I. Alienation — or the science of underwear

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

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

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

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II. Science and Truth: The Ultimate Ascetic Ideal

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

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

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

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

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III. Alienation through science

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

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

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IV. Conclusion: Hostility to life with method

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

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Literature

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes

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

2: Beyond good and evil, Preface.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

20: Heidegger, Nietzsche, P. 439.

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

Better to Want Nothing, Than Not to Want at All

Self-Alienation through Modern Science

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

The accusation that Nietzsche can be claimed for and against all views has long been popular because he constantly contradicts himself in his works and both represents and attacks any opinion, so that there is no “actual” Nietzsche left — at most the one that the respective reader wishes for himself as a friend or, depending on the case, as an enemy. Nietzsche a white wall? A projection screen for wishes? Kurt Tucholsky probably put this in the strongest possible terms:

Who can't make use of Nietzsche! Tell me what you need and I'll get you a Nietzsche quote in return. [...] For Germany and against Germany; for peace and against peace; for literature and against literature — whatever you want.¹

Anyone who deals with Nietzsche for a long time cannot help but ask themselves whether Tucholsky did not speak the most appropriate word with it. For in the never-ending hunt for Nietzsche's actual philosophy, a lot of contradictory things have already been said: that it prepared the spiritual ground for National Socialism, that it culminates in the three main doctrines of “superman,” the “idea of eternal return,” and the “will to power,” that her critical potential should be rated higher than her affirmative, that she is an “artist metaphysics” “It is only considered an individual philosophy that the “tragic idea” is the common thread of Nietzsche's entire philosophy Go through — just to pick out a few interpretations here.

We could also venture to assert that no position has hitherto been absurd enough not to find a role model in Nietzsche and not at least one quotation as proof in his work. Nietzsche a womanizer and enemy of emancipation? Not so hastily — how much room for development does he give women, and couldn't his genealogical method become an important tool of feminist theory? Nietzsche regrets that Protestantism brought an end to so many Catholic excesses — but not Christianity? Well, somehow all aversion makes you feel Nietzsche's secret admiration for Luther and his attitude of “I'm standing here and I can't help myself.”

Nietzsche on the right and a Chauvi, a reactionary, anti-liberal, anti-humanist block of wood? By no means, the only thing missing was a tender father's hand, so that the male fantasies of power overshot the mark here and there. But with a bit of fine work, we chisel out the more subtle and, excuse the repetition of the word, “actual” principles and recognize, lo and behold: Nietzsche is a leftist, a flawless democrat, a philanthropist. Incognito perhaps even for ourselves, but in the service of the “good cause” (whatever it is), and our purpose as a good and foolhardy interpreter will be to use the red thread not to shimmy out of the maze into freedom, but into the heart and mind of the philosopher.

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Surrender to incoherence

But let's put the irony aside. Nietzsche is rightly regarded as an unsystematic philosopher, and naming the core ideas of his philosophy can be quite a headache. In view of all the opposing attempts to determine the essence of his philosophy, it might seem advisable to be more modest and simply to prove that all the previous provisions prove to be reductions that are far more in line with the interpreter's wishes than Nietzsche's philosophy. Because always — always (?) — it would be possible to find a counterexample or a subtle counter-interpretation that casts doubt on every statement, no matter how clear. We therefore no longer claim that there is a core of his philosophy or a vein that splits into many small, rich secondary veins, but which all draw blood and life from the same center. We try to make Nietzsche more questionable and dive into a game of references and references, as serious researchers we name sources and delve into reading traces of Nietzsche's own reading. An overall picture looks outdated, requires a central perspective that we have already switched off the light a long time ago, while we claim that Nietzsche is more like one of those interchangeable images in which you see either a woman or a vase. And if we really still wanted to stick to the metaphor of the maze, then it would probably be painted by Maurits Cornelis Escher and would have neither entrance nor exit, neither heart nor center, but only a multitude of Minotaurs who draw themselves from two-dimensionality into a strange three-dimensionality, as if they themselves were still underlining that they were simply handmade.

In a sense, those who first set out in search of Nietzsche's actual philosophy have already mapped out the further path of Nietzsche research. With each fixed portrait, the tilted image had to be negated and shown that it was ironically broken, or just an independent attempt, or could be embedded into the overall picture. This method of initially particular undermining was finally perfected, universalized and finally scientified by parts of recent Nietzsche research. But now every statement about his philosophy slips into our fingers. In a gigantic process of corrosion, his philosophy runs the risk of dissolving into individual atoms, and there is more space from aphorism to aphorism: “Will we still find a bridge? Is there another way over? Is there another place to go? “May we ask that with a bit of Nietzschean tragedy

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Philosophy as a fragmentary hodgepodge

Or, as a sober mind might object, is there no danger at all? Isn't the magic of Nietzsche's enduring modernity precisely in the fact that every time creates its own Nietzsche? In the age of ideologies, it was naturally a Nietzsche of Zarathustrian doctrines, today a cuddly ambivalent philosopher of the one-side—on the other hand, not to arrest, always one step ahead, always dazzling, never reaching for. With a superior smile, we can watch new experts beginning Nietzschein interpreters still hailing for a firm statement. Well, they may not yet know the first sketch or the second revision before the published aphorism. If we multiply the interpretation options by each amended article per section, let's try inverting the signs once and remember that minus multiplies minus plus. A comma shakes up recent research today more than the question of whether Nietzsche rejected the idea of the Second Coming as a failure.

But what is dealing with Nietzsche's philosophy other than an ingenious gimmick in a hermetic academic space in which experts knowingly play the balls to each other? You don't take anything seriously yourself anymore. And doesn't the academic discourse at our universities suffer from this? They no longer believe: that truth can be named, that morality is enshrined in heaven, that philosophy changes the world. Clarified, philosophy now appears as the product of a completed digestive process of recent history, socio-cultural framework, established mentality and politics, which the rest of the population can confidently ignore. A philosophy that is about to give up its essential claims to knowledge becomes a mere archive, an increative institution that no longer dares to search for truth at all, but simply presents new aspects of an ingenious chronology of interesting ideas.

But even this criticism is perhaps too short-sighted and does not do justice to the current state of philosophy. Which philosophical school could still be convincing? Who seriously and wholeheartedly wanted to call themselves a Kantian? And anyone who has ever met a Heideggerian knows that they would rather not become one either. This raises the question: What can an established philosophy be for our future thinking? And how can we approach a philosophy like Nietzsche's today?

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Philosophy as critique

We can fairly barely avoid appreciating recent Nietzsche research for the fact that, as a corrective, it puts an end to the many simplifications in Nietzsche interpretations and refutes precisely those who brag loudest about his name: The self-optimizers and shallow life counselors and, of course, as ever, the political right who cannot refrain from making Nietzsche their own with a handful of keywords.

From his philosophy, we can certainly learn skepticism about closed philosophical systems. It is tempting to defend a thought-building, once painstakingly constructed, against the doubters to the best of our ability. But it's all too easy to become a prisoner of the architecture that you brought into the world at 35. In Nietzsche, we find an authentic certificate of thought that shows how to move away from the past without worries, and throw away what appears too tight and outdated. In this respect, with and through Nietzsche's philosophy, we learn how to think independently, but not a closed teaching system. Of course, this does not avert the risk of arbitrariness. The attempt to find a far-reaching perspective in Nietzsche cannot be insignificant, and stimulates an intellectual effort that turns out to be far more exciting than the self-righteous agreement that allows Nietzsche's thinking to break down into atomistic individual statements that only stand alone and could at most be placed in a subjective context.

Finally, however, we return to the question posed at the beginning: Can we arrest Nietzsche? Or, as Tucholsky claims, can it be used to justify everything, attack everything? Let us briefly look at the strategies with which certain statements from Nietzsche's philosophy are undermined, or at least put into perspective, so that Nietzsche, thought to the extreme, could not be pinned down to a single passage that “means something as it stands there.”

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Resolution strategies and objections

That the opposite of every thesis can actually be found That's what it's called. This is a strong claim, but it has the advantage that examples are easy to list. Whether these contrasts remain opposites when interpreted more precisely remains to be seen at this stage. But is there an opinion that is never contradicted if you understand it in the simplest way? Lo and behold, self-determined death, for example, suicide, to name just one example, enjoys unrestricted affirmation in Nietzsche. He contrasts it strongly and unequivocally with the mental and physical sickness he criticizes, which comes to an end in natural death. A counterthesis to this is sought in vain.

Some statements must be understood biographically in such a way that they can be practically subtracted from Nietzsche's philosophy. The old woman who gives Zarathustra the uncharming advice to bring a whip when men go to women is, for example, just a persiflage on Nietzsche's sister Elisabeth. No misogynous attitude could therefore be derived from this position. But even if this is true, a philosophy stands for itself, and we interpreters study the perspectives that arise from it, and not Nietzsche's psyche of any kind. Psychologization, which initially served as a strategy to create a more pleasing and well-rounded Nietzsche, leads, when applied consistently, to the levelling of his philosophy, as virtually every statement can be interpreted biographically and psychologically. But then you finally have to come to the conclusion that his entire work can only be regarded as a biography of thought, which is philosophically irrelevant because it applies to no one but the individual who wrote it.

The philosophical speaker can be broken down into countless experimental figures. Based on the justified objection to hasty interpretations that simply equate Zarathustra with Nietzsche, and the recognition that experimental figures such as the “great person” cannot easily be identified with Nietzsche, the practice of completely removing the ground from a coherent “speaker ego” has become established. Is this “I” really the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche or is there a philosophical type, an experimental figure or even a distorted image? Are there perhaps as many Nietzsche as I in his texts? Well, then we can turn our backs on any attempt at a Nietzsche interpretation that is even halfway coherent, because there is simply no Nietzschean philosophy that could be characterized on the basis of content. This strategy can certainly be applauded; it is delicate and clever. Any collection of Nietzsche can thus be shattered, as it is barely possible to get hold of him. But why should we dedicate time to a philosopher who has only tried out positions without considering their veracity? Starting from an exciting, dazzling ambiguity, Nietzsche's philosophy slips into arbitrariness that you can walk past with a shrug.

Certain statements are meant ironically. This is quite obvious, but it also requires interpretative reasons such as the presentation of several clues. And if she receives this, an irreconcilable contradiction does not necessarily have to arise. Nietzsche could, for example, pay tribute to the “sovereign individual.”² meant ironically because he only equipped it with a single skill, namely to be able to promise. However, this “freedom” to commit to something came from the worst system of coercion — the severe corporal punishment of anyone who breaks his promises. Yes, the irony is that the sovereign individual, who brags about his freedom, has forgotten the dark, barbaric period from which it was rescued. And yet, for Nietzsche, it is freedom that unironically marks a new step in human development. The irony here therefore proves not to be an indissoluble contradiction, but as a metaperspective of the person who sees both — their dark background and their proud face.

And lastly, we have the subtle interpretation, which applies his own critique to terms that Nietzsche uses seemingly natural, understandable in everyday life. Is this what he is saying as truth? But hasn't he removed the basis of the concept of truth itself? He talks about a ranking of perspectives, but who ranks them? He says that nature, the world is immoral in itself — when he has already thrown all statements “about himself” to pieces?

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Integrative power

And this is exactly where we should not stop and simply state succinctly that a certain contradictory character is an integral part of Nietzsche's philosophy, but try to relate the apparent and actual contradictions, the various interpretations, to one another and to weigh them. How much can our interpretation of Nietzsche's philosophy integrate, this could become a yardstick for evaluating it. However, we should become careful and suspicious of ourselves if a round, self-contained philosophy actually emerges in which you suddenly and in good old tradition claim that all contradictions prove to be only apparent when you only use a key to interpret them. At some point, the mere interpretation of Nietzschein comes to an end and it is our own arguments that wrestle with certain aphorisms. It is our own positions, tastes, perspectives and values that we see attacked by him and that we try to defend, not least with the strategies he has learned. We have arrived in the thicket of a philosophy with which, if we dare, we can wrestle with and perhaps even find a way out. The fact that this outcome leads us out into our freedom and not into the heart and mind of the philosopher only makes thinking the adventure that it “actually” is in Nietzsche's sense.

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Literature

Tucholsky, Kurt: Miss Nietzsche (1932). In: Mary Gerold-Tucholsky & Fritz J. Raddatz (eds.): Collected works, Vol. 3. Frankfurt am Main 2005, p. 994.

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Footnotes

1: Tucholsky, Miss Nietzsche, P. 994.

2: Cf. On the genealogy of morality, II, 1—3.

Determining Nietzsche

Does Nietzsche have clear philosophical doctrines? There is still a fight with Nietzsche's ambiguity today. When does he mean what he says? In her essay, Natalie Schulte explores the question of where, in the midst of assimilating ambiguity through ideological programs on the one hand and academically savvy dispersal of Nietzsche's thought structures into indiscriminate and incoherent fragments and perspectives, on the other hand, today's engagement with Nietzsche has to locate its decisive challenges. Between the dangers of confusing his philosophy and the limitless relativization of his theses, she is looking for a fruitful third way of dealing with the question of the “actual Nietzsche.”

Experts have been discussing what could connect Nietzsche and the heavy metal subculture for several years. Art scholar and heavy metal expert Jörg Scheller pointed out: “Significantly, no philosopher is quoted as frequently in heavy metal as Nietzsche. ”¹ The website loudwire.com created a list of “11 Nihilistic Songs Inspired by Nietzsche” including “God is Dead” by Black Sabbaths album, “13,” Orange Goblins Song “Ubermensch” and “Beyond Good and Evil” by the band At The Gates.² The website Lebmetal.com List a number of bands that were heavily influenced by Nietzsche's nihilism, such as Gorgoroth, Beherit, Burzum, Emperor and Limbonic art.³ Numerous other examples could be mentioned, such as the band's Nietzschean inspiration Slipknot (music video)⁴ or the Ukrainian band The Nietzsche, which belongs to the genre of mathcore and is named directly after the philosopher (music video).

So what do Nietzsche and black metal or similar “loud”, “hard” and provocative musical styles have in common? First of all, it should be noted that these musical styles were and are predominantly influenced by heterosexual young men from the middle classes of western industrialized countries. They emerged in the 1980s with the entry of birth-strong generations into adult life and were influenced by the pessimistic, apocalyptic mental climate of the time, where media topics such as forest deaths, arms races and nuclear accidents corresponded with the actual decline of industry and the high level of youth unemployment and offered the younger generation a somewhat encouraging vision of the future. On the basis of this premise, four connections between Nietzsche and heavy metal can be defined: The male emotional life, the relationship with women, the desire for social recognition and the connection to Christianity.

First: Both Nietzsche and Heavy Metal follow the principle of “hard shell, soft core.” Sensitive artists often hide behind the harshness and aesthetic radicality of music. The music with its excessive volume, the yelling and screaming, the wild costumes in leather and metal, masks and make-up — all this serves as armor for the young man who despairs of the brutality and injustice of society. In a sense, this is also a role-playing game as part of an initiation rite: The growing young man recognizes the harsh social reality and sees the difficulties of advancement ahead of him. He plays the “Wild Man” to mask his doubts and weaknesses and to generate social attention. He oscillates between the refuge of soundproofed practice rooms and brightly lit stages decorated with imposing pit towers. His music is like whistling in the forest. This is also reflected in many lyrics of heavy metal, hardcore and punk songs, which are characterized by criticism of capitalism and pessimistic visions of society. To put it bluntly, this would mean: Sensitive people listen to hardcore, torturers love hits and music stadel. Harshness and volume are therefore also expressions of suffering and fear, with the parallels with Nietzsche's personality and his compensatory radicalism becoming clear. As is well known, he was also a loudspeaker finesse.

Second: the absence of women. Young men usually cultivate a love for the tough styles of music before they discover love for a woman. Heavy metal becomes relevant after the onset of sexual maturity and loses importance with partnership and family formation. This suggests that the hard music styles and the associated pose of the “wild man” help young men to deal with emotions or to mask them with self-images of strength, stubbornness and power. Young men fear that living out feelings could be interpreted as a weakness and question the desired male identity. In this sense, heavy metal and hardcore would be equated with male body armor, which is intended to create a protective aura of danger through martial arts, bodybuilding or tattoos. Nietzsche's personality was certainly heavily influenced by the lack of stable sexual relationships. His rash marriage proposals and views of women in general may have been motivated by corresponding frustrations and insecurities.

Third: The desire to be recognized and to assert oneself. Aesthetic, political, religious: On several levels, the hard musical styles challenge recognized authorities — after all, these are fields of action for young men who want to realize themselves, see themselves as representatives of a generation and want to fight for social relevance. Protest and ambition for advancement go hand in hand. In this sense, they demand: Free rein for the individual! No restrictions due to rules and morals! Here you'll find what you're looking for at Nietzsche. In addition, demonstrative contempt for “Christian slave morality” is part of self-portrayal as tough and cool, in keeping with body armor.

Fourthly: Christianity as a reference. The tension between Nietzsche and Christianity, in whose spirit he was brought up, and in particular his well-known quip “God is dead” make him an advocate of provocative Satanism in the eyes of many heavy metal followers. From the perspective of secular Europeans, the metal scene, especially the American one, is almost obsessed with the theme of religion, although in addition to the “antichrists” and Satanists, there are also varieties of Christian metal and hardcore (“white metal” and the like). In any case, the frame of reference is often Christianity, which is due to the fact that it is much more influential and present in American society than in Europe and therefore offers much more friction for rebellious spirits. Jörg Scheller remarked:

On the one hand, heavy metal kept the symbolic worlds of the Christian church alive, on the other hand, it showed the hypocrisy behind it, think of Slayer. Heavy metal had an enlightening impetus in that it stood — knowingly or unknowingly — in the tradition of radical religious critics such as Diderot or Nietzsche. Nietzsche was convinced that Christianity was a symptom of decadence, that it carried on a cult of weakness and damaged virtues such as pride and the will to freedom. As a result, he preached the extreme — and the extreme is the core of heavy metal, as all metal musicians emphasize, regardless of their respective ideological orientation.⁵

The conference “Pop! Goes the Tragedy The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche in Popular Culture” [“Tragedy becomes pop! Nietzsche's eternal return in popular culture”] investigated the continued existence of Nietzsche's thinking in popular culture on a broad front for the first time in 2015 at ZHdK Zurich. Lukas Germann focused on Nietzsche's response in the Norwegian black metal scene.⁶ He defined the genre succinctly: “Black metal is a civilized game with the secret and repressed desire for the collapse of all civilization in forms and rules of art, appearance, and image.” Referring to the sub-genre of black metal, whose name is based on an album by the band released in 1982 Venom Going back, Lukas German spoke of now more than 33,000 bands worldwide. His investigation focuses on the Norwegian music scene of the early 1990s, in which two murders, one suicide and dozens of church arsons caused a stir. Norwegian black metal bands such as Mayhem and Emperor named Nietzsche as an important source of inspiration, the band Gorgoroth named several albums after Nietzsche's book titles: “How to philosophize with the Hammer”, “Antichrist”, “Twilight of the Idols”]. In general, the references to Nietzsche were rather superficial in most cases, stated Germann, and an important aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy remained misunderstood: “The celebration of life, celebrated especially at late Nietzsche, remains alien to Black Metal. And musically, most black metal bands don't actually follow Nietzschean paths either.” There was an impulse on the Norwegian black metal scene to combine life and art by cultivating a radical lifestyle and violently crossing the limits of art. Since Dionysian art pushed beyond itself, into practice, into life, one could certainly define the excesses that began in Norway in the early 1990s as Dionysian intoxication. However, the metal scene had failed to “understand the demonic-Dionysian intoxication of music and aesthetics as an opening, as an abysmal sea of possibilities.” Instead, they sought new limits, defined themselves through an exclusive identity and enmity, and cultivated the contempt of others. “The joy of evil, the creativity of contempt and destruction freezes into conviction” — but, according to Nietzsche, “convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies.”⁷because they lead to narrow-mindedness, unforgiveness and fanaticism and put an end to the free play of thoughts and arguments.

There is no doubt that scientific reception of Nietzsche has become more differentiated today and no longer generally labels him as an amoral Darwinist and pioneer of fascism. But this differentiation has not yet reached the breadth of society, including its subcultures. The traditional gloomy Nietzsche associations still have an effect here: rejection of morality, devaluation of women, contempt for the church, will to power. Nietzsche is still surrounded by an aura of brutality, uncanny and reckless. He is called upon as the godfather of extreme individualism and a borderline dominant quest for freedom. This highly simplified and one-sided interpretation of his work means that sometimes strange people act as Nietzsche fans — especially men whose behavior would today be described as “toxic masculinity,” in extreme cases even those who became active as perpetrators of violence and killers, such as the Leopold & Loeb Chicago murder case from 1924. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, at the time of the crime 19 and Richard Loeb, at the time of the crime 19 and 18 years old, together they planned the abduction of a person followed by murder, after they had already succeeded had committed minor crimes together. An eight-year-old boy became their victim. The two perpetrators from wealthy German-Jewish families were highly talented, Leopold read Nietzsche, in particular So Zarathustra spoke, and he was particularly fascinated by the idea of superman. Barbet Schröder's crime thriller Murder by Numbers (2002) with Ryan Gosling and Michael Pitt in the lead roles took up this story again. In the film, Nietzsche is the source of inspiration for the highly gifted student Justin (Michael Pitt), who gives a presentation on the topic of freedom in high school. In doing so, he expresses the provocative thesis: “Freedom is crime, because anyone who really wants to be free acts radically egocentrically, puts himself above the good of the community.” With his classmate Richard (Ryan Gosling), he decides to commit a perfect crime in order to put this concept of freedom into practice. They murder a woman unknown to them but are convicted in the end. The conviction that, through intelligence and willpower, they can place themselves above morals and laws may also have prompted the real high school assassins of Columbine or the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik to do their things.⁸

Not every Nietzsche reader becomes a killer, but unmarried young men who seek their place in society and use militant, provocative methods are particularly susceptible to brutalized and abusive use of Nietzsche's ideas. In an intellectual-artistic context, these are primarily men who like to claim the aura of danger and present themselves in the field of subculture, as artists, writers or musicians. In black metal, for example, the aura of danger is now part of the aesthetic experience. As long as Nietzsche only acts as the godfather of an “aesthetic of evil” in this context, everything is still in the “green zone.” It becomes more difficult when the evil thus glorified crosses the threshold of imagination and enters real life, into practice. While in black metal Nietzsche seems to grant the license to be evil, brings him madonna In the name of love in the game. In 2015, she decorated her music video to the song “Living for Love” with a Nietzsche quote, in which the philosopher laments the malice of humans. While it rains red roses on the singer and sparks applause, a quote from Nietzsche is displayed in English: “Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions he has felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself that was his very heaven.” In German: “Man is the cruelest animal. Up to now, he has been happiest on earth during tragedies, bullfights and crucifixions; and when he invented hell, behold, that was his heaven on earth. ”⁹

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Footnotes

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

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

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

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

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

6: Lukas Germann: The rest is just humanity! Black metal and Friedrich Nietzsche, presentation at the conference Pop! Goes the Tragedy The Eternal Return of Friedrich Nietzsche in Popular Culture (ZHdK Zurich 23/24/10/2015).

7: Human, all-too-human I, 483.

8: See the assassins at Columbine: “I simply love Hobbes and Nietzsche” (https://www.faz.net/aktuell/feuilleton/columbine-massaker-ich-hasse-euch-leute-1354954.html [31.7.2006]). About Breivik: In his manifesto 2083 — A European Declaration of Independence He mentions Nietzsche in ten places (cf. http://de.danielpipes.org/blog/2012/07/breiviks-mentale-welt [22.07.2012]).

9: So Zarathustra spoke, The convalescent, 2.

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Source of the Article Image

Nietzsche must piano. Painting by Else Gabriel, Berlin 2019.

Whistling in the Woods and Screaming for Love

Nietzsche's Echo in the Heavy Metal Music Scene

Like hardly any other philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche has left his mark on popular culture — less in the pleasing mainstream entertainment, but more in subcultures and in artistic positions that are considered “edgy” and “dark.” In this “underworld,” Nietzsche's aphorisms, catchphrases, slogans and invectives are widely used — for example in the musical genres of heavy metal, hardcore and punk focused on social and aesthetic provocation. What is the reason for that?

But those who criticize without creating, who are content with defending the exhausted without being able to give him the strength to new life: they are the wound mark of philosophy. They are driven by resentment.¹

Nietzsche's works are notorious for their consistent rejection of cumbersome philosophical traditions — against Plato and Christianity as “Platonism for the 'people'”², against Hegel and dialectics, against Kant's categorical imperative and then also against Schopenhauer's reluctance. This alleged anti-stance is attractive, there is finally a representative for all those who not belong to the masses. One for all the misunderstood, lonely geniuses who bear the burdens of misunderstood magnificence, a David against Goliath; the negative template that is defined by what it simply is not or cannot be.

The irony as well as the potential danger of using Nietzsche in this way is obvious. It is true that he may be whiny and defiant against his own agenda from time to time, but he is primarily concerned with self-affirmation of life. The will to power, the love of ancient Greece, the eternal return, they are all at the service of life, of reality. Yet, and this misinterpretation is the source of the fascist tendency, the core of life does not consist in any way of a forgotten origin from which we have alienated ourselves and to which we need to return, nor of a higher, ultimate wisdom (religion), even if it becomes immanent (truth, capital, state). The real is rather a movement; it constantly carries itself forward in the process of new creation. It is prolific, multiplies aimlessly, applies new matter to life layer by layer. It resists every standstill, every heating up idleness of the hard-working and pious, against the attempt to build up a dam of the absolute, the dogmatic, of totality in the midst of the torrential flows. The core of life is the core's own dissolution, i.e. the overcoming of the existing, the eternal departure into worlds yet to be created. Greatness yes, but a collectively impersonal one that doesn't need to care about their recognition. I think it's a very hopeful philosophy that goes beyond the scope of what is possible.

Nietzsche's diagnoses of the time can thus be read as a fundamental critique of modernity. Because, according to his observation, the present day in Europe is nowhere. Christianity, once it has killed its god, is left with nothing but its values — hostile values disguised in the guise of atheism, which have their roots in resentment. Humanity does not need God, good, but morality and reason, which show the self-inflicted subject where it's going, where the hope of cleansing the sticky original sin has not yet died. The teacher, the boss, the psychotherapist, the bourgeoisie with its blind loyalty to the state are the priests of the wicked. Her message: “[E] s a shame to be happy! ”³So enslave yourself, build a dam for the rivers so that they become a trickle. After the human being has freed himself from divine imperatives, he puts himself in chains again. But when he found at least certainty and comfort in believing in a true God, in redemption after death, he now sees himself faced with the dull stump of religious convictions, in which every value becomes a relative matter — “Yes, how should you believe can, you mottled people! — that you are paintings of everything that was ever believed! ”⁴. Deprives of every great truth, humanity is content with a minimum of life, does not dare to go beyond what already exists. Modernity is the age of nihilism.

The age of nihilism is that of capitalist society. Labor power as the fundamental driving force of human life, previously tied to a specific activity whose objectivity constituted the value of work, becomes abstract labor, which is sold as a liquid abstract in exchange for wage money. The productive forces lose their direct connection to the reality they have created; work becomes a mere necessity for basal reproduction, which is dependent on monetary means. Life stands still, the huge new creations and processes of development are nipped in the bud, because who still has time or money for this? First the daily bread, then the revolution — but people have forgotten that bread was also a revolutionary invention. The human being has to stand still, is robbed of his will and its fruits, his reality becomes alien to him, he is alienated. Life is not a prerequisite for work, but first and foremost wage labor is a condition for life — an eternal cycle of the type of a centrifuge that throws the unusable remains outwards and concentrates the surplus value produced internally. Capital sits enthroned there, becoming ever more saturated and yet never satisfied. It is both the starting point and the end purpose: money — goods — money; and at the same time thoroughly unproductive yet equipped with vampire teeth that only need to be chewed into the productive forces. The real tick is Silicon Valley, not punk on the street.

The age of nihilism has dedicated itself to a new master without realizing it. Capital is a devastating god who, in contrast to the gods of the earth, who served even more as an engine of creation, absorbs the productive power by becoming a projection screen for everything that has ever been believed. Reality evaporates into hot air before the eye, only to rage in abstract commodity form as a hurricane across the residual desert of reality. What remains is the alienated, naked subject, who only has to resort to bandages, all of which are necessarily reactionary because powerless: the privatization of people under the ideal of a sovereign individual, the fantastic promises of a career, the comfort of consumption in the bosom of colonial exploitation, the idealistic installation of a supposedly better past, the love of law and order, the escape into political identity, which has its origins in marginalization and oppression, the totalizing Morality as a weapon in the cultural struggle, which is fought far removed from material conditions — the powerlessness and the resulting resentment have become deeply entrenched.

On the theatrical stage of a cynical, artificial reality, Nietzsche draws attention to theatre production. The play, with all its tragic suffering and comedic ecstasies, may offer shallow entertainment, but at the expense of real living conditions. So, according to Nietzsche's plea, it is important to blow up theatre, to create new values for themselves that stimulate life, fertilize the desert. Nietzsche's voice calls for self-overcoming, beyond good and evil, where the ego becomes a marginal figure and the productive self-affirmation of becoming a protagonist. Anyone who does not use philosophy as a hammer, but as a pastime for the frugal, as a narcotic for the suffering or as a religion of the unbelievers, is better off being on stage at the time of the blast.

So what does Nietzsche mean? At times, it is a welcoming retreat where thinking can develop freely and the astonishment of human wealth drives us to set out again. And even though he himself was not an explicit critic of capitalism, he is still a weapon in the fight against all totality, including that of capital, against the absurdity of speckled people who cynically commit themselves to values in which they cannot believe. His criticism of his time is simply not a reactionary force, but an affirmative will to liberate, which fuels the turbines and challenges us to take the big step into the unknown. Last but not least, he remains a loyal companion for those who are scattered around, adventurous, dancers and all those who are encouraged by him to go on a journey.

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Literature

Deleuze, Gilles & Felix Guattari: What is philosophy? Frankfurt am Main 2003.

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footnotes

1: Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari, What is philosophy?, P. 36.

2: Beyond good and evil, Preface.

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

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

Nietzsche doesn’t Mean: Nietzsche Lives

In the last part of the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “, in which our regular authors briefly presented their respective understanding of Nietzsche in recent weeks, Estella Walter tells of 'her' Nietzsche as a critic of any totality in the name of the nameless reality of becoming.

III. The truth of falsehood

When Hegel saw the victor Napoleon after the Battle of Jena and Auerstedt in 1806, he said that he saw the “spirit of the world on horseback.” As a result of the fact that politics, in a word from Napoleon, has become fate, especially with the start of the First World War, the image of the world spirit is also changing. The winner on horseback becomes the thoughtful walker. The prototypical scene for this: Lise Meitner and her nephew Otto Frisch, who in exile in Sweden in 1938 found the answer to a physical question that Otto Hahn, who researched the fission of uranium in Dahlem, asked Meitner in a letter. They realized the implications of the fission of uranium. Hahn's experiments showed the possibility of building an atomic bomb. With this insight, dark globalization began as the possibility of a man-made apocalypse. The worldly spirit of a militant revolutionary becomes an athlete concerned about being.

Nietzsche's philosophy not only heralds the structural change of world spirit. His thinking shows a sense of the deep structures of cultures, from which it would be possible to continue to learn how forced global cooperation could move on to more civil paths. Nietzsche's strongest intuition is that the understanding of truth is changing in Western culture. He therefore foresaw massive turbulences as a result of the loss of faith in truth. But he also saw that this cultural crisis would be exploited. And not primarily in the sense of political self-interest. For Nietzsche, the crisis plays a role primarily with regard to the psychological economy. When the self-evident truths fail, participants in a culture begin to stick to truth-based inventions that protect and animate their mental fitness. The necessity of the truth in question becomes the virtue of the fabricated construction of truth.

Art as an art of living emerges from reflected The will to appear. As unreflected, this takes on a toxic form. In the gesture of the absolute, the suffering of the truth crisis is converted into a willingness to fight, which names clear culprits and thus offers the prospect of a — supposed — solution to the crisis. This is why “emergency addicts” invent themselves¹ Dramas of battles with exaggerated monsters, preferably as a conspiracy between specific classes, races, sexes. But since the truth is only guaranteed as long as the struggle with fictions continues, the permanent retaliation must not stop: “[U] and this is how they paint the misfortune of others on the wall: they always need others! And always others! “(ibid.) The absolute spirit of agitating adversity finds its truth in the morality of misfortune. For him, love of life becomes arrogance and life successes become exploitation. The unreflected will to appear is vitalized by denigrating successes and clouding over the zest for life. Nietzsche calls this psychological world power “resentment.” The good life of resentment becomes an attack on the good life.

However, Nietzsche's psychological genius recognizes in this development not only a tricky form of toxic identity politics, which revolves around the type of “self-apostolate [en]”² forms that enrich the critical mass of disoriented people into frustrated people. Nietzsche's hyperempathy understands the truth in the made-up truth of the “needy addicts” in the fact that it articulates a semblance that motivates life. Not from the truth, but from the point of view of life, the conspiracy theorists are right. The truth of appearances is the liveliness that they see as a”Anesthetization of pain due to affect”³, as an “affect medication”⁴ granted. Intense feelings of retribution, revenge, indignation manage to brighten up the incriminating twilight of an unclear truth. In the prosecution's “pressure of light” (Paul Celan) with her self-assured “barking of indignation [s]”⁵ The modern ambivalence is dissolving. A quieter form of moral attitude is found in Adorno's stylish negativisms, before which everything identical darkens in light of the blissful inaccessibility of the “non-identical” and becomes Unsafe space will. In both cases, the suffering from the lack of truth is compensated for by a narration of guilt and thus translated into meaning. The wound becomes truth. Anger grows out of their pain. The slogan of activist resentment is: The world has been interpreted enough, it is important to fight back. The wretched courier life gains a regal quality in the transmission of reports that reveal a hidden truth. The formerly deranged couriers can finally take themselves seriously again as messengers of a universal investigative investigation.

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IV. Contingency training

As a former Wagner disciple who was inspired by a “holy theocracy of beauty” (Hölderlin), Nietzsche understood first-hand that the modern world is shaken by a reformatting of its balance of truth. The pain of uncertainty that results from this is undeniable. For the post-art religious Nietzsche, however, it is also certain that tragedy as truth is only a phase. It'll pass by. The only question is when it will be time: “When will all these shadows of God stop darkening us? ”⁶

Nietzsche's proposal for a change of mind, which counteracts the anonymous Advent of the end of all Advent hopes, results in sketches, ideas and sounds for an elegant kind of appearance, the truth of which transfigures life again and again, for himself and for others. In Nietzsche's thinking, therefore, “a different training is being tried against states of depression.”⁷, which installs a new structure of truth. The tragedy of the lack of truth thus does not become a myth of a universal conspiracy. As a “free spirit,” Nietzsche tries to revive humanism as a kind of counterconspiracy conspiracy. The fact that God is dead also means that people can live in their own meaningful relationships on their own and canonize life secularly. At the very least, he should have the decency and righteousness not to yield to the temptations caused by the omnipresent desire for resentment. “Well! ”

However, Nietzsche's endeavor is deterred by the demands it requires. It does not solve the crisis of meaning of modernity. Rather, the absurd should become “heaven coincidence”⁸ in which the free spirit is to complete his flying skills as a secular angel of the post-apocalypse. From the beginnings of this and from disdain for the resentful grounding, a different normality emerges. The crisis of meaning is the normality of couriers, who have had enough of the all-too-banal wretches of the other messengers and of the ideologically transfigured aggressions of Ángeloiwho act as kings. For the kingless couriers, Nietzsche became an archmessenger. The last utopia for people who want to be more than “last people”: contingency as air that allows you to breathe and fly. That this is an ethos of”Live dangerously”⁹ stuck, showed Nietzsche's fate. He became the Icarus of an invincible superhumanity.

Nietzsche's change of sense of truth is philosophically expressed when an ontological turn takes place in the understanding of truth, which learns to express itself in new concepts and emotional states. The reason for this lies in the deformation of truth through the concept of truth as a network that has an absolutely true center that radiates to the edges. Truth as absolute is untrue. Going beyond Nietzsche with Nietzsche would mean formulating the truth of appearances more ontologically explicitly as a hiding of depressing truths and as a meaning of pain. If no center and no loss of center provides elegant orientation and existence is not doomed to freedom as an eternal periphery, it is necessary to ask how dense and meaningful vitality should be thought of. In return, Kafka's miserable and disoriented couriers have themselves as fascinating inner worlds, as “soul as subject multiplicity.”¹⁰ discover who maintains her own networks of couriers and kings. Encounters with life-enriching, post-monarchical co-couriers are essential for cultivating the inner worlds. This means that the function of the center is being replaced again. They are being replaced by densifications and strong relationships. The tendency towards the absolute is softened by irony. The hierarchy of center and periphery becomes a rhizome of rhizomes of plural excitation centers, which can stimulate themselves in differentiated sympathies. The contingency of existence can then be regarded as a “luxury of forces,” in which the lack of evidence, convictions and motivations as a “laxity of determination” represents the condition for the possibility of acquiring truths.¹¹ As a result, the most powerful old European truths are collapsing. Being as an overflowing emanation of an optimal center of being is fading away towards ever more pitiful edges. And the story also passes as the advent of a just salvation in an end time. That God is dead means that history and existence have come to an end. Nietzsche is trying to send new good news to the world. His alternative cosmos is a fluctuating, creative vacuum, a truth as a self-refuting truth, which, you hear and be amazed, is articulated in the jargon of Heidegger's serenity: “Everything breaks, everything is added anew; the same house of being builds itself forever. Everything divides, everything greets each other again; the Ring of Being remains faithful to itself forever. Being begins in every instant; the sphere there rolls around every here. The middle is everywhere. ”¹²

This plurality of acentrality is stabilized by an update of the cardinal virtues: An existential irony capable of benevolent self-loathing, empathetic revisionability, diplomatic prudence and an entrepreneurial spirit that is not only economic keep the system of differentiated sympathies running. Central to this is a new educational ideal as philosophical anti-stressing honesty, which repeatedly results in a “desire for the unknown, the undaring.”¹³ Can persuade. In this way, the problem child Earth becomes a stage of unlikely royal experiences, as a result of which she is crowned the true queen, of whom the intelligent couriers can't get enough of to send messages to each other. And the most skilful reports themselves become kings again, from whom reports are filed. The principle of responsible admiration is: Live in such a way that the effects of your actions increase the permanence of narrative life on earth.

However, according to Nietzsche, becoming part of the New European courier system is linked to a psychological numerus clausus. It states that the qualification for kingless couriers who have the “decision to do life service” (Thomas Mann)¹⁴ It consists of picking yourself up to an interesting, relatable life. In addition to the goodwill to tactfully transfiguration of worrying abysses, this also requires learning the art of productive self-loathing. Her core competence is the “disgusting folly of my disposable existence.”¹⁵ Change your mind against resentment on your own. Contingency is not deprivation or an essential shortcoming. Nobody is ultimately entirely to blame for the fact that you are imbued with the feeling of being beyond all access to an essential reality. The frustration over the poor nature of one's own situation can no longer be passed on to others. Instead of the toxic entertainment of retaliation, the uncertain search for traces of intelligent, sympathetic life can take place in the space of one's own self and in the world. The habit of critical awareness with its ever more sophisticated suspicions becomes the subdued curiosity of a treasure hunt in a “disposable existence.” The reconnaissance twilight could thus receive the glow of a dawn that has not yet lit. “Wind is coming, let's try to live.” (Paul Valéry) But what remains is the result of training and strolling.

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Sources

Sartre, Jean-Paul: The words. Reinbek near Hamburg 1983.

Schiller, Friedrich: On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters. Zurich 1998.

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Footnotes

1: The happy science, Aph 56.

2: Beyond good and evil, Aph 256.

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

4: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 16.

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

6: The happy science, Aph 109.

7: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 18.

8: So Zarathustra spoke, Before sunrise.

9: The happy science, Aph 283.

10: Beyond good and evil, Aph 12.

11: Cf. Schiller, About aesthetic education, 27th letter, p. 527.

12: So Zarathustra spoke, The convalescent 2.

13: So Zarathustra spoke, From science.

14: On this subject, see also the article The decision to make a living on this blog (link).

15: Sartre, The words, P. 131.

The Enlightenment’s Twilight

Nietzsche's Truth of Semblance II

After Michael Meyer-Albert in the first part of his text Telling the sad story of the self-doubt of the Enlightenment, he now reports on Nietzsche's “cheerful science” as an alternative.

“O comrades of my time! Don't ask your doctors and not the priests when you die internally! You have lost faith in everything great, so must you go if this belief does not return, like a comet from foreign skies.”
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(Hölderlin, Hyperion)

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I. In the shadow of God

Contemporary thinking takes the form of strolling. The work of the term is suspended and a participatory perception takes its place. Strolling is an active forgetting of the texts, which, if successful, rediscovers the world as an attempt to write an essay. Sometimes, however, you also come across literal finds. For example, the author was recently surprised by a graffito on his aphilosophical trips around the world. The following saying was written on an unappealing Leipzig house wall:

“God is dead.” (Nietzsche)

“Nietzsche is dead.” (God)

In Nietzsche's most legendary formulation, this profound laconicism could be dismissed as an elegant, defiant anti-atheist answer if it did not also contain statistical truth. There are currently just over eight billion people living on the planet. Of them, around 2.4 billion belong to the Christian religion, two billion to the Islamic religion and a good one billion to the Hindu religion. Almost a billion people are convinced atheists. From a purely statistical point of view, humanity's dominant concept of truth should therefore be metaphysically constituted. Even in 2024 after the birth of Christ, if you follow the dates, the saying of Jesus “I am the way and the truth and the life”¹ mean at least a quarter of the truth for humanity.

However, it can be denied that remaining in the official ties of a religion would be equated with the effectiveness of a religion. A different concept of truth has become established for the western hemisphere and the areas of its cultural influences. There is no longer a religious truth of revelation in the culture here. On the one hand, the focus on scientifically proven objective observational data that has emerged since the 17th century and its triumph in technical equipment and, on the other hand, the discussion of subjects as a voice in public space, which regulates itself through various forms, is decisive.

However, this truth beyond a divinely formed truth represents an epochal upheaval, the effects of which show symptoms of a crisis. To the subjects who have become “transcendentally homeless” (Georg Lukács), the world appears to be, as Max Weber said, “disenchanted.” With regard to the entire period of modern times, Nietzsche therefore points to an accelerating decentration of the human being, in which the feeling of nihilism is spreading: “Since Copernicus, humans seem to have fallen onto an inclined plane — they are now rolling away from the center point — where? In nothing? In's'pierced Feeling his nothingness? ”²

For Nietzsche, the reason for post-Copernican nihilism lies in the incomprehensible and usually not even understood devaluations of supporting understandings that were metaphysically constituted: “God is dead: but the way people are, there will be caves in which you show your shadow for thousands of years. — And we — we must also conquer his shadow! ”³

Two other dark truths can be added to support this Nietzsche finding. With the atomic bombings in August 1945 at the latest, science proved to be a seductive political handmaid. Her achievements since modern times, which consisted negatively in the neutralization of heated theological dogma struggles and which manifested themselves positively in the discovery of the world as an explorable space of complexity, are overshadowed by this. And the belief in the truth of the discourse was also clouded. Since the democratic mass agitations in the virtuous terror of the French Revolution, there has been suspicion of mob rule against the concept of truth of the resentful public. Alexis de Tocqueville's expression of the “tyranny of the majority” and Heidegger's formulation “dictatorship of man” point to the irreversible illiberal potential of democratic truth procedures as well.

This is an epistemological twilight over the era of globalization. God, science and conversation may not be dead. But they are all battered in the position of unquestionable authority. Time is doomed to an uncertain freedom of thought, which must inform itself through competent authorities. In differentiated complexity, there is a growing need to be an expert in the selection of experts who can provide you with halfway information about what is happening. What remains, however, is donated by the media, which people believe.

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II. Kings and couriers

Franz Kafka's diary notes contain the following aphoristic parable: They were presented with the choice of being kings or couriers. Like the kids, they all wanted to be couriers, so there are lots of couriers out there. And so, because there are no kings, they chase things together and shout to each other their own messages that have become pointless. They would like to put an end to their miserable lives, but they don't dare to do so because of the oath of service.⁴

The situation, which Kafka's little piece describes, illustrates the situation of the chaotically synchronized media world in the global age with a discrete reminder of what media were in the original sense. This does not only mean that Kafka is softening the understanding of media from fixation on technical equipment. Technical media are primarily just reinforcements of human mediumship. People are messengers, emissaries — “ángeloi” in ancient Greek — of information and passions.

But Kafka's text also shows how central to an intact media hemisphere the belief in participation in essential things is. The modern prejudice about this participation is that it is under culturally critical suspicion. This is plausible in view of the hierarchical order of the oldest media formations. From the outset, cultures were characterized by authorities who acted with the claim that the divine spoke through them. In the form of priestly kingship, they legitimized worldly power through spiritual closeness to the supernatural. The media were the messengers of objective truth and thus ruled by the grace of God.

Plato's concept of truth has a subversive power insofar as it requires secular God media to be able to attest to their strong relationship to the very top through logical coherence. Instead of cryptic oracle words and their supposedly high sense, the philosophical structural change of the public is trying to gain media authority through evidence. Competent expertise should prevail instead of social power. Plato's philosophy laments the shortage of skilled workers in the truth economy. The “philosopher king” should therefore be attributed the most competent competence. However, this result of platonic thinking raises the suspicion that something too much Pro domo to be. That is probably one of the reasons why its political market readiness was difficult. The first academy was therefore built outside the city walls of Athens. That they are after all almost 1,000 years (around 386 BC to 529 AD) Consistent, speaks for a location of university truth as distant proximity to urbanity. The truth of the Agora and the truth of the Academy come into productive tension due to a well-tempered distance from each other.

Kafka's profound parable now visualizes a situation in which Plato's concept was destroyed by his success. It shows the situation that results when the emancipatory push of Plato's primacy of evidence reveals an autonomy that drives criticism of all higher authorities to the point that the concept of “authority through truth” is shaken overall. None of the couriers dares to play language games in the form of “king's words” anymore. No one wants to be in charge because no one is a sufficient expert. Too much philosophical reflection allows us to distance ourselves from the idea of royalty, a philosopher king and certainly from seizing power through self-coronation. Complete Platonism is anti-Napoleonic.

There are plausible reasons for shaking faith in truth. The Enlightenment forced everything before the judgement of reason. As a result, it decomposed the canonical collection of classical orientations. In this way, a traditionally tense world is no longer inherited, but the impulse to create independent worlds through autonomous thinking. With the deformities that have come to light over time in science and in finding the truth by the public, reason itself has now returned to the judgement of reason.

With regard to the terror of virtue on the left of the Rhine, the Teutonic thinkers tried to think of a reorientation of the Enlightenment just a few years after the French Revolution. In doing so, art took on the role of complementing the cold-calculating mind. It alone solves the social question of how to immunize the Enlightenment into terrorist arbitrariness before it is implemented. Schiller, for example, was convinced “that in order to solve that political problem through experience, you must take the path through aesthetics, because it is beauty through which you migrate to freedom. ”⁵ Only an expanded formation of characters makes Jacobins citizens. The refinement of the human race should be an aesthetically promoted “development of sensibility.”⁶ move forward. Schiller's idea of comprehensive aesthetics resulted in the concept of beautiful politics. However, these all-too-beautiful ideas were tainted by the real aestheticism of the sublime state. Schiller was enthusiastic about the possibility of social synthesis through joy: “Beggars become princely brothers” (An die Freude). The disillusionment is followed by the reality in which emergencies require a say. When emergency policy reigns, social aesthetics turn into cheesy “sympathy with death” (Thomas Mann). The focus here is on heroic sacrifice for the big picture. In the 20th century, in the form of socialism and fascism, there was an unpleasant policy of the exalted as a new religion, which saw Enlightenment as a lethal revolution. The joy of being a meta-representative of every community has now turned into aggressive universalism.

With these sad results, the Enlightenment began to doubt itself so much that it questioned itself. Because the new kings were only spreading orders and not truths again, the couriers constantly whispered to themselves the message that they were probably all just deceivers. And at the same time, some couriers spread the rumor that every word may only ever be understood as bossy power and not as a power of competence. These unhappy messages replaced the king's word and gave a devastating but at least sustained participation in truth. The Enlightenment thus found a new security in ever more detailed critiques — to the delight of all fanatics and charismatics of the authoritarian: “Enlightenment is totalitarian. ”⁷ This dark truth was complemented by a negative aesthetic that suggests the experience of the “non-identical” as the only way out.

Nietzsche's thinking attempts to convert this enlightenment into a philosophy of dawn. To do this, he starts with a rehabilitation of Schiller's idea of a truth of art. His approach is to advance education about the Enlightenment by a further stage of reflection. When reason puts itself before the judgement of reason and dismantles itself ever more hermetically in ever new hermeneutical circles of suspicion, why not reconfigure this spiral of self-loathing? In Nietzsche's thinking, the placing of reason before the judiciary of reason as a whole is placed before the judiciary of reason. Art as a “cult of falsehood” gains as “good will [] to appear”⁷ a meaning that is intended to breathe new life into Enlightenment. Even though no one is a king anymore, there is still royalty as an effect of a noble lie about vitality. When faith in all great truths is lost, faith in the greatness of intelligent life can become a sublime truth. This has political implications: In a balanced social aesthetic, the heroic of the sublime is defused into an educational campaign that works on itself. And the politics of joy finds its realism in a commitment to a whole as a cooperative system that opens up spaces. What happens to couriers when it doesn't need a king or suicide, but an epistemological form of irony so that their miserable lives can change?

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Link to part 2

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Sources

Adorno, Theodor W. & Max Horkheimer: Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. Frankfurt am Main 2004.

Kafka, Franz: Reflections on sin, suffering, hope, and the true path. In: Max Brod & Hans Joachim Schöps (eds.): During the construction of the Great Wall of China. Unprinted stories and prose from the estate. Berlin 1931, pp. 225 — 249 (online).

Schiller, Friedrich: On the aesthetic education of man in a series of letters, Zurich 1998.

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Footnotes

1: Mt. 11, 27; John 10:9; Rom. 5.1; Hebrews 10:20.

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

3: The happy science, Aph 108.

4: Cf. Kafka, Considerations, P. 234.

5: Schiller, About aesthetic education, 2nd letter, p. 405.

6: Ibid., 8th letter, p. 430.

7: Adorno & Horkheimer, dialectics, P. 12.

8: The happy science, Aph 107.

The Enlightenment’s Twilight

Nietzsche's Truth of Semblance I

Nietzsche's best-known formulation, according to which God is dead, not only shows an anti-religious thrust. In particular, it points out that in modern times, constitutive self-evident elements no longer have traditional validity. As the cultural understanding of truth has faltered, not only has this or that truth become questionable, but the understanding of what truth actually is. This puts enlightenment under pressure to find the questions to which it should be the answer. It is this abyss of uncanny questionability from which Nietzsche's thinking attempts to show ways out that are viable. In the first part of his text Enlightenment Twilight Michael Meyer-Albert talks about the clarified doubts of the Enlightenment about itself.

Torn between philology and art, between word and music, Nietzsche is also not immune from the religious exaltation of art typical of the time. He becomes a fan of Richard Wagner and temporarily tries himself as an amateur composer. For Nietzsche, the “unfinished composer” — a name attributed to Gustav Mahler — music was an essential theme of his life, but he chose the word as a vocation, as a weapon and as a tool.

In the Middle Ages and in some cases up to modern times, art and artists were at the service of religion. The church acted as a client; the artists and musicians had to decorate monasteries and cathedrals with paintings or to enrich the service with compositions. The artist was therefore an (anonymous) instrument of God. The better his works came to him, the greater was the love of God that was expressed in them. The view that all great art is praise of God has been held even into modern times, for example by the Catholic writer Marcel Proust. At a young age, Nietzsche also sees music primarily as a gift from God:

“Forever thanks be sung by God of us, who offers us this wonderful treat,” wrote Nietzsche in 1858 as just under fourteen years old:

God gave us music so that we firstly, are directed upwards through them. The music combines all qualities, it can uplift, it can dance, it can cheer us up, yes it is able to break the most raw mind with its soft, wistful tones. But its main purpose is that it guides our thoughts towards higher things, that it elevates us, even shakes us.²

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The new art religion in the 19th century

In the Romantic period, the praise of God became a hymnal veneration of nature and art. In venerating historical and contemporary masterpieces, people now paid homage to a genius who lived in an inaccessible distance, although human. Art night and art enthusiasm were now an expression of a quasi-religious veneration of art. A well-known example of this was the collection of essays The heartfelt outpouring of an art-loving monastery brother by Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenröder and Ludwig Tieck. They told the life stories of “the great blessed art saints” in the style of hagiographies. At the beginning of the 19th century, also as a result of the French Revolution, the desire for originality and community spread. The reliance on emotional connection led to a new appreciation of feelings. Even in the final phase of the Ancien Régime, there was a countermovement to the rationality of the Enlightenment. Called “Sturm und Drang” in Germany, the Romantics opposed courtly authority and stiff formal traditions and instead focused on personal feeling and experience. Intimacy and enthusiastic goodness were now celebrated as the driving forces of private life and friendship. The love marriage became a bourgeois ideal, but friendly men also hugged and kissed each other intimately, wrote each other sentimental letters and swore eternal loyalty to each other. What would have been unthinkable in aristocratic court culture based on the French model became very popular in theatre, music and literature in the following decades. According to Nietzsche, the great popularity of the opera at the time was the layman's protest “against cold music that had been taught,” which was intended to regain a soul with the “revived polyhymnia”: “Without that profound religious change, without the abatement of the inner excited mind, the music would have remained taught. ”³ The cultivation of the emotional world, a now expressive, authentic language and a spiritually based veneration of art formed the basis of the new “art religion” of the 19th century. It transferred the spiritual-religious needs of the bourgeoisie to the arts, especially opera and symphony, primarily theatre and ballet, followed by poetry and the visual arts. Nietzsche recognized the scope of this historical trend: “Art rears its head where religions subside. She adopts a number of feelings and moods generated by religion, puts them close to her heart and is now becoming deeper, more soulful herself... “According to Nietzsche, religion is stronger than art, not the other way around, as some secular cultural people would like: “The wealth of religious sentiment that has grown into electricity breaks out again and again and wants to conquer new empires.” According to Nietzsche, In addition to politics and science, above all, art: “Wherever there is a higher level of human endeavor If you notice gloomy colors, you can assume that ghost gray, incense scent and church shadows have stuck to it. ”⁴

As part of the religious movement typical of the time that had swept over cultural life, opera and theatre became the ultimate artistic disciplines in a “Gesamtkunstwerk” -like, multi-sensual production. Renowned composers and virtuosos were revered as geniuses and treated as stars. Parallel to this enthusiastic mood in cultural and social life, however, hard-hitting capitalism changed the world. The natural sciences, in particular biology and medicine, experienced a strong upswing. The new art religion was used against the now rapidly advancing profanization, rationalization and scientification of all areas of society. One of their prophets was Richard Wagner. Wagnerianism soon polarizes the public as a new quasi-religious movement, and the young Nietzsche enthusiastically joins in. After a concert visit in autumn 1868 — the tristan-Prelude and the Meistersinger-Overture was on the agenda — Nietzsche switched entirely to the Wagnerian camp. Nietzsche gets to know Wagner personally in Leipzig, and he visits him at his house near Lucerne within the next three years 23 (!) Times — peak phase of that “star friendship” that Nietzsche started in The happy science alluded.⁵ Wagner also appreciates the admirer, who is 31 years younger. In 1872, he sums up: “Strictly speaking, after my wife, you are the only profit that life has brought me. ”⁶

Wagner may have exploited his young fan from the start and with long-term calculation. After Werner Ross, Wagner hires Nietzsche de facto as an academic PR powerhouse and ensures that he receives a professorship in Basel. Wagner needs an intellectual who certifies the high quality of his musical project. He uses his young wife Cosima to keep Nietzsche happy with many and long letters. Nietzsche praises in lectures and in his first publication The birth of tragedy from the spirit of music Wagner in heaven, sees him as a “reformer” and innovator of Dionysian Greek culture comparable to Luther. In a letter to Nietzsche, Wagner sees himself as an “prevented philologist,” while he describes Nietzsche as an “prevented musician.” Wagner dictates to Nietzsche the division of labor between the two: “Now remain a philologist in order to be conducted by music as such. ”⁷ Nietzsche fulfills the task by postulating that the Greek drama was created from original Dionysian music. Although this was destroyed by Socrates and Co., thanks to Wagner's genius, it is now possible to build on these original traditions after 2,000 years. The birth of tragedy, Nietzsche's first important work, contained a preface to Richard Wagner and was explicitly dedicated to him. At the time, Nietzsche presented him as a possible new founder of a culture comparable to Greek and, as an avowed Wagnerian, at the same time distanced himself from scientific philology. As a result, his further scientific career was blocked — as a philologist, Nietzsche was ruined from then on. The friendship, which was fragile and charged with expectations from the outset, lasted ten years and finally turned into harsh criticism:

We were friends and became strangers to each other. [...] That we must become strangers is the law about us: by doing so, we should also become more venerable! It should also make the thought of our former friendship holier! [...] And so we want to believe in our star friendship, even if we must be enemies of each other on Earth.⁸

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Musical achievements and music criticism

In the 19th century, art entered unimagined spheres that were previously reserved for the sacred. At the same time, however, modern music criticism is also developing. Back then, music may have reached the height of its historical appreciation — both in sensory experience and as an object of analytical thought. Nietzsche's thinking about music should also be considered against this background. Throughout his life, but without systematics, he has been involved in music theory discussions. He is also increasingly critical of Wagner's work — and dedicates a brilliant polemic to him: “My biggest experience was a recovery. Wagner is just one of my illnesses. ”⁹ On a practical level, Nietzsche worked as a veritably talented pianist from childhood, and he also started attempts as an autodidactic composer. In addition to more conventional song compositions from his youth, his later Manfred meditations relevant, which were created under the influence of Wagner music and were probably also intended for performance before Wagner. However, Nietzsche made the mistake of asking Hans von Bülow, the composer and Wagner conductor, for a professional opinion. This is indiscriminate: “An imagination tumbling in remembrance of Wagnerian sounds is not a production basis. ”¹⁰ In fact, Nietzsche's compositions show little innovation that could point to music of the future. As a musician, Nietzsche remains more conventional. It is not surprising, the NZZ once summed up,

that Nietzsche, who boasted in letters that there had never been a philosopher who was a musician to the extent and to the extent that he was himself, had barely any effect due to his musical convictions. Today, over a hundred years after his death, the philosopher Nietzsche is a European figure of undeniable significance, and the “unfinished composer” Nietzsche is a historical episode.¹¹

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What did music really mean to him?

Nietzsche made numerous commitments to music — especially in his youth, but also in the last conscious years of his life. But how intensely Nietzsche really perceived the music remains an open question in the end. What did he particularly appreciate about music?

Was it pure sound enjoyment, a purely formal, concrete musical experience, so to speak? Or wasn't the religious charge of listening to music more likely to create feelings of grandeur? So was the combination of listening to music with educational background, with lyrics (poetry) and with a historical-religious context decisive for enjoyment? “Music is not in and of itself so meaningful for our inner self,” writes Nietzsche, but only poetry has “placed so much symbolism in rhythmic movement, in strength and weakness of sound, that we think it speaks directly to the interior and comes from within.” It was therefore only the intellect that “put meaning into the sound.” ”¹² Some current authors speculate that music has enabled him to reach and express deeper layers of unconscious feeling.¹³ But this positive attitude in his youth is soon overshadowed by suffering from the contrast between science and art. Nietzsche sees the need to “escape from rapid changes in artistic tendencies into a haven of objectivity,” as he writes in an autobiographical review from around 1868.¹⁴ Nietzsche notes elsewhere: “[N] he lives with some peace, security and consequence only by forgetting himself as a subject, and indeed as an artistically creating subject.”¹⁵ He attempts this agonizing contrast through his theses in his first work The birth of tragedy to overcome. “As a musician, Nietzsche is certainly a romantic in general,” Curt Paul describes Janz Nietzsche's dilemma, but after “as a thinker he begins to overcome Romanticism, Schopenhauer's romantic musical criticism, he must fall silent as a musician and alienate himself from Wagner. ”¹⁶

Little is known of Nietzsche's sex life and sexual orientation. It is entirely conceivable that the excitement of music also had an erotic component in him. Once, Nietzsche notes down a “ranking” that appeals to him the most. First place: “musical improvisation in a good hour”, then: listening to certain pieces by Beethoven and Wagner, third: thinking while walking in the morning, the fourth is “Vollust”, which ends the list. “When he fears the lust of sexual intercourse — not that of desire — and flees, he experiences his music and the inventive wandering of his mind voluptuously, with sensual intensity,” concludes Werner Ross in his book The Wild Nietzsche, or the Return of Dionysus.¹⁷

There are apparently three sources of energy that recharge and intensify Nietzsche's love for music: religion, poetry and Eros. According to Nietzsche, music and the other arts needed a particular “physiological precondition,” the intoxication, especially the “frenzy of the festival.”¹⁸. According to Nietzsche, creativity can only develop uninhibited from a state of excitement in which clear thinking and rational consciousness have been switched off or dampened. Thinking further: The works of art created in intoxication are particularly good and successful works of art when they in turn can make viewers and listeners feel intoxicated. Nietzsche is obviously very enthusiastic about intoxication and its numerous variants. He raves about the “intoxication of sex,” but also about the “intoxication of celebration, competition, bravura, victory, all extreme movement; the intoxication of cruelty; the intoxication of destruction.” The motive for the conspicuous praise of all sorts of Dionysian debauchery may be found in his education, but above all in the lack of “debauchery” actually experienced. Here, the music experience certainly also offered an opportunity for sublimation. And so the realm of music served him as an overflow basin for the powerful floods of instincts and feelings.

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Literature

O.A.: Life without music is simply a mistake. Online: https://www.nzz.ch/articleDLWL3-ld.38202.

Figl, Johan: Feast day cult and music in the life of young Nietzsche. In: Günther Pöltner e. a. (ed.): Nietzsche and music. Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 7—16.

Janz, Curt Paul: Nietzsche's Manfred Meditations. In: Günther Pöltner and others (ed..): Nietzsche and music. Frankfurt am Main 1997, pp. 45—79.

Nietzsche, Friedrich: [From the years 1868/69]. In: Works in three volumes. Munich 1954, pp. 148—154.

Ders. : About music, in: From my life (1858). Online: http://www.thenietzschechannel.com/works-unpub/youth/1858-fmlg.htm.

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

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Footnotes

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

2: About music.

3: Human, all-too-human I, Aph 219.

4: Human, all-too-human I, aph. 150.

5: Cf. The happy science, Aph 279.

6: Cit n. https://www.wagner200.com/biografie/biografie-1866-1870-exil.html.

7: Quoted by Werner Ross, The wild Nietzsche, P. 59.

8: The Happy Science, Aph 279.

9: The Wagner Case, preface.

10: Quoted by Curt Paul Janz, Nietzsche's Manfred Meditations, P. 52.

11: OP., Life without music is simply a mistake.

12: Human, all-too-human I, Aph 215.

13: See, for example, Johan Figl, Feast day cult and music in the life of young Nietzsche, P. 12.

14: [From 1868/69], p. 148.

15: About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense, paragraph 1.

16: Janz, Nietzsche's Manfred Meditations, P. 47.

17: P. 114.

18: Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, Aph 18.

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Source of the Article Image

Jens Fläming, A Nie-Na-Nietzschemann is dancing. Oil on canvas, 1984. Nietzsche Documentation Center Collection in Naumburg. (Image courtesy of the artist.)

Nietzsche and Music

For hardly any other philosopher, music was as important as it was for Nietzsche. “Without music, life would be a mistake”¹, he wrote. Christian Saehrendt goes for Nietzsche PopArts The question of how this high appreciation of sound art was manifested in his life and work. He talks about Nietzsche's own compositions as well as one of the most iconic aspects of his life: his friendship with Richard Wagner. He shows that the music for Nietzsche is almost erotic It was important — and in this respect he was not so “out of date” at all, but a typical child of his time.

For example, you shouldn't ask the money-collecting banker about the purpose of his restless activity: it is unreasonable. The workers roll as the stone rolls, according to the stupidity of mechanics. — All people disintegrate, as in all ages and even now, into slaves and free people; for anyone who does not have two thirds of his day for himself is a slave, he is, by the way, whoever he wants: statesman, merchant, official, scholar.¹

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Contrary to all hermeneutical rumours, this quote makes it clear that Nietzsche is a good critic of capitalism. Even more — and this is likely to completely confuse academic minds — Nietzsche defends reason against capital in him. The banker is unreasonable because the former means, money, became an end in itself, capital, resulting in an inversion of means and end, in short: alienation. Money, however, cannot be eaten, as the myth of King Midas already reminds us; the pursuit of profit therefore becomes a life-averted delusion that collectively infects the atomized. The banker is thus a representative of irrationality and remoteness, as only the priest once was — which can also be seen in the effects of the financial market as a new place of worship. The supposedly most rational or streamlined form of transport in society — spoken with Nietzschean Max Weber — is therefore unreasonable for Nietzsche at heart, just because she is turned against life. Continuing with Weber: Purpose-rational action as such, which has said goodbye to substantive reason, becomes irrational because, cut off from the question of possibility and goal, it becomes entangled in its own function and only hunts for ghosts. It is obvious that Nietzsche was not only a contemporary of Marx, but also criticized the same society as that society, namely the capitalist one. Even more, it can help us today to further deepen many Marxist insights. For example, he proved how behind the alleged egoism of his class — the representatives of Protestant ethics — the ultimate Super-ego of self-weakness stuck, and how the flaunted luxury of the upper class, as they lose all personality behind their performance and thus impoverishes humanly, descends into asceticism. This, not least, was where Freud's reception of Nietzsche began, but this translated him back to bourgeois: into the absolute necessity of renouncing all culture. Nietzsche, on the other hand, stands for a culture of the body and a cultivation of pleasure rather than its suppression, which, as it were, must include reason as “great health” (Nietzsche), instead of remaining rejected by it.  

What is described in the opening quote as the “stupidity of mechanics” can therefore also be understood in Marxist terms as an “automatic subject,” as which capital functions. Under his spell, it is not the economy that serves us, but we serve it, which is why we do not work to live, but live to work. In short, the world is upside down because it is headless, i.e. ruled by an anonymous structure. The result: “slave morality” is rampant everywhere, affecting everyone, but particularly dominating the rulers, the successful, the beautiful, powerful and strong, because they are most deeply entangled in the false awareness of their grandeur, which, regardless, remains mere appearances. The opening quote argues against this pretense that wage slavery is still slavery, that modernity is not as liberal as it appears to be, and that statesmen, merchants, officials, scholars — i.e. the “high animals” from politics, business, state and cultural enterprises — are no less slaves than their former counterparts from ancient Greek times. The supposedly Nietzschean, in actual Schumpeter, adoration of the entrepreneur as a genius, as a creator, as a heroic individual thus receives an embarrassing refutation in Nietzsche himself: The individual principle lies precisely behind the celebration of individuality, because the persona, still that of power, is, according to the Latin root of the word, a mere mask of character, and thus implies the deep impotence of those people that they have to bear. From this perspective, Nietzsche becomes an alienation theorist par excellence. As against his modernist students Freud, Weber or Joseph Schumpeter, in order to become who he is, he must also be defended from his other, later, post-modern epigons — just as Adorno once had to defend Bach “against his lovers.” Just as it was once necessary, according to Bataille, to protect Nietzsche from the fascists, so today it is important to protect him from further integration into post-modern ideology. This certainly requires saving criticism — but this should primarily be about highlighting the emancipatory aspects of Nietzsche's thinking.

It remains to be clarified that what Nietzsche was largely reduced to in the post-structuralist reading — death of the subject, transhumanism, post-criticism — not only massively shortened, but completely upside down. Let us briefly review the shrinkage stages of post-modern Nietzscheanism, which have popularized that perversion. Instead of being a gravedigger of the subject, Nietzsche, particularly the middle period, can be understood far more convincingly as an individualist, existentialist or anarchist, to whom, influenced by romance, hardly anything is more important than qualitative individuality, self-conscious resistance and self-strong deviance — i.e. as everything that postmodernism abhors, denies or tries to dispose of in the blind spot of history. Nietzsche also calls for a new People who set their own goals instead of slipping off into an updated afterlife to humanity — i.e. lost transhumanistically to the back worlds of whimpering theo or technocracy and their theodicy — idolize the last person as aimless, willless, freely collaging and programmable Frankenstein. And post-critics who refer to Nietzsche are also rejected, as his aphorisms can hardly be understood otherwise than as those of a gifted critic and stylish polemicist. There are also reasons for this choice of form. Finally, the Nietzschean affirmation of life requires the negation of an entire system of resentment that only sees its own worth in comparing, competing, defeating and only mobilizes its own appreciation by devaluing others. In short, anyone who loves life must hate the forces hostile to life; anyone who affirms it must deny them; anyone who wants to live criticizes. Affirmation and criticism are thus a dialectic instead of, as the cheerful cynics of post-criticism tell themselves, antipodes to one another. In short, Nietzsche is not a gravedigger of the subject, not a transhumanist and not a post-critic, but their incarnate negation, precisely because he takes the affirmation of life so seriously.

Contrary to Nietzsche's postmodern reformats, he can be read more as an alienation theorist critical of capitalism, who socializes profoundly in Christian terms so that not least — like Marx — is in the tradition of Ludwig Feuerbach. Related to Young Hegelianism not in spite of, but precisely because of, extensive Hegel complaints, Nietzsche sees capitalist modernity — to which postmodernism as Decadence The last man and his slave morality are, of course, part of it — the metaphysics at work, from modern science to modern economics. While the former is scientistically speaking to the only truth in order to declare its positivist abbreviations the absolute essence of the universe, the latter is never just a political economy, but always a moral economy. For Nietzsche, debt and debt, a negative financial and ethical balance, are indivisible from one another, as he said in his The genealogy of morality clarifies. Capitalism is therefore to be understood as a religion, as Walter Benjamin emphasized, and not as an already reasonable or enlightened system. Modern economics and science, capitalism as a religion and scientific positivism are also combined by means of modern technology to exploit nature, which devastates both internal and external nature.

Together, Nietzsche sees real nihilistic violence at work whose negation of life could only stop people's self-determination and new determination beyond alienation. In this sense, he thinks anti-capitalist, yes, sometimes beyond the equally materialistic Marx, since he places the question of subjectifying capitalist objectivity centrally. Nietzsche's answer: Idealism, its real abstractions and its “identity principle” (Adorno), which are based on the exchange value of capital and in the self-purpose logic of capital, generate three tendencies in their subjects — one towards positivism, one towards nihilism and one towards moralism. All three can only be understood together, and cultural criticism only exists as one that involves political as a moral economy — i.e. as a dedicated critique of capitalism.

Marx's version of this critique is certainly the most developed, complex and important up to our time. But Nietzsche can supplement them by showing in his work: Positivism is also a form of alienation, of reifying thinking, and forces science into scientism by naturalizing it. “Scientific socialism” thus acquires a different, more ambivalent meaning. Nihilism, in turn, can be understood as a form of subjectification of late capitalism, after capital buried the former bourgeois values under its own development, so that nihilistic anti-bourgeoisie — whether in a modernist or post-modern manner — is no longer directed against capitalism, but is in an elective relationship with capital that is unconscious of itself. And moralism is also no real alternative to the said interplay of positivism and nihilism, because here the primacy of politics does not really replace that of economics. Rather, political impotence results in a moralizing resentment, which is therefore in continuity of being wrong and has no better purpose that could still break it.

Isms were always opposed to Nietzsche, as an enemy of the system: he found the positive side of life stifled in positivism; the critical moment of negation degenerated into an irrelevant, because indefinite apology of nihilism; and morality, which in turn could also serve to protect vulnerable bodies and the one earth that we animate, goes wrong in the moralism of inquisitorial gestures, who value nothing but their own nullity dispels isolated persons. What should therefore be written in the 21st century in the spirit of Nietzsche is a genealogy of moralism, which must be, as it were, a genealogy of positivism and nihilism, and as such a historical questioning of that social objectivity which forces positivist, nihilistic, moralistic modes of subjectification — in order to question capitalist totality in all its facets.

Nietzsche's work does not work against the subject, people, or criticism, but against the — devaluating — principle of capital, which destroys bodies, takes lives and threatens our living space. At least that is the more interesting reading of his oeuvre, which is far more emancipatory than that of postmodernism.

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Footnotes

1: Human, all-too-human, Vol. I, Aph. 283.

Nietzsche’s Critique of Capitalist Alienation

In the penultimate part of the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “Lukas Meisner comes to a surprising result at first glance: Nietzsche and Marx both practice fundamental criticism of capitalism and Nietzsche can serve to Marx's To complement a critique of political economy with a no less radical critique of moral economy.