I. The 'Poland complex'

“I am a Polish nobleman pure sang [pure blood; PS], to whom not even a drop of bad blood is added, least of all German. ”¹ Apart from the superlative of this statement — which can almost be described as' Trumpesk 'from today's perspective — Nietzsche certainly had reasons to believe in his Polish origin, which was repeatedly emphasized in letters and in his estate from 1880. In any case, as he reports several times,² He is repeatedly considered one of their own by exiled Poland and had his Polish origin confirmed by a document from an alleged genealogist.³ Even his sister shares this family legend. The core argument of the two is that their family name, which sounds a bit Slavic-sounding on the first listen, is actually derived from the Polish “Nietzky.” In the 18th century, one of their ancestors was elevated to count by Augustus the Strong, but had to leave the country after his death due to his Protestant beliefs. Max Oehler only proved in the 1930s — not without, of course, the problematic interest in identifying Nietzsche as a “pure-blood” in the sense of Nazi ideology — that this entire story could be a mere fantasy that should give the family a certain exotic sparkle and, last but not least, a drop of blue blood.⁴ In particular, the pastor's family had to confirm their identity that they were descended from a martyr of Protestantism. Perhaps the legend is therefore also the background to Nietzsche's famous sentence from 377. Aphorism of Happy science:

We are, in one word — and it should be our word of honor! — good Europeans, the heirs of Europe, the rich, overburdened but also overrichly committed heirs of millennia of the European spirit: as such, they also outgrow and reject Christianity, and precisely because we out They grew up to it because our ancestors were Christians of the reckless righteousness of Christianity who willingly sacrificed good and blood, status and fatherland to their faith.

This sentence shows in particular what Nietzsche might have been another reason for his obsession with his Polish origins: In the course of the 1870s, he became more and more alienated from the Bismarck Empire he despised, subjectively and objectively, and saw himself as a wandering cosmopolitan, as a “good European,” as an eternal homeless person. His desire to be a Pole meets this need for ever greater detachment from Germany — but at the same time reveals the desire for a new home, a new identity bond. At first glance, there seems to be a certain contradiction between the two impulses — but only at first glance. On closer inspection, they turn out to be quite compatible with each other.

II. The posthumous fragment

What is the nature of this new identity, which Nietzsche only discovered in Ecce homo public, but which plays a not insignificant role in private statements as early as 1880? What does it mean to him to be a Pole? An estate fragment written in 1882 and rarely noticed in research provides information about this, which is worth looking at in its entirety:

I was taught to trace the origin of my blood and name to Polish nobles, who were called Niëtzky and gave up their homeland and nobility about a hundred years ago, finally avoiding unbearable religious oppression: they were Protestants in fact. I do not want to deny that as a boy I was no small proud of my Polish descent: what of German blood in me came only from my mother, from the Oehler family, and from my father's mother, from the Krause family, and it wanted to seem to me that I had remained essentially Polish. It has been confirmed to me often enough that my appearance is Polish; abroad, such as in Switzerland and in Italy, I was often referred to as Polish; in Sorrento, where I spent a winter, the people called me il Polacco; and especially during a summer stay in Mariánské Lázně, I was reminded of my Polish nature several times in a remarkable way: Poles came to me, greeted me in Polish confusing and confusing with one of her acquaintances, and one before whom I denied all polenthum and whom I myself as Swiss introduced, looked at me sadly for a long time and finally said “it is Still the old race, but the heart turned God knows where.” A small notebook of mazurcas, which I composed as a boy, had the inscription “Our old forders in mind! “— and I was mindful of them, in various judgments and prejudices. The Poles seemed to me to be the most gifted and chivalrous among the Slavic peoples; and the talent of the Slavs seemed to me higher than that of the Germans, indeed I thought that the Germans had only joined the ranks of gifted nations through a strong mixture of Slavic blood. It was good for me to think of the right of the Polish nobleman to overturn the resolution of an assembly with his simple veto; and the Pole Copernicus seemed to me to have made only the greatest and most worthy use of this right against the decision and inspection of all other people. The political irrepressiveness and weakness of the Poles, as well as their debauchery, were evidence to me of their talent rather than against it. In particular, I revered Chopin for freeing the music from German influences, from the hange to the ugly, dull, petty bourgeois, tappish, important: beauty and nobility of spirit and in particular noble joy, exuberance and splendor of the soul, as well as the southern gluth and heaviness of feeling had not yet been expressed in music before him. Compared to him, Beethoven himself was a semi-barbaric creature whose great soul was poorly brought up, so that she never really learned to distinguish the sublime from the adventurous, the simple from the lowly and disgusting. (Unfortunately, as I will now add, Chopin has grown too close to a dangerous current of the French spirit, and there is quite a bit of music by him that comes across as pale, sun-poor, depressed and richly dressed and elegant — the stronger slave has not been able to reject the narcotics of an overrefined culture.)⁵

One should not be fooled into thinking that this fragment is written in the past tense. This entire complex of topics plays absolutely no role in Nietzsche's estate, including his childhood and youth writings, before 1880. In fact, it seems that Nietzsche only thought of remembering this family legend because he was mistaken for a Pole.

In any case, in 1877, in a letter to his girlfriend Malwida von Meysenbug, he reported that he got along very well with two Polish ladies during a stay at the spa, without even addressing his own Poleness with one syllable.⁶ And in 1878, in an estate fragment, he wrote down, interestingly enough, the opposite of what he wrote down five years later:

Poland is the only country of Occidental Roman culture that has never experienced a renaissance. Reformation of the Church without reforming the entire spiritual life, and therefore without establishing lasting roots. Jesuitism—noble freedom is ruining it. That is exactly how the Germans would have felt without Erasmus and the humanist impact.⁷

In short: In this fragment, Nietzsche is concerned with the fiction of a continuous way of seeing that has existed supposedly since childhood, which is intended to hide the stark breaks that his thinking experienced again and again. During his student years, he was still an ardent Prussian patriot, admirer of Bismarck and sympathized with German nationalism until the early 1970s.

Why was Nietzsche thought to be a Pole in the first place? In view of the frequency with which Nietzsche reports on such encounters, this story is not implausible, however suspicious one might be of the self-stylization Nietzsche sometimes engaged in in his letters. In 1884, he met in Nice with his girlfriend Resa von Schirnhofer, who wrote a remarkable report on this encounter in 1937, which gives an extremely vivid impression of how Nietzsche affected his contemporaries. It states:

Back then, the [presumed Polish origin of Nietzsche; PS] was new to me and interested me, as I had seen characteristic shape-related heads in a historical painting by Jan Matjeko's [sic] in Vienna of a resemblance that existed not only superficial in mustache growth, which I had also said to him, which he seemed very pleased about. Because he was very proud of his Polish character physiognomy.⁸

In making this statement, Schirnhofer is particularly likely to refer to Matejko's paintings Sobieski near Vienna thought (cf. the article picture), which was exhibited there in view of the 200-year anniversary of the victory of the united Christian Army on September 12, 1683 against the Ottoman army that had besieged Vienna. At that time, the Turks suffered a crashing defeat, which sealed the fall of the Ottoman Empire. An advance by his elite cavalry commanded by the Polish-Lithuanian King John III Sobieski was decisive for the Christian victory. A Polish achievement that many self-proclaimed 'saviors of the Occident' still find difficult to recognize today. In 1883, it was in any case a veritable provocation to show this painting in view of the non-existence of the Polish nation state in Vienna, which was intended precisely as such by the nationalist Matejko. Contrary to the usual customs of the time, the painting could be seen free of charge and he had an explanatory pamphlet printed with patriotic content.⁹

The beard dress of the king and his knights is in fact confusingly similar to Nietzsche's walrus beard. And this is not an isolated case: This type of beard has a long tradition on Polish royal portraits.¹⁰ Von Schirnhofer downplays the role of beard in her report, but there is some evidence that it was he in particular who led the Poles to think of Nietzsche as one of their own. However, this must not lead to the fallacy that Nietzsche let his schnauzer grow for this reason. On the contrary, there is much to suggest that student Nietzsche may have copied his now iconic beard from the most famous wearer of this extremely eye-catching type even then — the later Reich Chancellor Otto von Bismarck.¹¹ Prussia had therefore become a Polish beard.

This transformation is no more a contradiction than the mentioned simultaneity of Nietzsche's self-definition as a Pole and as a “good European.” Because the Poles are considered Nietzsche right now as a nation of free spirits, of “great [n] individuals.”¹². A paradoxical “anti-collectivist collective,” which is particularly notable for its remarkable constitution. When you realize that even the young patriot Nietzsche admired Bismarck above all because he regards him as a “great individual,” a political genius to his liking (a rating that remarkably continues to be found in his writings even after his break with the Reich), then it becomes clear that his beard should express one thing above all else: his own belonging to that illustrious circle “large Individuals” who, in his opinion, should direct and direct world history. So if Nietzsche's sister should claim on the occasion of the outbreak of the First World War: “Bismarck is Nietzsche in cuirassier boots, and Nietzsche, with his doctrine of will to power as a basic principle of life, is Bismarck in a professor's skirt.”¹³, that is by no means completely unjustified. But unlike in the case of Heidegger's embarrassing mustache from 1933,¹⁴ It would be wrong to infer a political affinity between the two from the visual resemblance between Bismarck and Nietzsche's beard: Nietzsche worships Bismarck and his policy of “blood and iron,” which he even revered in Beyond good and evil expressly welcomed as a southern antidote to the “spirit of the North,”¹⁵ not because it is nationalistic politics, but for similar reasons, for which he admires Goethe, Napoleon or even Copernicus and the Poles par excellence: Because they all correspond to his idea of “great individuals” who are concerned about the opinion of the “mob”¹⁶ Disregard and a truly”tall Policy”¹⁷ operate in the sense of “life” (ibid.).

III. Individualistic (anti-)politics

Like hardly any other, the estate fragment is suitable for clarifying the problems of Nietzsche's conception of the “great individual.” For now, it seems like a commitment to an almost anarchist individualism, which only has the catch of being limited to the nobility. Nietzsche even goes so far as to protect the individual's attachment to the stability of the community: For him, the fact that no state can be made with a consensus democracy is no argument against this form of political form, quite the opposite. At the same time, however, he does not plead for completely uninhibited individualism, as he associates it, for example, with German petty bourgeoisie and French decadence: His preference is not simply for individuals per se, but big Individuals whose greatness he associates with chivalry, beauty of the soul and aesthetic taste — which, however, is not an actual virtue at the same time, as he also celebrates the dissolute and irrepressible character of the 'Polish soul. ' You can see that his definition of “greatness” is rather vague here as elsewhere: Beethoven, whom he otherwise transfigured as one of the greatest geniuses,¹⁸ Is now suddenly devalued what exactly the resemblance between Chopin, Copernicus and Polish nobles should exist, is facie completely unclear. In any case, he uses himself, and this is the crux of the matter, primarily esthetic Criteria for a politic Verdict — moral and, in the usual sense, political criteria are ignored and even decisively devalued.

In this fragment, Nietzsche obviously oscillates between two moments that otherwise determine his thinking as well as his history of political influence: First, that of radical individualism, which makes him interesting for anarchists — on the other hand, that of the aesthetic transfiguration of an aristocratic “master morality,” which refers to his fascist reception. In this passage, Nietzsche is leaning towards the anarchist rather than the fascist pole — and yet it does not result in praise of universalized indiscriminate freedom.

IV. Utopia and Reality

It is hardly possible to adequately appreciate the 'Poland Fragment' if you do not consider whether it relates to any historical reality at all or whether it is a typical Nietzsche half-truth or even fiction. In this case, however, the 'fact check' is surprisingly in favour of the poet-philosopher: During the period of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic, which lasted from the 16th century until the dismantling of Poland in the late 18th century, Polish society was in fact characterized by individualism that was probably unique in history. In any case, all members of the nobility — around 15% of the population¹⁹ — met on equal footing and were able to participate equally in a political system that included elements of consensus and even council democratic elements. At the noble meetings, every member could actually veto all decisions of the meetings — which not only meant that they withdrew a resolution, but that the entire assembly had to be dissolved and no longer had a quorum. A regulation which — as you might expect — is regarded by most historians as one of the main constitutional reasons for the fall of Poland.²⁰ As early as the middle of the 18th century, even republican voices such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in response to a corresponding request made a comprehensive proposal to restructure the Polish state, were of the opinion that that “liberum veto” was absurd and had to be eliminated as quickly as possible.²¹ In fact, it not only resulted in the paralysis of all political decisions: Both the high nobility and even foreign powers made targeted use of it to corrupt the Polish state and increase their influence. A seemingly democratic settlement was in fact an instrument in the hands of the most powerful.

The time of “golden freedom” was, to put it bluntly, a time of darkest lack of freedom for all those who did not belong to the nobility and on whom the nobles were allowed to exercise their arbitrary freedom. While the noble meetings — Nietzsche is probably alluding to this — often degenerated into wild drinking binge with hearty fights, the vast majority of the population lived in abject poverty. Extraordinary social inequality, oligarchic rule behind a radical democratic façade, which Rousseau clearly laments. If you look at the political reality of old Poland, then the romantic image that Nietzsche paints of him quickly fades away. It is more an example of a particularly bad than a particularly successful political order according to all usual criteria. Only Nietzsche's aestheticized look makes them appear somewhat acceptable.

Rousseau believes that the problem is not the right of veto per se is. But, according to him, it does not work in a society that is characterized by social inequality and antagonistic particular interests and in which there is therefore no strong sense of cohesion. In particular, he believes that the development of patriotic heroism is necessary to save Poland from destruction: Every individual should be prepared to sacrifice himself for the fatherland. This idea has a superficial resemblance to Nietzsche's emphasis on chivalry and grandeur of the old Poles, but Rousseau does not involve any individualism, on the contrary: as a result of Rousseau, each individual should see himself not primarily as an individual but as a Pole. It is moral heroism, whereas in Nietzsche's case it is amoral.

Rousseau's critique of Polish society is based on pragmatic political criteria on the one hand — his aim is to preserve the Polish state — and on the other hand from the ultimate moral purpose of all politics, which he had already achieved in 1762 in Social contract articulated: A society without masters and servants, in which general and particular interest coincide. His considerations were incorporated into the Polish Constitution of 1791 — which was too radical for the surrounding absolutist monarchies so that they immediately occupied and divided Poland among themselves. (They had been able to live with the old constitution of “golden freedom” earlier.) — And they were also an important source of inspiration for the revolutionaries of 1789, who were mostly ardent admirers of the “citizen of Geneva.”

V. Conclusion

It may be recognized that Nietzsche's praise of chivalric self-will and aristocratic excessiveness is a legitimate antidote to the petty bourgeoisie of modern societies. The late Rousseau, on the other hand, propagated a nationalism that appears highly problematic from a liberal perspective and which should have an inglorious history of influence in the 19th and 20th centuries.

But the bottom line is that Rousseau is right: Consensus democracy is a model that makes no sense in an antagonistic society; Poland's “golden age”, celebrated by some liberals to this day, was in fact one of corruption, of social anarchy in the worst sense of the word and not exactly of cultural flourishing outside of Nietzsche's excessive imagination. Copernicus not only lived before the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian noble republic, it is also completely anachronistic to attribute him to one of the later established nations. He probably saw himself primarily as a subject of his employer, the Prince-Bishop of Warmia. Chopin, in turn, lived after the break-up of Poland; his father was French and France was his main place of activity.

“Old Poland” is a romantic place of longing, but it is not a desirable political utopia. Even in this fragment of the estate, which at first glance seems quite likeable, Nietzsche does not exactly show his brightest side. What is remarkable, however, is how he succeeds in both criticizing the shallowness of modern individualism and questioning modern collectivism. The tremendous potential and radicality of his thinking lies in this ability to merge very different, yes: contradictory, perspectives. But when it comes to political thinking in the strict sense of the word, it is probably better to stick to Rousseau.²²

Sources

Benne, Christian: Liberum veto. How democratic is Nietzsche's aristocratic radicalism? In: Martin A. Rühl & Corinna Schubert (eds.): Nietzsche's Perspectives on Politics. Berlin & Boston 2023, pp. 161—180.

Ders: Tell yourself. In: Ders. & Dieter Burdorf (eds.): Rudolf Borchardt and Friedrich Nietzsche. Writing and thinking in terms of philology. Berlin 2017, pp. 95—111.

Dabrowski, Patrice M.: Commemorations and the Shaping of Modern Poland. Bloomington & Indianapolis 2004.

Janz, Curt Paul: Frederick Nietzsche. A biography. Vol. I. Munich & Vienna 1978.

Oehler, Max: To the Nietzsche family tree. Weimar 1939.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: Considerations on the Government of Poland and its proposed reform. In: Socio-Philosophical and Political Writings. Munich 1981, pp. 507—561.

Ders: Of the social contract or principles of state law. In: Socio-Philosophical and Political Writings. Munich 1981, pp. 269—392.

Schirnhofer, Resa from: From the person Nietzsche. In: Journal of Philosophical Research 22 (1968), PP. 250—260.

Summer, Andreas Urs: “Bismarck is Nietzsche in cuirassier boots, and Nietzsche... is Bismarck in professor skirt”. In: Journal of the History of Ideas VIII/2 (2014), p. 51 f.

Stephen, Paul: Significant beards. A philosophy of facial hair. Berlin 2020.

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Article image

Jan Matejko: Sobieski near Vienna (1883). Image source: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlacht_am_Kahlenberg#/media/Datei:Sobieski_Sending_Message_of_Victory_to_the_Pope.jpg.

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Footnotes

1: Ecce homo, Why I'm so wise, 3.

2: See, for example, the report from his girlfriend Resa von Schirnhofer (From the person Nietzsche, P. 252). Nietzsche reported on this anecdote in at least five letters in the 1980s. To his important correspondent Georg Brandes He writes approximately on 10/4/1888 Right at the beginning of a short curriculum vitae: “I am usually considered Polish abroad; the list of foreigners in Nice's comme Polonais listed me this winter.” For a complete list of those letters, see my own book Significant beards, p. 101 et seq., where I have already explored in detail the connection between Nietzsche's beard and his “polentum” described here (see ibid., pp. 102—105).

3: Cf. Yanz, Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 1, p. 27 f.

4: Cf. Oehler, To the Nietzsche family tree.

5: Subsequent fragments 1882, 12 [2].

6: Cf. Letter from 4/8

7: Subsequent fragments 1878, 30 [54].

8: From the person Nietzsche, p. 252. In Mentioned letter to Brandes <k>Nietzsche also writes himself: “I am told that my head appears in Matej O's pictures. ”

9: Cf. Dabrowski, Commemorations, p. 59 f.

10: Consider something like Matejko's Portrait of King Stanisław Leszczyński or The list of all kings and dukes of Poland on Wikipedia. In the 20th century, the nationalist Polish dictator Józef Piłsudskian continued this tradition — and thus looks almost confusingly similar to Nietzsche in some portraits (see e.g. this photo).

11: See also how about the relationship between Bismarck and Nietzsche in general, in more detail Stephan, Significant beards, PP. 95—99.

12: Subsequent fragments 1884, 29 [23].

13: Quoted after summer, “Bismarck is Nietzsche...”, P. 52.

14: See that there pictured photo and also Stephan, Significant beards, p. 69 f.

15: Cf. Aph 254.

16: Subsequent fragments 1888, 14 [182].

17: Subsequent fragments 1888, 25 [1].

18: That's what it's called in a very typical estate fragment: “Beethoven, Goethe, Bismarck, Wagner — our last four great men.” Here Nietzsche praises “the monological secret divinity of Beethoven's music, the self-sound of loneliness, the shame while still being loud...” (ibid.) Not a word from Chopin.

19: Cf. The corresponding entry on Wikipedia.

20: For a first overview, see the corresponding article on the English-language Wikipedia.

21: Cf. Rousseau, Considerations on the Government of Poland.

22: For a somewhat more benevolent, contradictory presentation of Nietzsche's enthusiasm for Poland, cf. the corresponding research contributions by Christian Benne (Tell yourself and Liberum veto).

“Poland is Not Yet Lost”

Germany's Neighboring Country as a Political Utopia in Nietzsche's Posthumous Writings

The late Nietzsche repeatedly imagines himself as a descendant of Polish nobles. It is not just a personal whim, but also says something about Nietzsche's philosophical positioning: For him, Poland is a kind of “anti-nation,” a people of “big individuals” — and last but not least, the Polish noble republic is the political utopia of a radical democratic community, which, precisely in its failure, corresponds to his idea of “aristocratic radicalism.” Paul Stephan goes in this Long Read explores the deeper meaning of this topic in Nietzsche and questions his transfiguration of the old Rzeczpospolita: From a political point of view, this is not as desirable a model as Nietzsche suggests. Jean-Jacques Rousseau continues to lead in this regard Considerations on the Government of Poland from 1772.

Yes, that's right, I don't deny it anymore, I don't refuse, I admit it, I'm one of those who Nietzsche Zarathustra Read in bed with a flashlight at the age of 15 and felt quite attached to the ideal of superman, shall we say. Belonged among the little precocious atheists who really get on the heels of every enlightened religious teacher, was one of those who felt meant when Nietzsche wrote about the ominous “we.” And then on top of that, I never got away from it. I stuck with Nietzsche or maybe Nietzsche, writing theses about him and my dissertation. It should be noted that there were also others in between, for example Kant or Husserl, but this article is not intended to be about that, but only about the one thing I haven't gotten away from, from whom I probably won't get rid of, because thanks to his memorable quotes, a little Nietzsche sits in my head and gives occasionally — fortunately only occasionally! — add his mustard.

But why, we can ask imprudently, should Nietzsche even be a philosopher of adolescence and what does this accusation imply? For a long time, Nietzsche hoped for an appropriate response to his philosophy, at least to a slightly larger readership, but this was denied to him. In a package to mother and sister, he sent unsold copies of the Zarathustra as a “ball of books” and wrote laconically: “[S] pits him nicely in a corner and makes him mold”¹. In his books, he quarrels with readers, wishes for the right, the chosen ones and imagines himself to millions of readers in Ecce Homo, and then ask: “Did they understand me? ”². Towards the end, there is some intellectual correspondence that goes beyond the personal environment, for example with Georg Brandes, who gives Nietzsche's philosophy the nickname of “aristocratic radicalism,” which Nietzsche certainly likes,³  and who stood up for him in the later discussion of Nietzsche's questionable fame. Nevertheless, Nietzsche is no longer aware of his appreciation, because the wave sets in when he has already fallen prey to the mental transformation. But then the tide is tremendous, among writers and among artists. Gottfried Benn judges on behalf of one — his — entire generation: “He [Nietzsche] is [...] the far-reaching giant of the post-Goethean era”⁴. After all, academic philosophy must also take note of him, but in a self-reflective way, she asks: Should it do that at all? Is Nietzsche not just a “fashion philosopher” (Heinrich Rickert), a decadent, destructive aphorism writer who, instead of arguing, overwhelms readers with memorable images? Is Nietzsche not more among artists and poets, as Alois Riehl tries to show⁵ to calculate, and just a little, somewhat lagging, so to speak, among the thinkers?

Some, such as Ludwig Stein and Ferdinand Tönnies, wish to suppress Nietzsche's influence; they are afraid of the moral and political implications that they see conjured up by Nietzsche's philosophy. An amoralism is breaking ground, an unparalleled desire for intellectual destruction. Anyone who does not recognize that this philosophy must be rejected in the strongest possible terms is blind.

Among all the harsh allegations such as moral depravity, mental illness, lack of reasoning and scarce originality, there is also that of Nietzsche's attraction to young, emotionally and spiritually not yet strongly developed characters, i.e. in short — young people. Because of their fierce desire for their own genius, lack of sanity and immature emotionality, they are particularly suitable to be seduced by such a philosophy. Although the accusation of spiritual seduction of youth towards a philosopher is almost as old as philosophy itself, can we actually ask ourselves whether there isn't something that makes Nietzsche particularly attractive to young people and would possibly justify the fact that colleagues still look at their valuable Nietzsche researchers today with slight amusement?

Anyone who has read something about Nietzsche will not be able to deny that he speaks in the language of forcefulness, that he demands and warns that he follows him on his paths of thought, that he describes personal developments such as those of free spirits, which seem like an adventure. And his vocabulary is also adventurous, it goes downhill and sideways, into thickets, thinking ships on the high seas, searches for new shores and undiscovered countries, flies from peaks into the deepest chasms, is on the hunt and must fear being hunted. This thinking is a fiery existence and requires of the adept nothing less than to change one's own life, or at least to put it to the test, because “How much truth enduresHow much truth dares a ghost? ”⁶ The brave must ask himself. The metaphors remain undetermined; everyone must intervene and interpret for themselves, for example with the appeal to build houses on Vesuvius⁷ could be meant. There is something restless in Nietzsche's philosophy, something that just doesn't want to stand still, a longing for the foreign and one's own discoveries that is so great that love for the previous spiritual home can turn into contempt: “Better to die than here live”⁸. It is a departure into the unknown that only dazzling now and then gives clues as to what it is: Is it the “big politics”⁹ Or is it a life as an artist? Is it about revolutionizing the local cultural landscape or simply shaping yourself? About finding happiness in the moment or in current eternity, or not about your own work?

And isn't all of this the perfect philosophy for young people? All that urging and longing? The desire to be chosen, to have an “actual” task, and always the eloquent contempt for the comfort of setting yourself up in a homely community, i.e. the everyday adult world, where you have come to terms with yourself, is pragmatic and may have gained a realistic, but we can also say: ideless, self-assessment. And all of this is presented to you not in a long, dry treatise, but in small, linguistically brilliant bites. You can open the book anywhere and incorporate an elegant saying, nothing builds on each other, it doesn't aim in the direction of a conclusion anywhere. And there is also a lack of strict terminology that makes the philosophical books so boring, no countless definitions, no bland syllogisms. Technical terms incorrect display and the few incomprehensible passages, for example Latin, can be safely skipped. These are — even at the risk of snubbing some Nietzsche experts who claim that you could not understand him without extensive knowledge of Greek or Schopenhauer, or does the vulture know which philosophy — books that really anyone can read and anyone can interpret. They also do not require any previous knowledge of philosophy, but from time to time provide a brief overview of a previous prominent thinker, so that the young reader is immediately given the right prejudices for further studies.

Perhaps, we can graciously admit, it is quite nice when someone finds their way to rocky philosophy through Nietzsche, but what if they stick with it? Shouldn't you find your way to serious philosophizing at some point and leave the pathos-laden ballast behind, deal with the issues more soberly and calmly, and even make a productive contribution in a humanitarian society that Nietzsche — excuse me please — would have spit on?

However, admiring Nietzsche is not that easy and it wasn't even as a teenager. There were too many theses that were not only easy and mocking, there were also passages of dripping contempt for the weak, the compassionate, there were the vicious comments about women and the conjuring of leaders like the Earth has not yet seen them¹⁰. “Are you a Nietzsche fan? “I was asked when I Beyond good and evil read. No, because it's impossible to be a Nietzsche fan. On the one hand, it is impossible because there are so many contradictory theses that uncritical approval only entangles you into indissoluble contradictions that are difficult to ignore. On the other hand, it is impossible because Nietzsche has made every effort not to be found likeable, even though he himself claims otherwise. And he succeeded. Only those who are not uncomfortable with the excessive self-exaltation of Ecce Homo feels no reluctance to talk about the “misdeeds”¹¹, no aversion to the gayst of one of pigeons and lions Zarathustra¹² can be elevated to the rank of Nietzsche fan. And that must also be a rare species among Nietzscheans. Yes, you are attracted to something that appeals to your own taste, that requires “more of life” — and the one that repels you is a mystery. Which Nietzsche statement is true? The one I support or the one I reject? What did he “actually” mean? Do you think Nietzsche is the philosopher of passion? Far from it... How much does he warn in Human all too human before the Romantic period, in Zarathustra in front of the ridiculously self-deceitful projection power of poets and philosophers, how often he tries to unmask how our wishes and passions deform and — make us sick. Remember: Voltaire, not Rousseau is Human all too human dedicated.

Behind every statement about what Nietzsche actually meant, a question mark must first be placed. And your own philosophizing begins with the question. What is the evidence that Nietzsche means it that way and what against it? What do you wish for yourself when you interpret Nietzsche like that? What would you say for and against?

Nietzsche doesn't get clearer over time, it doesn't get more transparent. On the contrary, it is becoming ever more diverse, ever more varied, more and more varied. What is to be said of a pastor's son who in antichrist In the midst of a tirade against the weak, the “misguided,” Christian writes that everyone who “has theologian blood in his body [...] crooked and dishonest about all things from the outset.”¹³ stand? Is that a self-refutation, is the blood to be understood spiritually, is that crazy? Or is someone playing with the reader? Is someone who sometimes calls themselves “buffoon sausage” ironized¹⁴  describes?

Who is Nietzsche? What is his philosophy?

It doesn't leave you alone, it leads you into a maze that is less about the result of a thought than about the various directions of movement and finally also about the dead ends, the mistakes, the angles.

You can't help but notice that something you would have liked to believe in is lost. It can happen that what others find moving or uplifting makes you laugh, it can also be that skepticism is occasionally directed at yourself due to the warming feelings of sympathy and compassion. You don't get out of dealing with Nietzsche's philosophy unscathed, but perhaps with more perspectives, a wider horizon and a questionability that makes your life shimmer more exciting than any answer that would have satisfied.

Sources

Benn, Gottfried: Doppelleben. In: Autobiographical and Miscellaneous Writings Vol. 4 Wiesbaden 1977.

Riehl, Alois: Frederick Nietzsche. The artist and the thinker. Schutterwald 2000.

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Footnotes

1: Letter to Franziska and Elisabeth Nietzsche dated 16.4.1885.

2: Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 7.

3: Cf. Letter to Georg Brandes dated December 2, 1887.

4: Benn, Doppelleben, P. 154.

5: See his monograph Frederick Nietzsche. The artist and the thinker from 1897.

6: Ecce homo, preface, 3.

7: Cf. The happy science, 283.

8: Human, all-too-human I, Preface, 3.

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

10: Cf. Beyond good and evil, 10.

11: The Antichrist, 2.

12: Cf. So Zarathustra spoke, The sign.

13: The Antichrist, 9.

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

Is Nietzsche a Philosopher for Adolescents?

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In her contribution to the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “Our main author Natalie Schulte explores the question of whether the thinker can be described as a “philosopher for adolescents” and reports on her own relationship with him.

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Jonas Čeika wants to “abolish the situation” with a mix of two of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth century, i.e. fundamentally transform society. Some past authors had such ambitions. Yet no left-wing political philosophizing has made such waves in a long time. This can be seen in the linguistic severity of the counters. At the beginning of 2024, Daniel Tutt, for example, countered with his presentation How to Read Like a Parasite. Why the Left Got High on Nietzsche, which was published by the same publishing house, Repeater Books. Tutt's metaphor, which takes getting used to, calls for an invasion of Nietzsche's “community” in order to carry out reinterpretation work there (see p. 33¹). By banishing the “hermeneutics of innocence” (ibid.) from the toolkit and listening to the suspect again, Tutt wants to expose Nietzsche's “true” political concerns as the main driver of his thinking.

This heated development is due to Čeika's damn good writing style and his popular videos, which both attract attention. Before I go into Čeika's draft, I will first give an overview of the previous events in the same debate.

As Seth Taylor 1990 Nietzschean's left-wing. The Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920 revealed that the subject of dispute was the alleged closeness between Nietzsche, the thinkers of the “Conservative Revolution” and fascist ideology in general. Taylor criticized extreme forms of this genealogy, Georg Lukács' The destruction of reason (1954), for example, which characterized Nietzsche as an intellectual contributor to fascism. Steven Aschheims was more substantial The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990 (published in 1992), did not evade Lukács' attack either. Aschheim regarded Lukács' condemnation of Nietzsche as an “anti-modernist” (p. 42) — which points to the ignorance of the zeitgeist in Lukács' volts against expressionism. Yet younger critics such as Daniel Tutt still lean heavily on Lukács' destruction and press charges again. According to these opponents, Nietzsche could all too easily be reforged from right-wing into a pioneer of fascism, and has also deliberately defended the historical predecessor of fascism: a “Bonapartist-liberal order of rule” — according to Tutt (p. 34) — which was “designed” to “reprimand” “reprimand from below”, i.e. primarily by the socialist movements (ibid. p. 42).

Arriving in the 2020s, new motivations for the charged conversation come to light at Čeika. The liberty-stealing nature of wage labor and the division of labor is becoming more visible again, and the deflagration of many of our political actions on bureaucratic side tracks is becoming more noticeable. At the same time, few people who identify themselves as “left” want to shake the basic coordinates of their collective thinking and action. Čeika therefore wants the thinker “who wants to overcome the categories of modernity as a whole” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 4) — Karl Marx — speak again. Nietzsche should “be used to excavate Marxism” (ibid.), including its ignored or intentionally distorted elements. The plea for Nietzschean Marxism is about “ human Restoring the element — active human beings, their lived experience, and the most personal of their concerns” (ibid.).

Philosophy of Being versus Philosophy of Becoming

In general, Čeika's book offers an informed and fiery introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche's most fascinating and momentous concepts and critical thoughts: the “slave revolt,” the impossibility of a single, objective truth, and the “eternal return,” to name just three examples. In the history of philosophy, Čeika introduces his two protagonists by identifying their common root in “the long philosophical tradition of becoming” (ibid., p. 27), which dates back “at least” (ibid.) to Heraclitus (born around 520 BC). He celebrates this tradition as “life-affirming” and presents it as antagonistic to “the life-unifying tradition in philosophy” (ibid.) — in this model: the philosophy of being. The latter includes Plato, but dates back “at least” to Heraclitus's contemporary Parmenides. From these two parallel beginnings, both trends continue to flow effectively through Western philosophy to the present day. This simple scheme is plausible and certainly a welcome guide for newcomers to the history of philosophy. They have already read Čeika's book in abundance, many of which were written on it about his well-visited Philosophy channel on Youtube observant. But above all, the moral evaluation of the two trends — philosophy of becoming = progressive, changing society; philosophy of being = spiteful, reactionary — cannot stand still in this way. Where, for example, should Carl Schmitt (1888-1985) be classified, who philosophically underpinned the National Socialist seizure of power and supported the progressive overthrow of Western democracies?

But this does not change the validity of Čeika's critique of the philosophy of being, which he explains using Plato as an example, and the persuasive power of Čeika's portrait of Nietzsche as the philosopher “of the only world that we truly know — the ever-changing one that we experience through our senses” (ibid., 26). Away with Plato's “eternal world of [extrasensory; HH] forms” (ibid., p. 26) as “true” (ibid.) The basis of reality! But Čeika certainly doesn't mean that major historical upheavals, the majority of which we only know from traditions and not from our senses — China during the so-called “Cultural Revolution,” for example — should not be the subject of a philosophy of becoming. Sometimes the author's glorious desire for affective wording gets in the way of him himself. Overall, however, he uses terminology with sharpness.

Closely linked to this, Čeika Nietzsche, through his biography, comes to the foreground as a philosopher of the (human) body: “Let us get used to reading philosophers from their symptoms: The suffering and illness that Nietzsche's entire body took on forced him to be inextricably aware of the physical.” (ibid., 24th) But what Nietzsche's unavoidable obsession with one's own body teaches is more ambivalent. On the one hand, the pleasures and pain experienced by the body, from which Nietzsche writes his philosophy, offer an approach that is comprehensible to many: From there, readers can then understand his trickier concepts more individually, i.e. in a more meaningful way.

On the other hand, there are key events and processes in physical life that a philosopher of the body cannot ignore: Sex and sexuality are at the top of the list here. But how did Nietzsche then perceive and reflect on sexuality? Čeika says little about this, although there is a lot to report. For example, Nietzsche spoke out in favour of sex education for women before marriage, i.e. against the usual taboo on the subject in order to reduce suffering from sex after marriage.² In addition to such affirmative passages, there are also those who are prone to eugenics and testify to a disgust for heterosexual sex. In the Subsequent fragments from autumn 1881, No. 14 [16], for example, the author wants “[d] he permission to father children” as “an award” in order to deprive “normal sexual intercourse of the character of a means of procreation.”

Despite the many question marks that work and life raise, Čeika does not question Nietzsche's heterosexuality and at the same time tells how Nietzsche's search for a “successful love life” (57) failed — an unnecessary euphemism. Joachim Köhler's alternative story — The Secret of Zarathustra —, which has been available in German since 1989 and was published in English in 2002 (but heavily abridged), argues, however, that Nietzsche was homosexual and had also gained homosexual experience with sex workers in Italy. Even though Köhler's understanding has had little appeal among Nietzscheans worldwide, this in turn, seen from Charles Stone's queer perspective, says more about this genre of scholars than about who and how Nietzsche loved sexually. Stone's justified grumbling at “the hysteria of the prudish Nietzsche establishment,” which “has tried for decades to stifle any discussion of the philosopher's love for men” — published in 2018 in The Gay & Lesbian Review — could persuade a few more readers to reconsider Köhler's theses.

Walter Kaufmann's cunning translations

It is thanks to Čeika how his book intuitively develops from one topic to the next: It's almost a book — we want to know how it ends! His treatment of the disputed “will to power” is preceded by the question of how, after Nietzsche's great “popularity among the left” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 185) until the 1930s, Nietzsche could be converted into a “Nazi hero” (ibid.). Čeika outlines the history of reception rather than describe it comprehensively, so that we do not learn explicitly how the right-wing reception began during the First World War. Čeika places this shift to the right in relation to the book The will to power, created by Nietzsche's suitably oriented sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, and not by Nietzsche himself (cf. ibid., p. 186.) He also points to Mazzino Montinari's archival research, which prompted Montinari to adopt the following dictum:”The will to power does not exist.” (ibid., p. 187.)

This sourceless part of Čeika probably refers to Montinaris “La Volonté de Puissance” n'existe pas (1996): A clear signal that Čeika also thinks nothing of Nietzsche's authorship of such a work. Yet he cites from the American book no less than seven times throughout the book The Will to Power and cites Nietzsche as author and Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale as translators, each time in the endnotes. Čeika further obscures the matter by, contrary to current scientific practice, not 1968, the year of the first edition of Kaufmann and Hollingdale's successful translation, but 1901 as the year of publication: The year of publication of Förster-Nietzsche's ambitious work theft. And although Čeika disagrees with Kaufman's interpretation of Nietzsche as “an essentially not-political thinker” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 171), he does not connect this distortion with Kaufman's translation practice. Daniel Tutt, on the other hand, addresses this and finds that Kaufmann, “the most read English-language translator of Nietzsche” (How to Read, p. 31), deliberately falsified Nietzsche: “Words and emphases regarding his [Nietzsche; HH] advocacy of slavery were removed; his hatred of socialism and the working class and his spiritual embrace of a society based on an aristocratic ranking were all mitigated and downplayed.” (ibid., p. 30.) Tutt also provides evidence for his criticism, with a look, for example, at Kaufman's translation of the following passage from Ecce homo, The birth of tragedy, paragraph 4: “That new party of life which takes on the greatest of all tasks, the higher breeding of humanity.” Kaufmann deliberately plays down this passage by referring to the “higher breeding of humanity” — semantically strong stuff — as the soporific “to raise humanity higher” (quoted by Tutt, How to Read, p. 146).

The Abundance and the Superman

It seems as though Čeika wants to look the other way at some devastating passages in Nietzsche's work so as not to weaken his own narrative strands. Nonetheless, these strands actually offer new insights. For example, when Čeika draws attention to the connection between Nietzsche's concepts of “superman” and “abundance” and portrays the superman as “generous out of abundance.” He wants the stubborn caricature of Nietzsche's almost best-known character as one who “doesn't care about human suffering” (Hammer and Sickle, p. 233), put an end. In doing so, he is based on the following passage in Beyond good and evil, Aph 260:

In the foreground [of the noble person; HH] is the feeling of abundance, of power that wants to abound, the happiness of high tension, the awareness of a wealth that wants to give and give: — even the noble person helps the unfortunate person, but not or almost not out of compassion, but more out of an urge that the abundance of power creates.

Čeika's discussion makes it clear that this is not about which Power, which is administered by certain states of the 2020s, and previous generations, which can cause defenceless civilian populations, whether through cultural repression, bombing or hunger policies, to die out in misery and extinction. If Nietzsche had written about power in 21st century English rather than in 19th German, he would have been better served by focusing on the concept of “agency” rather than on that of “power” or “power.” The intervention of this central idea of contemporary English-language philosophy — which can only be cumbersome translated into German; “agency” is the best of several unsatisfactory options — could make the debate about Nietzsche's politics of power look completely different. Even according to Čeika's Nietzsche understanding, agency is transferred from “noble people” (in modern times: “people capable of significant actions”) to the “unfortunate” (now: “people who are severely restricted in their actions”), primarily from an “abundance of agency” among the former.

Youtube community with the power to act

Tutt regards Nietzsche's efforts to build a global community through his publications, which would have an impact on the future with his philosophy — and his followers above all as cheated by the prophet-philosopher leading them. Jonas Čeika has built up his community on YouTube with great feedback over the last six years — without any apparent bad intentions. Some of his older videos, which have been available for four years or more, have been viewed almost half a million times, his analysis of Late capitalism based on “K-pop” (Korean-language pop music) even over a million times. The huge amount of work involved in writing and producing these educational films is financed in part by subscribers, who support his community on a monthly basis. But you don't have to be a subscriber to access all videos. Čeika's deep enthusiasm for pop culture, especially for films, has helped him to communicate his educational and philosophical program via YouTube. Parallel to Čeika's theoretical introductions to postmodernism, in which Čeika skillfully opposes half-truths of intellectual influencers Jordan Peterson and Stephen Hicks defends, is, for example, also a post-modernist Review of the film or book American Psycho to see. Since the extent of Nietzsche's continuing influence on thinkers understood as post-modernist cannot be denied — this includes Lyotard, Baudrillard, Derrida and Richard Rorty — the circle is complete for now. Or are old circles more likely to reappear in new garments in order to confront us anew with our participation in the eternal return?

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Sources

Aschheim, Steven: The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890-1990. Berkely 1992.

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

Koehler, Joachim: Zarathustra's secret. Friedrich Nietzsche and his encrypted message. Nördlingen 1989.

Lukacs, Georg: The destruction of reason. Berlin 1954.

Montinari, Mazzino: “La Volonté de Puissance” n'existe pas. Transacted by Patricia Farazzi & Michel Valensi. Paris 1996.

Stone, Charles: The Case of Nietzsche. In: The Gay and Lesbian Review. September/October 2018. Available at: https://glreview.org/article/the-case-of-nietzsche/.

Taylor, Seth: Nietzschean's left-wing. The Politics of German Expressionism 1910-1920. Berlin 1990.

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

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Footnotes

1: Here and below, I have translated quotes from English-language books into German myself.

2: Cf. The Gay Science, Aph 71.

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Wrangling Over The Will: The Nietzschean-Marxian Legacy

About Jonas Čeika's How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle

Nietzsche has repeatedly become the subject of political interpretive projects, from left and right. Nietzsche and Marx was seen time and again as a double team of a concept of comprehensive emancipation beyond the well-trodden paths of dominant left-wing political trends. In his book How to Philosophize with a Hammer and Sickle. Nietzsche and Marx for the Twenty-First Century and in countless YouTube videos, Jonas Čeika updates this perspective for our time. For Nietzsche PopArts, Henry Holland addressed the question of what to think of this approach.

I became a Nietzsche fan at the age of sixteen or seventeen — that is the age at which you absolutely want to be a fan of something or someone, a fan in the sense of superficial admiration and a demonstrative will to confess. Back then, I only had a vague idea of Nietzsche as a gloomy, dazzling and, all in all, somewhat eerie figure. In this regard, Nietzsche suited my passion for haunted and scary characters, horror, musical hardcore and various “Monsters of Rock.” Dealing more closely and systematically with Nietzsche's work — back then I lacked the intellectual discipline and ultimately the will: because as a young fan, you might not even want to get too close to your idols. Perhaps you would rather see them at an unreachable distance or cultivate nebulous projections of your own juvenile ideas of grandeur? And it was also important for Nietzsche to keep a certain distance from the fans: “You have to know how to darken yourself in order to get rid of the swarms of mosquitoes from overly annoying admirers.”¹, he wrote down about it.

That Book from the storage room

Well, I didn't have Friedrich Nietzsche star cut posters in my pitched youth room, but I would still have described myself as a Nietzsche fan. His often loud-mouthed and presumptuous aphorisms impressed me as a “half-strong”; his philosophy seemed perfect for anyone who doubts authority — parents, teachers, priests. Young people must do this in order to be able to mature into an independent personality at all; contradiction and doubt are good and necessary in principle. However, there is a downside to rebellion and dissociation: self-doubt, loneliness, sadness. You long for soul mates, they are not always at hand, so imagination comes into play. In the preface to Human, all-too-human Nietzsche wrote:

So once, when I needed it, I also had the free spirits invented[.] [...] [D] equate free spirits do not exist, did not exist — but back then I needed them to society in order to remain good things in the midst of bad things (illness, loneliness, strangers, Acedia, inaction): as brave journeymen and ghosts with whom you talk and laugh [.]²

This is a genuine artistic concept that sounds familiar to me from my own experience, albeit in a mild version, from my youth: The escape into an art world, which, however, is on the verge of delusional world if you go too deep into it. You invent characters, equal friends, dream of a community of like-minded people. In this way, isolation and powerlessness can be endured, but not permanently, but only as a phase of latency until the real outbreak takes place, until the search for real spiritual relatives and comrades begins. It is a well-known phenomenon in the late phase of adolescence: Now self-esteem develops, but sometimes oversteps the mark. As a result, overconfidence is felt right up to the point of delusions of grandeur. A phenomenon that has obviously proved its worth in terms of evolution, because it produces courage and, under certain circumstances, inspiring enthusiasm. You feel incredibly strong, beautiful, irresistible, witty and visionary in this state — ideally the natural state of all artists. On the one hand, young people and artists are therefore linked by intoxicating overconfidence at the moment when they feel themselves, when they discover their self-effectiveness, be it physically, mentally, creatively. On the other hand, both also know the feeling of misunderstanding, of being misunderstood. Nietzsche summed up this ambivalence:

The artistic genius wants to make you happy, but when he is at a very high level, he easily lacks the people who enjoy it; he offers food but you don't want it, his pipe sounds, but no one wants to dance. Can that be tragic? Perhaps it is.³

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If Nietzsche were still alive and would go on reading trips with stops at various Thalia or Orell-Füssli branches, I would hurry over and present him with a specific book asking for an autograph. It is a paperback edition of Human, all-too-human out of the series Goldmann's Yellow Paperbacks, published in Munich in 1960. I discovered it in 1985 on a remote shelf in my parents' house, in a book cemetery, where what had been read or never read was collected. My parents bought it at the beginning of the 1960s during the prime economic miracle period, when intellectual hunger became noticeable as the legendary feeding wave subsided, or became a status symbol as education and bookshelf. My parents never talked about philosophy; Nietzsche wasn't a topic of conversation with us. The book must therefore have arrived in our household out of educational commitment or as a gift. I took it off the shelf, it looked unread, even though the cheap paper was already brownish. I read it and kept it to this day. It is not a beautiful book, a haptic or visual experience. I would present Nietzsche with a visibly inexpensive book for signature today, the cover is somewhat rubbed and dusted, a strangely colorful psychedelic cover motif would light up at him, individual pages are cracked and come off the adhesive binding, bent side corners, so-called dog-ears, threaten to break off. The spine of the book is missing and has been replaced by brown package tape. In the book, there are numerous passages marked by my hand, pencil and ballpoint pen were used hastily to underline, wild paintings of neon highlighters, fading in passages back to rosé, mint green and Naples yellow, traces of an unsystematic, discontinuous and erratic, yet at the same time disturbing reading!

It was Nietzsche's fault that I wanted to be an artist.

Nietzsche was and is regarded as an advocate of art and a Dionysian artistic lifestyle — even though he himself probably dreamt of it rather than practising it. He wasn't known as a party animal. Apart from extroverted fame and intrinsic creativity, it was also the artistic lifestyle itself that attracted people to art. Bohemians and free spirits, artist colonies and the life reform movement have stood for an alternative way of life since the beginning of modernity. “Become an artist” promised an escape from stuffy confinement, provincial stink, military drill and bureaucratic routine. Nietzsche became popular back then as a pillar saint for artists and all who would like to be. For over 150 years, his writings have inspired people for art — and many from the middle class and the petty bourgeoisie in particular felt appealed to many. I was one of them too. Nietzsche was one of the sources of inspiration that led me to want to turn my hobby into a career, to study at an art academy in Hamburg in faith in my “genius” and later to live as a visual artist in Berlin for a few years. Once I also picked up the brush to paint the philosopher myself — lying in a bed that his sister would have screwed together for him.

Today, it seems to me that I was a latecomer in my Nietzsche enthusiasm. We realized that today's artists rarely deal with Nietzsche. In my opinion, there are several reasons for this. First, the changed self-image of this profession: The transfiguration of Nietzsche as an apostle of heroic and megalomaniac artistry is a thing of the past. At that time, his writings offered the ideal legitimacy for the new self-image of avant-garde artists who did not want to tolerate any more traditional authority over themselves. On the one hand, Nietzsche was regarded as the key witness of the liberated, creative individual, and on the other hand as the catchword for an elitist (and potentially) totalitarian world betterment: The artist as the advancing herald of the future, the artist as a demiurge. In that “age of extremes,” aesthetic modernism was constantly in the tension between totalitarianism and democracy; it fluctuated between an aristocracy of spirit and collectivist visions of society. Today's artists, on the other hand, avoid pathos and fantasies of omnipotence so as not to appear too narcissistic. At that time, Nietzsche impressed many artists with his critique of science and rationality. To an ossified and misanthropic rationality, he set art as the last “stimulant of life” still effective in present-day nihilism⁴ opposite. In principle, this may be flattering and acceptable to every artist, but it still seems outdated today, as many artists are currently seeking to join forces with science: Instead of Dionysian intoxication, it urges them to engage in boring “artistic research,” bureaucratic third-party funding and applying for project funding. Contemporary artists are now regarded as so-called interface actors who mediate between art and science, aesthetics, technology and consumption, largely obeying regulatory and scientific authorities in order to “save the climate” or produce “queer” and “post-colonial” statements. Today's artists must always think of sponsors, customers and competitors, of new markets and fashions. They are often masters at identifying new consumption patterns and social trends. Nietzsche would not be able to win a majority among current juries, funding institutions and sponsors — which is why art avoids him.

One important reason for this is that Nietzsche is not part of the canon of left-wing thinkers. Paul Stephan has pointed out that Nietzsche is almost impossible for leftists to adopt because he was convinced of the inequality of humanity and actually assumed that social inequality was a social necessity.⁵ Instead, Nietzsche in Central Europe is still under general suspicion of being the godfather of far-right ideas. Defining him as a “house philosopher” of the New Right or the AfD may, however, be regarded more as a journalistic prejudice.⁶ According to Andreas Urs Sommer, however, Nietzsche can certainly be described “as a politically incorrect thinker”: “He takes very fundamental political self-evident principles, such as the idea of equality that we have of people, he questions the values of the French Revolution and also of the Enlightenment that precedes this revolution. ”⁷

In a weird fan club. So what?

In order to understand this ambivalent relationship between today's society and Nietzsche, let's look at which VIPs are publicly committed to Nietzsche. For example, who visits his grave in the Röcken Memorial near Leipzig, and which prominent cultural figures and politicians can be seen here? There are only a few. In the 1990s, the then Minister-President of Saxony-Anhalt, Reinhard Höppner (a Protestant and ecclesiastically engaged SPD politician), Joseph Fischer (THE GREENS, then foreign minister on an election campaign tour) and Wolfgang Wagner (grandson of Richard Wagner and then director of the Bayreuth Festival). Only a few other celebrities identify themselves as Nietzsche readers; former President of the Protection of the Constitution Hans-Georg Maaßen was an exception here. While on duty, he had a copy of Edvard Munch's Nietzsche portrait hung in the study and, looking back, was disappointed that many visitors, especially politicians, had not recognized the philosopher.⁸ Widely avoided in Central Europe and particularly in the left-liberal milieus of the cultural sector, Nietzsche, on the other hand, is receiving more attention in Asia and America, for example in China, where a first wave of Nietzsche reception was already observed during the reform phase of 1978,⁹ And in South America, in recent years, people could almost speak of a Nietzsche boom. In 2014, the recipient of the “Leipzig Book Prize for European Understanding”, Pankaj Mishra, contacted the memorial in Röcken at his own request. Mishra, who flirts with anti-democratic resentment in his books and rejoices about the imminent “decline of the West,” asked himself to remain alone at the grave for ten minutes. In 2016, there was a strange appearance by the then Prime Minister of Saxony-Anhalt, Rainer Haseloff (CDU), who let himself be seen at Nietzsche's grave on an election campaign tour — accompanied by tableau-Newspaper. In 2018, the Russian oligarch Vitaly Malkin made a pilgrimage to Röcken to confess Nietzsche and his book Dangerous illusions to advertise. The German press speculated about his motivation: “Is Malkin's book a megalomaniac method of setting yourself a memorial? In addition to yacht, luxury apartment, family foundation? And: Why exactly does this rich Russian love Nietzsche so much? ”¹⁰ Nietzsche is therefore still surrounded by an aura of the uncanny. The fact that it is often somewhat strange people who openly profess Nietzsche contributes to this. In the Nietzsche fan club, you sometimes meet strange company, even though you can hardly blame the philosopher for this. Nietzsche was occasionally called upon as a godfather by nihilistic perpetrators of violence, such as the high school assassins at Columbine: “I simply love Hobbes and Nietzsche”¹¹. Or by Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. In his manifesto 2083 — A European Declaration of Independence He mentions Nietzsche in ten places.¹² The accumulation of Nietzsche quotes and references in Norway's violent black metal scene also fits into this pattern.¹³ In this context, it is not very reassuring that former American boxing legend Mike Tyson has also been committed to Nietzsche for several years: “Most philosophers are so politically incorrect — challenging the status quo, even challenging God. Nietzsche's my favorite. He's just insane. You have to have an IQ of at least 300 to truly understand him. ”¹⁴ Admittedly, as a Nietzsche fan, I'm in strange company. And yet I can say from the bottom of my heart: I had the right instinct back then. To date, I feel fully confirmed in my life as a fan. The more I learned about Nietzsche's work, life and reception, the clearer it became to me that he is still THE godfather of all intellectual outsiders. His equally sharp criticism of science and religion, his relentless struggle against resentful philistines, bigots and duckmice, his insight into the inevitability of loneliness and sadness, his heroic-tragic pathos — all of this is difficult to communicate in today's society. And yet it is highly topical. The fact that Nietzsche receives occasional applause from the wrong side doesn't bother me because I have the suspicion: Not all of these strange Nietzsche fans seem to have understood him correctly or want to understand him correctly. Nietzsche had foreseen this. In 1878, he wrote down under the heading “Im Strome”: “Strong waters sweep away a lot of rock and scrub, strong spirits many stupid and tangled heads. ”¹⁵

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Source of the Article Image

Christian Saehrendt, Self-portrait as an artist, Oil on MDF, 100cm x 100cm, 2001, owned by the author.

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Footnotes

1: Human, all-too-human II, Mixed opinions and sayings, 368.

2: Human, all-too-human I, Preface, 2.

3: Human, all-too-human I, 157.

4: Subsequent fragments 1888, No. 17 [3].

5: Cf. Paul Stephen: What is left-wing Nietzscheanism? Speech by Helle Panke Berlin 26.4.2018.

6: Cf. Sebastian Kaufmann: Nietzsche and the New Right. Also a continuation of the Conservative Revolution. Presentation at the conference “Nietzsche and the Conservative Revolution” (Ossmannstedt Nietzsche Colloquium of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar, June 12-15, 2016 at Wielandgut Ossmannstedt).

7: “Nietzsche was a politically incorrect thinker”. Discussion between Andreas Urs Sommer and Korbian Frenzel, Deutschlandfunk Kultur.

8: Cf. Der Spiegel 30/2019, p. 38 f.

9: Cf. Felix Wemheuer related contributions to the panel discussion Is China closing itself off again? An inventory 40 years after the start of the reform and opening-up policy (Berlin 22/11/2018).

10: Hannah Lühmann: This Russian oligarch now wants to save Europe. world.

11: Jordan Mejias: I hate you guys. FAZ.

12: Cf. Daniel Pipes: The left is twisting Breivik's mental world.

13: Cf. 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” (Zurich, 23/24/10/2015).

14: Mike Tyson: On Reading Kierkegaard, Nietzsche. Genius.com.

15: Human, all-too-human I, 541.

What Does Nietzsche Mean to Me?

Our regular author Christian Saehrendt reports in his contribution to the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “about how he discovered Nietzsche as a teenager and has regarded himself as a fan of the philosopher ever since — precisely because of his contrariness.

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I. Freedom = Fascination

On Christoph Menke, Professor of Practical Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, one can read on Wikipedia: “He is regarded as an important representative of the 'third generation' of the Frankfurt School.” In his study published by Suhrkamp in 2022 Liberation theory he pleads for a new concept of liberation according to his claim for “radical”. In addition to the surrealists, the biblical Moses, the television series Breaking Bad and a whole series of philosophical 'guardians' from Walter Benjamin to Theodor W. Adorno to Martin Heidegger, is one of his important points of reference Nietzsche, whom he quotes again and again in the book and even quotes from Schopenhauer as an educator ended.

The core thesis of this, according to self-promotion on the cover text, “groundbreaking theory,” is that the entire Western philosophical tradition mistakenly misunderstood freedom as autonomy, as empowerment. If you understand freedom in this way, you link it to domination, exploitation and the power of habit. In the areas of art, religion and — surprisingly — economics of all places, Menke sees a different paradigm of liberation: liberation as a break with habit in fascination, enthusiastic dedication, for the sublime, the divine, but also money.

Since Menke also repeatedly points out the failure of these forms of liberation, he leaves the reader a bit baffled at the end. His basic idea intrigued But without a doubt. Hasn't this exact aspect been overlooked so far in philosophical thinking about freedom? Does freedom actually lie in something completely different from reasonable action, political emancipation, or power gained through self-discipline? Especially in moments of enthusiasm, spontaneity, break and desubjectization? For Menke, liberation is not a heroic active act of self-empowerment, but the passive speech of something external, higher that fascinates us and pulls us away from everyday life, from habit, from our identity.

II. A Fascinating Etymology

Menke, who in his book, for example, deals very extensively with the etymology of the Greek word for “freedom,” eleutheria, concerned, unfortunately hardly talks about the history of his positive counterterm there, although this is also very old. The Latin verb Fascinare means “bewitch.” The Romans thus referred to a power that was anything but liberating, namely that of fascinus or fascinum, the magic of damage, which was usually associated with the “evil eye” of the envious person, which emanates a destructive force for the individual as well as for the community, which must be tamed in order to ensure the respective integrity. However, the spell can only be fought with a corresponding counterspell, so that fascinum Finally, it primarily describes the means against the damage spell, above all the phallic amulets that were ubiquitous in the Roman world and were worn to ward off it.¹ However, this does not contradict Menke's theory, but rather reinforces it. In fact, he regards the Roman-Greek world as the origin of the false understanding of liberation that is still valid today — and it is not surprising from his point of view that it is precisely that world that is almost obsessed with taming the dark power of fascination; but by making use of the same power.

III. Evil Eyes

Nietzsche was undoubtedly familiar with this aspect of ancient culture. The “evil eye” is a metaphor he has used in countless places, almost a leitmotif of his thinking that can be easily overlooked. Of course, he takes the standpoint of antiquity he admires: For him, the “evil eye” is precisely the resentful, unfree slave's view of the freedom of masters, who later finds his ideology in Christian world hate, and which is so dangerous because it poisons the souls of the masters and allows them to develop a guilty conscience themselves. He speaks of a “pessimist look”² who oppose “the passions”³ Judge, the “evil eye”⁴ of the state on the original peoples and the “mob”⁵ to the entire earth, from “tired [n] pessimistic [s] look, d [em] distrust to the riddle of life, the [em] icy [n] no of disgust to life”⁶, the “hypnotic gaze of the sinner”⁷. This gaze is particularly dangerous when you focus on your own life, the “returned [] gaze of the misborn from the very beginning.”⁸: “[E] in remorse seems to me a kind of 'Evil Look”⁹, “Man has looked at his natural slopes with an 'evil eye, 'so that they finally became concealed in him with the 'bad conscience.' ”¹⁰

In short: For Nietzsche, morality is a “fundamental deterioration of the imagination, as an 'evil eye” for all things. '¹¹. It is the envious look of “someone who cannot see the high things about people.”¹², the cynic, the “spoilsport [s]”¹³. It is a permanent threat to “higher [n] people”¹⁴, who have to secure themselves against him by not ceasing to believe in themselves. — This all clearly corresponds to the ancient view of things and it is certainly no coincidence that Nietzsche so often places the term in quotation marks to make it clear that he is quoting exactly that ancient tradition in these places. Accordingly, Nietzsche knows that it takes even an evil eye to be able to combat the morality of resentment.¹⁵

In keeping with the usage of his time, Nietzsche uses the word “fascination” sparingly and when so, almost exclusively in its pejorative, ancient sense. He is actually one of the first to use it more frequently in German-speaking countries. It only became a frequently used and neutral or even positive vocabulary in the course of the 20th century.¹⁶ Whether Wagner and Schopenhauer,¹⁷ the socialists¹⁸ the first Christians¹⁹ the Rousseauist Romantics,²⁰ the mystical underground religions of antiquity,²¹ the martyrs,²² the “saints” in general²³: Fascination is one, if not the, decisive weapon of the “weak” in the fight against the “well-off” and “strong,” with which they manage to pull them out of their self-affirmation and win them over for themselves. By fascinating the strong, the weak become strong: “[T] he sick and weak have Fascination Had to themselves, they are more interesting as the healthy ones”²⁴. In this”Fascinating power of virtue”²⁵ Nietzsche sees one of the greatest threats to freedom. In addition to Paulus²⁶ and Plato²⁷ For Nietzsche, Socrates is a master of fascination: “Socrates fascinated”²⁸, particularly due to “its terrifying ugliness”²⁹ and contradiction and thus took revenge on the distinguished Athenians, became the philosophical representative of the revolt and “mob resentment.”³⁰.

Menke does not address this aspect of Nietzsche in his book, but it is clear how he would integrate it into his theory: In fact, he reads Nietzsche's story of the “slave revolt” affirmatively, he interprets it under inverted values, and therefore these passages only confirm his equation of liberation and fascination. Fascination could be understood as a force that frees rulers from their identity as rulers and the ruled equally from their identity as ruled.

Of course, for Nietzsche, ironically, this Understanding liberation right at the beginning of Western civilization and not the Greco-Roman opposite it. For Nietzsche, Western culture is, right from the start, a culture that is based on a false understanding of freedom, namely by liberation as being fascinated, not by liberation as autonomy and self-empowerment.

That is what it is called right at the beginning of Happy science:

I found a hatred of reason among certain pious people and was good for it: at least that's how the evil intellectual conscience betrayed itself! But in the midst of this rerum concordia discors [dissensive harmony of things; PS] and all the wonderful uncertainty and ambiguity of existence are And don't ask, don't tremble with desire and desire to ask, don't even hate the questioner, maybe even taunt him — that's what I say as contemptuous I feel, and that feeling is what I first look for in everyone [.]³¹

And at the end of the book, he continues this idea:

One kind of honesty was alien to all religious founders and their ilk: — they never made their experiences a matter of conscience of knowledge. “What did I actually experience? What was in me and around me back then? Was my sanity bright enough? Was my will turned against all deceit by the senses and brave in its defense against the fantastic? “— None of them asked this question, not even now all the dear religious people are asking: rather, they are thirsty for things which Contrary to reason are, and do not want to make it too difficult for themselves to satisfy him — that is how they experience “miracles” and “rebirths” and hear the voices of the angels! But we, the others, thirsty of reason, want to look at our experiences as closely as a scientific experiment, hour by hour, day by day! We want to be our own experiments and test animals.³²

Nietzsche pleads — at least in his middle and late periods — for criticism and skepticism in the face of “fascinating” experiences, against dedication to mystical experiences; for reflection and against the power of the immediate and present that Menke conjures up in his theory of liberation. For him, liberation in the sense of the ideal of the “free spirit” means not falling for charismatic figures such as Paulus, Socrates or Rousseau, not for the omnipresent “future sirens of the market.”³³ and the hollow ideals they promote.

IV. Critique of Fascination

Which concept of freedom and which reading of Western history is now the more plausible? The change in meaning of the word “fascination” mentioned above suggests that we are actually dealing with a growth of fascination in the modern age, with its trivialization and profanation. It's not something we fear and avoid anymore, but rather something we're looking for, whether we're looking for new memes on the Internet, going to museums, or getting carried away by mass political movements. In his study, Menke reflects on the manipulative violence of modern visual worlds as well as the compelling power of modern economics — the corresponding chapter is probably the strongest in the book — and tries to differentiate between genuine and artificially manipulative forms of fascination. But what is the point of this complex, ultimately not really convincing differentiation work? Is the fascination as we experience it today not more, as Nietzsche already describes it, an enslaving power that only binds us more firmly to the existing habit than one that liberates us in some way, if we do not want to completely replace the concept of freedom from ideas such as “autonomy” and “self-determination”?

The matter becomes more controversial when you consider another meaning aspect of “fascination” that Menke has also not addressed. Even though it is in fact not related etymologically, it is difficult today to speak fascinum Not at the Fasces to think of the rod bundle of the Roman Republic, which gave fascism its name. Just like the old Fasces as a type of sublimated fascinum served, a phallic symbol around which the community rallied to avert the power of the “evil eye,” fascism consists in the mythical conjuring of irrational forces to banish the dark energies of dissolution that threaten the community. Fascist politics are downright by definition eine The politics of fascination, which relies on enthusiasm, overwhelming, dedication, desubjectification and the charismatic aura of a leader figure to save “order.”³⁴ It is not the case that Menke completely ignores this problem in his study, but it only plays a minor role for him — surprising for a supposed successor to the Frankfurt School. How can liberation be meaningfully understood essentially and primarily as being fascinated — i.e. desubjectization, sacrifice, submission, etc. — and at the same time sharply separate this concept of freedom from a fascist, irrationalistic one? A squaring of the circle that Menke also fails to do.

Nietzsche goes the other way. He's going — already and right now in Schopenhauer as an educator, which Menke completely wrongly invokes in his study — from an individualistic, enlightenment understanding of liberation, but admits that it moments who needs fascination (ecstasy, dissemination, passivity...) in order to achieve complete freedom. Nietzsche describes this inspiration in a poem, for example:

Meine Truth is!
From hesitant eyes,
from collected shivers
Her gaze hits me
Sweet, angry, a girl's eye...³⁵

The view of — each individual — truth fascinates precisely because it is ambiguous, because it is “sweet” and “evil” at the same time in an inseparable identity. It is only the confrontation with this view that enables Zarathustra to climb the next level of self-expression in this poem.³⁶

In early writing The Dionysian worldview In terms very similar to Menke, Nietzsche celebrates the desubjectizing, delimiting power of “demonically fascinating folk song [s]”³⁷ The Bacchants, but also sees in it a menace to the community, which can only be met through its Apollinian containment; it was only because of this combination of subjectification and desubjectization, freedom and fascination that a high culture such as Greek was able to develop. In this sense, he continues to praise the fascination of Wagner's operas in his late work.³⁸ And Nietzsche writes himself³⁹ and his writings⁴⁰ a similar fascination force too. For Nietzsche, there is also a “fascination of strength”⁴¹. The — temporary and tamed — dedication is necessary to preserve and increase freedom and strength; but similar to how Nietzsche distanced and had to distance himself from his temporary idols Schopenhauer and Wagner in order to become himself, this dedication must not be absolute, must remain an “ironic”, reserved one in a certain sense so as not to lead to self-dissolution and therefore to loss of freedom.

Menke obviously has nothing to do with this individualism. In the mentioned chapter on economic fascination, he even makes the claim that the modern individualistic understanding of self-realization is realized in the neoliberal model of economic self-assertion; just as if it had works such as Sources of self not given by Charles Taylor, who show in detail that self-actualization in the modern sense is essentially a ethical An idea that calls on the individual to do as Nietzsche did in Schopenhauer as an educator writes that realizing one's “higher self” is not just one of the “flies of the market.”⁴² to mix. Menke's positive reference to this work, in which he perhaps most decisively represents an ethic of individual self-realization, does not quite fit in with it. It is similar to Menke's wrap-around against the supposed “western” concept of freedom: He loves the polemic, which sometimes escalates into — stylistically sophisticated — demagogy, but this at the expense of the philosophical depth of this book, which, in its abysmal contempt for individualism, enlightenment and emancipation expressed in it, is much more in the Conservative Revolution camp than That of their opponents is to be located.

V. Freedom in Fascination, Fascination in Freedom

It would be important to develop a comprehensive understanding of freedom that combines all the moments in question — individual self-realization, political self-determination, pragmatic self-empowerment, moral self-determination — and at the same time knows how to integrate the moments of aesthetic fascination, religious devotion, etc. — certainly also the moment of erotic fascination largely omitted by Menke and echoed by Nietzsche. Nietzsche's reflection on the power of fascination that endangers and at the same time enables freedom is more effective than the latest “groundbreaking” review by Heideggers Being and time, in which the “Master from Germany” already propagates a very similar reinterpretation of the concept of freedom in the sense of a desubjectizing sacrifice for the “people,” thinkingly anticipating his subsequent fascination with the “national community.”⁴³

It may be that Nietzsche focuses too much on the moment of individual self-empowerment in his middle and late creative phase. The politically reactionary impetus of his “evil eye” considerations is obvious. But just at a time of growing disenfranchisement of individuals and the strengthening of freedom-hostile, fascinated political and religious movements, singing the song of “lust of desubjektification” (Menke, p. 128) is like a declaration of bankruptcy based on contemporary diagnosis. Free-spiritedness and passion in every respect — political, spiritual, aesthetic, erotic... — must go hand in hand in order to further progress in omnipresent desubjectization preventing and freedom in the very dreadful sense of the ideas of 1789, which Menke and his pioneers are trying to eradicate,⁴⁴ restore, to deepen and broaden.⁴⁵

The “evil eye” of the fascinated person prevents Nietzsche from developing a genuine, authentic passion in particular, inasmuch as he demonizes immediate emotions and replaces them with hollow pathos that covers them up. Perhaps it would be a first step to address the violence of the bad fascination to deprive the “idols” of the present (God, money, 'great art, 'etc.), again a less charged but more exhilarating and liberating sensitivity rediscover. carmen instead of Parsifal, Baltic instead of south, lived solidarity instead of calls for world revolution from catheder, indulging in dreaming in a boat on a Swiss mountain lake, the silence of a cathedral... terms instead of jargon, authenticity instead of authenticity. You like about such ethics Wrinkle up your nose in the exhibition tower, but perhaps today is the smallest and most humble thing — worrying about the “little things”⁴⁶ instead of sacrificing for the “idols” of “big [n] politics”⁴⁷ — more radical than the grand gesture of world destruction and fashionable “West” bashing, which does not gain strength even after its hundredth repetition.

Secondary Sources

Confino, Alon: Foundational Pasts. The Holocaust as Historical Understanding. Cambridge 2012.

Hahnemann, Andy & Björn Weyand: Fascination. The appeal of a term. In: This. (ed.): Fascination. Historical conjunctures and heuristic scope of a term. Berlin e. a. 2009, pp. 7—32.

Stephen, Paul: Truth as story and moment. The critique of truth in Friedrich Nietzsche's work in light of the section How the “real world” finally became a fable. Nordhausen 2018.

Ders. : Zarathustra's “Eye View.” Nietzsche's theory of confrontation with reality. In: Nietzsche research. Yearbook of the Nietzsche Society Vol. 24 Berlin & Boston 2017, pp. 315—327.

Taylor, Charles: Sources of self. The development of modern identity. Transcribed by Joachim Schulte. Frankfurt a. M. 1996.

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Footnotes

1: For example, for a first overview, see the corresponding entry in Pauly's real cyclopaedia of classical studies.

2: Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, 24.

3: The happy science, 139.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, From the new idol.

5: So Zarathustra spoke, From the higher person16.

6: On the genealogy of morality, II, 7.

7: On the genealogy of morality, III, 20.

8: On the genealogy of morality, III, 14.

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

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

11: The Antichrist, 25.

12: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the virtuous.

13: So Zarathustra spoke, The dance song.

14: Human, all-too-human I, 480.

15: Cf. Götzen-Dämmerung, preface.

16: Cf. Hahnemann & Weyand, fascination.

17: Cf. The happy science 99.

18: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [82].

19: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [157].

20: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 9 [184].

21: Cf. The Antichrist58.

22: Cf. The Antichrist, 53.

23: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I am a fate, 8.

24: Subsequent fragments 1888, No. 14 [182].

25: Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [184].

26: Cf. Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 10 [189].

27: Cf. Götzen-Dämmerung, What I owe to the elderly, 2.

28: Götzen-Dämmerung, The problem of Socrates, 11.

29: Ibid., 9.

30: Ibid., 7.

31: The happy science, 2.

32: Ibid., 319.

33: Ibid., 377.

34: Just think of Thomas Mann's famous story Mario and the magician. See also the mentioned article by Hahnemann and Weyand.

35: Dionysus Dithyrambi,On the poverty of the richest.

36: For a more detailed interpretation of this constellation, which is central to Nietzsche, see my study Truth as story and moment and the essay summing them up Zarathustra's “Eye View.”

37: The Dionysian worldview, 2.

38: Cf. Ecce homo, Why I'm so smart, 6 and Letter to Carl Fuchs dated 27.12.1888.

39: Cf. Letter to Franz Overbeck from Christmas 1888 and Letter to Meta von Salis dated 29.12.1888.

40: Cf. Ecce homo, The birth of tragedy, 1.

41: Subsequent fragments 1887, No. 9 [185].

42: So Zarathustra spoke, From the flies of the market.

43: Menke makes no secret of the derivation of his concept of freedom from Heidegger's ontology (see in particular pp. 226—229). He is one of the most frequently mentioned philosophers in the study. The proximity of Menke's language to the “jargon of authenticity” (Adorno about the diction of Heidegger and his adepts) is unmistakable.

44: Consider, for example, the corresponding relevant statements by Goebbels, Rosenberg or Ernst Bertram (see Alon Confino, Foundational Pasts, p. 6f.), who had all committed themselves to the (brown) abolition of liberal subjectivism in favor of a fascinated dedication to the community.

45: In this sense, Nietzsche speaks of “two brain chambers,” two sensitivities — one scientific (critical) and one passionate (religious, metaphysical and aesthetic) — which everyone who wants to participate in the “higher culture” and who should keep each other in check in order to correct their respective differences: “The source of strength lies in one area, the regulator in the other: with illusions, one Things, passions must be heated, with the help of discerning science, the evil and dangerous consequences of overheating can be prevented” (Human, all-too-human I, 251).

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

47: Human, all-too-human I, 481.

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Menke Fascinates.

Is Liberation Fascination?

In his recently published study Theory of Liberation [Theorie der Befreiung]Frankfurt philosopher Christoph Menke describes liberation as “fascination,” as pleasurable desubjectization and dedication. He refers decisively to Nietzsche — but for him, “fascination” means bewitching, entanglement in lack of freedom and resentment. Can the mystical power of fascination really set us free — or is it not rather Nietzsche's right and liberation means above all self-empowerment and autonomy, whereas the fascinated sacrifice means submission, not least to a fascist leader?

I. The petty bourgeois gone wild

Politicized by the Easter riots following the assassination attempt on Rudi Dutschke in 1968, then philosophized by Sartre, I was in a KPD/ML sympathizer group in 1970 and therefore a Maoist. The Chinese Communists were Stalinists, which I, in turn, quarreled with and made me get off there again. The fact that 20 million people could die for the revolution was an indigestible argument. Only can you en passant Objecting that states regularly sacrifice their people millions of times in wars, Stalin is just one of many, which, of course, also include democracies. And it's always the others' fault. Yet I remained a revolutionary Marxist for a few more years.

In 1970, still as a Maoist, I was confronted with Nietzsche for the first time. In the 12th grade of high school, a philosophy course was offered, which my left-wing extremist classmates and I took part enthusiastically. The downside was the inherently very likeable teacher, who came out as a Nietzschean inspired by Hermann Hesse — a widespread career path of apolitics at the time — and with us the Zarathustra I read that as a Leninist I certainly refused to understand.

I had my first encounter with Nietzsche at this time with a participant in this course who was sitting on the window sill in the smoking room of the high school in a military parka and smoking — of course — the Zarathustra read. A nuisance for me and I hissed: “Nietzsche — a petty bourgeois gone wild! “She hissed back: “Marx is a petty bourgeois gone much worse.” It took about ten more years before Dagmar Allendorf introduced me to free love, more specifically forced me into an open relationship. She then became a good friend for decades and I had learned from her the advantages of open relationships, to which Nietzsche had certainly only contributed from afar and if so, from individualism to feminism.

II. The Suffering Nietzschean

While I was doing my doctorate on practical philosophy with Kant and Hegel between 1979 and 1982, another companion — also with those Maoists and in the said philosophy course — also wrote his dissertation about Nietzsche with Manfred Riedel. As a result, I could no longer avoid a serious confrontation with Nietzsche.

Even with his Nietzsche dissertation, Reinhard Knodt was closer to the zeitgeist of the early eighties than I was with Kant and Hegel as a background for Marx. Since the Colli-Montinari edition, Nietzsche had experienced a renaissance, not only in France and Italy, where post-structuralism had been spreading since the sixties and the post-modern discussion had just begun.

As a moderate Marxist in the meantime, I wrote my very first post-doctoral essay against this Nietzsche Renaissance, which was, of course, never published. Many leftists suddenly became interested in Nietzsche, which I saw as a frustrated escape line after Marx's star faded during the late 1970s. How could leftists be against nuclear power only in the seventies when Marx is concerned with the progress of the productive forces! I was a supporter of atomic energy until Harrisburg 1979.

How could left-wing intellectuals deal with such a dazzling figure as Nietzsche, who questions the scientific knowledge on which the development of productive power is ultimately based! Reinhard Knodt had over The eternal return of suffering doctorate. Instead of doing something about suffering, you present it as unavoidable, surrender to it and suffer attention-seeking like Nietzsche. Associated with this is the widespread lament of intellectuals about a lack of response in politics and society, as with Nietzsche, although you are as clever as you would in Ecce Homo Can read.

III. About Nietzsche through weak thinking

At the beginning of the eighties, it slowly seemed essential for me to philosophically address the problem of the destruction of nature. Following my dissertation, I developed a progressive concept of rationalization: The rationalization of the state begins in the 18th century, that of economics in the 19th and that of the relationship of nature — constitutional state, welfare state, natural state.

The Düsseldorf philosopher Rudolf Heinz, with whom I had studied for three semesters in the mid-seventies, dissuaded me from the concept of rationalization by referring me to French philosophy surrounding post-structuralism. Although this was not about Nietzsche at first, I began to develop a rational approach to the problem of destroying nature. With the help of Rudolf Heinz, I published my first book after completing my doctoral thesis in 1985, Philosophy and ecology. Philosophical and political essays, in which Nietzsche barely appears and only the Schlechta edition is referred to in the bibliography.

The focus on Nietzsche intensified in the second half of the decade when I met Gianni Vattimo, the main Italian representative of post-modern philosophy, whose hermeneutical approach was closer to me at the time than the post-structuralist concepts of Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard. He had already linked the problem of liberation to Nietzsche in 1974: Il Soggetto e la Maschera. Nietzsche e il problema della liberazione (“The subject and the mask. Nietzsche and the problem of liberation”). It was precisely this connection that I had criticized just a few years earlier.

In the meantime, however, I slowly left the communitarian paths of Marxism and returned to the beginnings before Maoism, finally the Extraparliamentary Opposition of the sixty-eight period was also called the anti-authoritarian movement and I had begun philosophizing with Sartre's individualism back then. But the time was not yet ripe for a return to Sartre's existentialism. That will only be the case towards the end of the millennium.

I first learned to understand Nietzsche's hermeneutics as a critique of science and modern technology from Vattimo; he had the book in 1984 Beyond the subject. Nietzsche, Heidegger and hermeneutics published. And it was just natural sciences and technology that appeared to me then and now as the actual background to the destruction of nature, less capitalism. Today, on the other hand, climate radicals believe that they can balance the relationship with nature with natural sciences and technologies. For me, however, these were and are not the solution, but the problem, even more so today when they unabashedly propagate the correct understanding of the world — a religious habit.

This included Nietzsche's criticism of mathematics in science and technology, which Edmund Husserl wrote in 1936 in his Crisis in European Sciences repeating, with the causality that will recur with late Wittgenstein, and the concept of action that Hannah Arendt will spell out, will be helpful. Natural sciences and technology do not capture nature as it really is, but interpret it and thus develop the will to power that experts represent today.

In this sense, Vattimo had not interpreted the history of thought as a process of ever better and more accurate grasping of the world, which dominates the world ever more precisely, but as a story of increasing insight into understanding this process as one of the weakening of knowledge and ethics — en passant In addition to Husserl, can you refer to Einstein's theory of relativity, the fundamental crisis of mathematics, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle and the failure to establish an appropriate scientific language in the logical constructivism of the Erlangen School. In the sciences, you don't want to know anything more about this.

This is how Vattimo developed the theory of “weak thinking” from this in 1983 — Il pensiero debole —, which I followed up in my second book on the destruction of nature in 1989: The technology and the weakness. Ecology according to Nietzsche, Heidegger and “weak thinking”. With that, I had definitely become a Nietzschean. Vattimo's programmatic essay dialectic, difference, weak thinking I translated it and published it in the anthology published by me in 2000 Ethics of thought.

IV. From negative ecology to the art of living

In the same year, I referred this to a term that was based more on Adorno's negative dialectic than Nietzsche's nihilism, but was all the more inspired by the latter. I first published a small programmatic book under the title About the difficulty of understanding nature. Outline of a negative ecology. The quintessence is: There is a difference between science and nature that cannot be bridged. That is precisely why care should be taken when dealing with nature.

I worked out the concept in 1990 and developed it through Lyotards Contradiction extended: That means that the problem cannot be solved politically either, because politics is the place of conflict between types of discourse. The title is Negative ecology. Political philosophy in the technical age. That should be my postdoctoral thesis. It was left behind and when I wanted to make it the basis of a lecture in the second half of the nineties, I had to discover that the concerned pathos surrounding the destroyed nature had left me, so that I did not want to publish the manuscript since then.

Nietzsche was initially a nuisance, which I fought back until I realized that his philosophy was much more innovative and inspiring than what the philosophy of my academic teachers had to offer. And epistemologically, you can learn about as much from Nietzsche as from Wittgenstein: The scientism that prevails today is an ideology that you have to believe as little as religions.

Nobody wants to hear that today. This is how you remain an outsider, bohemian, intellectual, artist of life with Nietzsche according to my book The superman as an artist of life. Nietzsche, Foucault and ethics (2009). On the other hand, if you get into the mainstream with Nietzsche, you have pulled the bad teeth out of him, which Arthur C. Danto recommends in order to make Nietzsche compliant with democracy.

On top of that, I learned a lot about individualism from Nietzsche, although he limits it to genius. You can and must shape your own life and defend yourself against all attempts to have the “last people” dictate this to you. In this way, Nietzsche created an ethics of the individual that brought me back to my anti-authoritarian beginnings with Sartre. So Zarathustra said:

Where the state ends, that is where the human being begins, who is not superfluous: that is where the song of the necessary begins, the unique and irreplaceable way. Where the state ceasing“Look at me then, my brothers! Don't you see him, the rainbow and the bridges of Superman?¹

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Footnotes

1: Thus spoke Zarathustra, Of the new idol.

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From Stalin to Nietzsche, or How I Became a Nietzschean, 1970-1990

As a Marxist, Nietzsche was an early nuisance. But with the Nietzsche Renaissance in the eighties, I couldn't get past him anymore. That's when I discovered Nietzsche as an innovative thinker. - Part II of the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “, in which our regular authors introduce themselves.

I. Criticism of a deficient theory of economics

Bourgeois and Marxist economic theories are always based on scarcity, complains the French writer, sociologist, philosopher and Nietzschean Georges Bataille (1897—1962). The starting point is always a shortcoming, an insufficient amount that must be compensated for in order to ensure the survival of the individual, the species, and society. The Homo economicus Is a through and through reactive Being who knows nothing but adaptations to a hostile environment, nothing but hardship; he is always in need, always neglected. As a result, he is prone to resentment—to competitive envy, self-centered cleverness, and chauvinistic avarice. It is precisely this poor human being, only interested in benefits and personal comfort, whose abolition Zarathustra with the image of Supermen Seek to conjure. For Bataille, Nietzsche himself is in fact not an appropriator, accumulating, but a giver Thinkers.

At the beginning of his story, Nietzsche's Zarathustra stands before the sun and says:

You big star! [...] [W] we waited for you every morning, took away your abundance and blessed you for it. See! I'm tired of my wisdom, [...] I need hands to stretch out. I want to give away and heal [...]. To do this, I have to go into the depths: as you did in the evening, [...] you abundant star! ”¹

The outcome of Nietzsche's Zarathustra story is thus not poverty and scarcity, but wealth and abundance. The desire for lavish expenditure, as essential to the radiantly selflessly consuming sun, drives Zarathustra down from his mountain, into his journey full of missteps and detours, full of exuberance, full of tragedy. Meanwhile, the draft of a “general economy,” which Bataille wrote in his work published in 1949 The ostracized part presents, as well as So Zarathustra spoke, from the sun, provided that he makes its excessively wasteful character the systematic starting point for his theory of economics. Because it is solar energy that creates a “pressure of life” all over the world² which results in the “production of ever more expensive forms of life”³ expresses. There is always too much energy, a surplus that cannot be absorbed by growth. What cannot be completely reinvested must be spent senselessly in the end. This is reflected in the luxury of nature, whose most prominent form is death. Nature's violent excesses recur on a sociological level: According to Bataille, even a society always has more resources than are necessary to simply preserve them: existence is always more than subsistence. Bataille insists that it is precisely the specific forms of waste of surpluses that make a specific society a particular society. Because the surpluses must definitely be spent — the only question is whether this is disastrous suffered, or in a way that is even enjoyable voted will. What goes beyond the mere subsistence of a society is, in Nietzsche's word, its culture.

“Idleness, pyramid building and drinking alcohol have the advantage over productive activity, the workshop or bread that the resources they consume are consumed without return, without profit,” writes Bataille in Ostracized part, “they liked Just us, they correspond to voting without distressthat we meet here. ”⁴ The radical reversal of value in Nietzsche's sense, which Bataille carries out from an economic theory point of view, lies in the fundamental primacy that he gives to the problem of spending over the need to increase the productive forces, which, according to him, also entails a complete reversal of morality. Because in this perspective, the concepts of what is considered “good” and “useful” are changing: The useless suddenly has a positive value. In this theory of economics, the emphasis is not on efficiency, but on waste. It is only when we exert ourselves senselessly that life begins, which is not just reactive, just adaptation, just servitude, but which unfolds excessively and creatively, where all singularities are allowed to roll out and are no longer subject to the compulsion to serve as economical a form of survival as possible. Bataille's “general economy” demonstrates her Nietzschean inspiration: formally as a reversal of value and on a content level as an affirmative emphasis on excessive waste processes.

II. Nietzsche's contempt for avarice, emphasis of generosity

From his earliest to his latest writings, Nietzsche's work is thus permeated by contemptuous ridicule of neediness and pettiness, at the same time by a glorifying emphasis on overflowing generosity and lavish creativity. Here are a few examples:

In An attempt at self-criticism, which Nietzsche wrote his first work in 1886, the Birth of Tragedy, prefaces, the author asks bitingly:

[T] as what the tragedy died of, the Socratism of morality, the dialectic, frugality and joy of theoretical man — how? Couldn't this very Socratism be a sign of decline [...]?⁵

In the early edition that was unpublished during his lifetime About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense Nietzsche juxtaposes a rational scientific human type acting out of necessity with an artistic and lavish intuitive type:

Where the intuitive person, such as in ancient Greece, wields his weapons more powerfully and victoriously than his counterpart, a cultural figure and the rule of art over life can be established [...]. Neither the house, nor the crotch, nor the clothing, nor the thönerne jug reveal that the need invented them [...]. While the person guided by abstractions only repels misfortune through them without forcing himself happiness from the abstractions, while striving for the greatest possible freedom from pain, the intuitive person, standing in the midst of a culture, already reaps from his intuitions, in addition to the defense of evil, a continuous influx of enlightenment, exhilaration, redemption.⁶

Nietzsche grumbles against the appreciation of work and the devaluation of exuberant pleasures in the Happy science: “Oh for this frugality of 'joy' among our educated and uneducated! Oh about the increasing suspicion of all joy! Die work More and more people are getting all their good conscience on their side: the desire for joy is already called the 'need to relax, 'and is beginning to feel ashamed of itself. ”⁷

Zarathustra makes it as clear as day: “Not your sin — your frugality cries out to heaven, your Geiz Even in your sin, cry out to heaven! ”⁸ “I love him whose soul is wasted, who does not want to be thankful and does not give back: because he always gives and does not want to preserve himself. ”⁹ “And in degeneration, we always guess where the giving soul is missing. Our path goes upwards, from species to superspecies. But we are terrified by the degenerating sense that says: “Everything for me. '”¹⁰

Nietzsche's relentless analysis of the life-hostile “ascetic ideal” in On the genealogy of morality, which is the basis of modern nihilism, is widely known.¹¹ Even the moral-critical terms of “genteel” or “aristocratic” present in late work, which seem to ostensibly bring Nietzsche close to a reactionary, chauvinist position, prove above all to an affirmation of generous self-wasting: The nobles assert themselves precisely because they are not concerned with their own advantage. Paradoxically, this also justifies their historical subjection to what Nietzsche describes as “slave morality.”

III. Ethics and politics of waste?

These few examples may be enough to document Nietzsche's hatred of need, restraint, and pettiness and his emphasis on wasteful generosity. But Nietzsche, like Bataille, speaks of this idiosyncratic ethical Valuation also a political Meaning to? Nietzsche never presented an elaborate political theory and in an attempt to derive an implicit political position from his writings, the interpreters have been biting out both their left and right molars since the beginning of the history of Nietzsche's reception. And yet there are small inconspicuous passages in Nietzsche's work that suggest a socio-political interpretation of his ethics of abundance and carefree exuberance. This is how he applies his concept of aristocracy to On the genealogy of morality in fact also sociological and suggests the possibility of a society that had communist features just as' aristocratic ': “It would be a Sense of power Not unthinkable for society, in which she could treat herself to the most noble luxury that exists for her — her injuring person with impunity to leave. “What do my freeloaders actually concern me? She could talk then. May they live and prosper: I am still strong enough to do that! '”¹²

This idea of a strong and happy community contradicts not only the political spirit of Nietzsche's contemporaries, but also everything that is opportune in today's political and social debates on domestic and foreign policy issues: Above all, there is a general need for security. The state must use expensive means of control to protect itself from external and internal threats. The coffers seem to be notoriously empty, and there are frighteningly large holes in the budget. Before someone is able to amicable even the tiniest part of social wealth, they have to overcome a lengthy, complicated bureaucratic hurdles that often involve humiliation. Whether we are looking at (alleged) threats from outside or from within, whether it is about terror and extremism, at hostile states, at competition on the world market, at the ravages of the environment or about our health: All signs point to prevention, control, caution (it is supposedly better than sorry) — and absolutely: frugality. In any case, this applies at the level of society as a whole. The luxurious excesses of the rich and super-rich, however, continue to testify, just as the destruction of countless lives in armed conflicts all over the world, to the need for senseless spending of and that Bataille's economic-theory perspective hits upon us. They also raise the question of whether we should not find and consciously choose other forms of pointless spending that we could all like, rather than in a spiral of ever more fear of our own destruction and ever greater security measures in response to unconsciously producing ever more disastrous forms of spending.

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IV. How we want to live

But if you follow Bataille, our biggest problem is that we don't even know anymore “what the words useless, sovereign, saintly mean”¹³, in this way, we are engaged in a rational discourse that only serves our reactive side and is only due to our need. I am talking about a we — and now also of an I — as if it were clear who is speaking here and who should be addressed. But that is by no means clear. Uns Is “never anything other than given in a misleading way”¹⁴. This is how a is constituted Wir Perhaps only in this ambiguity and in the question of the useless waste that it always demands of us, however loudly and emphatically we cry out for something useful when we stand like the last person on Zarathustra and squint. Perhaps we actually no longer know the meaning of the useless and sacred, as Bataille claims. However, there may be reasons to consider it.

A theatre director who had too little time to rehearse until the premiere once said to his acting ensemble: “If you have far too little time, you have to take a particularly long time. That's why we're only starting rehearsals in a few days, even though we could and actually should get started today.” This paradoxical instruction is the sovereign refusal to submit to the objective conditions of tightness and scarcity. Particularly under conditions of pressure and coercion, a particularly wasteful use of scarce resources is required. The greater the poverty, the more generous the hospitality; on the other hand, the greater the wealth, the more embarrassing the measures to secure and further increase it. Being able to waste yourself does not mean having enough resources; rather, it means not attaching the greatest, not the only, value to one's own security and self-preservation. Perhaps hospitality is more important than the need to satisfy one's hunger. Perhaps the sovereign disposal of one's own time is more important than the successful implementation of a project. Perhaps one day, following Zarathustra, we will “gladly cross the bridge”¹⁵ by finally acknowledging our own downfall. And maybe that's where a We begins that is worth living.

Sources

Bataille, Georges: The ostracized part. In: Ders. : The abolition of the economy, edited by Gerd Bergfleth. Munich 1985.

Ders. : Hegel, death and sacrifice. In: Ders. : Hegel, man and history, edited by Rita Bischof. Berlin, 2018.

Ders. : Nietzsche in the light of Marxism. In: Werner Hamacher (ed.): Nietzsche from France. Berlin & Wien, 2003, pp. 19—26.

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Jenny Kellner (born 1984) studied acting, philosophy and sociology in Hamburg and was Anti-economic communism. Bataille's philosophical challenge received his doctorate at the Berlin University of Arts. Her dissertation focuses on the Nietzschelektüre batailles. She has published numerous articles on the question of the political implications of Nietzsche and Bataille's thinking, most recently the article What does anti-politics mean in Nietzsche? in the conference proceedings Nietzsche's Perspectives on Politics (2023).

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Footnotes

1 So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 1.

2 battalions, The ostracized part, P. 55.

3 Ibid., p. 59.

4 Ibid., p. 153.

5 The birth of tragedy, An attempt at self-criticism, 1.

6 About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense, 2.

7 The happy science, 329.

8 So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 3.

9 So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 4.

10 So Zarathustra spoke, Of the gifting virtue, 1.

11 See the third treatise of The genealogy of morality.

12 On the genealogy of morality, II, 10.

13 battalions, Nietzsche/Marxism, P. 26.

14 battalions, Hegel, death, sacrifice, P. 67.

15 So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 4.

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The Desire for Waste

What significance can a practice of waste have in today's advanced rationalization? Shouldn't we rather do everything we can to increase our efficiency and productivity if we want to meet the challenges of this crisis-ridden time? But when we turn to the thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche and his ardent admirer Georges Bataille, we are sometimes exposed to an emphasis of waste that shakes our moral principles and perhaps opens us up to a new and different kind of politics than the one that seems to impose itself on us today as having no alternative.

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Like probably for many, Nietzsche was one of the first philosophers I read. When I was around 14 years old, I became interested in the books that were on my parents' shelves and which gave off a subversive air. These were virtually no philosophical works; my parents were less interested in them. The only actual philosophical work that was on our bookshelf — albeit unread — was Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, which, however, was of only limited interest to me at that age. (As a student, I only read through his refutations of the proofs of God once and they reinforced my atheism.) And there was even a Freud edition there, which, as an adolescent, I would curiously leaf through from time to time.

At around 12 years of age, however, I had already, I don't know how anymore, Sophie's World Get your hands on by Jostein Gaarder. As a result of reading this, I had developed a certain interest in philosophy and I had come into contact with Nietzsche's ideas for the first time and was fascinated by them. It was a fundamental alternative to the point of view I was familiar with, particularly to my parents' Christianity. That was actually my main topic at that time: The critical examination of my parents' Christian-conservative ideology of the time and the search for alternatives to it. I was actually interested in anything that deviated from that. For example, I read Feuerbach's Enthusiastic The essence of Christianity, Writings by and about Marx, on Buddhism. My literary heroes quickly became — after traversing Tolkien and Rowling's worlds — Kafka and Hesse. Hesse even earlier than Kafka. The allusions to Nietzsche in his works and the reading of a biography of Hesse, which emphasized Nietzsche's influence on him, finally won me in favour of Nietzsche.

My first book was, as far as I remember, So Zarathustra spoke. Even the Birth of Tragedy I read early because I was also very interested in ancient Greece. Reading experiences that can hardly be repeated today, everything was exciting and new. I saw myself as a free spirit in the Nietzsche sense, as a Nietzschean Marxist or a Marxist Nietzschean. Many of my friends back then had a similar view of the world. I remember that one of them, to whom a friend complained of heartsickness, laconically recommended it, but simply the Zarathustra Reading, then he'd get over it.

In hindsight, but already several years older, I think that my friends and I became victims of Nietzsche's manipulative rhetoric to some extent. Nietzsche — especially in the role of his prophet — suggests to the reader that they are “something special” just by reading his writings, to stand out from the “flock,” the “dumb mass.” He appeals to his narcissism. I think this aspect of his writings is one of the main reasons for their success and what makes Nietzsche really “dangerous” in some ways. Not necessarily politically, but psychologically: It provides an ideology that enables you to bury yourself in your own narcissism and thus reinforces it. You become part of a kind, paradoxical, community of “free spirits” — not to say “geniuses” — united only by the name “Nietzsche,” as Klopstock did in more innocent times. You admire Nietzsche, but in reality only yourself and your own “individuality,” “creativity,” “originality.” You don't really understand Nietzsche's texts — you get absorbed in them, live with them.

In retrospect, this phase or this mood seems very unpleasant, even a little embarrassing, but I think it was an important phase of transition and Nietzsche is able to unleash enormous creative and intellectual potential in his readers precisely through this aspect of his writings. They encourage you to be “different,” to think and do things that you would not have dared to do before, they sometimes lead to a noisy disinhibition of your own sense of greatness. And should this feeling not be confirmed by the world around you, should you, on the contrary, be offended, Nietzsche immediately offers the appropriate remedy: “What do you care about these marketplace people — you know that you are better than them? “It was not by chance Nietzsche's girlfriend and, possibly, lover Lou Andreas-Salomé who carried out the groundbreaking psychoanalytic study in 1921 Narcissism as a dual direction published and revealed the productive function of narcissism for artists and thinkers — “creators.” Yes: According to Nietzsche, you have to have a touch of narcissism in you to be able to produce something significant in art or philosophy; perhaps even in all other areas of life.

But now, as they say, I have “matured” and this whole way of thinking repulses me. Nietzsche does not heal his readers' narcissism, but reinforces it and at best offers a “wrong cure” by involving him ever more deeply in a narcissistic thought structure. However, I am now firmly convinced that true artistic, philosophical and, above all, human greatness comes from a completely different direction. I now value Rousseau higher than Nietzsche, even Christ higher than Dionysus. A Christian could easily pass by Nietzsche and think with compassion: “That poor confused person; hasn't he heard anything about Christ being resurrected 2,000 years ago? He has truly risen! “— The great artists, saints, thinkers — if “greatness” is a value in itself at all, I now doubt that too — were perhaps also self-absorbed egoists, but in their egoism they also opened themselves up to something higher that speaks to us through their works; regardless of whether you want to call it “God” or something else. They do not speak as individuals, but as generics. They don't mean they think.

But with all this, I'm not meeting Nietzsche myself. Because as soon as you have questioned your own narcissism and no longer find just a source of self-affirmation in Nietzsche's texts, you can use your philosophy truly discover and discover that it has much more and more to offer. That Nietzsche had just not been understood before. The narcissistic potential is just as hidden in his texts as the opposite if you just read them carefully. For his part, Nietzsche would only have remained a mediocre nerd like Max Stirner or Arthur Schopenhauer — whose fans may forgive me for this comment (I really appreciate both authors, but measure them to the highest standard) — if he had not taken this step himself, if he had not taken the step into the open, into the Self-overcoming would have dared.

For Nietzsche, however, the dream of superman remained the same. He couldn't finally take the step. But that is exactly what makes him so close to us and his thinking so familiar when we understand it correctly: This conflict between self-reference and openness, between humility and height, between “the last person” and “superman,” which is expressed so eloquently and harshly in his texts themselves. Reading them, we witness an inner struggle that is unparalleled in world literature — and which, I would like to say, also our Struggle is, or at least marks, a certain stage of intellectual maturity that we must all go through.

There is therefore no reason for me to reject Nietzsche or to renounce him. Since Nietzsche is no longer an “idol” for me, he is now simply a human and this only makes it interesting as a thinker and writer. Among these, he is still at the forefront for me, even though I sometimes wonder whether Hegel isn't actually more subversive than Nietzsche, at a time when “God is dead.”¹ and “Nothing is true, everything is allowed”² They have long been good as calendar sayings — or even Instagram memes. But even if you want to see Hegel's system idea as our ideal, you still have to recognize that Nietzsche is our reality. Condemning him would be self-denial; sanctifying him would be self-dumbling.

When I read Rousseau, for example, I am sometimes moved, almost carried away by the pure pathos of his writings, his profound belief in goodness, in humanity, in “nature.” But I know that today you couldn't think like that anymore, you couldn't write like that anymore. Some of Nietzsche's texts, on the other hand, appear as if they had only been written yesterday. His “delusion” is the delusion of an era that has not yet ended. He is unable to offer a cure, but he is the first sincere chronicler, witness and seer of this delusion. We, who are looking for healing, individually and collectively, must plunge ourselves into this maelstrom again and again true to our own maxim “What doesn't kill me makes me stronger”³. We just can't drown in it.

Ideas such as the “superman,” the “gifting virtue,” the “eternal return,” the “last man,” “nihilism”... The vision of a world without God and without truth. The story as an eternal struggle between Dionysus and Apollo, masters and slaves, resentment and glory, man and “woman” — all of these may be untrue ideas, but therefore far from dead, none refuted. You have to think them through again and again, look for ways out and hideouts, and be fascinated by them again and again.

In this respect, I can certainly share the polemic of thinkers such as Georg Lukács and Wolfgang Harich against Nietzsche. Yes, there is a lot of “evil” in Nietzsche, much downright ridiculous; he is a philosophical enemy of reason. But I am also taught by Carl Schmitt — and this sentence could also come from Nietzsche himself: “The enemy is our own question as a form.” — And I add his perhaps wisest words with Nietzsche himself:

“Friends, there are no friends! “So cried out the dying sage;

“Enemies, there is no enemy! “— I call, the living fool.⁴

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Footnotes

1 The Gay Science, 125.

2 On the Genealogy of Morality, III, 24.

3 Twilight of the Idols, Sayings and arrows, 8.

4 Human, All-too-human I, 376.

What does Nietzsche Mean to Me?

In the series “What does Nietzsche mean to me? “ over the next few weeks, our regular authors will each present their personal approach to Nietzsche and his thinking. Our senior editor Paul Stephan makes a start and reports on how he discovered Nietzsche as a teenager — and no longer necessarily sees himself as a “Nietzschean.”