I. The Barbarian As a Figure of Thought Between Criticism and Projection

In the history of culture and ideas, the term “barbarian” is a semantic hinge between demarcation and expectation, between identity creation and transgressive wishful thinking. In his later writings, Nietzsche gave the term a future-oriented function: The coming barbarians should not only be destroyers, but also carriers of a new strength, a regenerative cultural power. But what does this vision mean, how can it be interpreted in light of current social, political and psychological phenomena such as populism, a culture of self-expression and anti-intellectual movements?

Nietzsche's rhetoric, which is often regarded as prophetic, has a problematic tendency: The longing to “overcome” the present can itself be an expression of powerlessness and a lack of ability to adapt. The idea of radical break then replaces concrete criticism and power of action with an aestheticized apocalypse. This must be critically analysed.

The term Bárbaros Etymologically comes from ancient Greek: “Bar-bar” imitated the language of the non-Greeks. The barbarian was therefore the linguistic stranger who stood outside the cultural order. This linguistic difference gradually developed into a moral and civilizational evaluation: The barbarian became the uncivilized, the threatening, the opposite of the “we.”

This historical semantics is the origin of a structure of collective identity formation through demarcation. The barbarian serves as a negative foil through which a cultural “we,” a group identity, can be constituted. This dichotomy between the own and the foreign, internal and external, is still evident today in political discourses, such as in nationalist, anti-intellectual and populist movements. As Giorgio Agamben and Achille Mbembe have already analyzed, the figure of the barbarian is a biopolitical marker that organizes exclusion, legitimizes violence and makes the state of emergency the norm.²

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II. Nietzsche and the Ambivalence of the Barbaric

Nietzsche places the concept of barbarian in a different context. For him, the barbarian is not primarily the underdeveloped, but the unbroken. Especially in the estate and in the genealogy The barbarian appears as the bearer of a raw, unbridled will to power, which modern society has lost — through moralizing, resentment, and weakness.³ Who doesn't want to think of current presidents and despots, but also the celebrated self-presentation of their own special features on social media platforms? These barbarians of the 21st century appear to some of us as role models, as bearers of hope — but to others as warning signs. Regardless of which camp you belong to, this always creates a dialectic of delimitation.

But the longing for a cultural break, for a “stronger kind,” is not supported by a concrete theory of transformation. Rather, she flees (like Nietzsche did) into the imaginary of the break, which A priori that substitutes actual political and cultural work. The “barbarians” appear as saviors ex negativo: Its size is not designed, but hoped for. This philosophy of hope through rejection is ultimately a sign of philosophical helplessness, an apocalyptic longing for the other. But the realized dystopia of modern barbarism — visible in the narcissification of society, in threatening political gestures and in war — is neither strategically planned nor calculated nor expected: rather, it breaks over us as an unpredictable reality, grows out of complex dynamics of social development and escalates into forms that could neither be foreseen politically nor culturally in their scope.

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III. The New “Barbarians”: Populism, Narcissism and Lateral Thinking

In the present, we encounter identity-creating associations that present themselves as barbaric — in the sense of Nietzsche. The lateral thinker movement, conspiracy groups or even the followers of Trump, Putin and other authoritarian populist tendencies who believe in a heroic epic pose themselves as resistance to decadence, elites, modernity. But they remain trapped in the logic of resentment. What they criticize is often not so much the system as their own marginalization within it.

In addition to loss of meaning, post-modern society is increasingly threatened by narcissistic self-infatuation that makes any alterity disappear. It seems that the radical “barbarism” that Nietzsche had hoped for has not occurred — instead, a soft-washed, performative version of the barbarian has prevailed: the narcissistic consumer who subordinates everything else to his self-actualization path.

Nietzsche diagnosed a culture in which the great stories dry up and the transcendental foundations collapse. As a response, he did not expect a retreat, but a new kind of person who is not guided by values but sets values. Today we see the opposite: Late-modern society is dominated by a The will to image pulled through. It is no longer about being, but about being visible. People stylize themselves as a brand that only works as long as it creates desire.

Here, Nietzsche's concept of self-overcoming is perverted: The focus is no longer on growth, on risk, but on a narcissistic self-affirmation that displaces everything else — in the sense of Byung-Chul Hans. In The expulsion of the other Han describes a society that systematically excludes the foreign, the unavailable, the irritating in order to maintain a narcissistically mirrored self. In this world, the other person is no longer a challenge or an opportunity for development, but a functional object: evaluated, used, eliminated.

The new barbarian is no longer a warrior. He acts as a curator of his own visibility. His weapons are filters, hashtags, and algorithms. This barbarism is quiet, smooth, affirmative — and radical in that. It is the barbarism of optimization, in which the other person, instead of being destroyed, disappears into insignificance. Relationships become projects, people become resources, intimacy becomes a commodity.

Han is talking about the neoliberal use of the other person. The Other no longer appears as a radical difference, as resistance, but is transferred into an economic structure through a network of control, evaluation and comparability. The new narcissism is not (only) pathological — it is systemic.

Nietzsche complained of a “softening”⁴ of humans. Today we have it with a liquefaction To do: Nothing stays, everything flows, everything has to perform. The barbarians of the 21st century don't come with the sword: they hold up the selfie stick. They do not destroy buildings, but spaces of meaning.

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IV. Narcissistic Culture as a Nihilistic Continuation

One might be tempted to interpret this narcissistic culture as the exact opposite of Nietzsche's barbarians. But it is rather a consequence of the nihilism he described: When there are no longer any superordinate values, the ego becomes the sole measure. But what looks like liberation is in fact a new form of enslavement — a captivity within oneself.

Nietzsche's vision of great health, one affirmative existence, presupposes the other person: as resistance, as a border, as a dialogue partner. Narcissistic culture, on the other hand, only knows the echo. In narcissistic dynamics, the other is not integrated or surpassed — the other is reduced to its mirror function in such a way that it is eliminated. The current barbarism is therefore a barbarism of lack of relationship.

The narcissistic society is not only in the tradition of the Enlightenment, but also in its paradoxical disintegration. The emancipation of the subject has led to isolation. Social networks suggest connection but create isolation. The other person becomes a screen — his depth disappears. Proximity is simulated, while real encounters become impossible; constant visibility replaces subjectivity. People become the object of their own surveillance. The narcissistic look inward is no longer self-reflection, but a permanent scan for connectivity and recognition.

These movements are not creating a new culture. They don't call for self-overcoming, they're calling for projection. Their revolt is not a creative act; it is an expression of an inability to create. Self-empowerment is replaced by performative sacrifice, which is all too easily compensated with aggression and willingness to use violence.

The narcissistic self-presentation complex of “selfie culture” also shows an apparent subjectification, which, however, appears to be an expression of systemic powerlessness. The “Ich brand” is becoming a compensation strategy in a world without borders. However, this form of digital barbarism is not strong, but stale — a farce of authenticity.

Nietzsche criticizes the weakness of modernity, but at the same time absolutizes an inconcrete hope of a break. This dialectic results in a paradoxical relationship: The call for the “stronger kind” is an expression of the experience of not being able to design for oneself. The philosophy of superman thus becomes a philosophy of self-empowerment, which can only think of its own effectiveness through its contradiction. This voluntary task of acting competence can result in depressive solidification, in a passive-aggressive attitude of refusal towards the stranger, while at the same time idealizing the “other”, which allows identification, stranger, in fantasies of salvation.

Instead of in the mode of concrete practice, the contemporary barbarian conjurer also persists in an aesthetic of revolution. The productive power of philosophy is replaced by a mythology of rupture. Walter Benjamin called this “left-wing melancholy”: the adherence to revolutionary gestures without revolutionary effect.⁵

Nietzsche's idea of a “stronger kind” remains in the balance between overcoming fantasies and resignation of cultural criticism. The idea that “only barbarians can save us” is a refusal to adapt: The present is not thought of as formable, but as decadent, decaying, doomed to destruction.

However, a contemporary philosophy must be critiqued and be able to design. The view of the “barbaric” must not degenerate into a mythological figure, but must serve as a mirror: What do we lack that we long for destruction? Why do we think that strength that we no longer find within ourselves can only come from outside?

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V. The Possibility of a New Barbarism: Transformation Rather Than Transgression

Instead of a return to violence or symbolic individualism, what is needed today is perhaps a radical rehabilitation of others. The “barbarian” of the present day could not be the one who destroys, but the one who refuses total instrumentalization — who embodies the other in his existence: unavailability, ambivalence, resistance.

A new barbarism would have to break the systems of evaluation. It should counter the narcissistic gaze with silence. Perhaps it is the weak, the ambivalent, the inadequate who would be able to make a new form of relationship possible today — not through power, but through presence. A “barbaric ethic” would then not be an ethic of violence, but an ethic of non-functioning.

The figure of the barbarian historically refers to exclusion, symbolic violence — and at the same time to the recurring hope of a new beginning. Nietzsche philosophically exaggerated this figure and turned it into a projection screen for overcoming modernity. But there is a double risk in this exaggeration: The renewal is being externalized — it should come from outside, in the form of the “other person.” And it is aestheticized — as a heroic act, as the pathos of rupture.

An ethics of transformation argues against this fractional thinking: It takes what exists seriously, not because it is good, but because it is real. Transformation doesn't start with violence. It starts with attention. It is a quiet, lengthy, conflictual process that allows irritation and withstands ambivalences. In contrast to the transgressive gesture, which disregards the law, transformation looks for other rules, for other ways of dealing with power, vulnerability, and responsibility.

Transformation means seeing the other person as an opportunity rather than as an obstacle. It means thinking of yourself as a relationship beyond presentation as a brand. And it means not numbing the pain of the present with the hope of a utopian future: The work of change can be started out of pain. It is no less radical than the revolution — but it is slower, deeper, and more lasting.

What we need today are not barbarians, but transformers: people who are ready to continue building with the ruins of modernity — without cynicism, without promises of salvation, with a sense of what is possible in reality. This requires not heroic break, but radical patience, not apocalypse, but cultural work. The real strength lies not in the fervor of revolution, but in the ability to persist — and in the art of not only hoping but also acting.

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Marion Friedrich, born in 1973 in Germany, studied psychology in La Laguna (Spain) and then philosophy in Augsburg (Germany). In her doctoral studies at the University of Augsburg, she focused in particular on epistemological questions of neurophilosophy and noetic anthropology. Since 2007, in addition to her psychotherapeutic work, she has been teaching in her own humanistic practice at the University of Augsburg with a focus on epistemology, language philosophy, theories of emotion and artificial intelligence. Her current research interests include the philosophy of mind, AI ethics and the psychology of love. In 2024 she published the volume written together with Joachim Rathmann and Uwe Voigt Ego or eco? Narcissism and the ecological crisis with Reclam.

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Sources

Agamben, Giorgio: Homo Sacer. Sovereign power and naked life. Frankfurt am Main 2002.

Benjamin, Walter: Collected Writings III. Frankfurt am Main 1991.

Han, Byung-chul: The expulsion of the other person. Society, perception and communication today. Frankfurt am Main 2016.

Ders. : psychopolitics. Neoliberalism and the new techniques of power. Frankfurt am Main 2014.

Mbembe, Achille: Critique of black reason. Berlin 2017.

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The article image was created by the author using ChatGPT.

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Footnotes

1: Subsequent fragments 1887 11 [31].

2: Cf. Agamben, Homo Sacer and Mbembe Critique of black reason.

3: See, among others Subsequent fragments 1885 34 [112] and On the genealogy of morality, Paragraph I, 11 and I, 16.

4: See e.g. Subsequent fragments 1887 10 [2].

The Barbarians of the 21st Century

Narcissism, Apocalypse, and the Absence of Other

The diagnosis of our time: not heroic barbarians, but selfie warriors. This essay, which won the second place at this year's Kingfisher Award (link), explores Nietzsche's vision of the”stronger type”¹ and shows how it is turned into its opposite in a narcissistic culture — apocalypse as a pose, the Other as a blind spot. But instead of the big break, another option opens up: a “barbaric ethic” of refusal, of ambivalence, of relationship. Who are the true barbarians of the 21st century — and do we need them anyway?

1. Introduction: The Question of the Coming Humans

Friedrich Nietzsche was a thinker of thresholds, of transitions, of upheavals. His philosophy is not addressed to the guardians of the status quo, but to the promise of another kind of human being. It is no coincidence that he asks in one of his late fragments: “Where are the barbarians of the twentieth century?” This question is far more than cultural-critical polemic. It expresses his deep dissatisfaction with the European culture of his time, which he perceived as decadent, complacent, and exhausted.

For Nietzsche, “barbarians” did not mean those who relapse into savagery, but those who are prepared to destroy the old in order to make the new possible. They are not the breakers of civilization, but its overcomers.

Today, 125 years after Nietzsche’s death, this question arises once more — indeed, more urgently than ever: Where are the barbarians of the twenty-first century? And above all: what would they have to be like in order to correspond to Nietzsche’s spirit?

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2. The False Barbarian: Populism, Violence, Regression

The temptation is great to look for the barbarians at the political margins or extremes — among autocrats, demagogues, and agitators. Many of them indeed stage themselves as “system breakers,” as “enemies of the elites,” or as saviors of some imagined originality. But Nietzsche would hardly have allied himself with them. He was no friend of the masses, no apologist of ressentiment, no defender of the dull “will of the people.” On the contrary: he was an elitist thinker — though not in terms of social origin, but of intellectual incorruptibility.

The barbarian Nietzsche longed for does not act out of hatred, but out of abundance. He destroys not out of frustration, but out of creative power. From this perspective, the nationalist and authoritarian movements of our time are not barbarians but phenomena of regression. They do not seek to create something new, but to restore something old. They are not interested in becoming, but in reestablishing an imagined yesterday.

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3. The Exhaustion of Values

Nietzsche diagnosed the “death of God” as the end of a metaphysical order that had shaped Western thought for centuries. For him, this death was not a reason for mourning but a challenge: the old values have lost their binding force, and it is now up to human beings themselves to create new ones. But it is precisely at this point that the present hesitates.

The “last man,” whom Nietzsche caricatures in the preface to Thus Spoke Zarathustra, has taken over: comfortable, security-oriented, ironic, and world-weary. The possibility of the radically new is perceived as a risk, not as a promise.

In a culture of constant self-optimization, of digitalized life, and of moral hyper-surveillance, there is little space for what Nietzsche called “chaos” — the chaos from which a dancing star can be born. Everything is regulated, measured, evaluated. But nothing is dared any longer.

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4. The True Barbarians: Creators of the Future

Nietzsche’s barbarians are figures of departure. They come “from the future” and bring with them something that still eludes the present: new values, new perspectives, new possibilities of life. One should not imagine these new humans as superheroes or geniuses. Perhaps they are eccentric, perhaps marginalized. Perhaps they act not loudly, but persistently. But they share one trait: a radical turning away from what is inherited.

You will not find them on talk shows, not in party manifestos, not in influencer videos. They cannot be integrated, because their thinking lies beyond what can be integrated. Perhaps they are artists who deliberately refuse commodification. Perhaps philosophers who do not proclaim truth but provoke movements of thought. Perhaps solitary individuals who experiment with new forms of community, work, and intimacy — without ideological prescriptions.

Their barbarism consists not in violence, but in intransigence. Not in destruction, but in birth.

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5. What Does It Mean to Be a Barbarian?

To be a barbarian in the twenty-first century means: not to play along. It means withdrawing from constant surveillance, from digital conformism, from moral rigorism. It means — as Nietzsche demanded — “to resist the temptation of the times, not to submit to them.”

A barbarian thinks across the grain, not because it is fashionable, but because he sees differently. He does not live outside society, but neither within it — rather, beyond its self-evidence.

The barbarians can also be readers of Nietzsche, provided they do not venerate him as a saint, but take him as a demolition expert. They use his hammer not to shatter others, but to test their own idols.

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6. Outlook: Thinking the Unheard

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” This oft-quoted Nietzsche sentence is not poetic ornament, but a declaration of war against the complacency of our culture. The concept of chaos in Nietzsche is never nihilistic; it means openness, becoming, the not-yet-determined.

The barbarian is the one who does not fear this state, but cultivates it.

So — where are the barbarians of the twenty-first century? Perhaps they are not yet visible. Perhaps they are still turned inward. Perhaps they are reading this very text. What they make of it will show whether they are truly barbarians — or merely administrators of modernity’s legacy.

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Where Are the Barbarians of the 21st Century?

An Essay in the Spirit of Nietzsche

On August 25, we published an interview, conducted by our author Paul Stephan, with the AI tool Chat GPT (link). In it, he asked the software, among other things, to write him an essay on the question of this year's Kingfisher Award: “Where are the barbarians of the 21st century? “(link). As an experiment, we presented the text to the five-person jury of the award, consisting of Lukas Meisner, Hans-Martin Schönherr-Mann, Theodor Schild, Natalie Schulte and Paul Stephan himself — and it was surprisingly well received: In the preliminary round, it achieved fourth place on points and would therefore have made it into the shortlist by a hair. Only Natalie Schulte had drawn suspicion and presented the text to an AI checker, which, however, did not recognize it. — Would you have thought the text was human?

The essays from this year's winners will be published in the coming weeks. Did they do it better than AI, as we believe?

We deliberately refrained from editing the text, but published it exactly as the program spit it out for us. The article image is also from it.

As a part of this experiment, the subsequent translation has also been done by ChatGPT itself and we publish it without any alterations.

I. Nietzsche and Nihilism

Paul Stephan: Dear Professor Stegmaier, it is probably no exaggeration to describe you as a luminary in Nietzsche philosophical research. In addition to countless essays, you have written in particular an extremely readable Junius introduction to Nietzsche's thinking, which can be translated into English free of charge here can download, as well as an extensive interpretation of the so important fifth book of Happy science (Nietzsche's liberation of philosophy, 2011), the study Orientation in nihilism. Luhmann meets Nietzsche (2016), a collection of essays available free of charge on the Internet entitled Europe in ghost war. Studies on Nietzsche (2018, link) and an interpretation of his estate (Nietzsche at work, 2022) — just to name the perhaps most important. There are also countless anthologies edited by you. Last but not least, you were the managing editor of the important trade journal for 18 years Nietzsche studies and the series of publications Monographs and texts on Nietzsche research. When you look back on all your years of “involvement” with Nietzsche, unless the word is an understatement: What does his central insight seem to you to be? What is the essential lesson that you can and should learn when reading Nietzsche's writings — which, as you yourself write in the introduction to your mentioned introduction to his thinking, are easy to read but difficult to understand?

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Werner Stegmaier: Nietzsche's bravest and central insight was, it seems to me that nihilism, according to which it is nothing with the seemingly highest values and all absolute certainties, is a “normal state,” as he recently wrote over a long record of it with double underlining.¹ There is also nothing to overcome, as Heidegger in particular said. According to Nietzsche, the nihilism of Christianity and metaphysics, which had nothing to do with the truly livable values, overcame themselves by cultivating a sense of truth with their ascetic ideal which finally turned against themselves and made them implausible. This insight has had a tremendous liberating effect. According to Nietzsche, in the “revaluation of all values,” which was now up to everyone to decide for themselves which values they wanted to uphold, and in philosophy, if you were brave enough to do so, you could start with everything anew, in content as well as in forms. We still live on it today.

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PS: Nietzsche undoubtedly sees nihilism as a great opportunity, as a necessary stage of transition for a new culture. But not also as a danger, as a loss of orientation in a world that no longer has objective orientations to offer? I'm just thinking of Nietzsche's perhaps most famous aphorism, the 125. the Happy science.

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WS: Yes, Nietzsche makes a “great person” — a crazy person in the former sense — scream out: “Where is God? I want to tell you! We killed him, — you and I! We're all his killers! “, but at the same time also ask him:

But how did we do it? How were we able to drink the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we released this earth from its sun? Where is it heading now? Where are we heading? Away from all suns? Don't we keep falling? And backwards, sideways, forwards, to all sides? Is there still an up and a down? Are we not mistaken as if by infinite nothingness? Doesn't empty space breathe on us?

In spatial metaphors, this great person conjures up a new and complete disorientation in an infinite void in which you can no longer hold on to anything. At the beginning of Book V of Happy science, which Nietzsche added five years later, he takes up in his own name the “greatest recent event — that 'God is dead, '” clarifying “that faith in the Christian God has become implausible,” and paints what you ask for, a “long abundance and sequence of abort, destruction, fall, revolution,” which is now imminent with nihilism, “an atomization,” which is now imminent with nihilism, “an atomization Eclipses and eclipses whose parallels have probably never existed on Earth yet”². A little later, in the famous Lenzerheide recording, in which he attempts to overview and organize his assessment of nihilism, he adds that there will be a “will to destroy” and “self-destruction,” with which the now clueless and disoriented would “breed their own executioners.”³ And with that, you could easily identify the Germans and the Russians as well as their leaders Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. For Nietzsche, who might have foreseen something like this but of course could not foresee it, this was just a “crisis” that would “purify” and lead to fundamentally new social conditions. For philosophers like him, however, it would bring “a new kind of light, happiness, relief, exhilaration, encouragement, dawn that is difficult to describe.” There is a great “gratitude” in him that “the horizon is now clear again,” “every risk of the discerning person is allowed again” and “the sea, our Meer” lay there open again. For Nietzsche, philosophy did not stand above world events as mere theory, but was directly integrated into it, just as every orientation is integrated into it, because it always has a point of view in it and also influences it itself. Nietzsche believed that philosophy could set new goals and pave the way for world events, and his philosophy may have actually done so.  

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PS: What new goals and paths do you have in mind?

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WS: Nietzsche set them as big as possible: Nihilism, he assumed, will free (European) humanity to higher development, release it from the shackles of the ascetic ideals of Christianity so that it can develop its real and strong opportunities anew. That does not mean, as some “transhumanists” now believe, that everyone should become superhumans.⁴ One should just not assume that humanity would have already achieved its goal if it fulfilled those ideals, and that the “last” person, now definitely established, could bask in his happiness. According to a famous Nietzsche phrase, the human being is “the Not yet identified thiers”⁵, which cannot help but develop much faster than other animals due to its extraordinary intellectual abilities. For Nietzsche, however, this can only happen in an evolutionary way, through constant interaction between individuals. Evolution produces an enormous wealth of variants for him, and for higher development it depends on the particularly “successful cases” (ibid.). They always remained exceptions, but they could hardly venture out as long as all, in accordance with the old “Equal before God” (ibid.), are as equal as possible in everything and should therefore definitely be equated. In this way, “the type of 'human' is recorded at a lower level” (ibid.) and the major problems that now arise, namely, first and foremost “create better conditions for the development of people, their nutrition, education, education, education, economic administration of the earth as a whole, weigh up and use the forces of people in general.”⁶, could not be tackled in this way in a promising way. Instead, “the completed original folk cultures” must⁷ overcome, “one that exceeds all previous degrees Knowledge of the conditions of culture as a scientific measure for ecumenical goals”⁸ are achieved that span the whole world, and first of all Europe, which Nietzsche still sees in a leading role here, unites and the Jew⁹ In doing so, their pioneering role is acknowledged. For “such a conscious overall government”¹⁰ The Earth needs “higher people” who, with superior orientation, could set new goals for the world as a whole. And Nietzsche may have had a mistaken world politician like Kaiser Wilhelm II, but not yet faced the worldwide environmental destruction caused by industrialization, the threat of nuclear world wars and the now explosive, extreme distribution of wealth with which we are confronted, among many other global problems. On the other hand, “[d] he older morality, in particular the Kant's, [which] [requires] actions from the individual, which are desired from all people” (ibid.), now as “a nice naive thing” (ibid.): “[A] l whether everyone would know without further ado in which course of action the whole of humanity is good, i.e. which actions are actually desirable” (ibid.). In such contexts, Nietzsche often used a language that was later contaminated by the Nazis, and intensified it aggressively the less people wanted to hear him. However, this should not obscure his vision.

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II. Nietzsche's Politics

PS: I see a close connection to Marxism in this aspect of Nietzsche's philosophy. There is also a remarkable place in Ecce homo, where he summarizes his program as follows:

My task to prepare humanity for a moment of supreme self-reflection, a big noonWhere she looks back and looks out, where she emerges from the reign of chance and the priest and the question of why? , of what for? for the first time as a whole poses —, this task necessarily follows from the insight that humanity not It is on the right track of its own accord that she is absolutely not It is divinely ruled that, precisely under their most sacred values, the instinct of negation, corruption, the décadence instinct has acted seductively.¹¹

Although you could even think of the UN. While the difference may be that Nietzsche does not exactly democratically design this “conscious overall government.” But perhaps that is simply realistic and such comprehensive social and cultural reforms must be initiated by small avant-gardes. Despite its claim, Marxism, in its practical implementation, was ironically closer to Nietzsche than to Marx in this respect; and the UN is also perceived by many as elitist and “aloof.” In view of the numerous fundamental human problems with which we are in fact currently confronted, do you think that we should build on this' elitist 'model of social transformation more openly? Or could a radical transformation also be made more democratic than Nietzsche suggests?

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WS: In fact, the outstanding position from Ecce homo Describes once again in terms of Morgenröthe, to which it applies what Nietzsche later calls “nihilism”: the need for a complete reorientation of philosophy after the highest metaphysical Christian priestly values have proven to be fundamentally baseless. Humanity must now remember that it is not a higher power that sets its goals, but that it must set goals for itself if it does not want to wander around senselessly. Instead of “nihilism,” Nietzsche recently preferred the term “décadence”, which appeared in France — out of disappointment with the old meanings, one only sees decay, only negates. That continues to this day. But it was precisely metaphysics and Christianity that concealed the negative by setting the “higher” values against the values actually worth living in, which they denied or even disparaged them. Philosophers have often been up to now, Nietzsche adds in the same passage,”hid Priest.” They constructed “the salvation of the soul” from “contempt for the body” and its healthy ““egoism.” But there are now strong opposition movements. Nietzsche also speaks here, we must not conceal this, of the “degeneration of the whole, of humanity,” but without, like the Nazis, who of course gladly took up this, to combine it with biological racism; the Nazi ideology would have sharply rejected Nietzsche. Even in his time, he clearly recognized himself as an anti-nationalist, anti-socialist and anti-Semite.

Nietzsche barely noticed the Marxism of that time; he does not even mention the name Marx (and vice versa). If he had paid attention to Marx, he would probably have taken on a bold new goal for humanity, in the “fight against the morality of self-determination,” which he also led himself — this is how the aphorism quoted above ends. Both spoke of “alienation,” and both were able to draw on Ludwig Feuerbach, who saw alienation morality in Christianity: Everything good about people is projected onto God and God's Son; the bad remains with people themselves. But Marx saw in the development of (European) humanity, and Nietzsche would not have participated, a self-directed course predetermined by the production relations of the emerging industrial society, which would eventually lead to the revolution of the proletariat. For Nietzsche, this would only have been a different kind of external determination. He saw that when it comes to the major human problems mentioned above, that we spoke of, even in democracy, which he described as “unstoppable.”¹² held, in all areas not without orientational leaders — not domineering and selfish autocrats. Elites may and must also develop over time, but this is certainly possible in democratic selection processes. “Elitist” has also become a fighting term; “elite,” also adopted from French in the 18th century, meant “selection of the best.” If they — in the aristocracy, in the military, in business and in banking — can form a caste, for example through targeted marriage policies, and take on permanent positions of power, they appear “detached.” But even that has clearly outlived itself; democracy has successfully resisted it.

Today, you no longer have to be descended from an elite caste — Nietzsche also played with this idea when he looked at the Indian “Manu Code of Law” with its humanly “noble values everywhere,” his “yes to life.”¹³ —, in order to give humanity new ideas for a prudent and far-sighted orientation for its future, and these ideas too must first prevail in a democratic process. In nihilism as a normal state is like an “experimental philosophy”¹⁴ An “experimental ethic” is also popular — over “long centuries”¹⁵ away. What works in it is then enshrined in norms, values and laws and, if that helps, revelations are also attributed so that we can stick to them for now, and this is where the 'priests' come into play again. On the other hand, according to Nietzsche, “[d] he most spiritual people find Strongest, [...] their happiness, in which Andre would find their downfall: in the labyrinth” (ibid.) — i.e. where others can no longer orient themselves —, “in harshness against themselves and others, in attempt; their pleasure is self-conquest: ascetism becomes nature, need, instinct” (ibid.) — we would say today, to a sense of orientation that they also share with others be able to mediate. Nietzsche also vaguely grants them other “rights” and “privileges” due to their higher “responsibility” — we would no longer go along with them today; at least legal privileges have been overtaken by the democratic procedures that have now been established. Ideas and people with ideas must remain competitive if they are to be successful. Effective governance, particularly in the major issues, which is now expected and demanded everywhere, has not become easier, but decisions can thus be more approved and enforced more sustainably.

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III. The Philosophy of Orientation

PS: This is perhaps a good point to finally talk about your own thinking, which has been revolving around the concept of “orientation” for some time now. In 2008, you published the extensive work philosophy of orientation, and since then, numerous publications have been added to this concept. Since then, this idea has been so well received that even its own foundation, the Foundation for Philosophical Orientation, founded in 2019, can also be downloaded free of charge on its website (link), dedicated to popularizing and discussing this term. Would you like to outline what you are interested in and how you see Nietzsche as a pioneer of this new philosophy?

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WS: Sure, I've already tried to explain Nietzsche's philosophies in terms of orientation. For him, as I said, nihilism meant an extremely profound and difficult to endure disorientation of the entire European-educated humanity as it lost faith in Christianity and metaphysics. As a result, everyone wanted to 'overcome' nihilism — and in doing so somehow return to the absolute certainties of the old type. I have always found Nietzsche's philosophizing liberating — towards a comprehensively new philosophical orientation in nihilism as a “normal state.” I saw more and more clearly that the terms of the great philosophical tradition were no longer suitable for such a reorientation. After thoroughly studying Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein and Heidegger, I dedicated my dissertation to the basic concept of metaphysics, the concept of substance.¹⁶ It revealed that on the way from Aristotle via Descartes and Spinoza to Leibniz and Kant himself, “substance” loses the sense of a fixed and absolutely certain existence and becomes a mere category with the function of finding support in Heraclitic becoming, but a hold on time that shifts over time. I then called this “fluctuation” and wrote my doctoral thesis on Dilthey and Nietzsche, in whose work this fluctuation develops in different ways.¹⁷ With regard to the evolution of humans and then of humans in their history, we expect today that all concepts, including those of philosophy, are and must be constantly in flux if they are to move with the times. Nietzsche also pointed out this with his “The form is fluid, but the 'meaning' is even more...”¹⁸ constantly squeezed. Because of compilation The will to power, who had organized Nietzsche's rather biased sister very amicably after his death, Heidegger, on the other hand, stylized Nietzsche's philosophizing into a new metaphysics of the will to power, which drives all previous metaphysics to the extreme and therewith should have brought to an end — an interpretation that has been demonstrably failed today, but disastrous in its worldwide impact. It served Heidegger primarily to reserve a “different start” in Western philosophizing. He tried this with the resumed question of the “meaning of being,” which he considered to be the original and actual of philosophy and which he tailored in his later work to simply listening to the belonging of human existence to an indeterminate “Seyn.” But it is still unclear what to do with it. With Heidegger himself, it was compatible with a deep commitment to National Socialism and with a radical critique of technology that seems monstrous today.

If nihilism is about major disorientation, you may have to start with it instead and then with the concept of orientation itself. Since Moses Mendelssohn and Immanuel Kant introduced him to philosophy in the course of a religious-philosophical dispute 250 years ago (this is a comparatively short time compared to the concept of substance, which is almost 2,500 years old), it had spread more and more and entered into common language usage. It was just that he had not yet really made it into philosophy: Nietzsche knew him, but barely used him, Wittgenstein already more, Heidegger began it in his early work Being and time To address, Jaspers immediately shortened it back to the orientation of philosophy in and through the sciences. If you now use and therefore need the concept of orientation everywhere, it is because you have to reorient yourself more or less at any time, in every new situation and no longer have absolute certainties, only clues. There is still much more to how we navigate the infinitely complicated reality with our limited equipment than you initially perceive and think, but nothing metaphysical, just more complex. This is true in astronomy, physics and biology as well as in everyday communication, politics, law, journalism, etc. This is most noticeable in criminology, from which television evenings largely live: It is always exciting to see what else could come out after the first inspection. Philosophically speaking, we only have clues everywhere for what we call “being,” “reality,” “truth,” points that we stick to for the time being and until further notice. And it is also becoming increasingly clear to everyone that everyone always orientates themselves from a point of view within limited horizons and perspectives, each with limited orientation skills, i.e. all orientation is ultimately individual. We must come to terms with this, and obviously we can. We can no longer be with an inherently existing existence, but must start with the orientation that is possible for us in our world. And you can no longer rely on the same common sense as you did 200 years ago, but you have to see how what you call “reasonable” comes about in communication. That can be very diverse.

What you observe in order to orient yourself is recorded in signs and interpreted in languages, which in turn can be interpreted differently in different situations and from different points of view. In the end, as the late Wittgenstein put it succinctly, you never know what the other person means with your signs and you yourself with your own signs.¹⁹ In all orientation, that means, possible disorientation plays a role. We must start from this today, and do so by giving our own orientation and our orientation towards each other, including in philosophy, scope for understanding everywhere. And Nietzsche said that too, in Beyond good and evil (No. 27; link), already expelled.

With the concepts of previous theory of knowledge, decision and action, you really have to start over if you want to understand how you understand the world and each other. First of all, this must be done descriptively, and now that the attachment to the otherworldly has proved indefensible, there is no longer a need for the distant pathos of preachers, in which philosophers like to indulge so much. Philosophy only becomes plausible if it stays close to everyday experiences. I am also trying, with the late Wittgenstein, “to return the words from their metaphysical ones back to their everyday use.”²⁰, and yet to keep it at the level that philosophy has developed over its thousands of years of history.

The beginning of philosophizing seems simple because somewhere, on a small or large scale, you are disoriented, do not know your way around and want to get out of disorientation. It doesn't need more. What you then find are those clues to which there are always alternatives, so that you remain at a distance from them, only ever stick to them for the time being and therefore remain free to face them. Orientation on time could be the meaning of the big question of 'being and time', with which you can also do something in everyday life. This temporary orientation certainly includes philosophers “giving orientation”, also in the form of ethics with which they try to make the world better than it appears to them now. But this is also clearly always happening from specific points of view and on time, and here, too, there are always plausible alternatives.

What remains of the nihilism that Nietzsche proclaimed is the constantly unsettling uncertainty that things could always be different, that you could always see things differently from how you perceive them from your perspective. This keeps watchful for the possibility of other views. How much we need guidance because we constantly have to deal with situations in which we are only insufficiently familiar is nowhere more obvious than in the global crises that are now catching up with us. In the USA, people typically dare to do more. But as I am now experiencing, even in this country, more and more people, personally, in their professions and in the sciences they pursue, and also in their philosophizing, are able to make a new start in orientation themselves, without which there is nowhere. I'm happy about that.

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IV. Philosopher's Hideouts

PS: Thank you very much for this comprehensive explanation of your own approach, which I hope will have a broad impact. Of course, this statement would provoke numerous inquiries — but perhaps we will have to make up for this on another occasion. Instead, I would like to round off this exchange with a somewhat different question: Nietzsche is a philosopher who speaks to a wide audience as strongly as few others, if only because of his lively style. Because people feel personally addressed by him; not only on an intellectual level, but not least on an emotional level. If I may now address not only the thinker, but also the person Stegmaier, with all his life experience: Is there a position at Nietzsche that has particularly touched you personally, that may have even shaped your personal career and that you would like to share with us?

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WS: Yes, the position does exist and I would also like to share it with you at the end of our interview, for which I would like to thank you very much. It is about the “philosopher claim to wisdom“, and you have to listen to them — Nietzsche was just 43 years old when he published it, I'll be 80 soon — with a dash of irony. Often, he writes in Book V of Happy science (No. 359; link), which I appreciate so much, is the claim to wisdom, i.e. to philosophical teaching saturated with rich life experience,

a philosopher's hiding place, behind which he saves himself from fatigue, old age, cold, hardening, as a feeling of the near end, as the cleverness of that instinct that animals have before death — they go aside, become silent, choose solitude, hide in caves, become wisely... How? Does a philosopher's hideout suggest — the spirit? —

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Werner Stegmaier, born on July 19, 1946 in Ludwigsburg, was professor of philosophy with a focus on practical philosophy at the University of Greifswald from 1994 to 2011. From 1999 to 2017, he was co-editor of Nietzsche studies. International Yearbook for Nietzsche Research, the most renowned body of international Nietzsche research, as well as the important series of publications Monographs and texts on Nietzsche research. He published numerous monographs and anthologies on Nietzsche's philosophy and philosophy in general, including Philosophy of orientation (2008), Nietzsche's introduction (2011) and Luhmann meets Nietzsche. Orientation in nihilism (2016) and recently Wittgenstein's orientation. Assurance techniques (2025). The development of the “philosophy of orientation” he founded is his current focus of work. Further information about him and his work can also be found on his personal website: https://stegmaier-orientierung.com/

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Footnotes

1: Cf. abatement 1887, 9 [35]. In another place in the estate (1887, 9 [60]), it says: “Nihilism as a normal phenomenon.” Here too, “as a normal phenomenon” is added later.

2: The happy science, Aph 343.

3: Cf. abatement 1887 5 [71].

4: Editor's note: See also the article Look, I'm teaching you the transhumanist by Jörg Scheller (link).

5: Beyond good and evil, Aph 62.

6: Human, all-too-human, Vol. I, Aph. 24.

7: Ibid. See also the previous section (link).

8: Human, all-too-human, Vol. I, Aph. 25.

9: Cf. Beyond good and evil, Aph 251.

10: Human, all-too-human, Vol. I, Aph. 25.

11: Ecce Homo, Dawn, No. 2.

12: Human, all-too-human, Vol. II, The Wanderer and His Shadow, Aph 275.

13: The Antichrist, No. 56 & 57.

14: abatement 1888 16 [32].

15: The Antichrist, No. 57.

16: substance. Basic concept of metaphysics (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt 1977).

17: The philosophy of fluctuation. Dilthey and Nietzsche (Göttingen 1992).

18: On the genealogy of morality II, no 12.

19: Cf. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, SECTION 504.

20: Ibid., § 116.

Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Orientation

In Conversation with Werner Stegmaier

On the 125th anniversary of Nietzsche's death on August 25, we spoke with two of the most internationally recognized Nietzsche experts, Andreas Urs Sommer and Werner Stegmaier. While the conversation with Sommer (link) focused primarily on Nietzsche's life, we spoke with the latter about his thinking, its topicality and Stegmaier's own “philosophy of orientation.” What are Nietzsche's central insights? And how do they help us to find our way in the present time? What does his concept of “nihilism” mean? And what are the political implications of his philosophy?

I. From Commentary to Biography

Paul Stephan: Dear Professor Sommer, first of all, thank you very much for agreeing to this interview. It is hardly an understatement to call you one of the leading Nietzsche researchers of all. In addition to many other things, you are in particular the head of the Nietzsche Commentary Research Center at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and have contributed several volumes to this important commentary yourself.¹ Now you are venturing into a new major project, namely a new scientific biography of Nietzsche. Currently, we're starting this email dialogue on 4/4/2025, you're still working on it; by the time you publish this conversation, you'll probably have already completed it, if it hasn't even been published already. Even though you would be a worthy interlocutor on probably all aspects of Nietzsche's life, work and impact, this ongoing project should therefore become the main subject of this exchange.

My first question, which is addressed to you in this regard, may be a bit provocative, but it certainly won't surprise you. I would like to say that there is probably no other philosopher as there are as many biographies as about Nietzsche. In addition to countless popular science accounts of his life, the three-volume scientific biography of Curt Paul Janz has been available for many years — even offside topics such as Nietzsche's sexuality or his possible illness of syphilis have become the subject of extensive monographs. In which areas do you want to stand out from your predecessors? Where do you hope to be able to set new accents?

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Andreas Urs Sommer: Unfortunately, I have to reduce the expectations that have now aroused a bit and thank you, dear Mr. Stephan, for the opportunity to interview him, even though his subject matter, the Nietzsche biography, has by no means been completed. It won't be the same even on Nietzsche's 181st birthday on 15/10/2025. In fact, the publisher — it is C. H. Beck in Munich — had originally agreed on a manuscript submission deadline at the end of last year, which I was unfortunately unable to meet due to the various other obligations you mentioned. The quarter-round anniversary of death should not be an occasion to rush with the book, which is supposed to have a hand and foot — and perhaps a few more body parts. C.H. Beck Verlag has kindly given me more time to think and write. Because we are in a very peculiar situation: On the one hand, the international research activities on Nietzsche are immense, and on the other hand, since the work of Curt Paul Janz, which you mention, no comprehensive Nietzsche biography has been published that would actually be drawn from current research. If you wanted to exaggerate it, you could say: Since 1978, all biographers have written off Janz, who has also diligently copied it himself: the first volume of his biography is based on Richard Blunck: Frederick Nietzsche. Childhood and youth from 1953 — a book that was actually finished in 1945 and still had to be denazified, as it was originally written in the Nazi haze.

In short: On the one hand, there is a rich wealth of recent research findings; on the other hand, they have never been synthetically cast into a generally readable biography. In addition, the biography will pursue a decidedly philosophical claim: It wants to encourage people to think.

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PS: It is of course very understandable that you do not want to rush such a major project. Especially since Nietzsche also in the Preface to Morgenröthe writes: “Such a book, such a problem, is in no hurry; moreover, we are both friends of Lento, as well as I am my book. It is not for nothing that you were a philologist; you may still be, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading: — at last you also write slowly. ”² Perhaps that would also be one of the lessons you could learn from Nietzsche? Not to be stressed by the demands of an overheated and hectic present and yourself seine Take time to learn, in accordance with the own Speed to live?

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AUS: You can certainly include this advice in the recipe book of successful life — and Nietzsche would certainly have done it too, like many thinkers before him. Cheerful composure in the face of the supposedly super-urgent demands of the day should never be wrong. However, as an art of life oracle, Nietzsche is often just a caricature of himself, especially when you assign commonplaces to him. He himself did not follow the advice of slow reading — he read superficially, quickly, criss-cross and always focused on his own intellectual needs. Still to the advice of slow writing. He likes to describe how he — for example at So Zarathustra spoke — got into an eruptive writing frenzy.³ Readers with background knowledge often notice the breathlessness, even the hasty nature of his writing activities, while he then gets into “più lento” in phases. Nietzsche does not secrete a continuous flow of writing — he ticks wild when writing.

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PS: Yes, Nietzsche repeatedly encounters a huge discrepancy between life and work, between the myth that Nietzsche especially in his supposed “autobiography” Ecce homo created around himself and which continues to be spun on and on to this day and for what he really was. How do you deal with this obvious contradiction when writing your biography? Is it even possible to go beyond the thicket of anecdotes and legends to an “authentic Nietzsche”? And does the established Nietzsche image have to be completely revised in some parts in the light of recent research? Is it time to finally apply Nietzsche's famous “hammer” to perhaps his most stubborn creation: the “Nietzsche brand”; the “idol” of himself that he and after him created his countless disciples and enemies?

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AUS: Since he invented himself writing as a child and as a teenager, Nietzsche has been engaged in constant autobiographical self-reflection: We have countless testimonies about him in which he describes his life, even from very early times, when there was apparently no life at all to describe. The biographer is well advised to be suspicious of these personal testimonies — in particular of the parade horse in the stable of Nietzsche's autobiographical work complex, created in 1888 Ecce homo. This work is not simply an “autobiography,” but a text with a crystal-clear objective, namely to prepare the world for the destructive lightning of the “transformation of all values,” which Nietzsche wrote with The Antichrist Hoped to complete. Accordingly, there is pretty much the opposite of an accurate objective reflection of a life's journey. One should therefore not get on Nietzsche's autobiographical statements prematurely and simply take them at face value. Rather, it is always necessary to ask what the author intended with their placement. And fortunately, the biographer has a variety of other documents at his disposal which make it possible to contextualize these autobiographical statements. In general, contextualization is a central task of a Nietzsche biography. He is simply not the lonely thinker at a peak in the history of ideas, but is often intertwined and entangled with his time and with his contemporaries. Even my biography will not present “objectively” a “true Nietzsche.” But it tries to give a rich, differentiated picture.

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II. Nietzsche as a Person — and His Sexuality

PS: How do you actually have to introduce yourself to Nietzsche as a person? In films such as the adaptation of the novel And Nietzsche cried by Irvin D. Yalom (USA 2007) or Lou Andreas-Salome (D/OE 2016) he is shown as a driven eccentric. In my own research, however, I repeatedly came across statements from third parties that portray him as rather polite and reserved. A common image of a “typical Nietzschean” would probably be a kind of Klaus Kinski⁴, who is peaceful at times, but then suddenly becomes angry and quick-tempered without regard for those around him. Could Nietzsche himself be like that?

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AUS: According to everything we know of his contemporaries, Nietzsche acted cautiously in his social environment; seizure of transgression excesses in Kinski style were probably alien to him and remained alien to him when he observed them in others. The self-cultivation prompt from Morgenröthe (1881) he has apparently made himself his own:”The good four. — Redlich Against us and what else is a friend to us; valiantly against the enemy; magnanimous against the defeated; politely — always: that is what the four Cardinal Virtues want us to do. ”⁵ Nietzsche upheld politeness and refinement not only theoretically but also in practice: Social behavior determined by politeness produces the least amount of friction. In contrast, the fact that he could be berserk on paper (which led to the assumption that he had also been so in life) is another story in the truest sense of the word. But he seems to have had no trouble distinguishing one sphere from another. In fact, politeness included leaving others as they are. In a recording from 1880, he even forged a “new canon for all individuals”: “Be different from everyone else and be happy when everyone is different from the other”⁶. However, this maxim has remained buried in the estate; Nietzsche never included it in a published work.

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PS: Whether he then had occasional outbursts of emotion in the absence of his acquaintances or, when he was unobserved, will probably never be able to reconstruct. But I agree with you absolutely: The image of the Nietzschean as a choleric eccentric doesn't really fit in with what Nietzsche writes about adequate social interaction. But let me now address a perhaps somewhat sensitive topic that also concerns Nietzsche's unobserved private life, but which also concerns many of our readers and has already caused discussion on our blog⁷: I mean Nietzsche's sexuality. It seems to me that hardly any philosopher speculation about this is so widespread — although this topic is often circumvented in serious research. If I remember correctly, it doesn't play a particular role with Janz, for example. As far as I can see, there are three common competing stories: Firstthat Nietzsche was very inhibited and clumsy when it came to women, although he longed for them — and, according to the myth, he also became unfortunate with syphilis during his only physical intimate encounter with a Cologne prostitute.⁸ Secondthat, despite his possible infatuation with Lou Andreas-Salomé, he was in reality homosexual and even maintained contacts with young male prostitutes — as Rüdiger Safranski argues in his well-known Nietzsche biography from 2002 and, last but not least, Joachim Köhler in his extensive investigation The Secret of Zarathustra, which was published in 1989 but is largely ignored in research. Thirdlythat he was a sadomasochist with a strong masochistic tendency towards dominant women. The key witness here, curiously enough, is none other than Lou Andreas-Salomé — who is often accused of a certain sadism in dealing with men — herself, who hinted at this variant in her Nietzsche biography of 1894 and published posthumously in the diary of her extended stay in Vienna in 1912/13 with Sigmund Freud even of Nietzsche as “that sadomasochist on yourself”⁹ spoke. Who, if not she, would have to know, you might think, even though the exact nature of her relationship with Nietzsche is also very controversial. Köhler took up this assumption in the chapter “Knight, Death and Domina” of the book in question and argues, for example, that Nietzsche must have known Leopold of Sacher-Masoch's novels. However, in my opinion, his argument is somewhat stuck, as he identifies suppressed homosexuality and heterosexual masochism in a somewhat kitchen psychological manner.¹⁰ — We are certainly touching on speculative territory again, as Nietzsche was unfortunately less open-hearted in this regard than, for example, his arch enemy Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It seems to me that he struggles with the Puritanism of his time and his milieu without therefore pleading for a complete disinhibition of sexuality. There is almost always talk of “smelly normal” heterosexual sexuality, but piquantly enough, there is a noticeable tendency in Nietzsche to think pain and pleasure together — Köhler, for example, interprets the famous “whip sentence” in this sense as a commitment to the whip The woman! —, but also occasionally approving passages about ancient boys' love.¹¹ As a biographer, how do you deal with this? And which side do you take in the dispute over Nietzsche's intimacy?

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AUS: The undeniable interest in Nietzsche's sex life reveals a lot about the audience who asks about it and the cultural environment in which this audience lives. For most Westerners and people socialized in the 20th or 21st century, the topic of sex is of eminent importance — which in turn is very worth considering in terms of cultural philosophy: What does it say about a culture and its idea of the formability of one's own way of life when an ideological predominance of sex, i.e. of the tending to be unmanageable, prevails in it? But that is of course not the question you wanted to ask. Looking at Nietzsche, we can therefore simply state soberly: The idea that gender, drive, sexual desires could possibly not have been a capital problem for a philosopher of a previous century is outrageous, even unbearable, for today's audience. This audience must almost compulsively assume that the former person has suppressed something — the essentials — or (possibly even worse) lived it out secretly without cheekily sharing it with posterity.

The biographer therefore feels compelled to comment on this. You're hoping for keyhole stories, new “revelations.” Joachim Köhler made perfect use of this business model as early as 1989 with thin evidence in the realities and texts. I cannot rule out the possibility that Nietzsche Sacher-Masochs published in 1870 Venus in Fur read because he used to consume a lot of literature — so why not Sacher-Masoch, who, by the way, comes across as much more harmless and bourgeois than the “masochism” formed after him would suggest. What I can rule out, however, is that this possible reading has left any verifiable impression in Nietzsche's written legacies. In any case, the parallel position evidence that Joachim Köhler wants to teach about this does not convince me. By the way, Nietzsche actually mentions Sacher-Masoch once, namely in a letter to his publisher Naumann, in a long list of magazine editors who wrote a review copy of Beyond good and evil should get (link). Sacher-Masoch was on this list not because Nietzsche had something particularly piquant about him, but because he saw him as an ordinary journalist among other journalists — if he actually noticed him.

Unfortunately, I can't come up with sparkling erotic revelations in the biography, although these would certainly incite audience interest. Despite certainly better sales figures, I defy the biographer's temptation to inflate trivia about events. In the The genealogy of morality Nietzsche thinks about what philosophers should think about ascetic ideals. The argument is aimed at making use of asceticism: philosophers appear to be radical advocates of their own interest in remaining undisturbed. They want to keep themselves free of irritation, both in terms of external distraction and in terms of their own sensuality: “Peace in all basements; all dogs nicely put on a chain; no barking of enmity and shaggy rancune”¹².

He never revealed exactly what dogs Nietzsche thought were in his basement. And today's speculation about dog species reveals something in particular about the disposition of the respective biographical speculators. There is something involuntarily funny about wanting to have the “dispute over Nietzsche's intimacy” today. Anyone who adheres to biographical honesty will follow the methodological guidelines set by Nietzsche in antichrist ”Ephexis in interpretation”¹³ says: You should abstain from a judgment where reliable material is missing in order to be able to form a verdict.

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PS: Yes, what I actually find sad about this whole discussion is that they absolutely try to squeeze Nietzsche into some kind of drawer of today's defined sexual identities. Michel Foucault should tell us with his study at the latest Sexuality and Truth (1976) have proved otherwise: This entire modern category apparatus (homosexuality, masochism, sadism...) and the idea of sexuality as an “actual”, “authentic” identity are historically very recent and Nietzsche will certainly not have located himself within this framework at all, but simply followed his needs — and probably saw himself primarily as a philosopher, philologist, free spirit, not primarily as a sexual being, even though he repeatedly expresses the instinctive character of Thinking emphasizes¹⁴. We must indeed be very careful not to be blinded by the reign of “King Sex” (Foucault), which is also very repressive and impoverishing as far as our possibilities of being are concerned. In any case, the end of the 19th century, which was supposedly so bourgeois, was open enough to recognize an author like Sacher-Masoch as a reputable writer. He was a bestselling author, not an eccentric nerd. — Perhaps it is precisely in our obsession with the sexual that we are stuck in this regard? But today there is also serious discussion on the Internet about whether Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar were homosexual...

What can hardly be denied, however, is, as it seems to me, that Nietzsche, when you only start from his lyrics and ignore everything else, repeatedly refers to the topic of sexuality.¹⁵ Even for his teacher Schopenhauer, the “will to live” was not least an omnipresent will to procreate. Freud later based his psychoanalysis on this idea and was also inspired by Nietzsche. The already mentioned Lou Andreas-Salomé, for example, was later also a student of Freud and wrote several important contributions to psychoanalytic theory and the theory of eroticism. He was later perceived by many as a prophet of a Dionysian liberation of sex, especially in its' perverse 'dimension, I am thinking of Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, the first Freudo Marxist Otto Gross or even sex-positive feminism (starting at the turn of the century with Hedwig Dohm, Lily Braun or Helene Stöcker, for example). There is also evidence of a certain Nietzscheanism in the notorious Wilhelm Reich and later in Herbert Marcuse. Numerous other names could be mentioned here, but what I'm actually getting at is: Do you think this strand of Nietzsche reception is purely a projection effort or is it not based on Nietzsche's criticism of the puritanical hypocrisy of his perhaps not so humble time and his concept of Dionysian?

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AUS: That is the remarkable thing about Nietzsche: He invites to a wide variety of and often adversarial receptions, all of which refer to him with a certain right. On the one hand, he appears as the great thinker of physicality, who ridicules any shift of heavyweight into an ethereal, pure spiritual world. The Dionysian intoxication seems to find a lawyer in him. On the other hand, it stands for “pathos of distance”¹⁶, the great disillusionment, the great cold that evades all physical constraints. If for some he is the philosopher of orgiasm, for others he is the philosopher of the strictest philosophical asceticism — not asceticism for himself, but for the sake of merciless knowledge. But can you, if he continues, really want the insight? Why a will to truth and not much rather a will to falsehood?  

If we call on Nietzsche as a witness for this or that, he will evade very quickly. He is a highly unreliable witness in every way. Perhaps it would be wiser to renounce his testimony, his patronage for this or that. And not to hope for his help — neither during the sexual revolution nor in all sorts of counterrevolutions. At best, Nietzsche is helping himself.

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III. Could Nietzsche Help Himself?

PS: I have nothing to add to that. There is just one last quick question that comes to mind for me. What would you sum up after all your years and decades of intensive engagement with Nietzsche's life and work: Was it a person who yourself was able to help?

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AUS: A remarkable question! In fact, he was a person who always knew how to help the people who could help him. He had an amazing ability to use other people for his purposes and at the same time pathetically maintain the fiction that he was there all alone, abandoned by all over the world. That would be an indication that he could very well help himself — through others — in matters related to life. And even beyond instrumentalizing others, I tend to attest to him great talent for self-help. Philosophically anyway: Dead ends into which he maneuvered — starting with Schopenhauer and Wagner to Lou Andreas-Salomé and Paul Ree to all sorts of disease overloads and late self-deification — proved to be reciprocal experiences that he was able to make use of, usually not according to the rules of consistent closing, whether through daring horse jumps, whether through daring horse jumps through Kess-ironic Volten. If helping himself means cooking up a coincidence, then he has succeeded surprisingly often. It shows the power of philosophizing.

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PS: Thank you very much for this informative conversation.

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AUS: It was a pleasure. Let us keep trying with the power of philosophizing.

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‍Andreas Urs Sommer, born on July 14, 1972 in the Swiss canton of Aargau, has been a professor at Albert-Ludwigs-University Freiburg since 2016 and managing director of the Nietzsche Research Center based there since 2019. He completed his Habilitation in 2004 under the supervision of Werner Stegmaier with a study on the philosophy of history with Kant and Bayle at the University of Greifswald. Since 2014, he has been head of the Nietzsche Commentary Research Center at the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and has contributed several volumes to it himself. Among other things, he published the monographs Encyclopedia of imaginary philosophical works (Frankfurt am Main 2012), values. Why you need them even though they don't exist (Stuttgart 2016), A democracy for the 21st century. Why the people's representation is outdated and the future belongs to direct democracy (Freiburg, Basel & Vienna 2022) and the excellent introductory volume Nietzsche and the consequences (Stuttgart 2017).

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Sources

Andreas-Salome, Lou: Friedrich Nietzsche in his works. Vienna 1894.

This. : At school with Freud. Diary of a year 1912/13. Taching am See 2017.

Blunck, Richard: Frederick Nietzsche. Childhood and youth. Basel & Munich1953.

Foucault, Michel: The will to know. Sexuality and Truth I Frankfurt am Main 1977.

Janz, Curt Paul: Frederick Nietzsche. biography. Munich 1978/79. 3 vols.

Koehler, Joachim: Zarathustra's secret. Friedrich Nietzsche and his encrypted message. Reinbek near Hamburg 1992.

Niemeyer, Christian: Nietzsche's syphilis — and that of others. A search for clues. Baden-Baden 2020.

Safranski, Rüdiger: Nietzsche. Biography of his thinking. Munich & Vienna 2000.

Yalom, Irvin D.: And Nietzsche cried. Transacted by Uda Strätling. Munich 2001.

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Source of the Article Image

Johannes Hüppi: Andreas Urs Sommer & Friedrich Nietzsche (2025).

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Footnotes

1: See Jonas Pohler's report on the annual meeting of the Nietzsche Society dedicated to this commentary in 2024 on this blog (link).

2: Morgenröthe, Preface, paragraph 5.

3: See in particular the section dedicated to this work in Ecce homo (link).

4: Cf. Paul Stephan's articles Mythomaniacs in a short time. About Klaus Kinski and Werner Herzog on this blog (link).

5: Aph 556.

6: No. 3 [98].

7: See in particular Henry Holland's article With Nietzsche and Marx in the round of inheritance (link) and Christian Sährendt's contribution Dionysus without Eros. Was Nietzsche an Incel? (link).

8: This story was recently updated by Christian Niemeyer in his extensive study Nietzsche's syphilis — and that of others.

9: At school with Freud, P. 134.

10: A “diagnosis” which, however, also formulated Andreas-Salomé with reference to Nietzsche, who also spoke to the philosopher about this topic (cf. ibid.).

11: However, these can be counted on the fingers. The most important are Human, all-too-human Vol. I, Aph 259, Morgenröthe, Aph 503 and Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, Aph 47.

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

13: Paragraph 52.

14: See e.g. Subsequent fragments 1883, No. 7 [62].

15: For example, he criticizes Christianity primarily for its rejection of sexuality (see, for example, AC 56 &law) and even the lack of sex education among “distinguished women” (FW 71) and denounces the hypocrisy of monogamous marriage (cf. MA I, 424). The “intoxication of sexual stimulation” is the “oldest and most original form of intoxication” (GD, rambles, 8), although he also spoke of an original “lust for cruelty” (GM II, 7) and also repeatedly associates it with sexuality (see already GT 2).

16: See, for example On the genealogy of morality, paragraph I, 2.

A New Nietzsche Biography

In Conversation with Andreas Urs Sommer

The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche died 125 years ago, on August 25, 1900. We are taking this important date as an opportunity to publish interviews with two of the most internationally renowned Nietzsche researchers, Andreas Urs Sommer and Werner Stegmaier, around this year's anniversary of his birth on October 15, 1844. Freiburg philosophy professor Sommer is currently working on an extensive biography of the thinker, which is why the conversation with him focused in particular on his life; the conversation with his colleague from Greifswald, which focuses primarily on Nietzsche's thinking, will follow shortly (link). It will soon become apparent that the two cannot be separated. Among other things, we asked the expert about Nietzsche's character, his sexuality and if he lived what he proclaimed.

I. Writing with LLMs

As part of my private writing project, I intend to use various AI language models (LLMs) to generate targeted philosophical texts that are inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche in terms of style and content. I'm not just interested in philosophically sounding texts with a few Nietzsche buzzwords, as is currently happening with simple prompts on ChatGPT. My goal is to obtain differentiated texts that are based on specific phases of work or types of texts (e.g. maxims, aphorisms or letters) in literary, content and contextual terms. To this end, I train AI models specifically with Nietzsche texts in order to capture stylistic and rhetorical peculiarities more precisely.

The following texts were generated using the ChatGPT-4O model using “Instruction Tuning”. This means that I have achieved more and more the desired result with selected examples and many prompts. This is often sufficient to generate individual and short text examples, while for systematic generation, a model is trained with larger, processed amounts of data through “fine-tuning”.² For laymen, the technical set-up of locally trained models is still associated with time-consuming imponderables and depends on powerful hardware. In general, it is advisable to carry out tests that are as manageable as possible in order to be able to understand the results and optimize them accordingly in a controlled manner.³

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II. Nietzsche-Aphorisms about Sorrento and Sicily

One obvious type of curiosity when imitating is to ask yourself what someone might have thought or said about something. I have often worked with landscape aphorisms because they can be formulated more openly and do not necessarily have to follow a concise thesis. In this way, I tried to generate an aphorism for the Italian city of Sorrento. I have searched three books that are close together in time for suitable passages on landscapes and hiking: the first volume of Human, All Too Human (April 14, 1878), Assorted Opinions and Maxims (March 12, 1879) and The Wanderer and His Shadow (December 18, 1879). The results were bumpy at first. I suppose because Sorrento is a specific city and therefore the description had to fit this concretion. The titles were also aphoristically ineffective. In addition, ChatGPT's talkativeness got in the way, which is why I intervened briefly a few times to reach the following result:

Surrentum ex umbra. — The South in retreat, a corner where even the light takes a break: cool, shady, yet quietly demanding. The rocks are almost weightless, leaning on — tired perhaps, or wise. Everything seems half said here. The wind whispers of the past and silent grottoes dream of sirens that have long since fallen silent. Here, where every thought is beguiled by limes and oranges, aromatic scents. Here where only the colors are clear — thinking fables.

This result had to be optimized. I did like the basic mix of topics — southern Sorrento, the shady trees, the rocks... The contrast of clear sensual colors and beguiling spiritual thinking even gave the text some aphoristic punch line. However, the orientation was based on the aphorism “Et in Arcadia ego” from Wanderer and his shadow (link) too strong: Too often, the pattern “Here, where...” is used. In addition, the metaphor of the leaning rocks for Sorrento seemed inconclusive to me. Through suggested abbreviations and densifications as well as by searching for a title, I came to the following result:

Fugit lux, Surrentum apparet. — The South is retreating from itself. Here, where even the light stops — cool, shady, yet challenging. The rocks are half-high, straight and almost weightless: not falling, not defiant — but grown old, tired and clever. Everything is half-loud here, half said. The wind whispers about the past. The caves dream of the sirens echoing. And in between: penetrating scents of lemon, salt, sun.

I really liked the stilimitation here, although the meaning of the content became leaner, especially in the final sentence — especially since a single aphorism must be coherent compared to a series of aphorisms. The two examples are therefore only intended to illustrate what an LLM can achieve through imitation and how this can be promoted with prompts, objectives and suitable materials.

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In another series of experiments, I asked ChatGPT to generate an aphorism about Sicily. Nietzsche did not write one of these either in Messina or anywhere else — and yet it seemed almost like a gap to me that there is no such thing in Nietzsche's works. The following aphorism has thus been generated over several stages of revision. For the “Instruction Training”, I also used examples of other Nietzsche locations, letters from Messina and a few excerpts from historical travel guides from Nietzsche's library:

Sicily. — On Sicily's soil, two powers are fighting for the wanderer's soul: there Mount Etna, a symbol of Dionysian fire, everlasting and destroying passion — here the temples, heralds of Apollinan clarity, beauty and harmony carved in stone. Only those who have the courage to purify themselves in fire are able to climb the heights of pure knowledge and thus be truly human in harmony with the divine. Many burn themselves up during this venture, dying down in the excess of emotion — but who wanted to talk them out of their affirmation, which derived their right from existence?

It can be seen here that GPT-4o can work very well with pairs of terms: Apollonian powers, temples, recognition vs. Dionysian fire, volcano, feeling. However, the phases of work are mixed here, as the Nietzsche of 1878/79 no longer argues so strongly with Dionysian and Apollinian. Since there were no quotations from early Nietzsche in my instructional examples, it is clear that ChatGPT added some elements from Nietzsche's philosophy. This shows that LLMs tend to produce a generic or blending work phases, which they calculate based on their training data. This weakens the result from the point of view of a plausible imitation of the work. The final sentence, in which a new punchline should lie, was also always difficult. This was achieved reasonably well only after a few attempts.

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III. Two Generated Nietzsche-Maxims from the Middle Phase

I consistently got better results when I settled on short forms and a style: be it letters, aphorisms, or maxims. With a selection of maxims from Assorted Opinions and Maxims (AO) I then had GPT-4o generate a new spell. Usually two or three so that I could choose one for further use. I liked the following two maxims:

Humans are nature that is ashamed — and culture that apologizes itself.

Between drive and virtue flickers man.

The titles of the maxims were once again difficult to generate with the same prompt. With a few inquiries and sample texts, I think it was then easy to deliver or correct them. In the following example, the first title “Windbreak” was replaced by “Individual”, which looks concise and appropriate:

Individually. — Some things fall not because they are weak, but because they are free.⁴

This maxim is thought-provoking, makes sense and can be read extensively several times. In particular, the ambiguous “free standing” (standing unprotected, being alone, being free, etc.) invites different interpretations. The maxim is compatible with the game of separation (“individual”) and freedom (“free standing”), which has its price (e.g. free spirits in Human, All Too Human), and also a perfect fit for the Middle Nietzsche context.

Another procedure was to have the LLM combine original passages from AO into a new maxim. Due to the original material and the ambiguity of the original maxims, astonishingly good results can be generated here. I found this very successful:

Silent duty. — Anyone who works in the shadow of the big doesn't know the brilliance, but the weight.

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IV. Conclusion and Outlook

My conclusion is: With suitable sample material and instructions, LLMs can aptly imitate Nietzsche's style in individual short texts. As complexity and volume of text increase, it quickly becomes more difficult to generate meaningful texts — for example, a series of 10 related aphorisms. The connection of work phases, styles, and contemporary contexts to Nietzsche's work significantly increases plausibility and makes the results more interesting. However, the coherence of work phases in particular is difficult to achieve due to the already trained, generic Nietzsche styles of prefabricated LLMs. This speaks for LLMs own finetunings. My technical skills and time options have so far been limited here: The Nietzsche generators trained by me through fine-tuning have so far proven to be poor compared to “instruction tuning” with leading models such as ChatGPT or Claude. However, these time-consuming fine-tuning sessions have helped me to understand better and better understand exactly what an LLM does and how I can guide it through prompts. In addition, you get to know philosophical works from a different perspective when you have them processed through an LLM — this learning effect should not be underestimated, especially for people who have previously dealt exclusively with qualitative and interpretive processes. As fine-tuning is becoming increasingly easier and more accessible, I expect a lot of potential here in the medium term.

At this stage of the technical development of LLMs, I am interested on the one hand in exploring the possibilities and on the other hand in the attitude of (human) readers, who always read and interpret through the lens of their author's ideas. I have therefore deliberately not yet addressed the opportunities and risks for Nietzsche scientific research. It is only possible to record for the moment: LLMs open up numerous opportunities to experiment with philosophical texts. Such experiments may seem pointless to some because they are not “original” quotations or because they do not consider calculated texts to be philosophically relevant. These reactions show how our ideas of authorship, originality, or human origin shape the philosophical idea of authorship. These formations move in the flow of time. With regard to pseudo-Aristotelian writings, pseudepigraphy or the anonymously published texts of the Enlightenment, I would not rule out that the close view of philosophical authorship and historical-critically edited “complete works” will change.

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Tobias Brücker has a doctorate in cultural studies and is head of HR personnel development at the Zurich University of the Arts. He has researched Nietzsche's working methods and published in 2019 the monograph On the road to philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche writes “The Wanderer and His Shadow” ("Auf dem Weg zur Philosophie. Friedrich Nietzsche schreibt 'Der Wanderer und sein Schatten'"). He is interested in all facets of diets, authorship, and creativity techniques in philosophy and the arts.

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To the article image

“Nietzsche—Salomé” (AI-generated image, Tobias Brücker, 2024): Created with Midjourney based on the following historical photographs: Friedrich Nietzsche (ca. 1875, photograph by Friedrich Hermann Hartmann, public domain) and Lou Andreas-Salomé (c. 1897, studio Elvira Munich, public domain).

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Footnotes

1: For example on character.ai | AI Chat, Reimagined—Your Words. Your World.

2: The complex work involved in creating and fine-tuning a Nietzsche bot with various full texts from different phases of work is documented here: Building an Advanced Nietzsche AI Database | by Wayward Verities | Medium. The resulting “Nietzsche Reference Bot” makes it possible to interact with Nietzsche's full texts via chat and receive referenced answers, see here: https://chat.openai.com/g/g-F62wnKW8A-nietzsche-reference-bot.

3: Valuable insights into “instruction tuning” can be found in this experience report: I used AI to generate Nietzschean aphorisms | Towards AI

4: Editor's note: This aphorism is a bit difficult to translate because it contains a wordplay. In German, it reads: "Einzeln. – Manches fällt nicht, weil es schwach ist, sondern weil es frei steht." Depending on how you understand the phrasal verb "frei stehen", it can either mean "because it's up to them" (metaphorical meaning) or "because they stand independently" (literal meaning).

Thus Spoke the Machine

Imitating Nietzsche with AI

The continuous refinement of large language models, or LLMs for short, allows increasingly accurate stylistic interpretations of texts. This also applies to the writing styles of philosophers. For example, it has recently been possible to chat with Socrates or Schopenhauer — usually with consistent quality and limited depth of content.1 In recent months, our guest author Tobias Brücker has tried to generate exciting Nietzsche texts using various AI methods. In the following, he will present some of these generated, “new Nietzsche texts”, describe their creation and draw a brief conclusion.

“The whole world revolves around me/Because I am only an egoist/The person who is closest to me/Am I, I am an egoist,” Falco sings in 1998.

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“Love your neighbor as yourself! ”

What does Nietzsche say about this in 1888? “You live for today, you live very quickly — you live very irresponsibly: this is called 'freedom' right now . ”¹ Being irresponsible and being able to do what you feel like doing right now, not getting married and certainly not having children, not making any commitments, that is La dolce vita.

Selfishness is not the same as individualism. Historically, egoism precedes individualism. The Old Testament contains the famous commandment “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (Leviticus 19:18), which does not reject self-love, in fact bases charity on self-love.

When Christianity strengthens this commandment, namely “love your enemies” (Matthew 5:44), there is not much left of self-love. There is nothing more to be seen of self-confident egoism when the Church Fathers around 400 demand absolute obedience from believers and the confession of all sinful thoughts, not just actions: The end of egoism!

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From individualist Leonardo to capitalist egoism

Individualism only emerged in the Renaissance: The aim of people is their all-round education and the development of their abilities. This personifies Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), an illegitimate child from a middle class, not noble background. The self is now given its own touch, as a result of which the person begins to free himself from the constraints of faith. Leonardo was an atheist and homosexual. “What people call love is in reality nature's always the same smear comedy”², according to Volker Reinhard, Leonardo assumes. With this individualism, ancient egoism is rehabilitated in a moderate form.

Selfish individualism reaches its climax when John Locke (1632-1704) attests inalienable natural rights to humans as individuals. The most important of these is the right to own property. The primary purpose of the state is to protect this. In Calvinism, wealth is even regarded as a sign of divine mercy. Bernard de Mandeville (1670-1733) writes in plain language when he describes economic egoism as a private vice, but it leads to public benefit, i.e. promotes the general good.

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Religiously conservative criticism of individualists: Tocqueville

This lays the foundation for severe criticism of individualism when liberalism elevates capitalism to the political economy of the bourgeoisie. The harshest critics of liberal individualism initially came from the religious-monarchical camp. One of the main representatives is the French politician and political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-1859).

This is how he writes in 1835 in About democracy in America: “The poor” — compared to the nobility, this includes the citizens — “has retained most of the prejudices of his ancestors, but without their faith, their ignorance without their virtue; he has made the doctrine of private interest the guideline of his actions without knowing its scientific basis, and his egoism is as free of education as his devotion once was.” (p. 30) Such individualism when people their Faith as they have given up their morals pursues material benefits alone without regard for others and So without regard to the state.

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Nietzsche: “Who still wants to obey? ”

Did Nietzsche, who was only two generations younger, write off almost 50 years later? In his corpus, Tocqueville appears twice, and praises it.³ Denn So Zarathustra spoke: “Who still wants to govern? Who else obeys? Both are too cumbersome. Not a shepherd and a host! Everyone wants the same thing, everyone is the same”⁴. Even for Nietzsche, most citizens only care about their private interests and do not like it at all when the state and society get involved in this.

The bourgeoisie does not want to govern in this way; they prefer to leave it to the nobility. At the end of the 19th century, liberals such as the hard-working Nietzsche reader Max Weber (1864-1920) doubted that the bourgeoisie was even capable of doing so; until the French Revolution, the nobility ruled almost everywhere. Because the bourgeoisie is only interested in the economy and individual advantage, they have no view of the whole thing. How can it then take care of the community and the common good? The king, on the other hand — according to Tocqueville — had taken care of exactly that.

Such a lawsuit can also be found today and in almost all political camps: Liberalism is extremely unpopular, individualism all the more so and it is accused of egoism. Both are held jointly responsible for the fact that people no longer engage in politics and instead withdraw into private life, that they no longer serve the state or society, but only want to take advantage of it — even refuse military service.

Nietzsche shares Tocqueville's critique of individualism, but not his orientation towards the common good, which Nietzsche questions, while Tocqueville focuses on it. For Nietzsche, the common good is a bourgeois illusion. What does it say in the 1887/88 estate: “'The good of the general requires the dedication of the individual. '. But lo and behold, it Gives No such general thing! ”⁵

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Decline of values and the “last person”

Tocqueville, on the other hand, not only notices that there is, of course, a common good, but that it is precisely democracy that particularly requires people's commitment to the common good, as he had observed on his journey through the USA in 1831. Because democracy in particular includes various commonalities among citizens — women had no civil rights at all — which he misses in France. He writes:

It seems as though the natural bond that connects opinions with tendencies, action with thought has been broken; the harmony that can be felt at all times between man's feelings and ideas seems to have been destroyed, and one is almost inclined to say that all laws of moral responsibility have been abolished.⁶

To this day, religious, conservative and right-wing circles complain about the disintegration of common moral values and demand a “spiritual and moral change.” Tocqueville was one of the first to provide the arguments for this. Disbelieving himself, he nonetheless criticizes the widespread disbelief, as for him the common religious faith has a stabilizing effect on every state. But when people are no longer religious, they are no longer bound by such a bond.

A similar lawsuit, which of course drifts in a different direction, is also found in Nietzsche when he describes the mass of his contemporaries as “last people” because they only pursue materialistic interests. Nietzsche writes: “Look! I'll show you The last man. “What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is star? '— this is how the last person asks and blinks. The earth has then become small, and the last person who makes everything small jumps on it.”⁷, and pays homage to mass individualism.

But while Tocqueville conjures up the return of religious values, Nietzsche wants to leave them behind, but demands new ethical values that need to be invented. For Nietzsche, this is not just the task of the superman, but of those who should follow his doctrine and proclaim it. This is where the paths of Tocqueville and Nietzsche separate. Because Tocqueville actually believes that traditional values are correct, while new values that people invent themselves are an expression of individualism.

But there are other similarities between Tocqueville and Nietzsche. Because even this one certainly does not simply leave all traditions behind. Tocqueville blames individualism for breaking up family ties, because even within families, money is all that matters and the willingness to make sacrifices for the family decreases.

Nietzsche, on the other hand, broadened his criticism from the outset. Where Tocqueville primarily individualism, not liberalism per se, since he shares certain basic liberal assumptions, Nietzsche criticizes liberalism itself, which includes the individualism of the “last people,” but not that of the heralds of the superman, who are not affected by what he writes in the following quote:

For institutions to exist, there must be a kind of will, instinct, imperative, anti-liberal to the point of malice: the will for traditions, for authority, for responsibility for centuries, for the solidarity of gender chains forwards and backwards in infinity.⁸

Of course, that is no longer the case. Nietzsche also laments the decline of the institution of the family as a result of bourgeois individualism, similar to Tocqueville. On the other hand, he is also a critic of the family. How does Zarathustra say: “This is what a woman said to me: “I broke up, but broke up first — me! '”⁹

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Freedom of speech as a weakening of the state

For Tocqueville, individualism also leads people to imagine that they can make judgments about everything and everyone themselves. However, this promotes mutual distrust. Authorities are no longer recognized by the public. For Sarah Strömel, Tocqueville is already anticipating the state of democracies today. She writes:

This profound mistrust in the findings of others, no matter how established or proven experts, and also the general lack of trust in others, jeopardize cohesion in democracy. The excessive hubris that goes with it also makes individuals blind to their own ignorance.¹⁰

As early as 1872, Nietzsche criticized educational institutions in a similar way that they would educate people to have their own opinion and thus contribute to overconfidence, as Strömel complains. He writes:

Here, everyone is readily regarded as a literate being who has their own opinions about the most serious things and people should, while a right education will only strive with all zeal to suppress the ridiculous claim to independence of judgment and to accustom the young person to strict obedience under the scepter of genius.¹¹

Education should help people recognize authorities, Nietzsche's brilliant people, and their opinion leaders and adopt their views without questioning them. Nietzsche thus radicalizes Tocqueville's assessment when in 1886 he spoke about “the introduction of parliamentary nonsense, including the obligation for everyone to read their newspaper for breakfast.”¹², laments.

When it comes to democracy, Tocqueville is divided, as he is leaning towards monarchism. Unlike Nietzsche, however, he recognizes the democracy that has spread in the contemporary state. For Tocqueville, a common view of the world is absolutely essential for democracy. In the absolutist monarchy before the French Revolution, Catholicism did this. Nietzsche doesn't see things completely differently. He wrote in 1888:

There is no other alternative for gods: either Are they the will to power — and for as long as they will be gods of the people — or But powerlessness — and that's when they become necessary well.¹³

As a result, religion loses its guiding power and is no longer able to generally enforce faith and supreme ethical values. Søren Kierkegaard criticizes the churches in 1850 for proclaiming a dear God who can only be a punishing god. Nietzsche has a similar view, while Tocqueville complains of a loss of faith, but not yet, in the sense of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, the transformation of the punishing God into a merciful one.

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From monarchy to democracy

Tocqueville notes that the general situation in the Ancien Régime was constantly improving. But dissatisfaction grew all the more. “Reform frustrates and makes rebellious,” writes Karlfriedrich Herb and he adds that Tocqueville notes “how reducing social inequality increases discomfort about remaining inequality. ”¹⁴ According to Herb, the “Ancien Régime” for Tocqueville is “a revolution before the revolution. ”¹⁵ In fact, the monarchy understood governance better; in particular, it was friendlier towards its subjects than democracy.

Because in the monarchy, the king's power was significantly more limited than in democracy, through tradition, the co-governing nobility and through the institutions. Tocqueville states: “No monarch is so unlimited that he could combine all forces of society in his hands and overcome all opposition in the same way that a majority can with the right of legislation and law enforcement. ”¹⁶ In democratic states, there are indeed various forms of separation of powers between legislative, executive and judicial branches. However, the division of powers has only prevailed with regard to the judiciary and only partially. In the USA, Hungary and Poland, attempts are even being made to undermine the autonomy of the judiciary.

In his later writing L'Ancien Regime et la Revolution Dating from 1856, Tocqueville values democratic institutions while distrusting citizens. After Herb, Tocqueville also doubts that democracy will prevail. Herb writes: “A liberal end to the story thinks Tocqueville is illusory. ”¹⁷ For this reason, Francis Fukuyama's dream in 1989 that the world will become democratic after the end of the Soviet Union cannot come true; because, according to Fukuyama: “The liberal state is necessarily universal.”^18th In fact, it doesn't look like it anymore at the moment. Democratic systems are more likely to be under pressure today. That would probably be no problem for Nietzsche. Tocqueville, on the other hand, predicts such a development, which he would have regretted.

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From democracy to dictatorship

Tocqueville sees the centralization of states as a threat to both monarchy and democracy. He writes: “For my part, I cannot imagine that a nation can live or prosper without strong government centralization. But I believe that a centralized administration is of no use but to weaken the peoples subject to it, because it unceasingly reduces the spirit of citizenship in them.”¹⁹ and thus intensifies the retreat into private life.

Without centralization and bureaucratization, no state can be created. But both restrict the scope of monarchy and democracy. This disappoints citizens, who are no longer politically involved. This is how they experience themselves as isolated individuals. You could think of today's People's Republic of China.

For Tocqueville, on the other hand, everyone in the monarchy is unequal, but is integrated into a network that gives them support and meaning. For Nietzsche, there is a similar but even more radical rejection of equality. He wrote in 1888:

The doctrine of equality! .. But there is no more poisonous poison: because they seems preached by righteousness itself while they termination who is justice. “The same, the unequal, the unequal — That The true message would be justice: and, as a result, never make unequal things the same. ”²⁰

For Nietzsche, too, equality individualizes people with the result that they no longer recognize authorities. It's just that Nietzsche doesn't regret the damage that democracy is doing in the process. Rather, this opens up the opportunity to find his way back to a monarchy, which he certainly wants to be led by a brilliant king, whom he cannot recognize in Wilhelm II towards the end of his waking life in 1888.

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Nietzsche's dancers as individualistic elite

But there is still a clear difference with Tocqueville. Nietzsche is no simple opponent of individualism and egoism like Tocqueville. Nietzsche sees this in a more differentiated way. Yes, he even praises the egoism, which he individualistically expands, which can be found today primarily in the media world. So Zarathustra spoke:

And it happened back then too — and truly, it happened for the first time! — that his word is selfishness Blessed praise, the healthy selfishness that springs from a powerful soul: — from a powerful soul, to which the higher body belongs, the beautiful, victorious, refreshing thing around which becomes a mirror: the supple persuasive body, the dancer whose likeness and excerpt is the self-loving soul. Such body and soul self-lust is called itself: “Virtue. ”²¹

Ergo: Let's Dance (RTL)? But Nietzsche doesn't mean women. It is not yet the time of Marilyn Monroe or Claudia Schiffer — two of the many super beauties among movie and model stars. But whether in Nietzsche's “the beautiful body of the dancer” or the extensive sexiness in the RTL dance show, both require that you apply makeup and style your body, although for Nietzsche, this is more due to liveliness.

Nevertheless, for conservative Tocqueville, this would probably be outside of what he acknowledges — as the Conservatives called for a spiritual and moral change in the 1980s. But Tocqueville could not yet have foreseen that. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is more open to this.

Beauty presents the individual as something special who is not only different from others, but also stands out. This is where individualism and egoism or selfishness meet. Striving for one's own beauty realizes egoism in individualism. This is how Jean Baudrillard writes:

The Church Fathers understood this well, as they scourged it as something that belongs to the devil: “Taking care of one's body, caring for it, putting on makeup means posing oneself as God's rival and contesting creation. ”²²

Nietzsche would have no problem with that. But he would attribute the media noise of a Friday night dance show to the ambiance of the “last people.” But Nietzsche is not only concerned with the beautiful soul, but also with the beautiful bodies, which today owe less to nature than to techniques. With their individualism and egoism, the heralds of his teaching, who today of course include female proclaimers, belong to a small elite beyond the media market.

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Afterword: individualism that is unpopular everywhere

Tocqueville, on the other hand, would attribute Nietzsche's entourage to apolitical individualism, which poses a threat to democracy. But he would have many advocates. Warring states in particular emphasize community-oriented values, truly not just Russia with its large family. Nazi-ruled Germany awarded the mother cross in bronze for four or five children for their Aryan and morally sound mother. In accordance with its policy program, the Alternative for Germany wants to increase the birth rate through financial incentives. Tocqueville thus finds himself in an unpleasant neighborhood, from which Nietzsche frees himself through his followers and thus also from a past reading of his works as a Nazi philosopher.

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sources

Baudrillard, Jean: Of seduction (1979). Munich 1992.

Fukuyama, Francis: The end of the story — Where are we? Munich 1992.

Herb, Charles Frederick: Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old State and the Revolution (1856); in: Manfred Brocker (ed.): History of political thought. The 19th century. Berlin 2021.

Reinhardt, Volker: Leonardo da Vinci — The Eye of the World — A Biography. Munich 2018.

Strömel, Sarah Rebecca: Tocqueville and individualism in democracy. Wiesbaden 2023.

Tocqueville. Alexis from: The old state and the revolution (1856). Munich 1989.

Ders. : About democracy in America (1835/40). Stuttgart 2021.

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footnotes

1: Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, 39.

2: Leonardo da Vinci, P. 272.

3: Cf. those position in the estate and those Letter to Overbeck.

4: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

5: Subsequent fragments 1887/88, no 11 [99].

6: About democracy in America, P. 31.

7: So Zarathustra spoke, Preface, 5.

8: Götzen-Dämmerung, rambles, 39.

9: So Zarathustra spoke, From old and new boards, 24.

10: Tocqueville and individualism in democracy, P. 97.

11: About the future of our educational institutions, presentation 2.

12: Beyond good and evil, Aph 208.

13: The Antichrist, paragraph 16.

14: Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old State and the Revolution, P. 455.

15: Ibid., p. 450.

16: About democracy in America, P. 180.

17: Alexis de Tocqueville, The Old State and the Revolution, P. 446.

18: The end of the story — Where are we?, P. 280.

19: About democracy in America, P. 76.

20: Idol twilight, rambles, 48.

21: So Zarathustra spoke, Of the three bad guys, 2.

22: Of seduction, P. 128.

Why Are Many People No Longer Committed to Democracy!

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Individualism as a Political and Social Threat in Tocqueville and Nietzsche — but also as an Opportunity

Individualism, even egoism, is frowned upon in all political, religious and social camps. They are attributed to liberalism and capitalism. Such people are not committed to others, are not involved politically or for the environment. They also do not respect a common understanding of the world and therefore behave irresponsibly. The Nietzschean  is not impressed by such verdicts. She dances — not only!

I. Mythmakers

Paul Stephan: Dear Professor Ziegler, you completed the extensive study last year Critique of reactionary thinking published, which fortunately can be downloaded free of charge from the publisher's website (link). There, they not only develop a general theory of reactionary thinking, but also present some of his classics. In addition to “usual suspects” such as Ernst Jünger (1895—1998), Carl Schmitt (1888—1985) or Martin Heidegger (1889—1976), you also dedicate a separate chapter to Nietzsche. That may surprise some, others less so. How do you come to regard Nietzsche as a representative of reactionary thinking?

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Robert Ziegler: In fact, I wouldn't count Nietzsche among the reactionary authors in the strict sense of the word. In my reconstruction, Nietzsche appears as an important source of keywords and preparer for reactionary thinking. This can be proven on several levels: The numerous and eloquent invectives that Nietzsche directed against modernity, against women, against everything that smells of democracy or egalitarianism are well known. The theory inventory of later right-wing authors then includes above all the opposition of the large, strong individual and the weak, mindless mass that must and wants to be led — a motif that Nietzsche uses very regularly. Nietzsche's radical individualism, which sees itself as a struggle against entire epochs and their prejudices, invites to a heroic self-presentation that many later became intoxicated with. Individual topics such as the diagnosis of nihilism were and still are popular in right thinking.

All of this is fairly obvious and well-known. But another aspect seems more significant to me: Nietzsche comes back again and again, particularly concentrated and prominent in About truth and lies in an extra-moral sense (link), to speak of the idea that what we call truth is the product of linguistic interpretations of reality. On the one hand, Nietzsche has thus made a deeply unsettling diagnosis, for which, on the other hand, he suggests a possible way out: If all truth is anyway “lie” or myth, a product of language more than our efforts to gain knowledge, and also guided by vital needs — what prevents us from overcoming the bottomlessness of this situation by inventing myths that are as impressive and intensive as possible? Since I see reaction primarily as a literary strategy that tries to counter ontological uncertainty with the strongest possible means, it can be said in retrospect that the method of reaction is ennobled by Nietzsche's relevant admissions.

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PS: So from this point of view, you should meet the challenges of modernity by creating new myths? Let fascination take the place of liberation? Or more precisely: Experience a form of pseudo-liberation from these challenges in fascination? From my point of view, this interpretation is obvious, even though Nietzsche often presents himself as an enlightener and “hammer of myth.” He seems to be more concerned with destroying the traditional, implausible myths and allowing new ones to take their place, such as the “will to power,” the “superman,” and the “eternal return.” From this point of view, the progressive ideas of modern emancipation movements also present themselves as myths, but “old [] women.”², not life-affirming ones. Which brings me to my next question: Is the power of mythology necessarily a reactionary force? Is Nietzsche not perhaps even right that left-wing efforts also draw their energy from certain myths? Even Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), for example, draws a parallel between the labor movement and early Christianity³ and he — like Nietzsche, interestingly enough — is very interested in the myth of original matriarchy discovered or, critically speaking, invented by Nietzsche's Basel colleague Johann Jakob Bachofen (1815—1887)⁴. And you could give a myriad of other examples here.

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RZ: I would like to divide the question in two. On the one hand, I am in fact uncertain whether there can be such a thing as “left-wing myths.” It is true that there is always the temptation, in prehistoric times and especially at the hoped-for end of history, to imagine forms of society in which the contrasts, contradictions and struggles have finally come to an end. But it doesn't seem clear to me whether utopia has been good for the emancipatory movements. As far as the philosophy of history is concerned, I think Walter Benjamin's (1892—1940) warnings about the idea of progress are difficult to ignore.

On the other hand, coming back to the reactionary thinkers, the literarization of politics there has a very characteristic form: First, it is obscure. Authors such as Jünger or Schmitt do not regard their statements as constructs, interpretations or new myths, but on the contrary as the shattering of all illusions and the presentation of the naked truth. The fact that this theoretical large-scale cleaning has a violent effect even on the theoretical level is obviously an important aspect of enjoyment. Secondly, reactionary texts always revolve around the motives of struggle, war, enmity, blood, violence, decision, death. In the incessant (and often tiring) evocation of reality as a merciless struggle, the reaction of supra-historical truth — a truth that is decidedly anti-civilizational and gains strength primarily through literary presentation.

What the reaction could now be gleaned from Nietzsche, if you read it accordingly, was that you could elevate everything to the truth with the necessary rhetorical emphasis. The reaction is therefore both rhetorical and motivational — as is well known, Nietzsche also had a weakness for Bellicist terminology, even though it is often used metaphorically — and methodically with Nietzsche.

My doubt that you can knit myths with impunity from a left-wing perspective can be illustrated by the example of Georges Sorel (1847—1922): Sorel was “actually” politically close to syndicalism, but was repeatedly fascinated by openly far-right movements and organizations. His reflections About violence are relatively openly propagating the strategy of mobilizing mass movements using old or new combat myths. The strategy is therefore clearly stated here, and at the same time its weak point becomes clear: Myth-building, mobilization and violent confrontation are threatening to become the actual purpose. Content is then relatively arbitrary; in any case, a consistent left-wing position cannot be maintained with it. It is hardly surprising then that Schmitt relates quite positively to Sorel.

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PS: Yes, as was Mussolini (1883—1945), who was also a great admirer of Nietzsche.⁵ — But maybe we'll take a step back at this point. A major strength of your study is that you philosophically define the term “reaction” and thus try to wrest it from a certain arbitrariness with which it is sometimes used. Some important features of your term “reactionary thinking” have become clear so far. It is the literary strategy of constructing new myths — especially myths of violence, war, and perhaps also masculinity — whose affective power is intended to undermine emancipatory ideas and establish new “truths” in their place. But it is not a deliberate strategy in the sense of cynical manipulation. In your opinion, is this already the essence of reactionary thinking or is there still an important element missing?

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II. The Red Pill

RZ: As I understand reactionary thinking, it is not enough to list its elements. Rather, it must be considered a very specific movement be understood: I noticed that the reactionary authors repeatedly articulate an ontological horror. You suspect or even know that the real thing may not be in the strict sense is. What concerns them is the possibility of a comprehensive unreality. This can come across as completely philosophical, like Heidegger's “inauthenticity,” or openly political, like Schmitt's handling of parliamentarism as an empty form that just hasn't realized that it is long dead, or somewhere in between, as with Jünger, in which the “worker” is probably a timeless “figure,” but not the citizen: The bourgeois does not exist in the full sense of the word. After all, with Ayn Rand (1905—1982), it is only the great individuals who are true; all others are haunted by the certainty of their nothingness.

The extreme right still strives for very similar motives today: There is talk of an “interregnum” in which we supposedly live, i.e. a mere intermediate phase between two true, legitimate rich people. Or you explain that this is probably no longer Germany. If you dismiss such and similar phrases, you make things too easy for yourself. I therefore suggest that they be understood quite literally. Then you also understand why reactionary and right-wing thinking is so easily compatible with conspiracy theories of all kinds and all absurdity: They share the basic premise that what appears cannot claim full reality.

Of course, once you've maneuvered yourself into this situation, you don't get out of it well anymore: Any help in real life must be suspicious, as this itself is suspect. In the end, only one literary strategy remains: an insurance of dwindling existence through aesthetic evocation. Since being as such actually becomes uncertain, only the strongest antidotes help, which is why reactionary discourse intuitively uses forms of expression that produce the affect of the sublime. Reactionary thinking is therefore the movement which deviates from the horror of loss of being with the means of literary (auto) suggestion into the affect of the sublime.

One advantage of the term reactionary is precisely that it hardly has a strict provision in German. This makes it possible to give it a precise philosophical meaning that is, in a sense, in the pre-political field. This is because reactionary thinking has a clear affinity for right-wing and far-right politics and ideology, but is not identical with them.

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III. Power — Nietzsche vs. Spinoza

PS: In your opinion, Nietzsche's concept of the “will to power” as the epitome of “true reality” compared to the false realities of slave morality, the alienated world of nihilism, is particularly “groundbreaking” in this regard. Are we possibly dealing with a model of reactionary thinking? Or can it also be interpreted differently?

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RZ: As is well known, it was often interpreted this way: as a carte blanche for theoretical and practical recklessness. In fact, you could also find jobs for this with Nietzsche; it seems to me that he himself was not entirely clear how he wanted to understand the will to power. Because you can also give it a completely different interpretation: In many places, Nietzsche deconstructs the idea of an autonomous subject of action and the hypostasis of a “will.” Instead, reality presents itself more as an infinite web of non-egoic centers or nodes of power that are in continuous interaction with one another. “Power” can then not be meaningfully understood to mean domination or submission (“potestas”/“pouvoir”), but in a sense a coefficient of effect that is and creates reality at the same time (“potentia”/“puissance”). If you choose this path, then the “will to power” is significantly closer to Spinoza (1632—1677) than to fascism.

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PS: Instead of “will to power,” i.e. “will to be able” or even “will to reality”? Does this “Spinozistic” reading of the “will to power” result in a possible non- or even anti-fascist interpretation of Nietzsche's entire philosophy?

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RZ: I'm afraid that there are no straight paths from metaphysics to politics and vice versa; you should also resist the temptation to make overly clear (especially political) categorizations. Nevertheless, the suggested reading of the “will to power” leads to a view of reality that is repeatedly found expressly in Nietzsche (and which, incidentally, connects him again with Spinoza): In this view, there is an absolute primacy of positivity in being. Real is, and as such, it is constantly affirming itself. All negativities—regardless of whether it is resentment or the interpretation of being as struggle and war—is located on a subordinate level, which depends primarily on the expectations, illusions, or “poisoning” of the interpreters. Nietzsche is actually formulating the program of a non-reactionary exalted person, namely one who can refrain from cruelty:

There are enough things for the sublime to have to seek out the majesty where she lives with the cruelty of sisterhood; and my ambition would also not be enough if I wanted to make myself a sublime torturer.⁶

In any case, I no longer see an immediate docking point for fascist thinking here.

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PS: To get back to my initial question: Would such a “non-reactionary sublime” perhaps be linked again to an emancipatory myth, perhaps better: a utopia, of positivity? The French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821—1867), who was certainly not much appreciated by Nietzsche, uttered in one of his poems to his lover an “invitation to travel” to a country in which the following applies: “There is only beauty and pleasure, [/] order, silence, abundance.” — Should we not obey this temptation after all? Could the concepts of “will to power” and “superman” perhaps also express the longing for such a pacified non-place and as such inspire emancipatory struggle? Or would you be more careful about that?

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RZ: Perhaps such “myths” make sense and are justified in a strategic sense: as utopias that can mobilize and combine forces to wrest something from the status quo, at least here and there. From a purely philosophical point of view, however much they touch me, I can no longer share them — which is certainly reason for the professional melancholy that often seems to go hand in hand with philosophy. As mentioned, I not only regard the historical and philosophical requirements as mere children of desire: There is only such thing as progress in limited areas and for certain periods of time. But such utopias also seem to me to ignore a dimension of human life that plays a major role in Nietzsche, for example: the tragic. We are exposed to countless coincidences and fates; our physical and emotional organization makes us vulnerable not only to illnesses, but also to the constant interpersonal conflicts whose monotony over the centuries makes them no less painful in any case. Nature presents us with limits everywhere that can never be clearly identified, but which often results in revenge when exceeded. You can also express it this way: If the modern idea of politics has to do with the endeavour to change and improve the conditions of living and living together, then it is part of philosophical honesty that not everything can be political because simply not everything can be manipulated. There is hope, of course: It consists in the irritating or delightful circumstance (depending on taste) that it is never possible to say in advance what can and cannot be changed. I guess you always have to try it out again and again.

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PS: Professor Ziegler, thank you very much for this informative conversation.

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RZ: Thank you!

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Robert Hugo Ziegler teaches philosophy in Würzburg. He is the author of several books on political philosophy, metaphysics, natural philosophy and the history of philosophy. Last published in 2024 Critique of reactionary thinking, From nature and Spinoza and the shimmer of nature.

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footnotes

1: However, this term is not without controversy, as it was coined after the Second World War by Ernst-Jünger student Armin Mohler with the intention of cleansing their representatives of their involvement in the NS and fascism.

2: The Gay Science, Aph 377.

3: See in particular his article About the history of early Christianity (link).

4: Cf. the Scripture The origin of the family, private property and the state (link).

5: See also Luca Guerreschi, for example: “The philosophy of power.” Mussolini reads Nietzsche. In: Martin A. Rühl & Corinna Schubert (eds.): Nietzsche's Perspectives on Politics. Berlin & Boston 2022, pp. 287—298.

6: The Gay Science, Aph 313.

Nietzsche and Intellectual Right

A Dialogue with Robert Hugo Ziegler

Nietzsche was repeatedly elevated to a figurehead by right-wing theorists and politicians. From Mussolini and Hitler to the AfD — Nietzsche is repeatedly seized when it comes to confronting modern society with a radical reactionary alternative. Nietzsche was particularly fascinating to intellectual right-wingers, such as authors like Ernst Jünger, Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger, who formed a cultural prelude to the advent of National Socialism in the 1920s, even though they later partially distanced themselves from it. People also often talk about the “Conservative Revolution”¹.

What do these authors draw from Nietzsche and to what extent do they read him one-sidedly and overlook other potentials in his work? Our author Paul Stephan spoke about this with philosopher Robert Hugo Ziegler.

I. Why did Nietzsche live ascetically?

“Nietzsche and physical love” — this title would probably adorn the thinnest chapter in the thick book of his life story. He was single and never lived in a partnership. There is no evidence whether he was homosexual or asexual, and whether he ever had sexual intercourse at all. The alleged syphilis infection, which could serve as evidence of at least one single act, is doubted from today's perspective. His sister Elisabeth wrote about Frederick's love life:

His infatuation never rose above moderate, poetically inspired, heartfelt affection. How the great passion, the vulgar love, has remained completely removed from my brother's entire life. His whole passion lay in the world of knowledge...¹

Did Nietzsche live like a monk of his own free will? Or would you count him among the involuntarily celibate men, tens of thousands of whom today are known as “Incels” (Involuntary celibate) form a misogynistic movement that is primarily active online, but has also produced murderers and gunmen. In the USA and Canada alone, they have killed fifty people, primarily women, since 2014. The assassin from Halle, who shot two people in his anti-Semitic attack in 2019, was also connected to the incel scene. In Incels' imagination, men are divided into three classes: attractive “alphas”, average “Normies” and, as a group of losers, the Incels, who go empty-handed when looking for partners. These young men have a traditional image of masculinity, but at the same time experience that they do not live up to their own ideal. They hate themselves and especially women for not being compliant with them. Right-wing extremists, influencers and commercial pick-up artists cultivate this negative identity and exploit the incels. They are convinced that they are victims of an overly liberalized society that gives women excessive freedoms and that men have a kind of fundamental right to sex, which is denied them “by the system.”²

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II. Women and “women” in Nietzsche's work

Notwithstanding a lack of practice in matters of love and partnership, Nietzsche occasionally painted himself as a woman expert in his writings. In particular, there is a passage from Ecce homo, “Why I write such good books” (link) , in which several aspects of female identity, emancipation and sexuality are discussed, some of which reflect the current sexist and biological views of the 19th century and would at the same time fit today's Incel ideology. It is therefore not surprising that Nietzsche is misunderstood as the “godfather of all today's incels” in various online forums such as Reddit or Quora.³ The following quotes from Nietzsche are all of the above Ecce homo-Excerpt from the text. The first appears like impostor compensation in the context of self-identification with Dionysus:

May I dare to assume that I am the woman Know? It's part of my Dionysian dowry. Who knows? Perhaps I am the first psychologist of the eternal feminine. They all love me [.]

It is remarkable that Nietzsche seemed to be very progressive on one point in the context of his image of women: He approved that women had the right to full enjoyment of sexual intercourse — an outrageous “immoral” position at the time:

[T] he preaching chastity is a public incitement to repentance. Every contempt for sexual life, every contamination of it by the term “unclean” is the crime itself alive — is the actual sin against the Holy Spirit of life.

According to Nietzsche, however, the biological purpose of reproduction is paramount. Women should not be denied their erotic desire because procreation is their actual purpose in life and many other things (such as studying, writing, culture) only distracts them from it. This distraction leads to pathological and unfortunate conditions, with only therapy helping: “Have you heard my answer to the question of how to treat a woman cures — “redeemed”? You make him a child. ”

In this context, Nietzsche also pathologizes all emancipation efforts:

The battle for Equal Rights is even a symptom of illness: every doctor knows that. — The woman, the more woman she is, defends herself with hands and feet against rights in general: the state of nature, the eternal war Between the sexes, he is by far the first place.

Nietzsche therefore sees women at an advantage in the gender war of the state of nature, which is why he considers the use of women's rights activists paradoxical and self-destructive. Legally regulated emancipation is something unnatural: “'Emancipation of woman' — that is the instinct hate of misguided, That means childbearing women against the well-behaved — the fight against the 'man' is only ever a means.” Nietzsche summarizes almost resigned: “The woman is unspeakably much more angry than the man, even smarter; kindness towards a woman is already a form of degeneration.”

By stressing the predatory dangerousness, malice, and superiority of women, Nietzsche delivers en passant An explanation for his lack of commitment:

Fortunately I am not willing to let myself be torn apart: the perfect woman tears apart when she loves... I know these lovely maidends... Ah, what a dangerous, sneaking, underground little predator!

While Dionysus was often portrayed positively in the 19th century, although he was also described with traits that were considered typically feminine in that era, his female companions, the Bakchai or Maenades, were mostly characterized as insane and spanning. This subsequent devaluation of the ancient Greek manad cult is to be regarded as a typical expression of misogyny.⁴ Nietzsche is no exception. Symbolized by the maenades, he sees women as a being dominated by sexual obsessions: “The tremendous expectation of sexual love spoils women's eye for all distant perspectives,” he wrote to Lou Andreas-Salomé, whom he adored.⁵

In Beyond good and evil He summarizes once again why women are actually far too dangerous for men:

What inspires respect and often enough fear in women is their nature, which is more natural than that of men, their genuine, predatory, cunning suppleness, their tiger claw under the glove, their naivety in egoism, their incomprehensibility and inner savagery, the incomprehensible, expanse, wandering of their desires and virtues.⁶

In an interesting analogy in the Preface of Beyond good and evil Nietzsche equates truth with the feminine and describes the inability of philosophers to approach, woo and conquer it:

Assuming that the truth is a woman — is there no reason to suspect that all philosophers, provided they were dogmatists, understood women poorly? That the gruesome seriousness, the left-wing intrusion with which they used to approach the truth up to now, were clumsy and unseemly means of taking over a woman's room for themselves? It is certain that she did not allow herself to be taken.

Did the ridicule figure of the “left-wing, obtrusive” and at the same time “gruesome and serious” dogmatist also contain a bit of self-irony?

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III. Nietzsche's relations with women

Biographical research gave various reasons for Nietzsche's lack of love life. Helmuth W. Brann speculated almost 100 years ago in his book Nietzsche and the women about Nietzsche's lack of sex appeal and his resulting frustration.⁷ Adorno placed in the Minima Moralia It is astonishing that Nietzsche “adopted the image of female nature unchecked and inexperienced from Christian civilization, which he otherwise so thoroughly distrusted. ”⁸ Martin Vogel characterized Nietzsche as “erotically weak.” His image of women is of “appalling poverty and independence.”⁹ been. According to Pia Volz, Nietzsche “idealized his schizoid-narcissistic relationship disorder as a heroic loneliness gesture.”¹⁰ and manifested in the figure of Zarathustra.

Nietzsche had several older girlfriends such as Malwida von Meysenbug, Zina von Mansurov or Marie Baumgärtner — the mother of one of his students. Nietzsche asked for a young woman's hand three times. He also maintained contact with younger students, music lovers and readers of his works. In contradiction to his written statements about the role of women in society, which were strongly influenced by the discriminatory biological ideas of his time, Nietzsche maintained acquaintances and friendships with writing and philosophizing women. The 1848 revolutionary and Wagnerian from Meysenbug, who Nietzsche as the “best [] friend in the world” vis-a-vis third parties¹¹ called, may even be regarded as a pioneer of women's emancipation, which Nietzsche vehemently rejected. Nietzsche was also familiar with several lesbian women, in addition to the Swiss feminist Meta von Salis, these included the then medical student Clara Willdenow and the philosopher Helene von Druskowitz. His reactionary views on women's rights did not seem to be an obstacle to friendship for them, except for von Druskowitz, who vehemently distanced herself from Nietzsche in 1886 and “settled accounts” with him in publishing.¹²

“Nietzsche was the type of mother's son,” stated Vogel, “even during his time as a student and professor, he primarily sought to assure himself of the goodwill of older experienced women.”¹³, for example Sophie Ritschl, his teacher's wife in Leipzig, Ottilie Brockhaus, Richard Wagner's sister, and, as mentioned, Malwida von Meysenbug. With Malwida, who was 28 years older, Nietzsche also spent the vacation approved by the University of Basel in 1876. “In the case of older women, the last remnant of timid anxiety usually disappeared and Nietzsche moved in completely informal security and suddenly open-minded agility. ”¹⁴

In spring 1876, Nietzsche asked for the hand of the young Russian woman Mathilde Trampedach, who was in Geneva and had met only three times before. Trampedach took piano lessons with composer Hugo de Senger in Geneva — and had fallen in love with him (which Nietzsche may not have known). Nietzsche sent her the marriage proposal in writing on April 11, 1876, in consultation with de Senger.¹⁵ Trampedach politely declined (and married de Senger soon after), while Nietzsche apologized profusely for his move by letter on April 15 (link). A few weeks later, in Bayreuth, he fell in love with the young music lover Louise Ott, who, however, was already married to a banker and mother.¹⁶

In Nietzsche's marriage plans of those years, the idea of economic security certainly also played a role, which had become all the more urgent after the resignation of his Basel professorship. In a letter to his sister dated April 25, 1877, he describes a plan that he had devised together with Malwida: “The marriage with a suitable but necessarily wealthy woman” would enable him to give up the health-burdensome teaching activity and “with this (woman) I would then live in Rome for the next few years [...] according to the spiritual qualities I always find Nat [alie] hearts most suitable.” (link) He had already met sisters Natalie and Olga Herzen, exiled Russians, with Malwida in Bayreuth in 1872. They shared a common taste in music, and Nietzsche initially had Olga Herzen in mind.¹⁷ His interest later shifted to Natalie. However, there were never any more serious advances. In 1877, Nietzsche Malwida wrote: “Until autumn I still have the wonderful task of winning over a wife, and if I had to take her [sic] off the alley,”¹⁸ But at the same time he was pessimistic about his sister: “The marriage, very desirable indeed — is the most unlikely thing, I know that very clearly! ”¹⁹ In late summer, he knocks on Malwida again about this issue: “Have you found the female fairy who releases me from the column I am forged to? ”²⁰

In the spring of 1882, Nietzsche submitted a marriage proposal to the German-Russian philosophy student Lou Andreas-Salomé through Paul Reé in Italy, without knowing that he himself had already presented her with regard to marriage. On May 13, 1882, Nietzsche repeated the request at another meeting in Lucerne. Lou turned down both applications and then lived with Reé, which disappointed Nietzsche. However, in retrospect, in conversation with Ida Overbeck, he gave the impression that his application was about to be rejected by Lou, and only Pro forma was done for moral and social reasons.²¹ After rejecting his marriage proposal, Nietzsche had persuaded Rée and Lou in Lucerne to take a staged photograph in which the two men pull a car with the whip-wielding Lou in front of the photo studio backdrops, making both the car and the whip ridiculously small, giving the scene a comically ironic expression. Shortly thereafter, Nietzsche used the whip motif in the first part of the Zarathustra: “You go to women? Don't forget the whip! ”²² — it should remain one of his most famous quotes today. Years later, long after Nietzsche broke with Wagner, Lou traveled to Bayreuth and once showed the whip photograph around as a curiosity that Nietzsche's sister did not like at all.²³

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Malwida apparently did not lose sight of the project of Nietzsche's marriage in the following years and repeatedly introduced him to young women. In 1884, he met Resa von Schirnhofer in Nice. Schirnhofer, ten years younger than Nietzsche and a philosophy student in Zurich, was apparently regarded by Malwida as a suitable marriage candidate for him, but there was no connection between the two.

“What are all the young or less young girls doing, with whom I owe their friendship (lots of crazy little animals, said among us)? “he asked in a letter to Malwida at the end of February 1887 (link) and complained that his younger acquaintances had not been heard from him for a long time.

In the Trampedach and Andreas-Salomé cases, the question is whether Nietzsche was even seriously thinking of marriage, because in both cases he involved direct competitors and then lost out on them. It almost seems as if he had wished for the applications to be rejected. It is also noticeable that Nietzsche has repeatedly chosen the role of an asexual-platonic “third party in the league”, for example with Franz and Ida Overbeck, as well as with Paul Rée and Lou as well as with Cosima and Richard Wagner. In this way, he was able to escape a closer bond and say goodbye to this constellation at any time. Nietzsche's tendency to make friends with lesbian women also fits into the pattern of avoidance, because they posed no “danger” in terms of sex and partnership. All in all, you get the impression that Nietzsche's marriage ambitions were not very stringent over the years and may not have been intentional at all. Perhaps he even liked to live alone and ascetically? In the third treatise of The genealogy of morality Nietzsche deals critically or mockingly with the social functions of ascetic ideals, but also points out: “A certain ascetism, we saw it, a hard and cheerful renunciation of the best will is one of the favorable conditions of the highest spirituality.”²⁴. In the end, it remains unclear whether Nietzsche deliberately lived ascetically and actually did not need any partners at all, or whether he made a virtue out of necessity.

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IV. Is Nietzsche's syphilis the reason for his celibate lifestyle?

In the end, the question should be investigated as to whether Nietzsche's illness could have been the reason for his celibate lifestyle. In the 19th century, there were cases in which bourgeois men infected with syphilis remained single out of a sense of moral responsibility because they did not want to expose their wives and children to the risk of infection. Whether Nietzsche actually ruled out marriage for this reason, but was unable to explain it to third parties? Nietzsche is said to have received medical treatment for a syphilitic disease (“Lues”) during his time in Leipzig, but gonorrhea was also diagnosed with this term at that time until the gonorrhea pathogen was detected in 1879.²⁵ In 1875, Nietzsche was diagnosed with chronic chorioretinitis for the first time, which in some cases occurs as a result of syphilis and was interpreted as an indication that he had contracted it during his studies in Leipzig.²⁶ In the case of an actual syphilis infection, the question was why he did not mention the diagnosis and symptoms in any of his letters, even though he otherwise provided detailed information about any health conditions and problems. Perhaps the shame was too great. In the 19th century, the issue of syphilis was morally burdened and socially stigmatized. The disease was initially regarded as a side effect of prostitution and as a “punishment” for “sinful” sex workers and adulterers, but over the course of the century it was regarded more and more as a threat to marriage and family, and therefore to “public health.” Although the thesis of the heredity of the disease, which emerged around 1875, relieved the infected on the moral level, the horrors of the “progressive paralysis” diagnosed as a long-term consequence and the untreatability of the disease remained present and ensured a strong presence of the epidemic in science and culture.²⁷ Syphilis phobia also undermined the diagnosis of “neurasthenia,” a complex, psychosomatic nervous state, whose symptoms fatally matched the early stage of progressive paralysis and further increased syphilisphobia. In any case, at the end of the 19th century, syphilis was considered a disease that was interpreted as a sign of social decay and as a threat to “public health.” Bourgeois men often reacted to a diagnosis in panic, occasionally even with suicide,²⁸ They often saw themselves no longer suitable for a civil marriage.

In the end, Nietzsche's symptoms were never clarified. Clinical treatment and biographical research have included chloral hydrate poisoning, mental overwork, schizophrenia, epilepsy, dementia, mania and depression. For a long time, the diagnosis of his treating doctors dominated, who identified “progressive paralysis” as a long-term consequence of syphilis in 1889. In recent decades, this has been increasingly called into question and new diagnoses and theories (as far as this is posthumously possible at all) have been added, such as a brain tumour in the eye nerve, CADASIL syndrome or MELAS syndrome.²⁹

The question of why Nietzsche remained single and chaste throughout his life cannot be conclusively answered. His relationship with women had no physical dimension, but rather complex mental aspects. He is hardly likely to serve as the godfather of today's Incel movement; his worldview and self-image were too differentiated for that. He didn't blame anyone for his loneliness. It seems paradoxical today that he adopted the usual sexist attitudes of the 19th century — that procreation, for example, was a woman's real purpose in life — and yet longed for recognition from an intelligent and educated woman: “The safest way to combat a man's disease of self-loathing is to be loved by a clever woman. ”³⁰

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Source of the article image

Salwa Wittwer (Leipzig): Stay Toxic. Oil on canvas, 120 x 100 cm, 2024, owned by the artist.

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Literature

Adorno, Theodor W.: Minima Moralia. Reflections from damaged life (1951). Frankfurt am Main 1978.

Brann, Helmuth Walter: Nietzsche and the women. Leipzig 1931.

Diethe, Carol: women. In: Henning Ottmann (ed.): Nietzsche Handbook. Stuttgart 2000, pp. 50—56.

This. : Forget the whip. Nietzsche and the women. Hamburg 2000.

Foerster-Nietzsche, Elisabeth: The life of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 1. Leipzig 1895.

Kirakosian, Racha: Intoxicates deprived of senses. A story of ecstasy, Berlin 2025.

Niemeyer, Christian: Nietzsche's syphilis — and that of others. Baden-Baden 2020.

Radkau, Joachim: Malwida from Meysenbug. Revolutionary, poet, girlfriend: A woman in the 19th century. P. 360.

Schonlau, Anja: Syphilis in literature. On aesthetics, morality, genius and medicine (1880-2000). Würzburg 2005.

Tényi, Tamás: The Madness of Dionysus — Six Hypotheses on the Illness of Nietzsche. In: Psychiatria Hungaria 27/6 (2012), P. 420-425 (link).

Vogel, Martin: Apollinan and Dionysian. Story of a brilliant mistake. Regensburg 1966.

Volz, Pia: Nietzsche's disease. In: Henning Ottmann (ed.): Nietzsche Handbook. Stuttgart 2000, p. 57 f.

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Footnotes

1: Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche, The life of Friedrich Nietzsche, Vol. 1, p. 180.

2: Cf. https://www.bpb.de/themen/rechtsextremismus/dossier-rechtsextremismus/516447/incels/ (retrieved 08.08.2025).

3: Cf. https://a-part-time-nihilist.quora.com/https-www-quora-com-Was-Friedrich-Nietzsche-an-incel-answer-Susanna-Viljanen (retrieved on 07.07.2025).

4: Cf. Racha Kirakosian, Intoxicated deprived of senses, P. 149.

5: Bf. v. 8/1882.

6: Aph 239.

7: Cf. P. 23.

8: No. 59; p. 120.

9: Martin Vogel, Apollinan and Dionysian, p. 294 f.

10: Nietzsche's disease, P. 57.

11: Bf. to Carl Gersdorff v. 26/5/1876.

12: For an excellent overview of Nietzsche's diverse relationships with women, see also the relevant monograph Forget the whip by Carol Diethe.

13: Apollinan and Dionysian, P. 295.

14: Brann, Nietzsche and the women, P. 175.

15: Cf. Bf. v. 11/4/1876.

16: Cf. Diethe, women, P. 56.

17: Cf. Joachim Radkau, Malwida von Meysenbug, P. 360.

18: Bf. v. 1/7/1877.

19: Bf. v. 2/6/1877.

20: Bf. v. 3/9/1877.

21: Cf. Brann, Nietzsche and the women, P. 151.

22: So Zarathustra spoke, From old and young women.

23: Cf. Diethe, women, p. 50 f.

24: On the genealogy of morality, paragraph III, 9.

25: Cf. bird, Apollinan and Dionysian, P. 315.

26: Cf. Volz, Nietzsche's disease, P. 57.

27: Cf. Anja Schonlau, Syphilis in literature, P. 84.

28: See ibid., p. 101.

29: Cf. Tamás Tényi, The Madness of Dionysus. Nietzsche researcher Christian Niemeyer recently tried to rehabilitate the “syphilis thesis” (cf. Nietzsche's syphilis).

30: Human, all-too-human Vol. I, Aph. 384.

Dionysus Without Eros

Was Nietzsche an Incel?

It is well known that Nietzsche had a hard time with women. His sexual orientation and activity are still riddled with mystery and speculation today. Time and again, this question inspired artists of both genders to create provocatively mocking representations. Can he possibly be described as an “incel”? As an involuntary bachelor, in the spirit of today's debate about the misogynistic “incel movement”? Christian Saehrendt explores this question and tries to shed light on Nietzsche's complicated relationship with the “second sex.”