecological issues (see p. 156 et seq.), but more important to him than mentioning climate change is a critique of the harmful consequences of the “so-called [n] contraceptive pill” (p. 157).

19: Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 10.

20: At one point, Rochedy even praises the American author Ayn Rand, one of the most important thought leaders of radical neoliberalism (p. 142).

21: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I am a fate Am, 1.

22: From the flies of the market.

23: From the new idol.

24: Cf. p. 169 f.

25: Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 10.

26: In June 2023, 17% of all households in the UK were affected by moderate to severe food insecurity (spring), 13.5% of all households in the USA are hungry in 2023 (spring).

27: Aph 56.

Caught in the Crossfire of the Culture Wars, There Stands Nietzsche

Comparing Two Current Perspectives

It is well known that Nietzsche's history of influence has been read and absorbed across all political camps. But what about our present tense? Paul Stephan examines the writings of two authors who are about the same age as himself, in their mid/late 30s, and whose perspectives on Nietzsche could hardly be more different: While French journalist and YouTuber Julien Rochedy declares Nietzsche a pioneer of a right-wing cultural struggle, the German philosopher and political scientist Karsten Schubert attacks him for a left-wing identity politics. Both positions do not really convince our authors; rather, they are entirely within the framework of the prevailing simulation of politics as a cultural struggle, which would need to be countered by focusing on the really pressing life problems of contemporary humanity.

I. spring in autumn

Although it is now mid-October, spring weather has set in for the duration of this year's International Nietzsche Congress in Naumburg an der Saale. This year, the five-day event has the motto “Commenting on Nietzsche.” On the flyer (see the article image): Nietzsche sitting and reading; on the top of a mountain of books that can only be climbed through a ladder. The painting is by Halle artist Michael Girod, who has designed almost all posters for the annual conferences since 2006.

The event was organized by literary scholars Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kaufmann and Prof. Dr. Katharina Grätz as well as the philosopher Prof. Dr. Andreas Urs Sommer, who are all members of the Nietzsche Research Center at Albert Ludwig University Freiburg. All three are centrally involved in the Freiburg Nietzsche Commentary, which is based at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Sommer is also director of the Nietzsche Foundation.

The conference is a cooperation event between the Friedrich Nietzsche Foundation, the Nietzsche Society and the aforementioned research center. The venue was the both modern and contemplative Nietzsche Documentation Center, which is directly adjacent to the Nietzsche House decorated with vines, whose leaves shimmer wonderfully bright reddish this autumn. Although Nietzsche was neither born nor died here, he spent his youth here since 1858 and several years during his mental transformation.¹ Today, there is a playground and a daycare center right nearby, next to the historic city center.

To get in the mood for the conference, which took place from Wednesday, 16/10/2024 to Sunday, 20/10/2024, Renate Müller-Bruck gave a presentation about her booklet published in the summer “... trembling with colorful bliss.” Nietzsche in Venice. Müller-Bruck is a distinguished Nietzsche expert and worked for Mazzino Montinari, among others. From the mid-60s, Montinari, together with Giorgio Colli, initiated the Complete critical edition of Nietzsche's works, estate fragments and letters, which form the basis for the published in the 80s Critical study edition forms. Montinari is therefore one, if not which An essential figure in the history of critical editions of Nietzsche's writings. The congress was opened on Thursday with various greetings, including from Naumburg Mayor Armin Müller, Sommer and Prof. Dr. Marco Brusotti, chairman of the Nietzsche Society. Katharina Grätz took over the introduction after the program.

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II. The (un) popular philosopher

Even before the conference, in conversation with a Belgian business manager I know, the event comes up as a topic. The well-connected manager asks whether Nietzsche is very well known in Germany. So as is known. Known as... Sigmund Freud?! In Belgium, people are probably more familiar with Freud. — For him, Nietzsche is a philosopher, no more, no less. Beyond that, he can't say anything. Does not know any of the writings, is vaguely familiar with the term “superman” and correctly estimates it in the 19th century. — The average citizen will feel the same way: Ever heard, a title and one or two terms may be correctly guessed.

For lovers, this idea is sobering. Nonetheless, Nietzsche is probably one of the great philosophers who have also taken up a firm place in the pantheon of thinkers and writers abroad and in popular culture — his quotes have become commonplaces and bon mots. In this respect, he lives on, even though Nietzsche never quite as suited himself as a poster boy as Che Guevara, Karl Marx or Jesus, for example.

It is a sad truth that it will have remained more or less a side note for the majority of our current modern fellow citizens. He has this in common with most major figures in the history of literature and philosophy.
Although the Nietzsche brand remains an educational and intellectual phenomenon in a certain sense, it is true for Nietzsche in particular that this sphere repeatedly proves to be porous. On the Internet, he is celebrating success as a subject of videos, as an icon with a moustache or reference figure for a wide variety of celebrities and performers or those who consider themselves to be such. The Internet only rarely comments on Nietzsche in the way science would like. But more on the question of its digitization later. His significance is enormous for post-modern philosophy, as is for modern artists and, in their followers, popular culture, which certainly also has to do with the provocative and offensive character of his writings. Time and again, he used to cross the artificial limits of individual scientific disciplines with a romantic approach to completeness. For the event, I would like to watch the lectures, which promise a certain level of popularity, and confidently leave Nietzsche to the principle of chance; I hope they won't take offense at me.

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III. Destructions, Explanations, Editions

The first talk I'm listening to on Friday is surprising because of its joviality. Young scientist Milan Wenner talks about the Freiburg Nietzsche commentary. The long title of the commentary already suggests a tension between historical and critical editions. Different from the title of the talk From destruction to deconstruction? The Freiburger-Nietzsche Commentary as a phenomenon in the history of science suggests, this is neither about Martin Heidegger nor Jacques Derrida, but about the question of how editorial studies developed from its strongly philosophical beginnings — more on that later — to a more analytical, textual orientation: “The subject [Nietzsche] secede” from the text, means deconstruction in Wenner, the technical “lyrical ego” and the “texts as a complex fabric of clear voices.”

I am unable to listen to the full length of the second presentation I would like to attend, as Wenner's presentation resulted in such lively discussions in the already overcrowded room that I had no choice but to stay. The atmosphere is generally more cheerful and open than would have been expected from a scientific conference. The short length of the section presentations of 20 minutes, including the 10-minute discussion, gives the event a pleasant pace. The audience is also more diverse than you might think: interested people (I talk to a musician, a yoga teacher, a mechanic), experts, professors, teachers, scientists and those who want to become one, from a variety of different countries and of all ages.

One of the centerpieces follows in the afternoon. Dr. Sarah Bianchi, also a young scientist whose research focused both on micropolicies in Adorno and Foucault and critically on the implications of so-called digital enhancement, gives a presentation entitled Read essayistically. Power, Enlightenment, and Experimental Philosophical History after Nietzsche. According to Bianchi, commenting is already an enlightenment practice and — speaking with Nietzsche — not only a question of the subjectivity of essayistic artistry, but also of genealogy. A thoroughly controversial view, since, as was later interjected by the audience, the question is whether Nietzsche and, following him, Foucault's method would not exactly consist in undermining the philosophy of Enlightenment and its narratives of subjectivity. Bianchi refers to current French novelists, including Annie Ernaux and Édouard Louis. The aim would be to create spaces of discourse for the marginalized through essayistic writing and thus contribute to the “unmasking of ideologies.” As well as to contribute to the possibility of “affect and power-sensitive” positions beyond “digital perfection logic,” which, in contrast to the often predisposed self-help or advice literature, opened up “not a therapeutic or naturalistic, i.e. drive-based understanding, but a power-based” of subjects.

Bianchi's presentation is followed by a laudatory speech and panel discussion with Sommer, Kaufmann, Müller-Bruck and Grätz. With free speech sparkly with Swiss charm and gentle irony — and in print-ready letters — Sommer remembers Prof. Dr. Karl Pestalozzi and Prof. Dr. Annemarie Pieper. The former was, among others, president of the Nietzsche House Foundation in Sils Maria² and involved in the continuation of Complete critical edition, the latter of her name co-editor of Complete critical edition the letters and yearbook of the Nietzsche Society. In his laudatory memoriae, Sommer describes Pestalozzi as a representative of the University of Basel with integrity and improbably literate. Pieper, on the other hand, as a feminist and unadjusted pioneer in philosophy, whose academic-critical novel The Klugscheisser GmbH He doesn't go unmentioned with a long smile. Pieper died in February this year, Pestalozzi died in the previous summer.

From the panel discussion following the presentation with a title that references Nietzsche's famous essay, The benefits and disadvantages of Nietzsche editing for (academic) life, Grätz also tells me in passing, deciphers the motto of the congress. It is the project of a “new critical edition of the estate,” which is explained in more detail by Kaufmann. With a digital genetic edition, for which Prof. Dr. Paolo d'Iorio in the form of the website nietzschesource.org has already presented a prototype, Montinaris and Collis will be followed up on the preparatory work. The new edition should be even closer to the originals and create a digital citable source. As Kaufmann explains, parts of the Colli/Montinari edition are based on conjectures — i.e. editorial interventions — which no longer meet today's editorial standards. These include stylistic “corrections,” which were not without interpretive moments on the part of the editors, as well as problems with the critical apparatus that the project sets out to fix.

Many lectures also mentioned the exemplary years of failed editing practice on the part of the Nietzsche Archive under the aegis of Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, whose administrative practices, although they did not remain without widespread impact, can be described as thoroughly abusive. An indiscriminate source — even though it is still considered uncritically by parts of the international audience as a genuine work of Nietzsche and is published as such — is and remains the book The will to power, published by the sister herself and Nietzsche's close confidante Heinrich Köselitz alias Peter Gast. As all speakers never tire of stressing: an editorial construct, a very free interpretation by the editors. To put it bluntly: A “philological nonsense” that sailed under “false flag [the name 'Nietzsche']” is what one of the speeches that evening said; and not even the only one of its kind.

However, according to Kaufmann, the criticism can also be transferred to today. This is how the “myth of the alleged estate” emerged from the disorderly hodgepodge, which was also further fuelled by Colli and Montinari. The whole range of editorial questions arise: What is the score with the order, the authorization; but also the correct evaluation and evaluation, e.g. the question of whether the estate should be assessed as a work of equal importance at all? Even the Colli/Montinari edition is thus subject to a history of interpretation and a filtering process, which the new estate edition aims to compensate for and expand the possibilities of digital editing work. However, the project has not yet been able to find a financier.

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III. Spiritual flower reading

Saturday is still spring-like and warmer, a pleasant breeze is blowing — again: the beauty of the red vines of the Nietzsche House.

In the presentation The flower harvest — an endless commentary Dr. Catarina Caetano da Rosa, Deputy Director of the Documentation Center, presents a project in which she meticulously excerpted references to Nietzsche in secondary literature and references to them. A collection of second-hand quotes, pictures and mentions found on the Documentation Center website can be found. Da Rosa is also reminiscent of the list of fantastic animal groups that Michel Foucault wrote in his Order of things quoted by Jorge Luis Borges. In short, although this is more than an idiosyncratic art project, for the time being it is not a reception science project in the strict sense of the word. The experimental collection illustrates a “fragmented profile” of the philosopher and the “driving force” Nietzsche. In the room in the former study on the first floor of the Nietzsche House, there are a number of trendy T-shirts that look like a cross-section of the philosopher's iconography. They once again underline his pop cultural influence, which does not always have to coincide with reality or historical contexts.

In the evening, the grand awarding of the International Friedrich Nietzsche Prize to Prof. Dr. Renate Reschke, a luminary in Nietzsche research who in particular was one of the few in the GDR to conduct research on Nietzsche, will be celebrated. The prize is endowed with 15,000€. She receives congratulations, greetings and gifts from her colleagues and the mayor. The ceremony will be rounded off with a laudatory speech by Prof. Dr. Christoph Türcke. The evening will be accompanied by a performance of Nietzsche's compositions with vocals and piano.

Reschke's own presentation under the title About the dilemma of presence of mind and the lack of sense of history. On the continued topicality of Nietzschean cultural criticism characterizes a wonderfully pessimistic diagnosis of the present — in the sense of Nietzsche's time, but also of our own. In fact, according to Reschke, she would rather have talked about the topic “Why I am not a Nietzscherian”, but then decided on the present one. Reschke critically examines the concept of “presence of mind” and its relationship to history. Summarizing the enormously dense and partly polemical presentation seems neither possible nor effective to me at this point; rather, Reschke's wonderfully natural style is emphasized, which does not have much affection. She only rarely becomes very concrete: She speaks of the philosophical, so her presentation remains enigmatic in a certain sense and in the space of abstract. Her criticism is directed not only against the mass culture of modern media, which tended more to solidify the present (machine culture, acceleration, etc.), but also against his own milieu, including the (political) role of Nietzsche in the past East-West conflict, in which he long (for both systems) as Enfant Terrible valid, does not remain unaffected. Only Nietzsche himself could probably express it more beautifully: “No, we don't love humanity”³.

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IV. Two ghosts

What is crystal clear at the end of the conference is how closely interpretation, criticism and editorial studies are linked. As shown in particular by the dispute over Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche's administration of the estate, political, economic, but also private interests play a role time and again.

Finally, one last picture: Two ghosts, in the form of two mutually exclusive methodological camps, seemed to haunt Congress time and again. One that wants to stick to the concept, figure and personality, an authentic Nietzsche and a philosophy of his own, and the other, which is concerned with scientific analysis, technical structures and the historical and intellectual influences in his thinking. The image of the battle of scientific love for truth with theatrical love for appearances is not something you want to try in the end. I'd rather spend a moment with sunlight and the changing colors of autumn.

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

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Except for the article image, the pictures for this article are photographs of the author.

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Footnotes

1: Editor's note: See also the Nietzsche House and its history this Article by Lukas Meisner on this blog.

2: Editor's note: See the article by Christian Sährendt on this blog (link).

3: The happy science, Aph 377.

The Will to Commentary

A Report on This Year's Nietzsche Society Meeting

The almost complete Freiburg Nietzsche commentary has now become an indispensable tool for Nietzsche research. In meticulous detail work, the authors compiled useful information on almost all aspects of Nietzsche's works (history of origin, sources, allusions, receptions, interpretations...) and commented on them passage by passage, sometimes sentence by sentence and word by word. Almost all of the volumes published so far are available free of charge on the de Gruyter Verlag website (link). Even laymen will find a real treasure trove of background information and explanations here. The three leading employees of the project — its long-time manager Andreas Urs Sommer, Katharina Grätz and Sebastian Kaufmann — took the opportunity to dedicate this year's annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society to the topic of “Commenting on Nietzsche.” They were not only looking back, but also looking ahead.

synopsis

The conversation revolves around Daniel Tutt's book How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche, which was released at the end of 2023. Henry Holland first speaks to Tutt about his working class origins, which Tutt repeatedly addresses in the book. Tutt reports on this based on his first enthusiastic reading of Nietzsche as a teenager and how Nietzsche's individualism dissuaded him from developing class consciousness in the Marxist sense. For this reason, he wants to build on Marxist Nietzsche criticism, as articulated by Georg Lukács and Domenico Losurdo, for example. Holland then asks him about his assessment of left-wing Nietzscheanism. The example of this is Huey Newton (1942-1989), also discussed in the book, who co-founded the Black Panther Party in the USA in the 1960s and was subsequently one of its leading figures; an organization that campaigned in radical form for the emancipation of blacks. The discussion then revolves around the extent to which the Nietzschean search for the realization of a “higher self” is not yet compatible with Marxist social criticism and a corresponding commitment in the sense of a “parasitic” reading of Nietzsche's actually elitist ideas directed against the labor movement. By critically addressing the polemics of contemporary Rechtsnietzschean Costin Alamariu, Tutt and Holland see Nietzsche as a politically ambiguous defender of the individual and collective transgression of prevailing norms.

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Full conversation

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I. Nietzsche and the working class

Henry Holland: Thank you Daniel — Daniel Tutt — for being with us, for this blog and video interview. I came across your new book by chance after Micky Wierda from Repeater Verlag suggested the work to me for a review. How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche came out as a paperback and e-book at the end of 2023. It takes readers on an intellectual journey across a vast steppe of the modern history of ideas, in which political turning points — be it the Russian Revolution of 1917, or the turmoil of 1968 — are also always present. Taken into this fascinating but sometimes appalling territory, readers also learn the stories of extraordinary Nietzschean actors. And last but not least, right in the middle of this great history, the insights into your autobiography, which you repeatedly intersperse, also promote multiple changes of perspective. At this point, can you briefly reconstruct how your biography led you to Nietzsche and explain why your working class background plays a key role in your arguments?

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Daniel Tutt: First of all, thanks from my side, it is an honor to enter into a dialogue with you. As you suggest, I read Nietzsche for the first time as a very young student Beyond good and evil — and I understood almost nothing. But as with all of Nietzsche's texts — and because there is something about his attractive style — I felt compelled to read on and research what was actually going on in this extremely dynamic material. So it was something completely different from the usual Anglo-American analytical philosophy that I studied at university. And I was also interested in history and poetry, which went well together.

So I had this figure who came into my life, who somehow satisfied all my professional interests and also had to make a very profound comment on modern life, on modern existence. Nietzsche blew me away as only he could, and I think he also evoked a feeling of restless excitement in me that I couldn't exactly name or localize.

You spoke of the “working class”: That's true. It is one of the particular absurdities of our current capitalism that, in the understanding of many specialists, sociologists and even philosophers, there is no such thing as the “working class” anymore. This development has taken place in the last four generations since the Second World War. As a result of this development, the mere announcement that you yourself come from this “working class” is a scandal in itself. In doing so, you look at your mode of existence from the perspective of a specific antagonism that is being displaced by the status quo. Because the status quo doesn't want to see the world in classes. The status quo wants to see things in terms of individual singular agents or agents who try to define themselves through their relationship with the market. There, they also want to realize the “highest” version of their own “brand” — which, according to this perspective, is identical to their highest self.¹ But Nietzsche didn't make me more class-conscious. I rather believe that reading Nietzsche led me away from any formulation of class consciousness at the time; in return, however, she provided me with the necessary tools to attempt to realize a higher and singular self. And that is why the title of my first chapter is: “We live in Nietzsche's World.” That is exactly why I think his thinking is so timely. Peter Sloterdijk talks about the fact that it was Nietzsche's claim to bring us the fifth Gospel.² According to Sloterdijk, Nietzsche can therefore be regarded as a prophet of our world today. And in doing so, Nietzsche is also updating the Socratic maxim of expanding self-knowledge.³ But he adds something decisive to this important context: Those who strive for a higher self must take a dangerous path in order to get ahead. In other words, this path is only intended for a few. For me as a young person, that was the appeal of reading Nietzsche, namely that I wanted to reach my higher self and also be part of this Nietzschean community, which consisted of exceptional personalities. And that brings us to the other major narrative thread of the book: Nietzsche — he of all people — as a community-building philosopher.

If you want to follow my argument so far, you also have to admit that there is something like the Nietzscheanism There is that Nietzsche was more than just a philosopher of thought experiments or a critic of metaphysics. And also more than a philosopher who acts like a pure recluse beyond politics, who can be “subtracted” from social life and who is outdated.⁴ And finally, my book also asks the question of returning to Nietzsche once you have already familiarized yourself with him. In doing so, I draw on what I consider to be a long-neglected Marxist critique of Nietzsche.

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II. Individualism and Socialist Threat

HH: Yes, Georg Lukács' Marxist critique⁵ and Domenico Losurdo's almost encyclopedic recent writings form the pillars of your book.⁶ Among the many tempting threads you've just unfurled, let's first pick out Nietzsche's “community building project.” Because there is this debate, which is well-known to you and persists in a penetrating manner: Do Nietzsche's writings have an identifiable core, a definable center? Or are they hopelessly decentered? And here you are taking a clear stance per a “center,” for a crucial point in Nietzsche's philosophy, from which everything else starts. Or, more precisely, per a core of key points intentionally connected by Nietzsche. You will demonstrate how Nietzsche's thinking is essentially aimed at building an elite community of intellectual activists, an exclusive intelligentsia that in turn should have real influence on politics. Another part of this core, in your opinion, is that Nietzsche wants to maintain rankings at all costs, even if that means that the working class must be oppressed and put in their place. In short, he wants to maintain the existing taboos about identifying with the working class, or even class consciousness. Especially against this background, it would be useful to talk about one or the other so-called “Left Nietzschean” that you mention in the book. Because they obviously spoke of “class consciousness” in the course of their own efforts to build intellectual communities. Probably the most striking character you cover in this regard in your book is Huey Newton (1942-1989). Newton, known above all as one of the co-founders of the Black Panthers, came from a completely peripheral social position to suddenly take on a leading role within the radical left and especially the black communities in the late 60s and early 70s. You describe how Newton made this leap: Through a “creative misinterpretation” of Nietzsche's theses about the will to power.⁷ This took place almost at the same time as a cultural event: In 1968, an extraordinarily influential new translation of The will to power, this falsifying edition of Nietzsche's estate fragments by his sister and her collaborators, translated by Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. You again find that Nietzsche, from around 1971, was a constant in Newton's thinking. Could you discuss these connections in more detail?

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DT: I'd love to. I take two questions from your remarks. One of them concerns Nietzsche's relationship with the working class. The second is aimed at how I understand Nietzsche's so-called “core.”

If we even dare to claim that Nietzsche's thinking has such a “core,” then this is initially contrary to the well-established academic orthodoxy of French Theory⁸. But even if you look at Maudemarie Clark's American Nietzsche interpretations⁹ all the way to Brian Leiter¹⁰ Look, and these are mostly analytical Nietzschean approaches, then these thinkers also insist that we are dealing with a decentred thinker in Nietzsche. Even though they base this on entirely different arguments than Derrida, Deleuze and Foucault, for example, they still insist on the same point. And then there are also the various perspectives on Nietzsche, which is a genuine left Nietzsche's interpretation could guide. In this regard, it is crucial to clarify that Nietzsche was of the plebeian or even the working class not met with particular hate. It is rather a question of understanding Nietzsche's conception of this question through the lens of his wider critique of slave morality.

In this context, I would like to stress that, from Nietzsche's point of view, the state of the working class after the French Revolution and after the development of industrial capitalism from the 1830s onwards became extremely problematic. He diagnoses that working class consciousness during this period was imbued with ideas of “slave morality.” According to Nietzsche in his early work, this “slave morality” is particularly problematic because it implies an “optimistic worldview.” Such an attitude interferes with a culture's ability to produce individual “geniuses.”

When we look at Nietzsche's early writing Schopenhauer as an educator Then we see something that is in Goethe's wake: a departure from a particular understanding of the intellectual and from a particular understanding of greatness. Nietzsche describes individuals who still carry such size as “higher” or “most valuable specimens.” Nietzsche contrasts these with the philosophy of resentment and slave morality, which includes Judaism, Christianity and modern socialism and which, according to this understanding, insists on a vulgar concept of equality. This prevents the just mentioned form of human size from fully blooming. In contrast to the “optimistic”, Nietzsche calls this prevented form the tragic worldview. According to this reading, Schopenhauer is a philosopher who thinks of the great individual only in terms of contemplation, but not in terms of action. Nietzsche therefore attaches great importance to the need to combat slave morality through political practice that is anxious to kill this potential man of action and to preserve the genius. Because leveling movements, particularly socialism, seem to eliminate this possibility. And that is a source of deep melancholy for Nietzsche. We should also recognize that Nietzsche himself was a precocious genius, or at least that he was viewed in this way, receiving a full professorship in such an exceptional way at just twenty-four years of age.

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III. Fist fights with the philosopher of transgression

HH: There are some hot and conversational topics in the room that I like to address. Let's start with a biographical perspective. I repeatedly find Nietzsche's biography simply too chaotic that he could have created a coherent center in his oceanic work, which he could barely contain. Just think of his major health restrictions, which occurred to him as an adult and did not go away. One is tempted to apply his own blatant words, which he repeatedly directed mercilessly against the most defenseless sections of the population, to himself. Quite objectively, i.e. above all physiologically speaking, he was a “sick nature,” and what is the relationship between the realities of such a person's statements? “What humanity has seriously considered up to now are not even realities, mere imaginations, more strictly speaking, lies out of the bad instincts of sick, in the deepest sense harmful natures”¹². Such mischievous temptations aside, but still against the same background: To what extent do you want to attribute to Nietzsche a well-planned intentionality in his work? At the same time, I would like to talk about Huey Newton. In previous conversations between us, you recommended a fist-fighting approach to Nietzsche. In short, you claim that we can learn most from “Nietzsche's politics,” “Nietzsche's politics,” as you put it yourself, when we see them at the center of his entire work — and treat Nietzsche as a sparring partner.

And Newton also took a fist-fighting approach to his Nietzsche reading. Metaphorically speaking, it took place out there on the street and during confrontations; it wasn't about nice reading groups of “do-gooders,” for whom the question of who would be reading aloud was the biggest possible subject of dispute. And in this context, I also want to address the question of transgression or punishable transgression. Because I suggest that the reason for Nietzsche's attraction for so many readers, including so many working-class readers¹³, is that it paves the way for individuals to pursue “justified transgressions”: That is what we could call such acts.

In this context, it is crucial that Newton's participation in the Black Panthers was characterized by various transgressions of the bourgeois order, transgressions that had an overall emancipatory effect on their protagonists, even if they were violent again and again. In fact, he only became a nationwide leader in the USA after he was involved in fatal shooting of a police officer in October 1967. Following this death, for which he was charged with murder — in the event of a guilty verdict, the authorities would have executed him — a nationwide “Free Huey” campaign was organized in the USA, involving a number of disenfranchised groups, including the Young Lords and the so-called Latin Panthers. These groups recognized the racially motivated state violence in what Newton faced. However, he was not found guilty of the charges against him and was therefore able to take on a leading role in his organizations, as it were distinguished by his physical experience in punishing a transgression.¹⁴

Finally, I want to combine this question regarding the justified transgression by and with Nietzsche with a perspective from contemporary “legal Nietzscheanism” and also ask you for your position on the latter. It's about the new book by Costin Alamariu, whom many people only know under his daring social media pseudonym: Bronze Age Pervert. Alamariu is apparently concerned with staging and bringing about transgressions: But whether these are “justified” is another question. According to Alamariu, Nietzsche postulated a “happy moment” in historical cycles in which political weakness occurs, the previously enforced homogeneity collapses and a tension built up in regimes for a long time unleashes. (Against Alamariu, I am also thinking of the repressive homogeneity of working life in late capitalism, which is touched upon in your book, Daniel.) Furthermore, Alamariu claims that this homogeneity is being replaced by a “tropical multiplication” of monstrous types, most of them weak and/or deficient, but a few fortunately strong and “well-off.” And now I would like to quote Alamariu directly: “The qualities or virtues, the inner states, which are the result of aristocratic education and education, are now free to go their way in new, unexpected directions. [...] You come up with new tastes: the new as such and a preference for transgression, boredom with the law... ”¹⁵

Even though I think little of Alamarius's polemic as a whole, his description here resonates strongly with the campaigns of Newton and other left-wing political actors in the sixties and seventies. You again state, Daniel, that “Nietzsche openly championed the crises of capitalism and the decadence they stirred up,” because these “offer an opportunity to [further] accelerate the brutality they reveal.”¹⁶. You obviously don't believe in a collapse of our current political order that would have an emancipatory effect on most people in the working class: And you also see the vast majority of the world's population in this group. Would you still work to ensure that more people get a taste for transgression in a positive sense?

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DT: It's a complex question, but I can follow your thought process. Let me try to unpack the question. First of all, why do I think Nietzsche was in favour of accelerating decadence? This is a claim which, by the way, differs from the interpretations that were in circulation in the period immediately after the thinker's death, for example by Stefan George's Interpretations and those of the other early Nietzsche cults. And we can also talk about what Nietzsche recognized as the value of transgressive communities, namely that they could serve as guinea pigs for the elasticity of the morals of slave morality. In the eyes of many, this strategy has qualified Nietzsche as an anti-bourgeois thinker. And to a certain extent, this classification is also correct. I am not saying that Nietzsche is easy to understand as a supporter of bourgeois power. Lukács, on the other hand, will argue that Nietzsche's anti-morality, Nietzsche's theory of transgression, and so on, or even the community that Nietzsche is trying to build, form the elements that are to be understood as militant aesthetics in favor of maintaining bourgeois power.¹⁷ The value sphere of bourgeois power is itself to be understood as a kind of elastic sphere in which transgressions of their own values do not necessarily pose a mortal threat to their status as a class power. Nietzsche returned in 1968, but — and in contrast to the 1930s — he returned this time on the side of the left. This change appalled Lukács, who had witnessed the rise of the Nazis and had accused Nietzsche of complicity with it. But that's it: Nietzsche returned on the left, and the focus is on Counterculture, because Nietzsche's values, implemented in practice, lie primarily in culture. The question now remains: What is the benefit or strength of Nietzsche's critique of cultural value?

There's a lot to say about that. Huey Newton offers an interesting, let's call it a “parasitic” reading. Because Newton certainly acknowledges that Nietzsche carried reactionary baggage with him, but he still reads a specific text by Nietzsche that has a strong influence on him: About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense.¹⁸ This extremely convincing short early publication can be described as a precursor to what later became discourse theory. According to Nietzsche, language is the home of values that are manifested in words; words therefore have a political value.

In parallel, Newton took note of Nietzsche's critique of the working class: The conditions of modern life have pacified them, robbed them of a certain vitalism. As a result, people in the working class are sometimes no longer able to engage in the type of activity through which their higher self can ultimately be realized. That is actually, I think Henry, a true Nietzsche point. We shouldn't pretend that there isn't anything there. And I think Huey Newton saw the same thing. Yes, being in a state of passivity is one of the things to recognize when you come from the working class or are exposed to a life of poverty. The question thus becomes essential: How can we change this oppression and release it from its interdependence with the increasing passivity? For Newton, the answer was a linguistic and eye-catching operation, driven by the Panthers, which redefined the police in the minds of many. Redefining the police, literally as “pigs,” also allowed the Panthers to reinvent themselves and their relationship with the state, and this is where things get interesting.

Because that means that Newton was basically able to promote class consciousness by reading Nietzsche. Even though that, I believe, is the opposite of Nietzsche's intentions. Nietzsche is a militant bourgeois who may be in favour of transgression, but not necessarily in favour of a social order that would be in a constant revolutionary moment of agitation. Nietzsche is an anti-revolutionary. That doesn't mean we can't elicit something from him, and that brings us back to fist-fighting. Yes, if you are a left-wing person and ending the exploitation is a matter of your heart, you can read Nietzsche that way. I think that's going to be the most productive for you, right? And if you read it like this, then you will be able to identify with this very famous Nietzsche sentence, which is almost like a prayer for his enemies: “You must be proud of your enemy: then your enemy's successes are also your successes. ”¹⁹

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Daniel Tutt (born 1981) grew up on the US West Coast, in a working-class family that fell apart several times. Since he was a young teen, he worked in the construction industry, first as a mason's assistant (“hod carrier” in English), and earned his money in the construction industry even after graduating from university. In 2014, he completed his doctorate on the topic “Political Community in Badiou, Laclau, Nancy, and Žižek.” Tutt gives on his website states that he succeeded in making the transition to the “bourgeois” profession of philosopher primarily because he enjoyed the financial support of a businessman during the transition phase. Since then, he has taught in prisons and at universities and has published extensively on the interface of psychoanalysis, politics and Marxist philosophy.

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

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sources

Alamariu, Costin: Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy. New York 2023.

Clark, Maudemarie: Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy. Cambridge 1991.

Doggett, Peter: There's A Riot Going On. Revolutionaries, Rock Stars And The Rise And Fall Of The 60s Counter-Culture. Edinburgh 2007.

Director, Brian: Nietzsche on Morality. London 2014.

Losurdo, Domenico: Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel. Berlin 2012.

Lukacs, Georg: The destruction of reason. Berlin 1960.

Sloterdijk, Peter: About improving the good news. Nietzsche's fifth “Gospel.” Speech on the 100th anniversary of Friedrich Nietzsche's death. Frankfurt am Main 2000.

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

Xenophon: Memories of Socrates. Greek-German. Translated and edited by Peter Järisch. Düsseldorf & Zurich 2003.

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footnotes

1: Cf. Nietzsche's idea of an individual's “loyalty” to “his higher self” in Richard Wagner in Bayreuth, paragraph 3.

2: Cf. Peter Sloterdijk, About improving the good news. Nietzsche's fifth “Gospel”. Sloterdijk draws on Nietzsche's description of So did Zarathustra I speak back, as can be found in a letter to his publisher Ernst Schmeitzner: “It is a 'poetry', or a fifth 'gospel' or something” (Letter dated 13/2/1883).

3: See, among other things, the report by Socrates's student Xenophon, who collected some statements by Socrates on the subject of self-knowledge: Xenophon, memories of Socrates, P. 199-201.

4: In dozens of places in his writings, Nietzsche presents himself as “an untimely one”: In this regard, the four volumes of his Untimely Considerations, published between 1873 and 1876, best known. But also a chapter of the late script Götzen-Dämmerung Entitled Nietzsche's “Streifzüge eines Unzeitgemeines” (Link).

5: Cf. Georg Lukacs, The destruction of reason.

6: In particular: Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche, the aristocratic rebel.

7: Cf. Daniel Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite, P. 193.

8: Editor's note: In the international debate, post-structuralism in particular is referred to as “French Theory” (see also the corresponding remarks on this here).

9: See Maudemarie Clark, among others, Nietzsche on Truth and Philosophy.

10: Cf. Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality.

11: Cf. Schopenhauer as an educator, Paragraph 6

12: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, paragraph 10.

13: See, for example, a survey carried out in 1897 for the Leipzig Workers Reading Room regarding the reading behavior of workers, which was already mentioned on this blog (link).

14: Cf. Doggett, There's a Riot Going On, P. 128-130.

15: Alamariu paraphrases and quotes directly from Chapter Four by Costin Alamariu, Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy.

16: Tutt, How to Read Like a Parasite, P. 278.

17: Lukács writes in The destruction of reason For example: “Nietzsche [...] creates the concept of an instinctive bondage: the declining bourgeoisie must unleash everything bad, bestial in people in order to win over militant activists to save their rule” (p. 305). In the so-called “expressionism debate,” he emphasized the affinity between Nietzschean aesthetics and the fascist movement as early as the 1930s.

18: Cf. http://www.nietzschesource.org/#eKGWB/WL. However, this work from 1873 was only published posthumously.

19: So Zarathustra spoke, Of War and War People.

“The Most Noble Adversary”

Daniel Tutt and Henry Holland in Dialogue

After two previous contributions to Nietzsche in the Anglosphere For this blog, Henry Holland interviewed American thinker Daniel Tutt about his perspective on Nietzsche as the most important antagonist of the left. The discussion included Huey Newton, leader of the Black Panthers in the 1970s, and what his “parasitic” way of reading Nietzsche prompted him to read. An unedited and unabridged version of this interview, in original English, can be heard and watched on Tutt's YouTube channel (link).

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“The future, the wonderful unknown of the future, is the only object of the Nietzsche Festival. ”¹

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synopsis

Nietzsche is one of the great thinkers of the future. “Prelude to a philosophy of the future” is the subtitle of Beyond good and evil And already in the second Unexpected viewing Nietzsche conceptualizes the future as a primary tense from which past and present can only be adequately understood.

So what could be more obvious than dedicating his own conference to “Nietzsche's Future” — a plural that he also uses himself again and again? I stayed the first day of the meeting Nietzsche's Futures at, organized by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar. It lasted from October 7 to 11 and brought together proven Nietzsche experts from all over the world, who were asked to present their respective perspectives on Nietzsche's future from the context of their home country's experience.

After greetings from Ulrike Lorenz, President of the Foundation, and Helmut Heit, Director of the Friedrich Nietzsche College, who had organized the conference together with his assistants Corinna Schubert and Evelyn Höfer, a panel followed in which Nietzsche researchers David Simonin from France, Hans Ruin from Sweden and Martine Prange from the Netherlands spoke about the two questions asked as representatives of their respective countries of origin. In the next panel, South African researcher Vasti Roodt and Willow Verkerk from Canada spoke. The first day of the conference was concluded by a panel, at which the four editors of the Nietzsche studies, perhaps the most important body of international academic Nietzsche research, Christian Emden, Helmut Heit, Vanessa Lemm and Claus Zittel.

Most speakers largely agreed that Nietzsche's future lay in the continuation of the post-structuralist Nietzsche interpretation and in philological, textual approaches.² One must engage with Nietzsche's texts in order to experience their radical potential, which consists primarily in the destruction of existing truths and certainties. Time and again, the ambiguity, and complexity of Nietzsche's work was emphasized, which could in no way be reduced to specific “doctrines.”

I was only partially convinced by this point of view. Was this really a glimpse of Nietzsche's future or rather a summary of the last 20 years of Nietzsche research? Is Nietzsche really simply an ironist, masquerade player and trapper — or is he not always inspiring with his substantive statements, which, in addition to everything contradictory and ambiguous, also exist — and of which there was certainly talk of again and again during the conference?

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I. Nietzsches Futures

Nietzsche is one of the great thinkers of the future. “Prelude to a philosophy of the future” is the subtitle of Beyond good and evil And already in the second Unexpected viewing Nietzsche conceives the future as a primary tense from which past and present can only be adequately understood: We need an idea of what will be in order to understand what was and what is. — An important, not to say: forward-looking, thought that later Heidegger in Being and time would pick up.

Last but not least, the “superman” is an open utopia whose philosophical content could almost be translated as “future at any price.” Nietzsche's insight: Man is essentially an animal that lives in the future, that needs an idea of it as much as the daily bread that fluctuates between fear and hope. But he doesn't want to dictate a specific future to people; he consciously thinks of it as radically open. No wonder that he repeatedly speaks of her in plural form when he writes, for example: “Out, out, my eye! Oh what many seas all around me, what twilight human futures! And above me — what a rose-pink silence! What an obscured silence! ”³

Nietzsche is thus opposed to the entire tradition in philosophy that dates back to Plato, which sees truth essentially as a reminder, as a re—construction of something past. For him, truth is essentially something that must be actively created with courage, something that Not yet is: “Courageous, carefree, mocking, violent — that is what wisdom wants us: she is a woman and only ever loves a man of war”⁴.

Every generation, every individual, urges Nietzsche time and again to create this truth, to make the unheard audible, the unseen visible, the unthinkable imaginable. It is no wonder that he is perhaps the most important philosophical leader of the avant-garde and radical political movements of all kinds. Hegel still wanted to understand the present and this as the result of the entire history of the world: “The owl of Minerva only begins its flight at dusk.” Nietzsche, on the other hand, is the philosopher of dawn and departure — for him, as at the same time for Marx, the actual story has not even begun.

With this philosophy of “not yet”, Nietzsche in particular inspired the unorthodox Marxist Ernst Bloch, who took up and developed this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking more consistently than any other thinker, into an entire system of hope and utopia. Certainly there are also elements in Nietzsche's work — this is no surprise — that contradict this emphasis on the future: the myth of the “eternal return,” which has no real future, since everything has already existed; the peculiar nostalgic fixation on “men's morality” as a backwards “utopia,” which is not a utopia after all. But this Nietzsche simply has no future; it is necessary to defend the radical adventurer who goes out into the “open sea” against him⁵ And all the “shadows”⁶ wanted to leave the dead god behind. You can certainly ask whether he doesn't go 'too far', whether the new doesn't always have to contain elements of the old and abolish them in itself; but it is the pathos of the new that is essential, and that Nietzsche always just for boy draws interest to readers who see his writings as a catalyst for their own will to change.

What is the score of these thoughts in a time that has apparently adopted “No future” as its slogan and which is characterized by sheer promises of salvation, exhaustion and relativism — Nietzsche would say: nihilism? In which the young feel they are the “last generation” and the elderly have more and more power for demographic reasons alone and seem to be blocking real progress? Is there still a future? And if Nietzsche and Heidegger are right, a negative answer would mean: Then there is also no present and no past. And in what way could in such a post-historical world Nietzsches Exist the future?

II. “Nietzsche's Futures” in Weimar

With the expectation that I would receive, if not answers, then clues to these questions, I drove to Weimar on the first day of the conference Nietzsche's Futures hosted under the wing of none other than the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, one of Germany's largest cultural institutions. It went from October 7 to 11 and brought together proven Nietzsche experts from all over the world, who were invited to present their respective perspectives on Nietzsche's future from the context of their home country's experience.

In her welcome address, the President of the Foundation, Ulrike Lorenz, placed the conference in the context of her entire work and emphasized that it was the closing event of the theme year “Departure.” According to her unspoken statement, this was deliberately placed in the year of the Thuringian elections in order to counteract the AfD's victory in the election.

Helmut Heit, Head of the Foundation's Research Department and the Friedrich Nietzsche College, which is also affiliated with it, gave a further welcome address, an institution dedicated specifically to maintaining and continuing the Weimar Nietzsche tradition. He organized the conference together with his assistants Corinna Schubert and Evelyn Höfer. Heit emphasized that Weimar was the starting point of the “Nietzsche event,” even though the philosopher only spent the last three years of his life here, abducted and cared for by his sister. The with the sister and her controversial edition of some fragments of Nietzsche's estate as The will to power He did not conceal the dark side of this heritage, but rightly emphasized that Weimar Nietzsche reception was under progressive auspices until the First World War and was closely linked to the cultural avant-garde of that time, in particular Art Nouveau. He also pointed out that the Klassik Stiftung Weimar is making every effort to have Nietzsche's estate stored here on UNESCO's list of intangible world cultural heritage. However, the request in this regard had not yet been decided.

Heit blamed the following factors for the continued impact of that “event”: that Nietzsche had repeatedly found new multipliers such as the mentioned Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, Georg Brandes, Lou Salomé, the Chinese writer Lu Xun, Heidegger, Foucault or Judith Butler; the stylistic and content-related diversity of Nietzsche's philosophy; the aesthetics of his style, which repeatedly drew the attention of artists in particular to him has; that he repeatedly asks important questions of recurring relevance to stimulating Weise said that, as a radical critic, he repeatedly appeals to young people and inspires innovations. Nietzsche's present is still our time and Nietzsche critically described it.

This was followed by a panel in which Nietzsche researchers David Simonin from France, Hans Ruin from Sweden and Martine Prange from the Netherlands spoke about the two questions asked as representatives of their respective countries of origin. The conference was generally pleasant because, by focusing on these two problems — Nietzsche's impact in the various cultures and his future in them — the common thread of the contributions was always clearly visible and they always clearly related to each other.

David Simonin emphasized how early, as early as the 1870s, Nietzsche was discovered in France, even though it was only from the 1960s as part of post-structuralism — usually referred to as “French Theory” during the conference⁷ — has been incorporated into academic research. He distinguished between three perspectives on Nietzsche in today's French discussion: polemical, which criticize Nietzsche and especially his left-wing performers, in some cases vehemently; dialogical ones, which interpret and appropriate Nietzsche in light of current cultural problems; and philological — he referred in particular to the project nietzschesource.org —, which approach Nietzsche from a more historicizing, contextualizing and immanent point of view. From his point of view, the future of Nietzsche would lie in the latter approach, which he also professed himself. He spoke of the fact that it might soon be possible to solve Nietzsche's life with the help of virtual reality-Experience technologies directly and in 3D and accompany him on a train journey through the Swiss Alps, for example.

Hans Ruin presented the Scandinavian reception of Nietzsche. This was very fruitful and important for Scandinavian culture well into the 20th century, with Nietzsche being appropriated primarily as a pioneer of progressive and avant-garde — so-called “cultural radical” — positions. However, there had been no discussion about Nietzsche in Sweden until the 1980s; he even compared the situation at that time with censorship in the GDR. The Swedish translations of Nietzsche's works are, apart from that of Zarathustra was out of stock. Nietzsche's influence on Scandinavian culture was suppressed, Ruin spoke of a “hidden heritage” that had only been rediscovered from the 1990s by researchers such as himself and Thomas H. Brobjer, who had also brought about a new translation of Nietzsche's works into Swedish. In the noughties, this led to an upsurge in Swedish Nietzsche research. Ruin described it as a sign of a culture's health if it was able to read, digest and talk to Nietzsche's texts.

Martine Prange finally explained that Nietzsche had only played a minor role in the culture and, above all, the philosophy of her country. In addition to the generally hostile, very “croaky” mentality of the country, she attributed this in particular to the “Americanization” of Dutch culture and philosophy beginning after the Second World War, which has now gone so far that Dutch as a language of science has almost completely been supplanted by English. The Dutch research system has also been structured in an extremely competitive and market-like manner in recent years, so that hardly any funding has been awarded for research on intellectual history topics; there is only applied ethics everywhere. The new right-wing government has now cut back on already scarce research funding and is now mistreating “long-term students” with fines, so that Prange was very pessimistic, at least when it comes to academic Nietzsche research in the Netherlands. She emphasized the close connection between research and politics and expressed the hope that Trump would not be re-elected. With this clear accusation of poor political conditions for intellectual history research, Prange struck a nerve and received much encouragement. During the discussion, Ruin even spoke of the Americanization of Europe as a cultural “decadence.”

In the next panel, South African researcher Vasti Roodt and Willow Verkerk from Canada spoke. Roodt was of the opinion that Nietzsche was not a political thinker in the sense that his philosophy made no contribution to building a just democratic society. He is a thinker who talks primarily about personal problems by repeatedly pointing out the implicit background value underlying our explicit evaluations and calling for the endless project of critiquing these prejudices. She took up Nietzsche's distinction between mere scholarship, which could not set its own purposes, and genuine purposeful philosophy and warned against the dominance of the former. Even today, Nietzsche is calling for a “rendezvous at questions and question marks.”

Her presentation, in turn, provoked several critical questions. In particular, it remained unclear why Nietzsche's critique of our unconscious values could not also be applied to political values. Roodt also put her assessment into perspective a bit during the discussion and emphasized that she was speaking from the perspective of an unstable democracy that is still in its infancy.

Willow Verkerk's presentation was particularly exciting because she has broad international experience and has conducted research in Belgium, Canada, Great Britain and Japan, among others. She differentiated between a more European approach to Nietzsche, which roughly corresponds to what Simonin had called a “philological” interpretation, and a more English-language approach, which she described as “toolboxing Nietzsche,” i.e. a rather superficial selection of individual passages of the philosopher's text in order to use them to support her own considerations. She identified herself as a feminist researcher whose main aim was to import this European method to Canada.

Heidegger and the representatives of French Theory had already done this kind of “toolboxing”, and their students also mostly approached Nietzsche from this lens, being particularly inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Marxist Nietzsche interpretations. She named Nietzsche's genealogical method in particular as relevant core concepts, in particular in its development by Michel Foucault, the radical feminism of Judith Butler and the Critical Race Studies; his diagnosis of nihilism or the “last person,” which in recent times has often been understood as an accusation of environmental or ecological nihilism; his critique of metaphysics and the resulting perspectivism; his critique of the “sovereign individual,” whose autonomy is a result of discipline, in the second treatise of The genealogy of morality; and finally Nietzsche's view of the self as an embodiment of the will to power, which makes Nietzsche a pioneer of phenomenology, especially that of Maurice Merleau-Pontys, and psychoanalysis. Verkerk named Nietzsche's influence on early feminism and anarchism as further problem areas that deserve more attention from future Nietzsche research. She also pointed out that Nietzsche's critique of compassion has recently been approving in the Disability Studies will be picked up.

In the following discussion, various researchers emphasized that intensive immersion in Nietzsche's writings per se, regardless of their content, is a transformative educational experience that is lost when approaching them purely through instruments. Verkerk, for example, reported on the strong emotional reactions that Nietzsche's texts repeatedly evoked among her students⁸ and invite them to question where they actually came from.

At the end of the official part of the first day of the conference, the four prominent Nietzsche researchers Christian Emden from the USA, Helmut Heit, Vanessa Lemm from Great Britain and Claus Zittel from Stuttgart directly discussed the question “Does Nietzsche's philosophy have a future? ”. It was an illustrious round not least because it involved the current editors of the Nietzsche studies, probably the most important international body of Nietzsche academic research, acts.

Vanessa Lemm emphasized that Nietzsche stands for a completely new understanding of philosophy and a new philosophical way of life. He regards philosophy as a fundamentally relational endeavor, is a thinker of relation. Claus Zittel agreed with her that Nietzsche was a critic of any claim to absolute truth. This perspectivistic and relativizing method of thinking and writing by Nietzsche is very topical in a time of rampant 'absolutisms. ' He is a thinker of “difference” (with which Zittel took up one of the main keywords of post-structuralist philosophy), who repeatedly urges us to relativize our own positions to the point of radical consequence, to constantly abolish ourselves. He heightens our awareness that positions can only ever be transitory, and diagnoses different expiration logics in his writings without articulating an opposite position, playing a game with ambiguities, puzzles and masks that you would only understand correctly if you could read Nietzsche in the original.

Christian Emden agreed with Zittel that Nietzsche was not conveying a message or teaching, but that was above all a critic and that was his potential. Similar to Verkerk before, he named the genealogical method and the diagnosis of nihilism — understood as a radical question of the conditions for the possibility of values in general — as central relevant topics of his thinking. She also added the question of the relationship between normativity and nature, how it raised post-humanist thinking and New Materialism, and the question of what philosophy actually was.

All four editors were therefore largely in agreement to favor a more philological, work-immanent reading of Nietzsche — Zittel warned against an “escape from the text,” for example — and to reject interpretations that would like to take positions from Nietzsche's texts. According to Heit, Nietzsche wanted to fail and not create a system; failure was the great constant in Nietzsche's life, according to Emden; Nietzsche had recognized that only “false gods” were possible in modern times and that the lie had lost its innocence, according to Zittel. His notorious late work Ecce homo Zittel continues, for example, as a mere parody. Lemm spoke of the danger of politicizing interpretations of Nietzsche and of the philological approach as the most important antidote to them, as a central advance in Nietzsche research in recent decades, which, as Zittel added, took place around 2000. What is therefore particularly important about Nietzsche is his spelling, not so much what he writes in detail — although the editors of the Nietzsche studies They agreed unanimously that they did not want to print overly experimental texts in their magazine.

Nietzsche thus appears as a pioneer of “Antihumanism” and New Materialism — according to Lemm, who even spoke of the replacement of human intelligence by AI should —; not as an overcomer of nihilism, but as a nihilist himself, according to Zittel and Emden, even though, according to Emden and Heit, he also stresses the need for, though never absolute, values for our human existence.

Recently, the question was raised by the audience where Because Nietzsche's philosophy actually still has a future. At university? In this regard, the editors of the Nietzsche studies rather subdued. Zittel recommended that you not choose a research topic for career reasons that did not suit you, Lemm pleaded for a stronger intra-academic and cultural appreciation of philosophy.

III. And now?

The event was a rendezvous between the mainstream of current Nietzsche academic research, a mutual confirmation of one's own convictions in a family atmosphere, which was reflected, for example, in the fact that people usually called each other by first name. Almost all of the approximately 70 listeners were there for professional reasons, and even students from the surrounding universities were searched in vain. Critically, you could say: left-liberal followers of post-modernism among themselves. From the point of view of the researchers present, the “future” of Nietzsche lies primarily in the unwavering continuation of the present, a textual, philological reading of Nietzsche in connection with the classics of “French Theory” such as Foucault, Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Butler or, recently, Bruno Latour, the most important advocate of New Materialism.  

For now, there is nothing wrong with that. You don't want to imagine what a Nietzsche conference would look like, organized by ideologues from the strongest party in Thuringia — you would almost think that it was talking about two different philosophers. Nietzsche as a radical critic and relativizer of all, especially right-wing, ideologies and “truths”: Yes! More of that!

The drawings by German-Iranian artist Farzane Vaziritabar, which visually accompanied the conference, illustrated this view of Nietzsche particularly well. In a cartoonish style, they repeatedly question the Nietzsche cult of past decades and its (self) heroization, but without ridiculing it. He appears on them as a masked player and religious critic, as a pioneer of the critical philosophers of the 20th century from Sigmund Freud to Theodor W. Adorno and Jean-Paul Sartre to the “French Theory.” However, in keeping with Lemms's plea, an AI-generated pop Nietzsche was chosen as the cover photo of the conference.

And yet there is room for doubt. Nietzsche repeatedly criticizes skepticism, nihilism and, last but not least, philological research in his texts themselves — even though, as always, Kurt Tucholsky's famous mocking dictum applies in this regard: “Tell me what you need and I will get you a Nietzsche quote in return.” Like Natalie Schulte, taking up Tucholsky's quip, on this blog Recently emphasized, although Nietzsche's texts are ambiguous and often puzzled, they cannot therefore be interpreted at will. He combines his perspectivism with the call to create a”Ranking of values to determine”⁹. He is not simply a masked player and ironist, but also criticizes the masquerade and the arbitrariness of modernity in countless places.¹⁰ He wants Europe, that the world, to create a new, self-determined future for itself¹¹ even if it becomes vague when it comes to their concrete form. An appeal that cannot mean to stick to a general reference to the relativity of every positioning, but which amounts to taking decisive and courageous positions in the face of its relativity. Last but not least, as can be seen from Heidegger, Nietzsche and Bloch alike, the future is not simply given to us as an object, but that we are called upon to actively shape: Wir Are they who give Nietzsche a future or not and it is up to us, as its readers and performers, to design them responsibly without being determined by any past or present. Rather, these only make sense in the light of this draft.

This uniqueness To recognize Nietzsche, which in addition to all “difference” also exists in many respects, would rather be the future of Nietzsche research that would also appear to be relevant beyond its own haze. But this recognition is perhaps more difficult and painful than the same perpetual lyre of ambiguity, ambiguity, relativity, etc., as it refers not least to Nietzsche's problematic political legacy, which Heit referred to at the outset and later in particular, albeit rather subtly, Roodt. The sad truth, not said by Roodt, but clearly hinted at: Nietzsche himself might have been more of a supporter of political projects such as the South African apartheid regime than her critic.

After decades of philologizing and relativizing Nietzsche, it would therefore probably take another “content” — to take up a term Andreas Urs Sommers, who also spoke at the conference¹² — A turning point in Nietzsche research, which goes hand in hand with an unequivocal political positioning in line with the political ideals of modernity pointed out by Roodt. It should mercilessly uncover and criticize Nietzsche's positions that are incompatible with these ideals, but at the same time also point out the important and promising aspects of his thinking, which contradict these positions and which were rightly mentioned again and again at the conference. Because if you leave it with pure skepticism, you undermine all positions, including emancipatory ones; you only do half the work of criticism in the sense of emancipation.

This is particularly supported by the fact that during the conference, despite all affirmation of Nietzsche's ambiguity, mysteriousness, etc., there was always the contents of his writings — such as his insights into psychology — which were also brought to the forefront by the researchers themselves. So “textism” — according to Sommer's expression — obviously cannot completely eradicate this moment if it wants to save even a grain of relevance in the world. Hic Rhodus, hic salta! — The rose of renewed Nietzscheanism blossoms here, you researchers dance!

This rethink is all the more necessary because otherwise the future of Nietzsche will inevitably be written by forces other than the participants of the conference would like in unison. Only in passing was the danger of renewed legal Nietzscheanism pointed out.¹³

None of this is intended to diminish the merits of the philological interpretation of Nietzsche. Rather, it should be pointed out that, in the sense of a Hegelian three-step, it is probably time to find a new path in the sense of Nietzsche's countless ambiguities that took place up to the 1970s and the successive ambiguities of his philosophy in the sense of informed ambiguity, which does not ignore the results of philological research, but takes them up in order to engage again with contents to pave the way for Nietzsche's thinking. The growing interest of her students in Marxist Nietzsche interpretations mentioned by Verkerk — as well as in feminist, racism-critical or those within the Disability Studies — gives hope that this development, in response to the renewed legal Nietzscheanism, whose renaissance beyond Nietzsche university research has already been taking place a long time ago, will just as inevitably take place. And the seemingly still undecided mainstream of Nietzsche academic research will be just as necessary in this regard position must. A renewed enlightened humanism, as Bloch advocated in his specific synthesis of Marx and Nietzsche, could be the fruit of these efforts, perhaps even a collective cultural departure like the one that took place around 1900 in Weimar and throughout Europe, inspired not least by Nietzsche's ideas — which were understood quite “naively” at the time.

IV. Anecdotal sequel

During breaks, I spent time and again in front of the conference venue, the Mon Ami Cultural Center in the heart of Weimar. Passers-by came and went and looked curiously at what was going on there today. Some simply asked for the toilet, no one stayed. One person quoted from his head one of the countless misogynous passages from Beyond good and evil¹⁴ And said Feist: “That's misogynistic — so what? “Did he choose Höcke a few weeks earlier? Would participation in the conference have convinced him otherwise in terms of the hoped-for “departure” or would at least have brought him to relativize his position?

On the way home, I met a local man who identified himself as the poet of quite original puzzle verses. Some of them reminded me a bit of Nietzsche's aphorisms. He proudly showed me a television report from one of his readings on his smartphone and told me that he had already sold several thousand copies of his books. I preferred to keep silent about mine sales figures and he probably outperformed just about all of the researchers who had spoken today in terms of sales success. And not even Weimar local television has appeared in Nietzsche's Futures strayed.

How to popularize the insights of philosophy without popularizing them? That was perhaps the actual background question of the conference and the dwindling research funding is only an expression of this problem. What future does it have philosophy? Does philosophy have as an academic discipline?

But perhaps this is also the wrong way to ask the question. Philosophy, if it has any value, will always have a future. If she doesn't have him, you don't have to grieve about it with Nietzsche, but realize: “[W] as falls, you should also push that! Everything of today — that falls, that expires: Who wanted to keep it! But I — me wants Still bumping it! ”¹⁵ Nietzsche will always find his readers as long as we live in a culture that is similar to his own. He, Plato, Hegel, Kant, so many others: They have all advanced to something that may even be valid forever as long as there are people. Even if it wasn't so, so must But we, as philosophers who take themselves seriously, believe in it. And it is the same with the future of humanum, with the future of democracy. Hope is a principle, a principle that enables a self-fulfilling future. The thinking that poisons hope and faith may have no future. Or, in the words of early Nietzsche, directed against philology, quoting an important humanist from Weimar:

History, however, which only destroys without an inner building instinct leading it, makes its tools embarrassed and unnatural in the long run: because such people destroy illusions, and “anyone who destroys the illusion in themselves and others is punished by nature as the strictest tyrant. ”¹⁶

The photographs accompanying this article are by Paul Stephan. The product image is a drawing by Farzane Vaziritabar (Link to the artist's homepage with the complete series Ecce Nietzsche).

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literature

Battalile, Georges: Nietzsche and the fascists. In: Compensation to Nietzsche. Munich 1999.

Summer, Andreas Urs: What remains of Nietzsche's philosophy? Berlin 2018.

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footnotes

1: Georges Bataille, Nietzsche and the fascists, P. 164.

2: At the conference, it was more or less assumed that these two strands of interpretation were ultimately one strand. Or it was assumed that both strands ultimately resulted in the same interpretation. However, I certainly see a certain tension here that should have been discussed in more detail. The term “philology” was also used synonymously with “textual reading,” which could also be doubted given the variety of philological methods.

3: So Zarathustra spoke, The Honey Sacrifice.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, About reading and writing.

5: Cf. The happy science, Aph 343.

6: The happy science, Aph 108.

7: Whereby Simonin emphasized that this current of theory is no longer so “French.”

8: A male student burst into tears while discussing a seemingly misogynous passage and asked desperately, “How can you even think of something like that? “, while a fellow student said enthusiastically that Nietzsche was absolutely right in his critique of feminism.

9: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 17.

10: Just think of the famous section From the land of education in Zarathustra. One of his last sentences is: “I alone still love my children's land, The undiscovered, in the farthest seas: My name is to search for and search for my sails.” Hans Ruin pointed out that Swedish feminist Ellen Key made an almost identical sentence from another section of the book their main work The century of the child preceded.

11: Heit rightly referred to the important body Ecce homo: “My task is to prepare humanity for a moment of supreme self-reflection, a big Midday, where 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 Set “(Morgenröthe, paragraph 2). — This is where Nietzsche and Marx touch, here even the late Nietzsche ventures very far into the no man's land of utopia, oriented himself into the blue, which Bloch wrote about a few decades later. It is not a happy science, but a sad science to see such bright spots as a pure “parody.”

12: Cf. summer, What remains of Nietzsche's philosophy?, PP. 28—41.

13: Simonin, for example, only spoke in a subordinate clause of a few French “YouTubers” who would recently promote a right-wing Nietzsche interpretation. However, when he means authors like Julien Rochedy, whose videos about Nietzsche sometimes reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of clicks — we will dedicate a separate article to his Nietzsche interpretation on this blog shortly — that seems like a serious understatement; Simonin should be happy to reach even a few hundred readers with one of his undoubtedly more scientifically based articles.

14: It was, if I remember correctly, that 145. aphorism.

15: So Zarathustra spoke, From old and new boards, 20.

16: The benefits and disadvantages of history for life, paragraph 7.

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A Day in the Life of Nietzsche's Future

Report on the Conference Nietzsche's Futures in Weimar

From October 7 to 11, 2024, the event organized by the Klassik Stiftung Weimar took place in Weimar Nietzsche's futures. Global Conference on the Futures of Nietzsche instead of. Our regular author Paul Stephan was on site on the first day and gives an insight into the current state of academic discussions about Nietzsche. His question: What is the future of Nietzsche academic research when viewed from the perspective of Nietzsche's own radical understanding of the future?

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I. Summer evening philosophy

Idleness is the beginning of all philosophy. No effort of arguments and no analytical headache characterizes relevant thinking. At the beginning of one of the classic texts of philosophy, a rest in the shade under a plane tree is therefore advertised in order to be able to adequately address the major topics:

PHAEDROS: Well, do you see that tallest plane tree there?

SOCRATES: How should I not?

PHAEDROS: There is both shade and a moderate draft, also grass to sit down or, if we'd rather, lie down!

SOCRATES: You just want to go about it like that!¹

This motif of philosophy as an art of pause has also been preserved in modern times. In joking verses, Nietzsche votes for an outdoor philosophy that is based on mutual sympathy:

It is nice to be silent with each other

Better to laugh with each other —

Under silk sky cloth

Leaning towards moss and beech

Laugh sweetly out loud with friends

And white teeth show up.²

Philosophizing in the protective gray of shadow as the place where time can be thought of contradicts the attitude of philosophy as a work of concept as a work of concept as circulated by Hegel. Nevertheless, there could also be found a passage from the master thinker of the 19th century that suggests an objection to brooding reflection. This is how the famous preface to his ends Principles of the Philosophy of Law from 1821 with the words: “When philosophy paints its gray in gray, then a figure of life has grown old, and with gray in gray it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized; the Minerva owl only begins its flight at dusk. ”³

It is with these thoughts that a philosophical serenade in Gütchenpark zu Halle between Peter Sloterdijk and Stefano Vastano — organized by Literaturhaus Halle — began in July 2024. They allude to a theme that Sloterdijk, who repeatedly pointed out in his work that he was significantly influenced by Nietzsche's thinking, in his book published two years ago Who hasn't thought gray yet. A theory of colors developed extensively. While the swallows performed their seasonal capers in the alarmingly gray summer evening sky and from time to time a dull murmur was heard from the city, which came from the European Football Championships taking place at the same time, the approximately 80 participants, who were greying reindeer, listened to the conversation lasting approximately 90 minutes. The interplay between Vastano and Sloterdijk was interesting to watch. In a strong Italian accent, the former presented sentences such as melody suggestions to the philosopher, who turned 77 years old on June 26, bent over like a self-playing piano, and visualized wide contexts at heavenly lengths as the day was running out.

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II. Grey theory

Sloterdijk explained that gray was actually the basal color of Western philosophy. Right at the beginning of Plato's philosophy, in fact, there is an influential distinction between real essence and superficial appearance in the allegory of the cave, which is described by a kind of cinematic theory of fraud. In the seventh book of Politeia lets Plato Socrates philosophically construct reality as a kind of involuntary cinema event. According to this, the mass of people is bound within a dark cave, in which they are biased by a play of shadows that are projected onto the cave wall in front of them by candlelight behind them, in front of the undetectable wearer. In this sense, what most people think is the actual reality and what therefore sets them in suspense are just illusions. For Plato, the truth consists of climbing out of the cave and seeing the light of reality. The difference between Plato and Sloterdijk now lies in the fact that Sloterdijk draws attention to the distinctions created by the grey shadows on the grey cave wall. There would be differences in gray in gray. This is how the world of apparitions emerges from the shades of gray between shadow and wall. There is no need to break out for this truth.

In this respect, one could speculate, Sloterdijk is following Nietzsche's project to reverse Platonism. Instead of promoting an exodus from the cave to light and campaigning for the black and white difference, post-Platonic philosophy addresses twilight. This is the reversal of the most powerful western prejudice. Not everything that doesn't glitter is gold. Wouldn't reality be presented in a completely different light if the essence of ontology was that the essence of being was its appearance? Not so much reflection and the idea as attention to the objects and the atmospheres in which they appeared would become so central. The light of the Enlightenment, which gave up the idea of making ideas and no longer defames the caves as illusory worlds, no longer provides a clear and clear definition of the crystal-clear facts. What it can do at best is a better description of the horror, the ambiguity, the ambivalent, the complex mixtures of the possible. No “pressure to light” (Celan) requires shadowless illumination of everything and everyone as a massive object. Explication is becoming more careful. Post-Platonic theory stands as a good awakening of the Enlightenment to itself in the twilight of utopia: Between light and dark, the diversity of horror opens up as the true colorfulness of life. There are still plenty of worlds to discover in grey. Plato and Hegel's ideas thus become imaginable as conceptual caves from which thought must free itself: When philosophy paints its gray in gray, life can sometimes be recognized and understood again in a new form that can rejuvenate it.

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III. Exciting boredom

When the completely enlightened world is no longer, as was the case with the critical, all-too self-critical theory at the beginning of Dialectic of Enlightenment Presented against the rational culture of modernity, must shine in the sign of triumphant disaster, the opportunity opens up to analyse the structural change of modern lifestyles in more detail. As a result, Sloterdijk then showed Heidegger's meditations on boredom from his winter semester lecture The basic concepts of metaphysics — perhaps the best lecture by, as Emmanuel Levinas once said, “unfortunately the greatest thinker of the 20th century” — from 1929/30 exactly the basic mood of horror. Only humans can be an animal that is bored because they are open to a world that can affect you. The stone is “worldless”, the animal is “world-poor.” It is only through perception and participation in the wealth of the world that, with an astonishingly activist connotation for Heidegger, can be “world-building.” If this world-building fails, the self that is open to it fails and you notice yourself as a penetrating absence. Boredom is the sobering self-knowledge as an emotion: I am fog, therefore I am. But here too, Sloterdijk, again following Nietzsche's project, is trying to revalue the gravity. Where Heidegger suggests that “deep boredom in the abysses of existence like a silent fog goes back and forth”⁴ And showing the arch-conservative's clear will to philosophize a new state of emergency out of this phenomenon, Sloterdijk strives to recognize a sparkling freedom in the absence of intrinsic initiative. Whoever is none of their business, who loses themselves in boredom, is radically disposable of everything possible. In gray leisure, the ability to “unalarmed alert” (Sloterdijk) to let the world get close to you grows. And it increases the ability to roll off the appeals of urgency. Sloterdijk referred to Melville's character Bartleby, who infuriated his environment by evading the impositions with which he was confronted with a notorious “I would prefer not to” — Sloterdijk translated ad hoc as “I would rather not”. (However, the author can only conditionally recommend the use of this saying, in view of the immediate and lasting negative effect it had on the course of the evening when his companion at the event expressed the wish whether he would be so kind as to fetch her another glass of wine.)

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IV. The politics of gray

Through an allusion to the figure of the “gray eminence,” Sloterdijk recently drew attention to the political implications that affect his thoughts. He writes about this in his book: “[T] he liberality of modernity that invites mixing cannot force the desired rainbow society. At the same time, it is too late for segregation and pure colored identities. ”⁵  Sloterdijk concludes from this that grey is the most politically rational color of the time. The gray is fate. The toxic dualisms of true and false, good and evil dissolve in their unconditionality. From the epochal, utopian departure into better worlds through the reddish brown or brown-red mobilizations, the horizon emerges, which offers the prospect of better living in the now more interesting gray of everyday life. Grey is the communication of extremes, the twilight of consensus, the wonderfully unobtrusive boredom of the middle, whose life dramas no longer need the fight to live and die in order to feel something. Through his chromatic speculation, Sloterdijk thus supports Francis Fukuyama's thesis that the story of making history has come to an end. According to the story, that is, after archaic heroism, which always needed the strong contrast of black and white thinking in order to legitimize its intensities. Lots of enemies, lots of honor, lots of unnecessary bloodshed.

Nevertheless, according to Sloterdijk, the dimension of thymos — the “courage” — remains significant as the part of the soul that, according to Plato, is central to the impulses of insult, recognition and pride. In the gray story, it was no longer the heroic epics of the warriors and the missionary projects of the priests that colored the era. In the modern age, post-heroic heroism emanates from entrepreneurs, artists and athletes. It is they who invent the sacred games after the death of God, which on the one hand can provide new comfort, but which on the other hand also re-ritualize the thymotic energies. It is less the invisible hand of the market than the invisible hands of a new thymotic morality that governs such as extended Checks and Balances the community. The prestige struggles for a more profitable business, the more successful work, the new record mark domesticate the surplus of the aspiring part of the soul, which wants to exceed what is, without having to destroy what is or prevents it from having to destroy it. Enemies don't have to become friends. It is enough if they face each other as opponents, competitors, opponents. The ever-increasing diffuse cheers from the city, which burned on during the conversation and were played at the same time by the German national team, impressively pointed to the established structural change of the heroic in the modern world.

If civil integration of the thymotic does not succeed, for example by equating the thymotic too sub-complex with the belligerent and being canceled as toxic masculinity, the phenomenon of cynicism acquires a new charisma. Sloterdijk quotes a quip from Rochefoucauld, according to which hypocrisy is a bow of vice to virtue. Cynicism no longer makes this effort. He impresses by openly displaying his amoral disinhibition. Napoleon, who crowned himself emperor in 1804, provided the paradigmatic scene for this. This relapse into the monarchy has happened in France, the second home of Sloterdijk, four times since 1789. The alarming developments in the USA currently point to the virulent dimension of wild Thymos as Trumpism, which celebrates itself in its cynicism and brazenly exploits the legal grey areas in its favor.

Sloterdijk ended the evening with a mixture of joy and concern with the words that they hope they had completed their workload. The swallows were silent, the day grew grey and the last master thinker, after quickly signing a few more books, took the car to the train to Berlin.

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sources

Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. Frankfurt am Main 2022.

Hegel, George Frederick William: Principles of a Philosophy of Law. Frankfurt am Main 2002.

Heidegger, Martin: Basic concepts of metaphysics. Frankfurt am Main 2001.

Plato: Phaedrus. Hamburg 2005.

Sloterdijk, Peter: Who hasn't thought of gray yet. A theory of colors. Frankfurt am Main 2022.

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Item image template

https://www.wikiwand.com/de/Peter_Sloterdijk#Media/Datei:Peter_Sloterdijk,_Karlsruhe_07-2009,_IMGP3019.jpg

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footnotes

1: Plato, Phaedrus, 229 3a.

2: Human, all-too-human I, sequel 1.

3: Hegel, Principles of the Philosophy of Law, P. 28.

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

5: Sloterdijk, Who hasn't thought gray yet, P. 18.

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A Philosophical Serenade About Grayness

A Summer Evening with Sloterdijk at Gütchenpark in Halle

One of the most important philosophers of our time, Peter Sloterdijk (born 1947), visited Halle at the beginning of July. The thinker, who was heavily influenced by Nietzsche, shared his thoughts about “gray” there and impressively showed the heights to which philosophy can rise.

In the writings of transhumanism, Friedrich Nietzsche is one of the most famous philosophers.¹ This statement may seem banal at first. In which area, one could ask somewhat polemically, is Nietzsche not one of the most renowned philosophers? Whether in lyrics to black metal² Or bodybuilding, whether in the song lyrics of the Dandy Warhols, in Oi punk in Skinflicks or in beard counselors overgrowing international bookshelves — Nietzsche is referred to everywhere, as his polyphonic, eclectic work offers itself as a calendar archive for everyone and no one.

Especially for those people who don't take it too seriously with context sensitivity and genealogies of thought, Nietzsche's aphoristic style, which anticipated the feverish salvo talk on Twitter/X & Co. and was already pop long before pop, is seductive. Steam chatters long for hammer philosophers. Just search a PDF of the collected works for keywords, and you have a gaudy saying that can be used to philosophically pimp all sorts of things. It's harder with Immanuel Kant or Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Whether it's a manager or a squatter — if things have to be done quickly and smell a bit of dynamite, the quotation would prefer Nietzsche.

It is therefore hardly surprising that transhumanists are no different. And yet the eternal return of Nietzsche in transhumanism is anything but random. It is obvious that those who want to overcome humans and accelerate their profane ascent into the “posthuman” heaven have a particular affinity for the concept and concept of “superman.” Whether their understanding of superman also corresponds to Nietzsche's understanding is to be examined in the present text with regard to a sub-form of transhumanism, extropianism.

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I. Against entropic “religionism”

w Max Mores transhumanism. A Futurist Philosophy (1990), one of the defining texts of transhumanism, Nietzsche plays an important role as a source of keywords. The author, philosopher and CEO of the Alcor Life Extension Foundation from 2010 to 2020, sees himself as an “extropianist” and thus represents a current of transhumanism that is aimed directly at (life) practice and the accelerated — limitless, everlasting — psychophysical transformation of humans using the latest technologies (cryonics, biotechnology, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, etc.).

Extropianists aim to quickly and effectively move humans, both as a species and as individuals, beyond what they consider to be a deplorable current state. More contrasts the type of extropianist with that of the “religionist,” whose faith has an inhibitory effect. This is where Nietzsche comes in: “The religionist has no answer to the extropic challenge that Nietzsche's Zarathustra poses to us: “I'll teach you the superman. The human being is something that should be overcome. What did you do to overcome him? '”³. More continues: “I agree with Nietzsche (in The will to power) agree that nihilism is only a transitional stage resulting from the collapse of a false interpretation of the world. We now have enough resources to leave nihilism behind us and affirm a positive (but constantly evolving) value perspective.”

For extropianists, it is important to use all ethically valid (here: respecting the human dignity of the individual) resources for optimization, as acceptance of the human status quo appears to them as an expression of defeatism. In one form or another, this premise runs through the various other trends of transhumanist philosophy and life practice oscillating between liberalism, libertarianism, social democracy, social Darwinism and other isms, including through more differentiated and skeptical approaches than the radically optimistic one by Max More, such as that of Stefan Sorgner. The German philosopher believes “constant self-overcoming is central to promoting my own quality of life. I also consider the area of scientific and biotechnological research to be extremely important and call for increased funding for it.”⁴. From Sbergner's point of view, Nietzsche is also elementary for transhumanism: “When dealing with transhumanism, the similarity of transhumanist principles with those of Nietzsche's philosophy is immediately apparent” (ibid., p. 111). In Sorgner's book transhumanism. “The most dangerous idea in the world!? ” Nietzsche is the only philosopher to have a separate chapter dedicated to it. Elsewhere, he directly pleads “for a Nietzschean transhumanism.”⁵.

However, while Sorgner, following his doctoral supervisor Gianni Vattimo, advocates a decidedly “weak transhumanism,” More — in a very cliché Californian way — as a strong transhumanist who is committed to the radical expansion of human abilities and possibilities under the auspices of an undialectical, dogmatically set “positive.” Extropianism is born as the death of tragedy, overshadowed by Nietzsche's will to affirm.

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II. Transcendence and new faith

More's example makes it clear in an exaggerated way how deeply transhumanism is rooted in Anglo-American philosophy and theory; how strongly it is associated with utilitarianism, humanism, liberalism, individualism, and enlightenment; how much it is based on the typical Western-modern, Promethean nexus of science, (purpose) rationality, self-perfection — “from fate to machsal” to a Good advice from Odo Marquard. Immortality is considered a realistic goal, aging as a curable disease. It is significant that the first conception of transhumanism dates back to the forward-looking atheist eugenicist and first UNESCO Director General Julian Huxley, who in his article transhumanism (1957) postulated:

The human species can, if it wants, transcend itself — not just sporadically, an individual here in one way, an individual there in another way, but in its entirety, as humanity. We need a name for this new faith. Perhaps transhumanism is the right term: Man remains human, but he transcends himself by realizing new possibilities for his human nature and for his human nature [.]⁶

However, transhumanism only became an independent movement in theory and practice in the 1980s with representatives such as FM 2030, Max More or his wife Natasha Vita-More (the self-chosen surnames are literally a transhumanist program to be understood). It is precisely then that references to Nietzsche begin to accumulate, in particular to the superman, who is promoted to the rank of “posthuman.” Julian Huxley's Brave New World (yes, it is the brother of the much more skeptical and technology-critical author Aldous Huxley...) managed without Nietzsche's assistance.

In their euphoria, the extropianists are not only turning into the openness of the future, where they Frontier human existence continues push, but also in the old footsteps of the modern bourgeoisie intoxicated by themselves, as Peter Sloterdijk did in Remembering beautiful politics (2000) portrayed: “One suspects, astonishes, perhaps even envious how secure the bourgeois people of that time were in their ability to avoid the real into hymnics. How short were the paths from piano duo to humanity back then, how quickly did they rise from punch to genre”⁷. In contrast to modern-skeptical European, particularly German, educated bourgeoisie, however, transhumanists enthusiastically affirm and use modern technology and (natural) science.

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III. The selective superman

Nietzsche's superman from Zarathustra is an obvious reference when it comes to self-transgression and replacement from traditional, presumed restrictive morality. But extropianists such as More and other transhumanists cultivate a selective and tendentious approach to Nietzsche's most well-known figure. It is undeniable that there are many parallels between Nietzsche's work and transhumanism on the content level — the critique of Christianity (keyword “slave morality”), the orientation towards (natural) scientific research and technology rather than religious morality, the fundamental affirmation of development and self-transgression. But with Nietzsche, the content cannot be thought of without the form and style; indeed, form and style are, stronger than with most other philosophers, even the content.

While transhumanists usually write their texts in a rational style that is quite conditional, yet understandable and also takes into account academic conventions, and strive for technical feasibility (Nick Bostrom has written a user-friendly “Transhumanist FAQ”⁸), the feverish tone of voice, the expressive formulations, the dramaturgy of sentences, which mimetically comprehends his own erratic, essayistic thinking, straddle incessantly into the forming ideological order. At the level of Nietzsche's style, even there is no impression that it is sober science where sober science is praised. And when banal feasibility thinking emerges as a result of going to the last summit, the style lights up like a warning lamp. Anyone who reads Nietzsche minus the style doesn't read Nietzsche.

Another issue concerns semantics. What always with Nietzsche both problem and potential is, the seemingly endless development opportunities after God's death, gives extropianists such as Max More cause for hope in a fairly non-dialectical way. This shows the difference between optimistic affirmation and tragic affirmation. For More, beyond the scope of development of confining metaphysics, humans through science and various techniques, of manifesting themselves in machines Artes mechanicae to optimize action-oriented cultural and anthropogenic technologies until the old person is overcome and a new era of evolution begins. What is the new “posthuman” person (?) The extropianists don't know exactly what to say, but strangely enough, they assume that he — or it, or she — somehow better will be. More wisely omits an in-depth examination of the normative dimension of the “positive” of this optimization — and in doing so deviates from his philosophical personal trainer Nietzsche, whose work can also be understood as incessant strife, questioning, yes, a despair of the possibilities of modernity that sometimes turns into paradoxical affirmation.

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IV. Extropianists as the last people

As Nietzsche exposes himself to the abyss and breathes in its cold, More pours it over with new, warming certainties. The fact that “knowledge, freedom, intelligence, longevity and wisdom” are inherently good is the basis of his concept of transhumanism as a dogmatic principle. But why the long life longed for by extropianists per se Should be good, remains unclear. It is true that the extended lifespan is always linked to the requirement to stay healthy longer. But doesn't it rather articulate the bourgeois longing of the “last person”: to get as old as possible, to stay as healthy as possible, to be as satisfied as possible? The fact that human cultural achievements also arise from weakness and pain, from illness and loss, from failure and doom plays a subordinate role for More. However, this insight is still present in Nietzsche, for example in Ecce Homo: “I am a Happy ambassador, As there was none, I know tasks of a level that the term for them has been missing so far; it is only from me on that there are hopes again. With all this, I am also necessarily the person of doom.”⁹.

While More the values of humanism, enlightenment and modernity as a constructive affirmed, does the voice present itself from Ecce Homo also as an “annihilator”, namely of values, and as an “immoralist”, not least as a “buffoon”: “I have a terrifying fear that one day I will be taken saintly Says: You'll guess why I wrote this book prior Spell out that it is intended to prevent people from making mischief with me... I don't want to be a saint, I'd rather be a buffoon...” (ibid.). In Nietzsche, the superman is not a figure of light: “Superman's beauty came to me as a shadow”¹⁰. Those extropianists, on the other hand, who always bring (predominantly utilitarian) ethics, values, morals into action for their superhuman project and ultimately Gute promises (otherwise it is hardly possible to successfully fundraise for transhumanist experiments...) are therefore more in the tradition of those who work in Ecce Homo as “the Good, which benevolent, benevolent”¹¹ be denounced: as crypto-religious idealists. The ostensible religious critics of extropianism are perhaps religious in a similar way as the Christians criticizing Caesar were Caesar — and soon sat on his throne. If religions, or more precisely: political theologies such as Christianity, had exploited suffering to keep people small (keyword Job) and to deny them superhumans, extropianists exploit suffering ex negativo. They sanctify the optimization of power in a similar way as the “religionists” sanctify submission to fate.

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V. Transhumanism vs. Posthumanimus

In contrast to modern-skeptic posthumanism, which no longer recognizes man as the “crown of creation” (Wolfang Welsch), but sends him to the “Parliament of Things” (Bruno Latour) as a representative of political ecology or teaches him the humility of multi-speciesist collaboration in the “hot compost heap” (Donna Haraway), extropianist transhumanism ties in with futurocentric and anthropocentric exceptionalism of modernity, ironically by involving the (previous) human surmount wants — the most human thing about humans is simply the attempt to overcome people. No squirrel tries to overcome the squirrel. No cactus tries to overcome the cactus. No pebble tries to overcome the pebble. Only humans try to overcome people — this is the purest expression of their humanity. And only where anthropocentrism is in full bloom does the diffuse “posthuman” appear to be a desirable state. One's own strength has grown so much that weakening appears attractive, comparable to materially saturated people who regard “minimalism” as a desirable goal.

In this context, a strict distinction must be made between trans- and post-humanism. For posthumanists, the posthuman is paradoxically what has already, always been the case is, but is not recognized, even suppressed and ideologically combated, namely the existential “interconnectedness” (Haraway), the irreducible reliance of us humans on a “network” (Latour) of others and others, human as well as non-human beings. Posthumanism can therefore be described as an act of explication understand. You find again what is already implicitly the case. For transhumanists, on the other hand, the posthuman is a state that has yet to be achieved: The superman must manufactured become. The post-humanist critique of dualism, which wants to find its way out of binary schemes such as nature/culture, is not decisive for transhumanism. The much-cited vision of “mind uploading,” i.e. the technological outsourcing of one's own consciousness onto a carrier medium, alone shows that for transhumanists, despite the naturalistic-materialistic basis of their philosophy, there is a categorical difference between body and mind. The concrete “mind” is supposedly not linked to a specific “body.” But is it not a more concrete Body that one concrete Spirit makes possible in the first place, and is not the “body” (Helmuth Plessner) the unity of their differencethat can't be split up? A mind that existed independently of a specific body would not be the mind of a people, but haunted a Platonic cloud cuckoo home. w Nietzsches The benefits and disadvantages of history for life On the other hand, the criticism of the humanist body-mind dualism is decisive, as it is about the recognition of one's own, irreducible physicality and animalness — an animality that does not have to be overcome by any “superanimal.” The remoteness of animals from history and morals should rather be a corrective for humans: “This is how the animal lives unhistorical: because it opens in the present tense, like a number, without leaving a strange fraction, it doesn't know how to adjust, conceals nothing and appears completely as what it is in every moment, so it can't be anything but honest”¹².

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VI. Extropianism is Marx as Musk

Transhumanists, and in particular the extropianists among them, continue to live in human morality and human history, yes they want the most grandiose chapter of this story themselves writingby climbing to the pinnacle of humanity, the posthuman — only ostensibly paradoxical. Extropianist transhumanism is therefore less compatible with Nietzsche in all its tragedy and conflict than with the left-Hegelian tradition on the one hand, whose revolutionary understanding of history is based on the changeability of all relationships through human action, on the other hand, with the liberal capitalist tradition, which is committed to eternal progress, eternal optimization, eternal growth. Extropianism is Marx as Musk.

In More and other extropianists, the posthuman could be interpreted as the equivalent of the Hegel ending of the story. But because the potentially infinite perfection of the human — or the postman — cannot have an end, it cannot have a beginning. In its attempt to determine the course of history, extropianism processes itself, pulsing through optimistic emptiness, outside the story — and thus tilts back into exactly that u—topical religious metaphysics that, if you believe More, it actually wants to overcome:

Our species persists in old conceptual structures and processes that hinder progress. One of the worst is religious thinking. In this essay, I will show how religion works as an entropic force that opposes our progress toward transhumanity and our future as posthumans [.]¹³

It's one of those things about the future. Like the average Messiah, she is prone to delays. And when it finally arrives, it is not recognized as such; indeed, it is already out of date at the time of publication. The Messiah of the future always dies on the cross of increased expectations of him. FM-2030, an Iranian-American author, lecturer, consultant, Olympic athlete and pioneer of transhumanism born in 1930, said 2030 was a “magical time.”¹⁴ ahead — all people would then be ageless and would have an excellent chance to live forever. Transhumanist technology enthusiast Ray Kurzweil seconded him in 2016 (link). Evident is the religious subtext. In 2000, FM-2030 died of cancer. Would he still have been so optimistic in 2024? The darkening world situation and noticeably aging entertainment show us today that the new extropianist prophets are not necessarily more reliable than their old religionist predecessors with their notoriously incorrect apocalypse predictions. And even if their prophecies were received, the beneficiaries would immediately be dissatisfied with them: Excuse me, they fob us off with a bit of immortality and agelessness!? We would have deserved more! The posthuman will probably become human, all too human. Or, in the words of philosopher Leszek Kołakowski: “At the point of an explosion that seems to blow up the inheritance, the explosives always come from inherited stocks.”¹⁵.

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Jörg Scheller is a professor of art history at the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) and visiting professor at the Poznań Academy of Arts, Poland. He regularly writes articles for, among others, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung, THE TIME Artforum and is a columnist for Stuttgarter Zeitung as well as from Psychology today. As a 14-year-old, he was already on stage with a metal band. He now runs a heavy metal delivery service with the metal duo Malmzeit. Scheller is also a certified fitness trainer. In 2015, he organized the conference with Martin Jäggi Pop! Goes the Tragedy. The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche in Popular Culture at ZHdK. He TwitterXT at https://x.com/joergscheller1.

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bibliography

Campa, Riccardo: Nietzsche and Transhumanism. A Meta-Analytical Perspective. In: Studia Humana, Vol. 8/4 (2019), pp. 10—26.

Huxley, Julian: transhumanism. In: Ders. : New Bottles for New Wine. London 1957, pp. 13—17.

Kolakowski, Leszek: The presence of myth. Munich 1973.

Krueger, Oliver: Virtual immortality. God, Evolution, and the Singularity in Post- and Transhumanism. Bielefeld 2021.

More, Max: transhumanism. Towards a Futurist Philosophy, retrieved online at: https://www.ildodopensiero.it/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/max-more-transhumanism-towards-a-futurist-philosophy.pdf

Sloterdijk, Peter: Remembering beautiful politics. In: Ders. : The aesthetic imperative. Hamburg 2007, pp. 29—49.

Sorgner, Stefan: transhumanism. “The most dangerous idea in the world”!?. Freiburg, Basel & Vienna 2016.

Der.: (2019): Superman. A plea for Nietzschean transhumanism. Basel 2019.

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Source reference for the article image

Nietzsche by Luke Mack, 2010 (link)

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footnotes

1: For a quantitative analysis, see Riccardo Campa, Nietzsche and Transhumanism.

2: Editor's note: See the article on Nietzsche's reception in heavy metal by Christian Saehrendt on this blog (link).

3: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 3. All quotes in this article in English have been translated into German by the author.

4: Sorgner, transhumanism, P. 33.

5: That's the subtitle of his book superman.

6: P. 17.

7: P. 39.

8: Cf. https://nickbostrom.com/views/transhumanist.pdf.

9: Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 1.

10: Ecce homo, So Zarathustra spoke, 8.

11: Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 4.

12: The benefits and disadvantages of history for life, paragraph 1.

13: transhumanism.

14: Quoted by Oliver Krüger, Virtual Immortality, P. 71.

15: Leszek Kołakowski, The Presence of Myth, P. 38.

Look, I'm Teaching You the Transhumanist

Friedrich Nietzsche as a Personal Trainer of Extropianism

After Natalie Schulte reported on the echo of Nietzsche's “superman” idea in the start-up scene last week (Link), Swiss art scholar Jörg Scheller is dedicating this week to her continued existence in extropianism, a subtype of transhumanism that aims to artificially accelerate human evolution on both individual and genre levels using modern technology. The physical law of “entropy,” according to which there is a tendency in closed systems to equalize all energy differences until a state of equilibrium has been established — a state of complete cooling in terms of the universe — is opposed by the proponents of this flow with the principle of “extropy,” the increasing vitality of a system.

Nietzsche's superman can seem like an atavism. Who would still take such a cranky, remote, inhumane exaltation project seriously today? Who is not shuddered at the proclamation that they want to raise humanity to a new, self-transcending level? In Germany in particular, we have had more than enough bad experiences with exaggerated and unrealistic ideas that had very realistic, terrible consequences. The superman belonged to the National Socialists, racial delusions and biological beliefs. Bad enough that Nietzsche could also serve as a keyword for these apostles of coming glory. That's behind us.

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I. Beyond us

But do we have that? If you leaf through the advice literature of these days, even more contemporary: if you click through the more recent Moneymaking videos on YouTube, a lot of things seem strangely familiar to the Nietzsche reader. “The fastest route to success is to accept that you with your current sense of self and your current identity and how you perceive yourself and how the world presents itself to you through your lens and your paradigm, you're not capable of bringing about the future, that you want to bring about. [...] We don't achieve goals, we achieve characters. We achieve identities”¹, says Charlie Morgan, one of the most famous influencers and young multi-millionaires, who reveal the secrets of wealth to their audience on social media. “It was uncomfortable, it was out of my comfort zone, but it made me grow; and I think it's human nature to want to grow.”², preaches Alexander Müller, co-founder and owner of Greator, the most influential stage for speakers and coaches in Germany with over 800,000 YouTube subscribers alone, and can use these words to touch on Zarathustrian wisdom: “Life wants to climb and to overcome oneself.”³. “Go into your vision, even though it's going to hurt sometimes. But in the end, you'll have grown for your next step. Towards a happier, more successful and more fulfilling life”⁴, Müller adds great promises.

Expanding oneself not as part of a more comprehensive educational process, as an accompanying experience of meaningful, socially relevant activity with numerous challenges, and not as self-abandonment and self-transgression towards others in the sense of Christian charity. No, growing beyond oneself as a pure end in itself, as a source of meaning par excellence, as a principle and meta-program, as a supreme authority setting sub-goals, simply as a Zarathustrian life principle. We no longer find this radical core assumption in politics. But she has made it into the entrepreneurial milieu of the 2020s and is shaping an entire generation of entrepreneurs in a new, modern guise with spiritual flair.

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II. The Molting of Superman

That external success is a reflection of the state of internal development is observed as one of the basic axioms on the scene. It therefore only seems consistent that a lack of economic success is reliable proof of internal backwardness. “The company is the mirror of the entrepreneurial personality. Both can only develop together. As your business grows, you have two options. Either you grow with it and you succeed. Or your company grows over your head and you sink. ”⁵ That would be bad, of course. But don't worry! With the offers from the speaker and coaching scene, you will transform yourself, create depth of soul, intense happiness and self-chosen sense and — by the way, as an inevitable by-product — wealth. By the way, the latter does not mean anything internal, but rather quite profane: things, status symbols, comfort and money. A spirit without goodwill could assume that the latter is still the real impetus for many people's “inner search.” But even these require more than simply learning skill sets and diligent practice to achieve their goals. Yes, even more than an organic transformation.

Commitment to transformation itself is necessary. Because everyone has come as far as their current personality allows them to. Everyone gets what they deserve, could also be formulated. But can the true entrepreneur ever find his end, his port, his final form somewhere? No, because its essence lies in changing nature, in constantly rejecting an old ego in favor of a new, more capable version. “You must commit psychological suicide. You, the person you are right now, is not capable of this, because if you were, you would have it.”⁶ The old self must perish because it was too weak to get more from the world than it got. No luck, no salvation, no money.

It is not the dreams of owning a home or of a legacy that drives the protagonists of this ideology, as was at least proclaimed by previous generations of the bourgeoisie, but the innermost self becomes the object of processing, of struggle, and becomes a center of passion for one's own fate. The self-transcending, constantly sinking, sending, pushing ego, which affirms suicide in this sense, affirms doom, affirms life as the growth of one from the other, the dying — what is this other than the superman who demands of himself: “You must want to burn yourself in your own flame: How did you want to become new if you didn't become ashes first are. ”⁷

May we put forward the daring thesis: There is no need to talk about the superman anymore because he has long since realized himself? Realises only in a small class, but it is precisely in the class that embodies the greatest creative, reality-forming potential. Because what is not systemically outsourced to technical, legal, institutional structures and entities, what innovative power is actually given to individual people, who else could find this more concentrated than with entrepreneurs?

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III. Contemporary adventurers

No one is as prominent about wanting to fail, adventurism, trying out and playing as the caste of entrepreneurs. And no one is as uncaught in organizational structures and mechanisms, in the machinery of large corporations and political enterprises as they are. Nowhere else is so much tried out, dared, lost and won as there: “As entrepreneurs, we make bets everyday. We are Gamblers — gambling our hard-earned money on labor, inventory, rent, marketing, etc., all with the hopes of a higher pay out. Oftentimes, we lose. But sometimes, we win and win BIG. ”⁸ Nietzsche's superman also dares to do anything and risks perish when the demolition company rolls in the dust everything that appears outdated and outdated, and yet his gaze is always focused on what can be rebuilt: “[M] ag everything that breaks our truths — can! Many houses are still to be built! ”⁹ Yes, the higher the bet, the bigger and more noble the company, the act: “That is the dedication of the greatest, that it is risk and a game of dice for death” (ibid.)

Nothing is more highly valued in the startup scene than the balancing act of courage, commitment and composure. The real player takes high risks, “gives everything” to win — and walks off the field laughing when he realizes that he has lost. This is how you outline the ideal entrepreneur; Zarathustra wishes the new person with such “individuality”: “[W] he of you can laugh and be uplifted at the same time? Anyone who climbs the highest mountains laughs at all grief games and grief seriousness. Courageous, carefree, mocking, violent — that is what wisdom wants us: she is a woman and only ever loves a man of war. ”¹⁰

The goal becomes a mere means for the entrepreneur, an almost arbitrary setting that basically only serves to achieve a specific lifestyle, namely that of constantly being overly aware of oneself. The personal “mission,” which is often enough talked about in manager seminars, does not have to be either world peace or the “prosperity of nations,” which the thought leaders of capitalism such as Immanuel Kant and Adam Smith dreamed of, but can be consciously postulated and believed as just a temporary vehicle for personal transformation and top performance. You get involved in how you get involved in a game of chess. You have to take the desire to win seriously. But regardless of whether you get up as a winner or a loser in the end, you shouldn't have taken the game seriously. The board is cleared, the pieces are rebuilt, a new round, just as serious, just as inserious.

It may be said that this is accompanied by an almost superhuman experience of autonomy. Principles are established, one's own actions are rigorously guided by them, as if they were chiseled on tablets of law and dictated by heaven, the main thing is that one's own self has made them law: “Free from what? What does Zarathustra hide! Bright but let your eye tell me: free What for? Can you give yourself your evil and good and hang your will on yourself like a law! Can you be yourself a judge and an avenger of your law? ”¹¹ These laws only apply to the Nietzschean superman as well as to the entrepreneur as long as they push the ego to its limits and beyond them. Once a plateau has been reached — and yes, that certainly means a financial plateau for the latter — it is time to break the old rock lumps. They just constrict and need to be replaced with updated engravings that require a new look. An ego that will unlock a higher dollar-per-month level.

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IV. Combat companions instead of morale

Regardless of how many continuing education courses on “ethical business” the protagonists of the start-up scene may attend, morality remains a clearly external, foreign element, as can be easily assumed. It is true that your own product should always “solve a problem” and could therefore be called “good” in the Aristotelian sense. But the spectrum of “problems” that the clever businessman is preparing to solve ranges from the need for new technologies for heart valves to faster, cashless payment processing to “needs” for pornographic material. The limits of what is feasible are set by law, not by morality. It is true that many young entrepreneurs would undoubtedly not trade weapons, slaves or drugs if the legal framework were more relaxed, but this personal moral restriction is hardly one that receives any significant support from the persuasion system of their ideology.

The doctrine of superman could also be regarded as moraline-free. Although the old morality with its life-denying ideals should be overcome, where it should go remains largely undetermined. What the person who strives for the new ideal suffers from is not the suffering of injustice or evil in the world, no it is the disgust at the smallness of the person “that their best is so small! That their worst is so small! ”¹² The superman should be “loyal to Earth”¹³ Stay, do not devalue pleasure, it can even upgrade selfishness, domination and anything else that has been under negative signs so far. And the overall project also revolves around revaluation: “Appreciating is creating, hear it, creators! Valuing itself is the treasure and gem of all valued things. It is only through appreciation that value exists: and without appreciation, the nut of existence would be hollow. Hear it, you creators! ”¹⁴. But who is better suited to giving things their value, their price, than the capitalist, the stock market player, the young entrepreneur? Prices are not determined by thing, world or nature, remember that “nature is always worthless”¹⁵, but the value is put into nature by people, you could also say that it is invented.

Similarly, in view of the abstract demands of morality, compassion in the entrepreneurial milieu retreats to a reduced modus operandi. One of the central, infinitely iterated mantras is that individuals resemble the people with whom they spend the most time: “Being successful is very easy. What if I told you that you have the key right in front of your eyes? Yes, literally! Just take a closer look at your surroundings: Who do you live with? Who are you working with? Is your environment full of positive energy? Who do you spend your free time with? ”¹⁶

Like the superman, the entrepreneur has to look for those who are children of the same spirit. Anyone who gallops along the same path from transformation to transformation can be friend and brother, because then you can recognize each other, can fertilize and inspire yourself, can lighten yourself up in the dark hours of doubt, but even more: can encourage the other person to do greater, greater actions. Friendship means seeing the potential slumbering in the other person and awakening it together with him. That's when you grow together, each with their own adventure, and yet with a strong, friendly hand and voice close by. What you want are “companions [...] who follow me because they want to follow themselves — and wherever I want. [...] The creator is looking for companions and not corpses, nor for hosts and believers. The creator is looking for the collaborators, the ones who write new values on new boards”¹⁷.

And what about those who don't see it that way? The companies of the past, those who are not convinced of the same ideology of making money through spiritual awakening? Who perhaps embody different ways of life and value something else? And who expect something more from friendship than cheering each other on while sprinting on the hamster wheel? Well, here too, you should pass by, not with resentment, but murmuring a blessing and in freedom. But under no circumstances should you chain yourself to these people. They've left them behind. What are their concerns and advice now, perhaps even their empty remarks that they have transformed themselves into a superficial self-optimization machine? What do they already know? Basically, they're weak. And you shouldn't be a doctor or a crutch for the weak. They won't thank you for it. Don't chain yourself to the lame, leave them behind, surround yourself with people at your “level”, i.e. in the entrepreneurial milieu: with as identical a worldview as possible.

Who has ever swum through Zarathustra's lines would not see the Master's last lesson, namely to renounce compassion?¹⁸ It is important not to be a teacher to those who are too weak to internalize and embody the teachings of the superman, but to go on alone and make them serious with the intent: “And if you don't teach me how to fly, teach me — Fall faster! —”¹⁹

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V. “Price is what you pay, value is what you get”²⁰ (Warren Buffett)

But we can assume that most of the young entrepreneurs, even the coaches, consultants and speakers, have never read Nietzsche and have heard little more than the word “superman.” How can it be that so many of their beliefs and phrases seem to correspond exactly to the Zarathustrian ideal? Has his concept found a secret path into the collective subconscious and sought out its own niche, “its” people, to whom it can talk? To repeat the question from the beginning, is there hardly any talk of superman anymore because he has realized himself?

At the same time, however, one must hesitate to see Nietzsche's dreams realized when looking at the preachers of the money through happiness message. Is that the elite he was hoping for? A community of money-hungry fortune seekers? From the stage, highly paid speakers bark their promises of salvation in the best spotlight. On Fuckup Nights, entrepreneurs laugh about their worst failed attempts, their worst bankruptcies. In fitness centers, friends yell motivating truths to each other. If you can make it here, you can do it anywhere.

Is Zarathustra, the herald of the superman, not himself — contrary to his own self-confession — far too much of a philosopher to be satisfied with such meager materialism? And doesn't superman as an idea have a completely different spiritual core than simply surpassing himself? We don't just want to say succinctly that excessive ownership is regarded as an ankle bracelet by the proclaimer of the Superman and that the ideal of money appears frowned upon from the outset: “— truly not to a nobility that you could buy like the grocers and with grocer gold: because everything that has a price has little value”²¹, but above all stress that the Appreciate There is a completely different salary, as well as the The meaning of the earth It is by no means to be understood materialistically. New values should be created because the previous ones have proven to be nihilistic. The ideals of Christianity hostile to the senses and the body are outdated because the thesis of God has become implausible, but the people who revealed God as an invention and projection have retained the old values in an inferior, mediocre version. Now that there is no longer a God who can still be credible, where earthly life is everything, people try to make life comfortable, safe and healthy. The Zarathustrian ideal opposes this comfort, lack of idealism and diminution of the idea of humanity. Even the values of entrepreneurs are certainly not one of frugality, so you could even confuse them with the Zarathustrian ideal, if you only want to recognize in this the “above and beyond” just the simple self-law. Nonetheless, “Always on” and “Always more of the same” has a nihilistic core. Where everything is given a number value, the unequal is made equal. Money is accumulated without the players being able to say what that money is good for. You can still “bet” and “gamble it away”, simply spending it in a lifetime would be a challenge. Without an answer to the question of how the world should be shaped, creative power can only yearn for “more” that cripples all other areas of life.²² People need new values and aspirations that they can believe in, so they need an answer to the question “Why? ”. In a secular age, only humans can answer this question. But can he do this as an individual, is the superman even an individual? This is a complex question. The superman is often seen as an egomaniac who, in complete self-importance, takes the place that God previously held. No morality, no superordinate law, can dictate to him anymore. Is there an internal law?

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VI. The cannibals of capitalism

If we come back to the motivation that brings Zarathustra, the herald of the superman, to people, we see a motive that we should definitely not ignore. When Zarathustra is advised not to go to people; they would not listen to him, would not understand him, might even be dangerous to him, Zarathustra replies: “I love people. ”²³

Although much of a person may seem like pure self-empowerment in favor of a richer, mentally richer ego, one should not ignore the fact that Zarathustra wants to bring people a gift. Only if you ignore this can the words, mantras and aphorisms in the vibrant scene of the young entrepreneurs sound strikingly similar to the virtues of superman. The destruction of traditional ego, the growth of anew as a principle, the fresh daring, the playful spirit that engages but also releases itself again, which drafts its own laws in the highest autonomy without morality that serve him, not those it serves itself. The superman, who never gets stuck in fixed forms, just as he doesn't hold onto loved ones where he has outgrown them. He who, where evil happens to him, without resentment of life or people, affirms every difficulty as a challenge, as an opportunity to grow, as a springboard for the next level. Who feels thankful. Who, in the end, enjoys without shame and guilt, because he knows that there is no God and no judgment waiting for him.

And yet, on closer inspection, you have to realize that Nietzsche is misunderstood even where he is not quoted. The superman is not explicitly mentioned in the vanguard of the young capitalists. But many pieces of their ideology are taken from the intellectual inventory of Nietzsche's philosophy. But only in a reduced, adapted, deformed version. The true and only goal of today's economy — little has changed since Marx — remains capital accumulation. She likes to wear new, contemporary garments over and over again, invent new fashions and incorporate cultural trends and integrate all sorts of different vocabulary, but her essence always remains the same. And their subjects, the executants of their mechanisms, adapt their own inner life to the requirements of the system at any price for the best possible usability — from their point of view for “success”.

Nietzsche's superman, however, has another promise. An idea of humanity and human development that has dispelled the grievances and misunderstandings of a multi-entangled spiritual tradition and is able to start its own, ungodly future with freedom. In order to explore this, however, it might be a good idea to talk about Superman again.

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literature

Beck, Tobias: Unbox your life! Resident-free: The secret to your success. Offenbach 2018. 7th edition 2022.

Hormozi, Alex: $100M offerte. How To Make Offers So Good, People Feel Stupid Saying No. Ebook, Aquisition.com 2021.

Meerath, Stefan: The path to becoming a successful entrepreneur. How you and your company gain new momentum. Offenbach 2008. 21st edition 2021.

Morgan, Charlie: I told myself I was rich until it came true. Online: https://youtu.be/IUxn7vT104Y (published on 19.03.2023, retrieved on 26.5.2024).

Müller, Alexander: It's In You. Visions, success, fulfilled life. Ebook, Munich 2024.

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footnotes

1: Morgan, I told myself I was rich until it came true, minute 21:16 & 22:14. Translation: “The fastest way to success is to accept that with your current self-image and your current identity and how you perceive yourself and how the world presents itself to you through your lenses and your paradigmthat you are unable to bring about the future that you want to bring about. [...] We don't achieve goals, we make personalities happen. We create identities. ”

2: Miller, It's In You, position 198.

3: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the tarantulas.

4: Miller, It's In You, position 215.

5: Meerath, The path to becoming a successful entrepreneur, P. 59.

6: Morgan, I told myself I was rich until it came true, minute 20:58. Translation: “You must commit psychological suicide. You, the person you are now, is unable to do that, because if it were you, you would already have it. ”

7: So Zarathustra spoke, From the creator's path.

8: Hormozi, $100M Offers, p. 11. Translation: “As entrepreneurs, we make bets every day. We're players — we bet our hard-earned money on manpower, inventory, rent, marketing, etc., all in the hope that it will pay off. Losing often. But sometimes we win and win A LOT. ”

9: So Zarathustra spoke, About overcoming yourself.

10: So Zarathustra spoke, About reading and writing.

11: So Zarathustra spoke, From the creator's path.

12: So Zarathustra spoke, From the old and new tables, 2.

13: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 3.

14: So Zarathustra spoke, Of a thousand and one goals.

15: The happy science, Aph 301.

16: Beck, Unbox your life!, position 102.

17: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 9.

18: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, The sign.

19: So Zarathustra spoke, From old and new boards, 20th

20: Translation: “Price is what you pay; value is what you get. ”

21: So Zarathustra spoke, From old and new boards, 12.

22: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, Of redemption.

23: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 2.

“A Gods’ Table for Divine Dice Throws and Dice Players”

Nietzsche's Superman Visits the Start-Up Scene

Nietzsche's superman is dead. Hardly anyone can do anything with this obscure idea anymore. You'd think so. And yet, in the current startup environment, you encounter numerous set pieces from Zarathustra's promise. What is it all about? — On the occasion of Nietzsche's 180th birthday, Natalie Schulte dedicates herself to this peculiar continuation of one of the philosopher's best-known concepts. A plea for taking a closer look at Nietzsche's idea despite its past and present misinterpretations.

Editor's note: We have translated longer English quotations into German in the footnotes ourselves.

I. Nietzsche in Ukraine — A rough overview

Paul Stephan: Dear Dr. Mudrakov, thank you very much for agreeing to this discussion about Nietzsche in Ukrainian culture. Perhaps it is best to start with a very general question: What role does Nietzsche play in your country? Is there and was there a strong interest in the German philosopher that had a significant effect on Ukrainian culture? Or is it more of an exotic fringe figure? At the last Nietzsche conference, you already spoke about the author Olha Kobylianska in this regard, We reported, which strongly receives Nietzsche in at least one text. Was it therefore more of an exception — or are there any other such examples?

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Vitalii Mudrakov: In fact, it is a great honor and joy for me to talk about such a connection as “Nietzsche and Ukraine,” because Ukraine is, so to speak, my ontological growth context, it is my home country, and Nietzsche is one of the most important intellectual 'fertilisers' for this growth. So since we're talking about such important things, I feel a huge responsibility. I therefore thank you for giving me the opportunity to have such a conversation. I also hope that this discussion will not only be insightful but also reflect my inner feelings in a certain way.

To answer your question in general, we can use the suggested wording to say that this is an “exotic fringe figure” — but this exoticism has left its mark. In this regard, I would like to deepen your question by explaining when exactly Nietzsche had significance in my country.

His role in Ukrainian intellectual life should therefore not be underestimated, but it was very different in different periods of time! I would therefore like to start our exchange with a periodization of Ukrainian receptions. And since parts of the Ukrainian regions belonged to different state structures in different periods (the Austro-Hungarian and Russian Empires, the Soviet Union and independent Ukraine), it is also essential to talk about the geography of Ukrainian receptions. So that we can better orient ourselves, I suggest the following preliminary, perhaps somewhat political, periodization:

(1) I would describe the first period as “imperial”, spanning the end of the 19th century until the fall of the empires. At this point, Nietzsche entered the territory of the Ukrainian lands, which belonged to different empires and were granted very different cultural and political rights. And this is where the writer Olha Kobyljanska (1863-1942) comes to the fore. After all, she is, among other things, the one who very actively introduced Nietzsche's ideas into Ukrainian literature and thus established modernist tendencies in it. For this reason, she is actually considered one of the key authors of early modernism in Ukraine.

Numerous leading intellectuals of the time pointed out Nietzsche's excessive influence on the writer.¹ They referred in particular to the ideas of the “strong person” or “strong woman” introduced by the author, particularly in her early works. With these, she had a significant impact on the dominant feminist movement of the time in the region and therefore we can say that the — mediated — influence of Nietzsche was very significant here. Kobylianska can therefore be regarded as the first Ukrainian Nietzschean woman who lived in Austria-Hungary. And also the first Ukrainian Nietzschean woman ever, because her interest in Nietzsche preceded similar tendencies in the rest of Ukraine, which was then part of the Russian Empire.

Overall, the Nietzschean influence in this part of Ukraine dominated by Russia is rather superficial; it can be seen, for example, in anti-Christian criticism and the experimentation with various mythologies, such as motifs from the pre-Christian Slavic tradition, in some works. In turn, he can be traced back to wife, the writer Lessya Ukrainka (1871-1913). She came from Volhynia, which was then part of the Russian Empire. Volodymyr Vynnychenko (1880-1951), Vyacheslav Lypynsky (1882-1931) and Dmytro Dontsov (1883-1973) can also be included in the galaxy of the “Russian part” of Ukrainian authors, in which the influence of the German philosopher is obvious. These authors are united not only by their reception of Nietzsche, but also by their political work. Although their interpretations of Nietzsche were very different, in view of this synthesis of philosophy and politics, we can still speak of a divided ideological aggravation inspired by Nietzsche's philosophy. This aggravation was based on the desire to change the life and existence culture of the Ukrainian nation. The authors mentioned above spoke, for example, of the “need for a revolutionary transformation of a new person's life,” the “problems of popular will,” or the “ideal of a strong person.”

(2) I can't say much about the second Soviet period, as Nietzsche was banned during this period — the approximately 70 years of the existence of the Soviet Union — and there were hardly any opportunities to work with his texts. During this period, Nietzsche was only seen through the filter of the phrases of Soviet encyclopedias, as follows: “A reactionary idealistic philosopher, an outspoken apologist of bourgeois exploitation, aggression and fascist ideology.” Nietzsche was therefore unable to compete with the Bolshevik interpretations of Marx for the attention of the Soviet proletarians.² And the initial attempts of the 1920s and 30s to continue to receive Nietzsche, in particular through literary visions, ended in the tragedy of the “shot Renaissance”: the Ukrainian futurism of Mykhailo Semenko (1892-1937), who sought to embody a type of strong-willed “iron man” on an artistic nihilistic platform, or the echo of the “superhuman” images as Leader of the masses, who was responsible for his own homeland, by Mykola Khvylovyj (1893-1933), met with the effects and consequences of Stalinism.

It is important to emphasize that the authors of both periods lived in empires and suffered in different ways under the Soviet regime (some were forced to emigrate, others were imprisoned, and some immediately paid with their lives). They were therefore part of both periods, so that the peculiarity of this periodization consists primarily in pointing out the specific possibility of reappraising Nietzsche's philosophy or working with the principles of his worldview in general.

(3) The third period, which can obviously be described as “independent” — from the early 1990s to today — once again opened up the opportunity to get to know Nietzsche and to develop a number of research projects on his philosophy. However, I would not be talking about general cultural influence here, but rather of growing Nietzsche research and translation. In the 1990s, Anatoly Onyshkos published translations of So Zarathustra spoke and Petro Tarashchuks from The Antichrist; At the beginning of the 2000s, Onyschkos were translations of Beyond good and evil and On the genealogy of morality published. Another very important Nietzsche translation project was started in 2004 by Oleh Feschowetz and Kateryna Kotiuk in cooperation with the publisher Astrolabe. Its significance was that the translation was based on the critical edition by Colli and Montinari, which Nietzsche opened up to the Ukrainian public in a completely different way, a “de-Nazified” Nietzsche. The website of the publishing house Astrolabe states that seven volumes of the translation have currently been completed. Unfortunately, progress is a bit slow. There are also other contemporary translations, such as the one translated by Wakhtang Kebuladze Morgenröthe, which was published a few years ago, and some of the German philosopher's ideas are discussed in a philosophical translation laboratory led by the named author and translator.

It is interesting to note that the first studies dedicated to the Ukrainian reception of Nietzsche were written right around the philosopher's anniversary years. For example, the more programmatic articles by Ihor Bytschko (Nietzsche in Ukraine, on the 150th anniversary) and Volodymyr Zhmyr (In the footsteps of Nietzsche in Ukraine, on the 160th anniversary). The recently published article Ukrainian Nietzscheanism by Taras Ljutyj underlines the previous two.

This year's 180th anniversary of Nietzsche gives reason to hope that, despite all the burdens of Russian aggression and the war, this event will also be addressed to some extent in the Ukrainian region. At least I have a few ideas that will not only have a unique effect but will hopefully have a lasting effect. — That's why I would say that Nietzsche is just beginning his journey in Ukraine.

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II. Nietzsche and the development of Ukrainian national consciousness

PS: Thank you very much for your detailed and very detailed answer. Let me ask you a question about each period. Zur first period I would like to note that I see great parallels here with Nietzsche reception in general. There were numerous feminists and emancipated women who took from Nietzsche such a mission statement from a “strong woman,” sometimes even a “referee.” Nietzsche was read not least by women — and this in a completely different sense than can be inferred from some of his texts. Against his will, he became an important catalyst of feminism and general emancipation of women — I think it is here to distinguish between the political movement and the cultural movement — but also, as you also note, a catalyst for political and cultural radicalization processes in general. What I am interested in is whether the consciousness of a Ukrainian There was literature or whether the authors saw themselves more as subjects of the imperial or tsarist empire.

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VM: If we talk about the time frame of this period, namely the late 19th and early 20th century, then a full-fledged awareness of Ukrainian literature was definitely and unequivocally formed during this period. In addition, what can be conditionally described as “the next generation of this consciousness” is already taking place during this time, because the understanding of an independent Ukrainian national literature had already developed before that. I primarily mean the phenomenon of Taras Shevchenko (1814-1861). He lived and worked in the Russian Empire in the middle of the 19th century and is regarded as the founder and promoter of Ukrainian national consciousness in literature in a political sense. Even today, Shevchenko's work is regarded as the spiritual basis for the formation of the modern Ukrainian nation and as a source of national and political consciousness, and the writer himself is a symbol of Ukraine — similar perhaps to Shakespeare for England or Goethe for Germany. But of course we can also talk about writers who lived before him or at the same time and who have also made their contribution to this awareness. Ivan Kotlyarewskyj (1769-1838), for example, and then Petro Hulak-Artemovskyj (1790-1865). The former is regarded as a classic of new Ukrainian literature, but his contribution to the development of Ukrainian national culture is of a more aesthetic and linguistic nature; the latter, despite his literary, translation and educational merits, is accused by researchers of excessive loyalty to the tsarist office. For this reason, the turn of the century already marks a certain germination of this foundation for Ukrainian literature. However, these tender seedlings were always under the hot sun of political pressure from the tsarist empire: official non-recognition, opposition, or complete prohibition of the Ukrainian language and all literary production.

When it comes to figures of Taras Shevchenko's stature in Austria-Hungary, Ivan Franko (1856-1916) is the undisputed favorite. He drew his stories from the life and struggles of his home people, which he wanted to see united in an independent state. Although the general situation of the Ukrainians in the Empire was much better than in the Tsarist Empire and the Ukrainian language, for example, had the status of a “marginal language,” the topics of struggle and freedom for his people are at the center of Franko's work. They represent very well the national consciousness conceived and established by Shevchenko. It should be emphasized that awareness of Ukrainian literature in both parts of Ukraine is focused primarily on the eastern center of the country, i.e. Dnipro Ukraine (Naddnipryanska Ukrayina), which developed a somewhat deeper impetus for national unification. This is likely due to the harsher conditions of existence there.

This is how Nietzsche's seeds grow on the “soil” of these national impulses. In other words, the “radicalizations” mentioned, nourished by his philosophy, first appear in the aesthetic and cultural coding of the above-mentioned authors at the beginning of the 20th century (and in Kobyljanska even earlier, from 1890), and in political coding — but a little later, at the turn of the first decades of the 20th century.

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III. Between censorship and subversion — Nietzsche during the Soviet period

PS: To second period I would like to ask whether Nietzsche was not read in opposition circles after all and acted as a source of ideas there. In the GDR, it was certainly the case that Nietzsche was thoroughly read and discussed in such circles despite official censorship and was therefore able to have a subliminal effect that was also (semi) official in the 1980s. But it would also have been almost impossible to completely suppress Nietzsche there, if only because of its proximity to West Germany and Nietzsche's prominence before 1945.

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VM: Even the period of Soviet occupation was not too homogeneous and was always the same. A look back at the history of censorship in the Soviet Union would be proof of this. The most terrible thing, however, is that not only were Nietzsche or a number of other authors banned, but that the inevitable need to work exclusively with Leninist-Stalinist Marxism was enshrined. Philosophy became a “servant of ideology.” The challenge for intellectuals was therefore to keep philosophical discourse alive in a hidden way and in clandestine form. In addition to developing purely philosophical and theoretical questions, however, it seems important to me to talk about a factor in reading Nietzsche, namely the desire to further develop one's own national culture and identity. This factor had different dynamics in the various Soviet republics. He was always very important in Ukraine. Therefore, the search for sources of confirmation of one's own cultural identity and thus independence could by no means dispense with such fertile ground for rethinking as Nietzsche's philosophy. And it is obvious that it was an underground matter. Here I would like to make an interesting point from the above-mentioned article by Volodymyr Zhmyr, In the footsteps of Nietzsche in Ukraine, mention. In it, he tells how he visited his neighbor's apartment once, in 1964, and saw an open 1:32 book on the table. It was an edition of So Zarathustra spoke from 1903, translated by an author named A. V. Perelhina (unfortunately I couldn't find out her first name). He had traded this translation for another book, and only then could he become familiar with this text. I am telling this story to show how Nietzsche could have been available to read by pure chance. In other words, this work has been lying around on the shelves of private libraries since the days of the previous empire, the period we call “imperial,” without falling victim to the purges of the Bolshevik authorities. Only in this way could an “academic philosopher” read his work by chance. There was no such close “West Germany” from which some works could have come and finally the total number of publications and Nietzsche's actual influence in pre-war Germany was much higher, which was not so easy and quick to eliminate. In the USSR, it was the ideology that cleaned the shelves of many private libraries of such books, while in university or state libraries, special services did this.

The underground inspirations I spoke of would be a good topic for future research, but they are not very well developed at the moment. However, the example of a group of Ukrainian intellectuals who worked to protect the national language, culture and the freedom of artistic creation and were certainly looking for impulses for their own progress — the sixties (Schistdesyatnyky). To illustrate, let us take one of the dissidents and representatives of this movement who was tortured to death by the Soviet authorities, Vasyl Stus (1938-1985). One of his fellow students at the institute testified that he had always been very interested in philosophy and had read Nietzsche very intensively in addition to other thinkers. Since he spoke German very well, it is possible that he read Nietzsche's German-language works that could have been known to him from earlier times. We also know of his diary, in which he wrote down and commented on quotes from philosophers, particularly Nietzsche. The actual ideological influences remain to be investigated here, but the fact that the German philosopher was well known and intensively discussed in these circles cannot be denied.

In this context, I remember a story from my mentor, a well-known translator and specialist in Kantian philosophy, Vitalii Terletsky. He told us students how he studied at the Faculty of Philosophy in Kyiv at the turn of the 80s to the 90s. An extraordinary irony of fate was that back then, in order to read Nietzsche, you had to visit the most important religious and cultural site in Ukraine, the Lavra (the Kyyiv Cave Monastery or Holy Assumption Monastery). This question must also be addressed: How and when did these books get into the church library? But in any case, it is remarkable that it was precisely this ecclesiastical library that “protected” Nietzsche and made his works available for reading.

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IV. Nietzsche and the Ukrainian future and present

PS: What the third period As far as concerns, it may need to be emphasized for our German-speaking readers that these are translations into the Ukrainian language. Russian translations do exist, I suppose, but these translations are part of the effort to establish the Ukrainian language suppressed during the Soviet period, and probably even before, — which is by no means a dialect of Russian, but is perhaps more comparable with Dutch, which would hardly be regarded as a dialectic of German — as a language of education. In general, it is a problem that, for a long time, the West regarded Ukraine as a kind of “Little Russia,” just like Putin. Just recently, the German philosopher Christoph Menke spoke disparagingly of an independent Ukrainian nation as a propaganda “invention.”³ But it is clear that the struggle for an independent cultural identity as a condition for creating a democratic, self-determined community is always moments of reconstruction and Construction includes, especially in the case of nations that have been denied independent cultural development for centuries. Just think of Ireland's revival of the Celtic language or Israel's corresponding efforts — for which Nietzsche was also an important source of keywords, as the Zionists were concerned with the heroic project of constructing a “new Jew” who no longer endures anti-Semitism, but aggressively fights, and stops being as submissive as the “old Jews” or denying their own Judaism like the Millified. As far as I know, Nietzsche did not make a single comment about the Ukrainian countries, even though he was very interested in Eastern Europe, especially in Russia and Poland, with which he even identified himself (cf. my article on this topic on this blog). In this regard, we must finally give up our perhaps imperial, neo-imperial, arrogance and ignorance and accept the independence of Ukrainian culture.

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VM: Dear Paul Stephan, you have raised many topics with this question or comment. I will therefore only talk about each of them very briefly. First of all, to The subject of translations. Yes, of course we talked about Nietzsche's translations into Ukrainian, because why should I talk about other translations, for example into Russian? There were also translations into other languages, such as Polish. However, as you correctly remarked, many Russian translations of philosophical literature are the result of Soviet policy towards languages in general and their opportunities in science (philosophy, literature) in particular. But in the 1990s, more modern translations, particularly by Nietzsche, were also produced in Russia.

I would like to make it clear that all (especially German-speaking readers and researchers) who are accustomed to speaking about Ukrainian culture or language exclusively within the framework of Russian culture or language should reconsider their approaches, because they are outdated and have the aftertaste of imperialism for me personally. You said that very well. And Nietzsche's first translations, which were created in the pre-Soviet period, at the turn of the 19th and 20th century, also testify to an attempt to establish and develop his own culture, especially a linguistic one: Both Russian and Ukrainian translations appeared around the same time. But under very different conditions. It is obvious that only the Russian translations could be officially supported, while the Ukrainian ones were made unofficially in prisons in the form of notes on scraps of paper. I am referring here to the already mentioned Ukrainian writer Volodymyr Vynnychenko. He made one of the first Ukrainian translations of So Zarathustra spoke At some point in the early years of the 20th century, when he was in a tsarist prison, when Ukrainian was not even recognized as a language and was forbidden in every respect. This notebook is now in the Kyiv State Archives. As we see, the translation of Nietzsche for the Ukrainians was carried out by the official bodies of the various periods that were located in Moscow Barely greeted. And coming to terms with such moments of struggle and attempts at resistance should open the eyes of many Western intellectuals to the fact that Ukrainian culture and language are absolutely independent.

What does “Little Russia” actually mean? Serhiy Plokhiy showed in his popular study The Gates of Europethat the “Little Rus” referred to the original core of Rus. “Klein” only meant that there was a smaller number of dioceses there. The “Grosse Rus” was only created later. The Ukrainian countries were therefore never an “offshoot” of Russia, as the term suggests — it is the other way around. At least the term did not originally mean a minority and certainly inferiority, as Putin would like to understand it today. These intellectuals should address this story seriously before they speak of the Ukrainian nation as an “invention.” On the contrary, a propaganda “invention” is the narrative of Russia as a legitimate “original Russia” with Ukraine as an “inferior offshoot.” And it is those Invention that is used to deprive Ukrainians of any opportunity for democratic self-determination — as the Russians have been trying for centuries, although, as described, large parts of the Ukrainian countries were not even part of the Russian Empire for a long time and developed culturally independently of it.

And finally, I'm not sure whether we can use historical or cultural analogies as a template for an explanation. Every nation has its own story, which must first be written, and then parallels can be drawn with other stories of cultures and languages. For a European, although not for all intellectuals, Ukrainian history is still unknown, and unfortunately this often underpins its Russian interpretation. However, if this is a good tool for such and similar intellectuals to understand this issue, then thank you, dear Paul Stephan, for pointing out such parallels.

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PS: You yourself are not only an observer, but also a participant in this, if you will, “third wave” of Ukrainian Nietzsche reception and, as you told me in advance, want to use the mentioned anniversary to found a Ukrainian Nietzsche Society for the first time in the country's history. What I would be interested in in in this regard would be what you yourself, as a Ukrainian Nietzsche recipient, can deduce from his works and what do you think Nietzsche's significance for Ukraine in general could lie in your current situation?

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VM: Yes, there is such an idea and even a plan to found such a community named after Nietzsche. I am currently in the preparation phase. I am trying to understand the possible response of Ukraine's intellectual class to such an initiative and to understand the potential potential of this initiative. We'll see what happens because it's no easy task under the current conditions.

You know, at different times I liked different topics or concepts and Nietzsche's description of them. That has gradually changed. The only thing that remains unchanged is my interest in Nietzsche's methodology. At least that's what I call them. It is a way of analyzing various phenomena as a necessity in order to see something else there that can reveal processes of degeneration or some negations that are often forgotten or suppressed. It is therefore about a constantly incomplete thought project that is driven by dissatisfaction with the prevailing stubbornness. This approach is also known as Nietzsche's “perspectivism.” I have held this opinion for a long time, and we discussed it in our discussions during our joint stay in Weimar in 2017 and beyond, for which I am very grateful to you, and it is also discussed in our article on Nietzsche and the Ukrainian revolution of self-overcoming (link) Treated to some extent.

On this basis, it can be said that the first struggles to overcome one's own slavery (in a spiritual sense, which was almost always imposed by Moscow as an inferiority) took place in the form of revolutions, and now a decisive battle is under way, in which everything is at stake. But overcoming this stage will not be the last, because then we will have to overcome ourselves again, create a new perspective (in the Nietzschean sense). And that will be another major challenge, because now the Ukrainian mind is enveloped in “war mode,” a state in which you easily lose the objective parameters of thinking. They can be overridden by a strong sense of patriotism and a strong desire to establish justice. And that's not bad, it's normal. Because in the War with Evil, in the struggle for one's own identity, one must mobilize all necessary means to strengthen the sources of one's own identity. But as soon as this battle is won, it is important to switch back to another, more open mode so as not to fall into the clutches of “resentment” and the “spirit of revenge,” which Nietzsche so talks about. This is a very serious challenge in the post-war period! And this is where the Nietzsche perspective can be very useful.

For today's Ukraine, however, it is first important to set in motion a wave of Nietzsche studies in general, not only with popular theses aimed at making sharp statements about the reevaluation of the old, but also to understand this methodology of deep and extraordinary thinking. That means: Nietzsche as not a doctrinal philosopher, but as a methodologist. Very different versions of his philosophy are important than the ones we already know. With this in mind, I am currently working on a small project to discuss his philosophy in Ukraine, in particular for the philosophical community otherwise known to make. It will be a series of articles about Nietzsche published by European researchers to mark his 180th birthday. This perspective is very important because I am almost certain that only a few universities — perhaps none — have access to at least some Nietzsche studies of a different kind.

What I mean by that is that Nietzsche should encourage critical, in-depth analysis while promoting creativity. It seems to me that his philosophy has great potential even today to inspire very unusual combinations. I would even say: the potential for provocation, especially intellectually, of course. By the way, there is even artistic proof of this, the painting Nietzsche in ice, or the birth of music from the spirit of tragedy by Oleksandr Rojtburd, a Ukrainian artist, from 2017.⁴ This is an aesthetic vision of his philosophy, which is obviously not without a provocative element. However, this artistic puzzle has yet to be solved and interpreted.

PS: Dear Vitalii Mudrakov, thank you for this extremely enriching insight into the Ukrainian reception of Nietzsche and I sincerely wish your country and family all the best for the future!

VM: Thank you for your interesting question and your friendly attitude.

Vitalii Mudrakov is a philosopher who was born in Ukraine. He studied music, ethics and aesthetics at the Humanities University (Khmelnytzkyi, Ukraine) and then philosophy and religious studies at the Yuri Fedkovych University in Chernivtsi (Ukraine). He has lived permanently in Germany since 2022 and was a scholarship holder at the Friedrich Nietzsche College (Klassik Stiftung Weimar) and at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” (University of Münster). He has recently received a scholarship at the “Center for Religious Studies” (CERES) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. He is currently working on a concept of “identity security.” His current research also focuses on Nietzsche's metaphor as a methodological concept of epistemology and axiological transformation as well as the Ukrainian reception of Nietzsche.

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Source reference for the article image

Oleksandr Rojtburd: Nietzsche in Ice, or the Birth of Music From the Spirit of Tragedy (2017). Online: https://www.wikiart.org/en/alexander-roitburd/nietzsche-in-ice-or-the-birth-of-music-from-the-spirit-of-tragedy-2017

Footnotes

1: These include historian Mykhailo Hrushevsky, literary critic Serhiy Yefremov, language and cultural critic Ahatanhel Krymsky and writer Lessya Ukrainka.

2: Although I know and will try to prove it in an upcoming essay that this ban was only official. Behind the scenes, Nietzschean ideas were certainly present among Bolshevik ideologues and inspirers.

3: “Another undemocratic entity in this war is the 'nation', whose deep and long history is discovered (until recently they would have said: invented) and sung about.” (Dear Etienne, dear Christoph... Online: https://www.philomag.de/artikel/lieber-etienne-austausch.)

4: Editor's note: This is the article image.

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Nietzsche and Ukraine

A Conversation with Vitalii Mudrakov

Vitalii Mudrakov is one of Ukraine's leading Nietzsche experts. Due to the war, he and his family currently live in Germany. Paul Stephan talked to him in detail about some aspects of the rich Ukrainian reception of Nietzsche in the context of the country's independent cultural history, which has often been ignored. It shows that Nietzsche's liberal thinking repeatedly inspired central protagonists of Ukrainian culture in their struggle for an independent nation free from Habsburg, Tsarist or Soviet foreign rule — and today again the struggle for their own self-assertion in the face of the Russian invasion.