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.

Visitors from the north immediately feel that they have reached a magical place: The view sweeps across Lake Sils towards Italy, the southern light flatters the eyes, the warm Maloja wind surrounds the face, a thermal airflow that blows all day in wind force 4 to 5 in some weather conditions. At the tip of the Chastè peninsula, which stretches far into Lake Sils, it is particularly noticeable when it rustles the pine trees.

Chastè was one of Friedrich Nietzsche's favorite places, who spent seven summers in the nearby village of Sils Maria. In the 1880s, he lived in a simple guest room in the Durisch family's house several times for a few weeks. In the dry and sunny climate of the Upper Engadine, the philosopher, tormented by frequent migraine complaints, hoped to find favourable conditions for his health and ability to work. Important works were designed in Sils and some were written down: The Happy Science, Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, The Wagner Case, Götzen-Twilight Among others, especially in his main poetic work So Zarathustra spoke Nietzsche's interpretation of the Engadin landscape as “heroic” and “invigorating” is palpable.

During his stays in Sils, he imposed a strict daily schedule with fixed working and meal times and several hours of exercise. The wide, flat valley allowed long walks in the area, where you didn't spend too much and had the opportunity to fill the notebooks you carried with you with flashes of thought at any time. Even his first stay in Sils is said to have given him a key idea on a distinctive, pyramid-shaped stone on the shores of Lake Silvaplana, which gave direction to his further philosophizing: that “idea of eternal return” that in So Zarathustra spoke should play an important role. The pyramid stone is marked on current hiking maps and Google maps, so that even today everyone can check the aura of this rock while walking.

The 200-year-old house in the historic town center of Sils Maria, where Nietzsche lived as a regular summer guest, was acquired in 1959 by the “Nietzsche House Foundation in Sils Maria”, which was founded specifically for this purpose, and furnished with exhibits. On August 25, 1960, on the sixtieth anniversary of Nietzsche's death, the Foundation opened a museum in the house. The concept of the foundation, which is still the owner of the house today, is based on two pillars: On the one hand, an exhibition provides information about the life and work of the philosopher, and on the other hand, the house is intended as a living place of living, working and research. The Munich Nietzsche Forum awards a “Werner Ross Scholarship” every year. This is aimed at young academics, writers and authors who work on texts and projects on the extended subject area of Nietzsche. The scholarship offers a free four-week stay in the Nietzsche House in September with final participation in the Nietzsche Colloquium, which takes place annually at the neighboring luxury hotel Waldhaus.¹ The 14 scholarship recipients so far came from Germany, Canada, France, Italy, Finland and China. This shows that international scientific interest in Nietzsche has therefore stabilized and the Nietzsche scientific community is constantly rejuvenating. But scholarship holders are not the only ones who can live in a room in the house to write in an inspiring environment. Other guests, i.e. “civilians”, also have the option of renting a room in the house. The aim of this mix of users is to promote dialogue and networking among researchers, Nietzsche readers and tourists. In addition, the Foundation has been holding exhibitions of contemporary art related to Nietzsche in the house since the mid-1980s; after all, Nietzsche, like no other thinker before, had repeatedly strongly inspired artists and encouraged them to engage productively with his ideas and person. After guest performances by Gerhard Richter and Helmut Federle, among others, the Graubünden artist Not Vital was also a guest: A monumental white plaster moustache was his main exhibit, which he deposited on Nietzsche's bed.

Since 2021, the Nietzsche House has been showing a renewed presentation of Nietzsche's life and work, which was curated by Matthias Buschle and Wolfram Groddeck. In addition to biographical and chronological facts, important terms from Nietzsche's world of thought are explained to an audience that consists not only of Nietzsche experts, but also of curious people and random visitors to tourists. Over the decades following the opening, this audience has become noticeably more international. In addition, during the corona years, an increasing number of Swiss people, including many French-speaking French-speaking Swiss from Western Switzerland, discovered the house. For this reason, a multilingual concept of the memorial site was necessary, which included the digital dimension and met the contemporary public's need for easy-to-process and well-portioned information.

The exhibition rooms were designed in 2021 in a uniform design, on the background color of the original Zarathustra books, i.e. in a subtle turquoise. The sequence of showcases follows Nietzsche's life chronologically. Rarities such as various first editions and a small, regularly changing selection of valuable original manuscripts from the important Rosenthal-Levy Collection are on display. The individual exhibits are rather concisely labelled — due to the current reading habits of a predominantly tourist audience — and the explanations in four languages can be read in a text booklet or on a mobile website. Panels integrated in the display cases provide information on basic concepts and important keywords in Nietzsche's thinking.

You can stay overnight in simple double rooms with historic flair (minimum three nights, maximum three weeks, for groups one week) during the two seasonal opening hours from mid-June to mid-October and from mid-December to mid-April. Unfortunately, the room that Nietzsche himself lived in is excluded; it is part of the museum presentation. The building also houses a reference library for Nietzsche research, which comprises around 4,500 titles. A kitchen is also available for house guests to enjoy lively conversations around the fireplace.²

In less than half an hour from the Nietzsche House, you can reach the Chastè peninsula, which was visited by Nietzscheans from all over the world in the past and today. Some expect an encounter with the recurring spirit of the philosopher there. For example, the renowned Belgian architect and designer Henry van de Velde. He told of a vision that came over him on August 25, 1918, the 18th anniversary of Nietzsche's death, while visiting the Chastè peninsula: “There I felt a shiver as if I were suddenly standing in front of a temple, a mausoleum, where I would come into contact with Nietzsche himself. ”³ The aura of the place is unwavering: Anyone who is on the rocky peninsula today will repeatedly meet contemporaries who, reading or pondering, linger on benches and in the countryside and are also ready for an appearance of Nietzsche's spirit.

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Article Image Information

View of Chastè, photo by Christian Saehrendt, 2024

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Footnotes

1: See also https://www.nietzsche-forum-muenchen.de/.

2: Cf. https://nietzschehaus.ch/das-nietzsche-haus-i/wohnen/.

3: Letter from Henry van de Velde to Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, August 25, 1918, National Research and Memorial Center of Classical German Literature in Weimar. Goethe and Schiller Archive, collection by E. Förster-Nietzsche = signature 72.

Musing in a Southerly

Visiting Nietzsche's Summer House in Engadin

The Inn River rises at an altitude of just under 2,500 m in southeastern Switzerland, in the canton of Graubünden. Over a distance of 80 km, it first flows through a high-mountain valley called the Engadin. Here, not far from the sophisticated spa town of St. Moritz, it crosses two small lakes, Lake Sils and Lake Silvaplana, between which lies the idyllic mountain village of Sils Maria. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche spent several summers in this exquisite landscape and was inspired by it to write some of his most important works. Christian Saehrendt set out to search for clues at what is perhaps the most important “pilgrimage site” on the Nietzsche scene.

Paul Stephan: Dear Estella, dear Hans-Martin, we met today in virtual space to talk about the “generational question.” A “millennial,” myself, a “zoomer,” and a “boomer.” The discourse about these different “generations” is right now In vogue, on social media, you can hardly avoid corresponding memes and videos; the features section is also full of them. “Zoomer”, “Boomer” —would you call yourself that?

Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann: I'm probably a bit too old for the baby boomers, I'm more of a pre-baby boomer. On the other hand, I am also too young for the right sixty-eight — I turned 16 in 1968 — more of a post-sixty-eight who was politicized and intellectualized by the experience of the 1968 period. My generation of young teachers, about a decade older than me, was partly influenced by Nietzsche and Hesse. It is not clear to me whether they still belonged to the “apolitical generation” of the early Federal Republic. But with Nietzsche and Hesse, they developed an individual understanding of their situation so that they no longer saw themselves as part of a community, as had been self-evident since the 19th century.

Estella Walter: Dear Paul, dear Hans-Martin, I myself am somewhat baffled by the question of generations, perhaps because my age group is in the middle of it right now and reflection is therefore difficult. However, the (increased) interest in generations as a diagnostic tool is definitely very exciting. Accordingly, I do not see myself as belonging to the generation assigned to my age group. Rather, I see it as a sometimes rather cumbersome template that makes sense in some analyses and not in others. In any case, it seems to me that Nietzsche himself has little influence on Gen Z than thinkers who relate to him, such as Michel Foucault and Judith Butler, or even public figures such as Jordan Peterson.

PS: I myself think that there is definitely such a thing as “generational experiences” and the resulting common characteristics of certain age cohorts. I can find myself in some stereotypes about the “millennials,” less so in others. But of course, from a scientific point of view, it would be necessary to add that other formative factors such as social and local origin, gender, ethnicity, etc. also play a role. And I also believe that individuals are never completely determined by these numerous factors, but that their identity is always the product of individual choice — especially if you know about this generational discourse and can consciously distance yourself from the respective stereotypes; or not.

SM: I can only agree with that. But we are asking ourselves the question of generations here. Other factors are important when they affect this question. My generation, insofar as it was political, was rather hostile to Nietzsche from a Marxist perspective. At the beginning of the seventies, the new edition by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari was also not as widespread and well-known — in non-Nietzschean circles —; the first volume in German was published in 1967, the complete critical study edition only in 1980. But there were also more artistically oriented contemporaries in my generation who also referred to Nietzsche. Of course, I can no longer say to what extent the various new questions of interpretation have already been addressed. They were probably more inspired by older Hesse fans.

Those who were artistically oriented probably reflected on his understanding of Dionysian art. In particular, such an element has spread massively through rock music, combined, of course, with drug experiences, which in any case were aimed at expanding consciousness or at least new experiences, which are then also associated with the Zarathustra can connect: invent new values. The politicians in my generation were certainly influenced by Marx and Adorno and followed the widespread rejection of Nietzsche based on the interpretation that Nietzsche's sister had promoted. If you let yourself be influenced by French existentialism, then you came closer to Nietzsche again. But the closeness between the two was not too well known.

PS: As for Nietzsche, I would also say that other thinkers are far more important to my generation. So did Foucault and Butler, but many also read Adorno and Marx in their formative years anyway. I like the “generation education strike” attribute better than “millennial,” even though it doesn't describe my entire age cohort, of course. But I think everyone who studied around 2010 and was halfway interested in politics was somehow influenced by the big educational strike movement. We only came to Nietzsche through detours and always from a political perspective, even though his thoughts about the education system partly corresponded with our demands for real education rather than mere education. In some cases, however, Nietzsche also served as a springboard to break out of the strong politicization of discourse and to consider things from a more existentialist, individual and artistic perspective.

EW: It is not so easy to find a common denominator between students (outside of university I rarely come across someone who has points of reference to Nietzsche). I think that similar to you, Paul, you are more likely to come across his works through detours or coincidences. Of course, there are the (left-wing) politically oriented people who come from post-structuralism, but then there are also the armchair philosophy students who are strictly interested in him professionally and regard those, mostly from analytical philosophy, who Nietzsche, if at all, as a literary pastime, not as an object of philosophical discussion. Of course, there are also those here and there who let Nietzsche degenerate into a self-help guru. This may be due, among other things, to the fact that Nietzsche offers such a wide projection screen; rhetorically, there is a suitable slogan for everyone. His ambiguity is what makes him so interesting.

For the events concerning Gen Z, which are witnesses of our contradictory times (climate change, reactionary division of societies, identity politics, colonial hangover, global exploitation relations, etc.), Nietzsche's own contradiction is undeniable topicality, it is like a mirror, a confrontation with ourselves. However, he plays a minor role in the political discussion of all these events and how to deal with them. Unlike Marx or Adorno, he usually stays in seminars and textbooks, rarely making it onto the streets.

SM: First about education: My generation and those of 68 were diligently calling for reforms — think of the slogan: “Under gowns, the muff of 1,000 years.” But they ultimately received a remuneration, which they later implemented themselves. This has little to do with Nietzsche, at most the associated claim to self-development, which seemed to obscure these generations by the old university — what a mistake, the old university still offered more opportunities for this than the later Reformed universities. The politicians among us had no problem even with a division of society. It always seemed divided and today's talk about it is a strange romanticization following the integration of the left and the Greens into politics. My generation of the seventies was ecologically oriented — at most a certain romantic nature suited Nietzsche. I then read Nietzsche ecologically as a science critic in the eighties — a reading that no one likes to this day. But there was also a political direction that turned away from dogmatic Marxism, which I might like to call “spontaneist,” and which came to Nietzsche via the post-structuralists. How quickly Foucault's genealogical turn of the seventies spread after that is questionable. However, it is likely to have been leaked by the end of the seventies. Nevertheless, Nietzsche and Foucault's moral criticism has probably spread rather little. After all, ethics boomed in those decades. Hardly anyone wanted to hear a critique of ethics, which I still lean towards today following Nietzsche and Foucault.

EW: I'm familiar with the post-structuralist way of reading, but how exactly can Nietzsche's scientific criticism be read ecologically?

SM: According to Nietzsche, you don't understand nature as it really is. Then you have to be all the more careful with her. Ecological technology would then not be the answer, at least not in the sense that the sciences really tell us what is happening there.

EW: I see. However, the argument now seems widespread to me. Or at least skepticism about a technological solution in view of limited knowledge about nature.

SM: But then the last generation would not be able to claim that they were the last that could still do anything about climate change — with Nietzsche, climate change cannot be more than a prophecy. The Greens have long been scientistic and technicistic.

PS: “skepticism” is a good keyword. The “millennials” seem to be a very skeptical and hesitant generation. Whether in private, political, philosophical: You don't want to commit yourself and keep all options open. Sometimes we push it to the point of excess. The previous and subsequent generations often seem to me to have more courage and determination.

In my opinion, this is reflected in Foucault's dominance in my generation. At least the humanities and columnistic discourse are completely under the spell of shallow post-modernism. A bit of hedonism, a bit of relativism, a lot of skepticism, but no outright skepticism either. A bit like South Park or Vice. Nietzsche actually fits in with this, but only a specific Nietzsche, always read from the perspective of postmodernism. I think that in order to free ourselves from our generational paralysis, we must leave this way of thinking behind us. A rediscovery of Nietzsche — but certainly also of the real Foucault, for example, who from his common sense-Distorted image is of course very different — could help with that.

EW: This way of thinking that you're talking about runs through the generations. The feeling of powerlessness and paralysis, of insignificance in the face of the desperate situation, is no less evident in subsequent generations. It is precisely the nihilism of the “last person” that Nietzsche is talking about. The politicization of Gen Z, for example, may contradict this; after all, it requires change and new beginnings. But the paths and methods must also be looked at there. Activism takes place on social media, but it sounds more like moral cries that don't touch on the material basis of the problems. The same applies to activism that takes place on the streets: demonstrations on the scale as we know them are primarily symbolic. Subversive disruptions and interruptions in some small groups may provoke an outcry, but change little in the long term unless collective organization develops from them.

I would like to briefly comment on Hans-Martin's objection: I agree with you on that. However, there are certainly always voices that criticize technological solutions as long as they still follow capitalist laws. I also associate this with the objection that nature is unpredictable and our knowledge of it is necessarily limited. Subjecting them to technology, whose development is particularly linked to profit-maximizing laws, poses risks. Although that is perhaps another aspect...

What kind of ecological approach would you envisage against the background of epistemological problems? You have to start somewhere, even if not under scientific and technical supremacy.

SM: Of course, I see both objections differently from the perspective of my generation. It seems to me that there is more political self-importance and the skepticism among the population is not a philosophical one that really focuses on the sciences in the style of Nietzsche Morgenröthe would doubt. People no longer know where they are heading because a doubt about progress has spread. — On the other hand, many still expect their salvation from the institutions, as a state faith is returning here. I can't classify this generationally. But my generation and the next generation still sit in management positions and they determine public opinion, which of course no longer controls the new media — hence the whining. At the same time, all generations think they have no power or influence. You should check out Foucault for that. Everyone influences what happens. But intellectuals, not least Nietzsche, are constantly complaining that they are so indiscriminate, yet they know it for sure. But even the intellectual is only an individual person and expert rule allows him even less influence than the rule of state and capitalism. Capitalism dealt with the environment better than former socialism. There are no alternatives in sight. I'd rather keep it that way with Nietzsche recipient Heidegger. Man is not the master of being. With supposed drive, at least as many problems arise as this solves. Instead of action, Heidegger demands thinking. Of course, if the sciences asked the question of the meaning of being, they would no longer be as successful. But maybe that would be the right thing to do. — You have to reverse the 11th Feuerbach thesis: If you want to change the world, you must first understand it differently. And that is exactly what Marx did, and so did Nietzsche. Who was more influential? With the idea of the eternal return of the same, perhaps today Nietzsche.

EW: I actually agree with most of the points you raised. That is why I believe that the feeling of powerlessness is a cross-generational phenomenon and gives oneself ever new material for self-affirmation. This is followed by the search for new gods (state, identity, capital, truth, etc.) as a consequence of the propagated, alleged, powerlessness. — In my opinion, thought and action are not mutually exclusive. Anyone who buries themselves inside and only lives in platonic clouds will change just as little as those who allow themselves to be driven by thoughtless pressure to act. (However, “action” should not be understood in the sense of a rational cause-effect chain).

But you still don't give me an answer to the question of what kind of ecological approach you would envisage against the background of epistemological problems.

SM: That is ultimately the question of how important ecological issues are given, which are currently receiving great attention. And a lot has also happened since the seventies. This was the result of left-wing citizens from my generation. Many have opened organic stores. This should be addressed individually rather than by the state. That seems more sustainable to me. Statesmen, including women, cannot do that. Citizens must do it themselves and get the state to support them in doing so. But political problems are not monocausal, but there are many different ones that are just as important. I think that you can learn a lot from Nietzsche. But it is clear that this primarily concerns intellectuals, although Nietzsche is certainly one of the few philosophers who is also received outside the philosopher's guild.

PS: Yes, it seems to me that there is a generational difference again. With my generation, my perception is that for us, at least around 2010, the ecological issue was completely secondary. We didn't care so much about that, but rather about the mentioned question of a good and fair education system, the issue of peace (keyword Iraq war) and the collapse of the financial system that seemed possible to us as a result of the crisis of 2008. A bit funny, in retrospect. Perhaps we also wanted to differentiate ourselves from older people, for whom this issue was so important. And despite all the politicization, we were also very individualistic and would not have dreamt of giving up our cheap flights across Europe and meat — these are all topics that only came up a little later, even though my generation has now “caught up” in this regard, if you like to speak that way.

But I also find the last aspect that you raised, Hans-Martin, important to highlight. I know a great many people who have never studied but have read Nietzsche and know what to do with him. He's a bit like Kafka, Marx too. These are all authors who are “popular.” You can't just write the story of Nietzsche's reception as a story of his academic commentaries, but you have to tell it much more broadly, otherwise you're just looking at the tip of the iceberg.

Boomers, Zoomers, Millennials

How Do the Respective Perspectives on Nietzsche Differ?

This time in confidential Du, Paul Stephan talked to Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, our oldest parent author, and our youngest regular author, Estella Walter, about our different generational experiences and about what is actually to be thought of the fashionable discourse about the different “generations.” We talked about post-structuralism, the ecological issue and the diversity of possible connections to Nietzsche.

It is a fascinating part of the country, the Thuringian chain of cities. In the west, the Lutherstadt of Erfurt with its medieval core and its somewhat different Art Nouveau “bacon belt”; in the east, Jena, the heart of German idealism and German Romanticism in equal measure; in its midst Weimar, in turn the center of German classical music, music academies, the First Republic, the Bauhaus — but also: Nietzsche's place of death.

Naumburg is located not far from this chain of cities, which is significant in terms of intellectual history, in the idyllic Saale-Unstrut Delta. In this beautiful city, Nietzsche spent his schooling and those years of 'spiritual absentence' in which he was cared for by his mother. He returned here again and again — throughout his life — from his extensive hikes in Switzerland and Italy. Here, in Weingarten 18, where Nietzsche's mother lived from 1858, there is still the Nietzsche House today, in which a new permanent exhibition presents the philosopher's thinking and biography in an unusually aesthetic way. Five extended audio tracks — in German or English — lead to 1, 2, 3... Nietzsche the guests through nine rooms, sometimes cramped, across two floors. Children are just as much thought of as those who consider Nietzsche's closeness to animals and things to be fundamental; for man is not a backworld, not a transcendental appendage, but an earthly, local and thus a reality that acts both physically and materially.

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In the audio track of the exhibition on Nietzsche's life, in addition to his appointment at the age of 24 to a professorship in Basel (even before he received his doctorate) and his extended years of wandering after early retirement due to his health condition, his “Turin experience” is particularly fascinating. In this, according to tradition, he threw himself around the neck of a tormented horse as if protective, which, according to the official story, marks the beginning of his “madness.” Madness is still conveyed so sensually; the anecdote acts as evidence against doctrine for all those who are open to him: From the will to the power of the tormenting, from the compassionate of the rulers, the person Nietzsche was apparently less pleased than his teaching would suggest. Yes, it seems that he was as repulsed by “blond beasts” and their brutal “superhumanity.” Although the museum does not suggest this conclusion, it treats Nietzsche's animal epiphany with appropriate sympathy.

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The new permanent exhibition also demonstrates a contemporary sense of taste. But Nietzsche was not a Untimely? Was he not a despiser of taste and fashion? In any case, text boards have 1, 2, 3... Nietzsche Hardly any and all the more gimmicks, which in a certain sense fit into Naumburg's cityscape during post-reunification times — where only the facades are still colorful. In this way, the museum's presentation reflects the museum environment, although the early Nietzsche would certainly not have been pleased with this. It also provides visitors with superficial and uncritical knowledge rather than profound or new knowledge. In terms of form and content, the addressees therefore appear to be more confessors than experts of Nietzsche — more informed by popular culture than by philosophical studies. On the other hand, it provides important corrections to tried and tested prejudices, especially for these addressees.

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For example, she explains that Nietzsche just none He was a nihilist (but, at least according to his own claim, an anti-nihilist) and that his quip “God is dead” is to be understood more complex (yes, ultimately different) than as a summing up of one-dimensional modern faith. Hitting in the same notch but cliching on his part, seems to be the main enemy of 1, 2, 3... Nietzsche to be the Habermash problematization of the Nietzschean levelling of the difference between philosophy and literature. This problematization, however, fails on its part to Habermas' over-identify Nietzsche with post-structuralism (from Philosophical discourse of modernity known) to question what could have opened paths both beyond the hegel of the Federal Republic of Habermas and across the neoconservatives of the new spirit of capitalism — the post-structuralists.

Accordingly, it also remains questionable whether, in the case of Nietzsche, as the exhibition suggests, from terms — in terms of “will to power” or “eternal return” — although the selection of these in the museum rooms is quite convincing. After all, a wanderer philosophized here with his shadows and a hammer, not a systematist with an encyclopedia and dialectical method. Yet the Nietzsche-curious person in 1, 2, 3... not only about his countermethod of genealogy and aesthetics (appearances come before consciousness!) but also about today — not least politically — central concepts such as “resentment” or “nihilism.” The latter, however, is questionably discussed as “influenced by Nietzsche” and as a mere description of the present tense of the late 19th century, instead of bringing it beyond its Russian conditions of origin — and with Nietzsche — into a dual connection with religion and scientism that would continue to this day.

Last but not least, it is unlikely to convince Nietzschekenner to find nothing but a defense of “diversity” in his “Earth Government,” which was intended to instigate slavery, feudality and inequality (as the cynical post-critic Sloterdijk recalled), such as 1, 2, 3... suggests that Nietzsche, of all people, was the first left-liberal. The defense of “faraway love”, on the other hand, which excludes all nationalism and some anti-Semitism (although unfortunately hardly any racism in Nietzsche's case), as den Highlighting Nietzsche's essential anti-essentialist contribution during the period of neo-chauvinism is definitely thanks to the new exhibition in the Nietzschehaus.

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Regardless of criticism, offers 1, 2, 3... gives visitors an enjoyable, light, entertaining and, as it were, educational afternoon, even on weekdays when the museum is open from 2 pm to 5 pm (except Mondays). It should be a suitable period of time to listen to the various audio tracks and — along their — to experience various acoustically conveyed experiences of the same haptically retrievable spaces. Even the new exhibition does not completely resist the temptation to romanticize or heroize Nietzsche; people who have been reading Nietzsche for years and decades are still likely to get a whole lot closer to the person who wrote about Superman through them. It is precisely this bringing the people Nietzsche is most grateful in our era of hegemonic human self-abolition, which is being tried ideologically to be overtaken ahead of time by anti-, trans- and post-humanist avant-gardes. In any case, Nietzsche was still a person who only lacked the goal and thus the species, but not humanity when it came to the suffering of an animal.

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In the best sense of the word, could 1, 2, 3... In this respect, they contribute to reopening places such as Naumburg, Jena and Weimar, figures such as Nietzsche, Hegel and Goethe in terms of intellectual history: because Nietzsche's proteleological question of the self-determined goal of man, the ideal of authenticity of German Romanticism, the rational society of German idealism and the adequate order of good life (German classical music) belong together beyond all bourgeois resentments of education — especially But: beyond all Germanness.

Link to the Nietzsche House website with further information.

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Information about the pictures

All images in this article are taken by the author unless otherwise stated.

Article image: Front of the Nietzsche House in Naumburg

1, 2, 3…

About the New Permanent Exhibition in the Nietzsche House in Naumburg

Since 1994, the house in Naumburg where Nietzsche lived with his mother for several years after his mental collapse in 1889 has had a museum dedicated to life and work. On the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of its existence, the permanent exhibition of the Nietzsche House was completely redesigned, curated by Berlin philosopher Daniel Tyradellis. Our regular author Lukas Meisner was there and took a look at them.

“Not too much sun, the light is misunderstood, twilight is the actual lighting of humanity.” (Benn, Three old men)

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I. Well-tempered cosmopolitanism

You can't just live in houses. A language, a legal system, customs or dream worlds can also be homes. Wherever strangers are transformed into familiarity and familiarity gains a liveliness that becomes a “beautiful stranger” (Eichendorff), people live. Life creates a house of existence through symbols, fantasies and rituals. It inspires itself through its work. “People live on this earth full of merit, yet poetic.” (Hölderlin) Architecture is therefore just another form of an existential world friendship movement. Life can light up in the twilight of structures.

Starting from aesthetic speculations about Greek tragedy, Nietzsche arrived at an existential-architectural understanding of life early on in his philosophy. He sees reality as an existential dialectic of the forces of Dionysian — ecstatic, eruptive — and Apollonian — as a dreamlike transfiguration and formation. Central, and this applies to Nietzsche's entire dramatic philosophy — even though, after his “turn” in Bayreuth in 1876, a marked change from tragedy to comedy prevailed in his thinking — is the primacy of order over chaos. Because existence is confronted with an excess of strangers, life that lives is constitutively Apollinan. All Dionysian outbreaks also only occur as a result of this vital transfiguration integration:

Could we ourselves an incarnation of dissonance think — and what else is a human being? — so this would dissonanceIn order to be able to live, you need a wonderful illusion that covers a veil of beauty over your own being. This is the true artistic purpose of Apollo: in whose name we summarize all those countless illusions of beautiful appearance which make existence worth living in every moment and urge us to experience the next moment.¹

In Nietzsche's phase of “free spirit,” following the painful break with Wagner, Apollinian then gains an expanded meaning in the term “appearance.” Appearance becomes a vital compensation for the abysses of truth that you cannot live with. Successful life requires an architecture of illusion. For Nietzsche, the aesthetic transfiguration of the Apollonian dream is transformed into a gentle theory. This is embodied on the one hand in benevolent, encouraging interpretations and on the other hand in a therapeutic suppression of facts that cannot be integrated. Nietzsche thus describes the enlightened non-enlightenment as a “decision to ignorance, to indiscriminate closure, to close his windows, an inner saying no to this or that thing, not letting it come close, a kind of state of defense against much that is known, a satisfaction with the darkness, with the final horizon, a saying yes and approving ignorance. ”²

One could see Nietzsche's thought as a prelude to an established understanding of the humanum established in 20th century anthropology as a being that, unlike the animal guided by its instincts, is cosmopolitan. “Cosmopolitanism” — a term coined by Max Scheler and preformed in Johann Gottfried Herder's thinking — appears in philosophy in substantial power first with Heidegger in Being and time on. There, a conceptual specification is achieved, which formally expresses Nietzsche's entire understanding of the rational existence of the free spirit: “The mood of state of mind existentially constitutes the cosmopolitanism of existence. ”³

Nietzsche's existential-architectural thinking is addressed in Heidegger's words. The mindset of the free spirit, which needs a house of appearances in order to be able to live in cosmopolitanism, must be located in a housing of good moods. As an architect of the vital, you build on your vitality by exposing yourself to certain influences — such as mountain lakes, magnanimous people, music from Bizet, the climate of Liguria, etc. What Heidegger does not reflect is the aspect of regulatable “Throwing” as a conscious will to transfigurative appearance. Only a well-tempered state of mind in Apollinian can develop an openness to cosmopolitanism at all. The chaos of nerves differentiates itself partially sealed into a cosmos that motivates life to live as a cosmopolitan citizen. It is only when realities are dimmed proportionally that twilight is created, which presents the contours of the world in an orderly manner to a highly nervous cosmopolitanism and enables a life that “world trust” (Heidegger) has and can pass on. Therefore, the”Not yet identified thiers”⁴ Man a filter, a shelter, a house for being, in order to Vita contemplativa to follow up. Only when the world is not annoying can it “worlds” (Heidegger). Without a stimulating interior and a protective outdoor architecture of life, there can be no cosmopolitan philosophy.

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II. Against the tree

In his recently published book Nietzsche's architecture of the discerning⁵ Geneva-based city planner and professor of architecture Stephen Griek has written a large-scale essayistic meditation on the connection between thinking and building. He took the title of the work from a Nietzsche aphorism, which he also prefaced it as a motto. It states:

Once and probably soon, we need to understand what our big cities in particular lack: quiet and vast, expansive places to think about, places with spacious long hallways for bad or overly sunny weather, where no sound of the cars and the caller penetrates [...] Buildings and facilities which, as a whole, represent the grandeur of Sit-Express reflection and sideways. [...] We want to express ourselves into Have translated stone and plant, we want into us walk walkwhen we into Transform these halls and gardens.⁶

Griek is inspired by these formulations and strives to highlight the related basic structure of thought and architecture. For him, the common feature lies in the fact that both shape reality in the form of the draft (see p. 46). Through this idea, he can understand architecture as a form of conceptionality through which people interpret the world. Griek is close to Nietzsche in that thinking is regarded as an art whose creativity is primarily to be understood negatively. Art omits, reduces thinking, limits architecture: “Architecture [...] is therefore an cutting out, simplifying, reducing, abstracting the outside, the world (space is not simply there, but a conscious excerpt from the outside, creating space is elimination).” (p. 214) Architecture thinks and thinking is architecture as creating space from chaos through “regulatory fictions” (p. 160).

Nietzsche's idea of appearances is thus received and emphatically polemically opposed to a concept of truth that is based on the understanding of a hierarchical order; a truth whose essence is established and whose structure only needs to be developed. For Griek, the image of the tree (see p. 21 f.) is emblematic. He cites the text as the origin of this idea A City Is Not a Tree by Christopher Alexander from 1965 and notes how Gilles Deleuze applied this image to the entire history of Western ideas. (Cf. p. 20f.)

However, Griek is rubbing himself up against criticism of this totalitarian concept of truth, which in his eyes is hostile to innovation. As a result, his immense range of facts and ideas used is clumped together. His interesting approach that structures of architecture are structures of thought and Vice Versa present and his sometimes comprehensible plea for a “culture of becoming” (p. 39) thus fizzles out in a very erudite polemic. Criticism of the tree does not result in a sketch of an alternative organic; instead, everything is subordinated to a monotonous attack on classical existence. As essay-like as Griek's text may look, he will become predictably tree-like even in his confrontational attitude.

In addition, Griek's approach wants to show an openness to becoming, which presents his text as a “construction site accessible to everyone and completely comprehensible” (p. 36). Even though it is sympathetically intended to pursue a philosophy that also wants to show what it says, the Greek does not succeed. The subject matter does not expand, but degenerates into the expected result of a critique of the truth of the tree over and over again. The polemic scares away the phenomena. An experienced architect in particular would have been expected to provide more specific explanations of individual buildings in order to explain his ideas using real designs, as the works he has positively emphasized Learning from Las Vegas (Brown/ Venturi) and Delirious New York (Koolhaas) afford. It also doesn't help if quotes from Nietzsche are not used as evidence of thought processes, but usually only serve as associative hints, and often only as a kind of sound backdrop. They appear like posters on the fences of a construction site. If books are houses that make you a guest as a reader and get an impression of the quality of their respective living experience: Why should you then move into accommodation in unfinished construction sites that obviously do not want to achieve this quality?!

By failing to elaborate his theses on specific details and Nietzsche's philosophy, Griek is missing the opportunity to illustrate the conceptual innovations highlighted by Nietzsche. In particular, the significance of the body for Nietzsche, which then continues to have an effect in the body phenomenology inaugurated by Heidegger and systematized by Hermann Schmitz, which recognizes moods and atmospheres as substantial realities, is not specified. Yet it is architecture that, like music, cultivates the form of being and provokes an absorption. A philosophical examination of the connection between thinking and construction should have focused on the topic of how moods and buildings, atmospheres and living are connected and how the concept of participation is enriched by these topics.⁷ But since Griek is fixated on the violent dominance of a culture of tree-like existence, he is concerned with standing up for chaos, change, entropy. From this static of being present, he cannot think of an extended static of being, which always requires his own seclusion and conservative order. Because of the axe, you no longer see the alternative to a tree.

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III. Fake architecture

The deeper reason why Griek is unable to work out decisive reflections that characterize Nietzsche's thinking is that he has taken a polemical stance against an ontology of the tree, which legitimizes itself by overemphasizing the concept of “will to power.” Nietzsche's idea of appearances is thus regarded by him almost exclusively as a form of conquest. Life is accentuated as a permanent revolution of creativity against the existence of facts. Only autonomy as active determination is free and everything else is obedience to a totalitarian truth itself, which is “hostile to life” and “always tyrannical” (p. 138). Through his critical reflex, Griek does not sufficiently specify the dimension of the defensive in appearance, which has priority in Nietzsche. The connection between a sense of creativity and the necessary artificial remoteness to the directness for the fragile, uncertain and sometimes also creative animal human is therefore not clearly explained. Even though Griek admirably imaginatively describes the city as “ontological [] immunization machines” (p. 248) and profoundly characterizes the meaning of the house as “dosed openness to becoming cosmic” (p. 233): The understanding of appearance as protection against too much cosmopolitanism is neglected. Yet it is precisely in the preceding motto that this dimension of Nietzsche's thinking dominates as an anti-Christian form of a peripatetic Vita contemplativa.

Greek's ideal of a non-tree-like design as an “open architecture” that respects the “necessary drifting of life” (p. 322) is thus found in designs that are open to being easily replaced by other designs. After all, there should be no compulsion through manifest construction that could possibly block future construction. All gestures as a temporary measure. Instead of the tree, the eternal construction site. However, buildings are not just bossy, virile designs that replace other designs, but when they can achieve the dimension of Apollonian “comfort” as a resonance room design, they are opportunities to enrich life through a redesigned interior. It would be possible here to recall the classic meaning dimensions of the term “power” and inscribe it in architectural contexts: Power as Auctoritas is the competence to design spaces that impresses with the attractiveness of their creativity and not simply Potestas, which forcibly imposes a will on someone else to their rooms. The experience of existing multiple good living creates the desire to design your own space as an individual combination of traditional domesticity. Open architecture is not a building that counteracts the will to build new buildings with unrestrained expressivity through buildings that can be demolished easily. Truth is what makes you live.

In his intentionally incomplete designs, Griek sits down for an unfinished architectural and reflexive design of fundamental confusions that are laid out in Nietzsche's way of thinking. Nietzsche does not point out clearly enough the two basic dimensions of the architecture of appearance: Appearance is a protective wall and appearance is an animating imagination. In addition, especially in Nietzsche's later thinking, there is an “obscuring” (Celan) “will to power” (Celan) overemphasis on the “will to power.” Nietzsche falsely substantiates the vulnerability of the truthful animal to be transfigured into an ontology of chaos, which then legitimizes a naturalism of power.

If Nietzsche had read himself more carefully, he would have noticed the underdifferentiated variety of meanings of the sham. Schein has existential, cultural, physiological, psychological, philosophical and philological connotations: Existentially, it acts as an Apollinian protection against the “original joke.” Or appearance can also take the form of meaning that orders the chaos world. Appearance as a cultural entity protects against the depressing obscurations of a culture that suffers from the loss of its substantial metaphysical interpretation. However, appearances can also be defined as a filter against attacks by resentful sham constructs by angry and embittered people. Physiological appearance indicates that undisturbed life requires a diet of sounds, places, feelings, etc. as a basis in order to adjust stably into bright, lucid states. Psychologically, appearance means the state of emotional stability as complacency. Philosophical appearance as an overall understanding justifies one's own way of life. Philological appearance finally expresses itself in self-encouraging language games, which can be used as “fake bridges” to others. From all this, it could be speculated that a comprehensive architecture of knowledge according to Nietzsche would have to see itself as a mental, physiological, symbolic and philosophical pseudo-construction. The “House of Being” (Nietzsche) is a house of appearance, whose rooms are to be designed in six dimensions in such a way that they make it possible to live in as a walk within oneself.

Despite all sympathy for the contemporary topic, the impressive wealth of knowledge — for example by pointing out the effect of a more efficient protein variant (through the amino acid arginine instead of lysine), which played a role in the evolutionary development of nerve cells in the frontal lobe of the neocortex (see p. 186) — and also the sometimes ingenious wording of Greek — “symbolic big bang” (p. 248), “Boosting the tree” (p. 21) —, the impression of redundant polemic prevails when reading. That's a shame, because as a small plea, the book could certainly have released an innovative, axe-like impulse. However, in the present 300-page version of this exuberant controversy, signs of fatigue arise quite quickly. You soon know how the wind blows and there are ten oh-yes effects on an aha effect. The reviewer openly admits that, on his reading trips, he does not easily want to forego the comfort of clearly structured bookhouses in which you can take a walk and that, despite all philosophical openness, he likes to avoid the airy openness of becoming uninhabitable sign building sites — however innovative, non-intrusive and enthusiastic they may be.

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sources

Greek, Stephen: Nietzsche's architecture of the discerning. The world as science and fiction. Bielefeld 2024.

Heidegger, Martin: Being and time. Tübingen 1953.

Sloterdijk, Peter: spheres I—III. Frankfurt a.M. 1998—2004.

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footnotes

1: The birth of tragedy, paragraph 25.

2: Beyond good and evil, Aph 230.

3: Heidegger, Being and time, P. 137.

4: Beyond good and evil, Aph 62.

5: Published in 2024 by “transcript” publishing house and quoted in body text below.

6: The happy science, Aph 280.

7: Sloterdijks opus magnum spheres explores exactly these questions on thousands of pages and comes to the conclusion that the essential minimal architecture of the House of Being must be designed with a nine-fold emotional and social covering.

In the House of Semblance

Preludes on the Connection Between Architecture and Thought in Nietzsche with Constant Reference to a Book by Stephen Griek. A Review

A fruitful method within philosophy can be addressed seemingly minor, everyday topics. For example, the relationship between thinking and architecture, as this text is based on the newly published book Nietzsche's architecture of the discerning By Stephen Griek tried to show. With Nietzsche in mind, according to Michael Meyer-Albert, protecting a dwelling — both literally and figuratively — from the chaos of reality is essential for a successful world relationship. He neglects this in Greek's post-modern approach, which aims at maximum openness and wants to replace clear spatial structures with diffuse nomadic networks. Architecture as an art of non-violent rooting thus becomes unthinkable; the “house of appearance” that supports human existence collapses.

I. Nietzsche and 19th-century dietetics

Dietetics experienced a major upsurge with the Enlightenment. Dietetics and hygiene meant not only eating and washing, but also all aspects that specifically affected the human way of life. In the 19th century, dietetics was considered practical and less dependent on theory, for some even as the only area of healing art that was not at the mercy of many changes in scientific knowledge. It was therefore natural to think about the connection between dietetics and intellectual activity. A whole series of popular books such as the The art of living for mentally busy people by Joseph Henri Réveillé-Parise, the Chemical letters by Justus von Liebig or The book of health or the art of living according to the institution and laws of human nature by Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber. The latter contains a chapter on “Rules of Life Relating to the Spiritual Side of Man.” This dietary discourse had a particular influence on the philosophers of the 19th century.

I have argued extensively in other texts that dietetics is decisive in Middle Nietzsche and there in particular in The Wanderer and His Shadow as well as in the Morgenröthe finds its way into Nietzsche's thinking and life.¹ Especially between 1877 and 1879, it is noticeable that Nietzsche uses dietary counselors. Especially in the late 1870s, Nietzsche complained that nutrition was not made an object of general reflection. Simple things such as eating, living, heating or dressing should become the primary matter of philosophical self-employment. This teaching of the “next things” is remarkably closely linked to his reading of the popular literature on advice and dietetics at the time.

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II. gazebo, Schreber & indoor gymnastics

Medical room gymnastics by Daniel Gottlob Moritz Schreber published in 1855.² Room or home gymnastics refers to regular physical exercises in living rooms, which are mostly carried out without additional equipment. Schrebers indoor gymnastics was the most popular guide. Nietzsche ordered this book (15th edition from 1877) on August 29, 1878 and shortly afterwards reported to mother and sister that he had just done “room gymnastics.”³ He writes to his publisher: “Therapeutic exercises have arrived and have already been used eagerly. ”⁴ Because of the well-known indoor gymnastics, it is no longer necessary to mention a book or an author.

However Nietzsche came up with the words “next” and “very closest” things, they are certainly part of popular contemporary discourse. Right in the first issue of the German family magazine gazebo Do you read the following statement in 1853: “And strange! Perhaps the closest thing that surrounds us, the closest thing to ourselves, is something most people don't know. ”⁵ Nietzsche, in turn, writes in similar wording: “All the more may one admit that the Very close things seen very poorly by most people, very rarely noticed. ”⁶ When Schreber spoke of disdain for the “simple, natural and obvious,” Nietzsche speaks of “disregard [...] Of all the closest things. ”⁷ In both cases, the argument is initially formulated independently of health. Schreber's weighting on contempt and Nietzsche on contempt is directed against the educated: they would mistakenly regard everyday life and the study of their own body as something trivial and low. The reaction to this state of general ignorance was similar among Schreber and Nietzsche: According to Schreber, the “physical needs” must be “thoroughly explored in their essence,” while Nietzsche demands comprehensive knowledge of the “next things.”⁸

Nietzsche sometimes argues provocatively from a dietary point of view: For example, he attributes the high culture of the Greeks to their better way of life in terms of “food and drink.”⁹ The belief that good nutrition improves blood flow to the “brain” and would therefore think better is common in dietary guides due to emerging brain research since the 18th century. Schreber, for example, describes extensively in the indoor gymnastics the metabolic process of nutrition, exercise, blood and physical-mental “freshness” and “strength.”¹⁰ Schreber's hygienic methods as well as Nietzsche's knowledge of the “next things” can never be completed, but must be constantly reworked depending on the phase of life, gender, age, physique, social situation, climate and location. That is why Nietzsche and Schreber only offer individual healing methods and health conditions. In this sense, Nietzsche also demands — once again taking up a popular dietary argument — that everyone should be transplanted into their nutritionally suitable environment.¹¹ This should have made it clear that contemporary dieters did not simply stop at nutrition or health prevention, but also pursued a philosophical claim. Schreber regards his room gymnastics as part of a “hygienic health philosophy.” It is ultimately about “happiness” and the most important art of all, the “art of living.”¹²

Nietzsche uses room gymnastics as a philosophical model for morality in one of his aphorisms. In aphorism”Most necessary gymnastics“from The Wanderer and His Shadow is asked to fail yourself something every day.¹³ This is essential daily exercise if you want to remain joyful and independent. And in Human, all-too-human Gymnastics even became a model for the question of why philosophy makes you want: “First and above all, because it makes you aware of your strength, i.e. for the same reason that gymnastic exercises are pleasurable even without spectators. ”¹⁴ It is not an intellectual theorem, but the everyday experience of room gymnastics — feeling one's own strength through daily practice — which is able to explain the desire for philosophy.

The doctrine of “next things” in the context of popular culture is the precursor to Nietzsche's philosophical connection of body and soul or body and spirit. Many passages in Nietzsche's works testify to this narrowing: For example, in the dictum of the “guideline of the body” in the required philosophy of nutrition.¹⁵ The figure of Zarathustra says: “For truly, my brothers, the spirit is a stomach! ”¹⁶ In addition, popular dietetics is not only reflected in Nietzsche's works, but also in his everyday life: Nietzsche eagerly practiced indoor gymnastics, tried out meat substitutes such as malto legumes and was a big fan of Liebig's meat extract, the first preservable meat broth. Last but not least, after giving up his professorship, he lived in a lot of popular tourist resorts, some of which were overcrowded, such as St. Moritz, where he came into contact with popular culture in an almost concentrated way. Nietzsche described the interrelationships between location, climate, dietetics and philosophy one year after Wanderer and his shadow blunt in aphorism”In a roundabout way“from the Morgenröthe. Here, what was lived in concrete and practical terms in the writing situation in St. Moritz is expressed philosophically: philosophy as an “instinct for a personal diet” (not the other way around!).¹⁷ And the draft of the aphorism states: “This whole philosophy — is it more than a drive to prove that ripe fruit, unleavened bread, water, loneliness, order in all things taste best to me and are the most beneficial? So an instinct for a right dieting in everything? And a mild sun! ”¹⁸

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III. Nietzsche research struggles with popular culture

In philosophical research, popular literature is often underestimated and its philosophical claim is thus overlooked. I vaguely remember a presentation about Nietzsche when I was a student. A philosopher explained to us that Nietzsche was an excellent, original thinker because he had only read “big” literature. This meant the “classics” such as Goethe, Kant or Schopenhauer from recent times; Plato, Aristotle or Homer from antiquity. Nietzsche evaded all trivial literature and only dealt with the great ghosts. Even then, I doubted this ingenious aesthetic author image, which is still used today by “researching” Nietzsche admirers. Authorship, on the other hand, seemed exciting to me precisely because the most diverse living conditions, peculiarities, hobbies, reading and methods of thinking influence people who write philosophically. Creativity doesn't care about differences between high and popular culture. Reading different types of literature simply corresponds to the reading practices of a popular person, such as Nietzsche. In fairness, it must be noted that Nietzsche himself sometimes quoted little and presented himself as a little-reading, lonely philosopher. At the same time, however, he criticized the aesthetics of genius and, with his passages on writing, reading and authorship, also left enough clues to critically question his own self-portrayals. In addition, current editions, bibliographies and case studies allow research with historical-critical standards.

The influences of popular culture on Nietzsche and his thinking (as on every philosopher living in society) are relevant. Two disguised forms of interpretation repeatedly attempt to diminish this relevance. They thus practice genius aesthetics, i.e. promote an idea of authors as geniuses who act incomprehensibly, acontextually, independently of historical-cultural contexts and therefore produce incomparably brilliant works. Such an attitude towards authorship gets in the way of a scientific approach, especially when it is believed, as is today, that we have long since overcome the aesthetic of genius. Two such ingenious aesthetic strategies persist:

Popular cultural influences are firstly replaced by “classic” positions of well-known philosophers. In this way, an idealized “intellectual story” is constructed: At the end of explanations of Nietzsche's philosophy of nutrition, people like to read that this is a direct reaction to Feuerbach (“You are what you eat”), Epicurus or other “classical” sources of ideas. Such interpretations relativize cultural influences and actions in favor of an idealized primacy of original thoughts and decisions made by individual authors. The claim to be able to contextualize and classify a philosophy historically and critically is not just a philological project. Rather, reading, working and living styles provide important resources for philosophical engagement.

Second Popular cultural influences are put into perspective as small building blocks of “big” ideas. Although Nietzsche's philosophy of nutrition is addressed, it is teleologically related to “overarching” ideas such as superman, the will to power, or Nietzsche's metaphysical critique. The “material” diet is the “small” thing, the spiritual-conceptual metaphysical critique is actually the “big” or the philosophically relevant part of the work. It is not at all easy to analyse popular cultural influences independently and “let” their relevance stand.

This not only interprets inadmissibly, but sometimes ignores Nietzsche's own reversal of this relationship. It is thanks to Nietzsche that his work and way of life as philosophical To have understood practices. He has rediscovered the life-world aspects of everyday life for philosophy and as a philosophy thematized. For example, he wrote rhetorically about the relationship between his diet and “big” thoughts as in Ecce Homo: “In a completely different way, I am interested in a question on which the “salvation of humanity” depends more than on any theologian curiosity: the question of sustenance. [...] these little things — nutrition, location, climate, recreation, the whole casuistry of selfishness — are more important than anything that has been taken important up to now. You just have to start here relearn”.¹⁹ More subtly in a tongue-in-cheek letter: “It occurred to me these days that I had done 'The Dawn, ''Happy Science,' and the 'Zarathustra: 'Considering that this literature belongs to the term 'Liebig Meat Extract,' I mustn't get angry about my 'health' — rather amaze! ”²⁰

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Tobias Brücker has a doctorate in cultural studies and is head of internal continuing education at the Zurich University of the Arts. He has researched Nietzsche's working methods and published the monograph Auf dem Weg zur Philosophie. Friedrich Nietzsche schreibt „Der Wanderer und sein Schatten“ in 2019. He is interested in all facets of diets, authorship, and creativity techniques in philosophy and the arts.

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Sources

Brücker, Tobias: Auf dem Weg zur Philosophie. Friedrich Nietzsche schreibt „Der Wanderer und sein Schatten“. Wilhelm Fink 2019.

Dr. l-N [anonymous]: Vom Baue des Menschen. In: Die Gartenlaube (1853). Leipzig 1853, p. 91.

Schreber, Daniel G.M.: Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik. Leipzig 1862.

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Photo credits

Figure for “Rumpfaufrichten”, from Schreber, Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik, p. 62.

Figure of “Leg throws forwards and backwards” and “sideways”, from Schreber, Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik, p. 81.

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Footnotes

1: See esp. Brücker, Auf dem Weg zur Philosophie, chapter 3.3 on “Writing and Dietetics” and the paragraph “Nietzsche's Reading Popular Dietetics”, p. 173 ff.

2: I quote Schreber here and subsequently after what is available to me 8th edition from 1862.

3: N. to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche, 21.09.1878, No. 759.

4: N. to Schmeitzner, 10.09.1878, No. 754.

5: Gartenlaube (1853): Dr. L-n, p. 91. This is an anonymously published series of articles.

6: Schreber, Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik, p. 5; The Wanderer and His Shadow, 6.

7: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 5.

8: Schreber, Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik , p. 12; The Wanderer and His Shadow, 6.

9: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 184.

10: Schreber, Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik, p. 14.

11: Cf. The Wanderer and His Shadow, 188.

12: Schreber, Aerztliche Zimmer-Gymnastik, S. 28.

13: The Wanderer and His Shadow, 305.

14: Human, all-too-human Vol. I, 252.

15: Cf. The happy science, 7.

16: Thus Spoke Zarathustra, From old and new boards, 16.

17: Morgenröthe, 553.

18: precursor Subsequent fragments 1880, 7 [15].

19: Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 1.

20: N. to Overbeck, 28.03.1884, No. 497.

Everyday Life Contributes to Thoughts

Nietzsche and Dietetic Popular Culture

Nietzsche did not just influence popular culture. He himself was part of a contemporary popular culture and was significantly influenced by it. As a spa tourist, he chased after the trendy health resorts, studied popular magazines and non-fiction books as a popular reader, ate his way through various (self-prescribed) diets as a diet freak and used modern technologies from telegrams to Malling-Hansen's writing ball. In the following article, Swiss Nietzsche researcher Tobias Brücker summarizes some influences from contemporary dietetics in order to exemplify how Nietzsche's life and thinking were shaped by popular cultural factors.

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

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I. An unusual “encounter”

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

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

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

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II. Man and machine as an artistic team

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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III. Disadvantages and side effects

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

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

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

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

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

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

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IV. Conclusion

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

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footnotes

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

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

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

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

5: So Zarathustra spoke, Die Heimkehr.

What is ChatGPT Doing to Philosophy?

Attempt of a Critical Examination

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

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

A rocky start

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

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

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

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

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

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

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“Knowledge” about Nietzsche: at Wikipedia level

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Kierkegaard, Stirner and Nietzsche

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Nietzsche, Kant and tips for further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes

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

Society versus Self-Becoming

A Dialogue about Nietzsche, Authenticity and the Challenges of Modernity

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

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