It may
therefore
appear at first glance as if, in his public life, Nietzsche had fallen victim to his own double gifts.
Sloterdijk - Thinker on Stage
Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Walter
and comm. (New York: Vintage, 1967).
2. Jurgen Habermas, Der philosophische der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ? p.
120.
3. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, in die 37 (1983), p. 759.
4. Habermas, p. 760.
5. Cf. my essays "The Prestige of the Artist under Conditions of Modernity," in Cultural Cri-
tique no. 12 (Spring 1989); "Imagination and Modernity, Or the Taming of the Human Mind," in Critique no. 5 (Winter 1987); and "Art and the Sacrificial Structure of Modernity," after- word to Jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: The Genealogy of the Beholder in Diderot (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
6. SeePeterBurger,TheoryoftheAvant-Garde,trans. MichaelShaw(Minneapolis:University
of Minnesota Press, 1984).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxiv FOREWORD
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and ed. J. T. ? (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), p. 38.
p.
p. 39. pp.
Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," On Narrative, J. T. Mitchell, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 23.
Mitchell, "Foreword," ? p. viii.
Sam Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 54.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
14. Cf. ? Godzich, "After the Storyteller ? ? ? ? foreword to Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xviii-xix.
7.
8.
9. 10.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ed. W. 12. 13.
? Preface
? What I am presenting here is more than anything else a reading of Nietzsche's early ? The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music ? minor etude of one of the most fundamental texts of modernity, an occasional study
in the most literal sense in that it was written at the sugges- tion of Gottfried Honnefelder.
In addition, this text offers an attempt to think of the concept of enlightenment in conjunction with that of the drama as a liberal continuation of several Nietz- schean suggestions. Through this modification of the concept of what constitutes enlightenment, there developed an excess of commentary on the primary text -- an excess that made it seem appropriate for me to publish these reflections inde- pendently, rather than as a postscript to Nietzsche's book, as I had originally in- tended. I would still remind the reader of how worthwhile ? how inspir-
close reading of Nietzsche's book on tragedy can
If the dramatic structure of enlightenment is borne in ? ? ra- tional thought assimilates its own phenomenological characteristic into its reflec- tiresome theoretical ? that characterizes modern philosophy will collapse. Only a consciousness that is informed by drama, I be- lieve, can escape the complementary disfigurements of a theory that has been cut loose and a practice that is out of ? thereby forcing it always to speak of the bastards created by a dialectic between the two. In the drama of conscious exist- ence, it is not theory and practice that encounter each other, but enigma and transparency, phenomenon and insight. If enlightenment does occur, it does so
? ? ? ? XXV
? ? xxvi PREFACE
not through the establishment of a dictatorship of lucidity but as the dramatic self-illumination of existence.
The ramifications of these insights for the self-interpretation of philosophy are extraordinary. As soon as it has gained a dramatic awareness of itself, it will cease to provide the world with mere opinions. The universal concept of philo- sophical thought will burst forth as a process of processes within which a world of worlds is written, experienced, gained by force, endured, stipulated, effected, and thought. Thus, philosophy will not be that which an alleged enlightenment had wanted to make of it, a resonant process of thinking by following along behind an existence that has always already just slipped past us. Philosophy will perhaps again be worthy of its name when it signifies the cocreation of universal poetry and a passionate involvement in the adventure that is called knowledge.
? Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism
? Chapter 1
Centauric Literature
For this reason, a higher culture must give to man a double brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science.
Human, All-Too-Human
The classic texts are those that survive their interpretations. The more they are dissected, the more elusive they seem. The more persistently they are wooed by the intellect, the more icily they stare past their transcendental suitors. And the deeper the forces of hermeneutical interpretative illumination and philological re- construction penetrate the fabric woven by the classical ? the more adamantly that text resists the impact of
Is it enough to explain the preponderance of the classical texts over their in- terpretations by stating that the successors of genius are always incapable of keeping up with it, or that it is impossible for commentators to exhaust the es- sence of the ? Perhaps a hundred years ? when the humanities were in their infancy, it was still possible to believe that the resistant nature of the great texts could be accounted for in this way. A naive hermeneutics of this type was at home during a period in which the classical authors hovered, like secular
above those who had been born after ? kept aloft in an aura of heroic inac- cessibility by an ardently worshiping culture. Their works lent credibility to the claim that their interpreters, as the professional ministrants of the intellect, waved their incense burners over the classical texts so as to translate the eternal truths contained therein into pared-down formulas that could be understood from the limited perspective of their own times.
This is not the case today. The interpreter no longer approaches the classical texts like a believer going to mass; the philological sciences have long since grown tired of their cryptotheological service to pedantic literalism. It has become increasingly more difficult for interpreters to believe that they have a
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
? ? 3
? 4 ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
mission of any ? and to compile their commentary on the classical writers in the name of the eternal intellect. Instead of plunging to whatever solemn depths to find the true significance of ? they have increasingly withdrawn into a methodologically refined indifference toward all the usual pretensions of the in- tellect. A text is there, and we are here; we stand like cold-blooded barbarians before a classical ? ? indifferent to the ? perplexedly turning it over in our hands. Is it still good for anything? In any case, we can no longer presume an a priori belief in the vital significance of the eminent text. At the utmost, this significance is revealed only when an ambitious critical ego wants to make use of the material to improve itself, or when, because of a topical interest, a useful quotation is pulled at random from a historical source.
And yet the drama is just now beginning, for it is precisely whenever disillu- sionment has done its job, and the succeeding generation of the intelligentsia (whether it has grown more mature or more ? it is in any case more mod- erate and skeptical) has learned to live with what it has inherited, that what is of consequence in the great texts is revealed. Just when everyone has stopped be- lieving in them, they begin to speak to us in a new voice. When they are no longer given credit for meaning anything, they begin to enrich us in the most surprising way. When we have decided that they have no significance for us, they unobtrusively begin to reach out toward ? And just when we think that we have finally turned our backs on them and rid ourselves of them once and for ? they begin, slowly but irresistibly, to trail along behind us ? like persecutors or meddling teachers, but like inconspicuous ancestors and tutelary spirits, with whose generosity and discretion we are no longer accustomed to reckoning. When we have decided to concern ourselves henceforth only with our own par- ticular problems and are ready to indulge in existential reductionism and shake off the all-too-excessive burden of it ? it is then that we discover the voices of the classical authors in the midst of what remains ? indispensable phrase here, a beautiful passage there, occasionally the stirrings of a kindred spirit. Scattered everywhere, these are the fragments of a vocabulary ? that we find ourselves unable to relinquish precisely when we have decided to deal only with our own affairs and to withdraw from the din of the media, the ? and the barrage of estranged information with which they bombard us.
Thus we are able to arrive at Nietzsche today. He should be read within this con- must reckon with his new presence and acknowledge it as that of an author who is being allowed to return because he has been dismissed, and as that of a thinker upon whom we have stumbled because the subjects he deals with (even after the "clean-up") are themselves still ? brilliant, stimulating, and theatrical -- and in every respect as unresolved as our own. And in doing so we need not pay the least attention to the official status of his thought and to the dubiousness of his ranking as a classical writer. It is too late to be
? ? ? ? LITERATURE 5
racking our brains over whether Nietzsche, of all people, should have been ele- vated to the status of a classical writer, and whether he, as a man and a thinker, was the right choice to have been carried on the shoulders of an army of inter- preters into the pantheon of thought. The history of reception does not, for the most ? trouble itself with the varying degrees of historical and human great- ness, and thus Nietzsche has become a classical author because of a strange mix- ture of admiration and ? though, in his case, this has long since ceased to be the well-balanced classicism of bourgeois high culture, but is, in- stead, the wild classicism of the modern period, with its dark criticisms and its burning Nevertheless, it has become common practice when discussing Nietzsche to remark that there are thinkers whose works can be studied independently of their biographies, and those whose life history and the development of their thought form an impenetrable unity. Nietzsche is said to belong to this latter category. We perceive in this platitudinous concept a trace of the injustice that can be done an author by comparing him to the classical authors. Nietzsche has not been mysti- fied to quite that ? greatness has nothing to do with his being dead. Even if we disregard for the moment the almost inhuman brilliance of his later prose, Nietzsche's contemporary and mutilated aura has nothing in common with the irritating tone and noble boredom that are otherwise so often part of the clas- sical climate.
But what is it that makes Nietzsche so contemporary now ? so con- temporary that even the admonitions that were raised against his teachings are once again notorious? What has made him once again questionable, quotable, and exemplary? Is it simply that our latest neuroses are in search of a philosoph- ical protector? Or could it be that, after decades of dealing with
and born-again moralism, our Zeitgeist is again clamoring for harder truths and an enchanting removal of restraints? Has our pervasive doubt in the possibility of progress brought us to the point of needing alternative explanations for the phe- nomena of the modern ? that create a distance between us and the monsters of history and phantoms of socialization? None of these as- sumptions is completely incorrect. But they cannot explain why it is Nietzsche's name that always comes to mind whenever we attempt to come to terms with the deepest self-doubt of the modern period and
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
to make intellectual sense of the most difficult ambiguities of the present.
Before we delve deeper into one of the great texts of this author, I would
to suggest a hypothesis on the nature of Nietzsche's writing. Accordingly, his new presence could be explained not so much through his (undeniable) cultural-
and philosophical competence, the illuminative power of which is still apparent, but through a weakness that touches us more irresistibly than any strength. If Nietzsche is, as it were, still among us, it is less because of the advantages he has over us today than because of the inabilities he has in
? ? ? ? ? ? 6 ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
common with us. Nietzsche's most prophetic characteristic was his inability to be a specialist in any one discipline. He never allowed himself to be content with doing anything in a manner that was merely professionally correct; he never man- aged simply to do what was expected of him. Not that he would have been unable to meet the standards of any of the disciplines he ? opposite was the case. Nietzsche's misery began and ended in the fact that he could never be sat- isfied with pursuing one and only one subject in accordance with the established rules of the art. Certainly, he did do this to an extent in that he was undoubtedly an exceptional philologist, an astute critic of his own times, and a profound an- alyst of morals, among other things. But whenever he pursued any one of these disciplines "correctly" (indeed, he was more than correct), he always practiced at least one other at the same ? because of this was suspected of a gen- eral incorrectness.
It may therefore appear at first glance as if, in his public life, Nietzsche had fallen victim to his own double gifts. His almost inexplicable lack of success during his own lifetime may have resulted from this (a ? of success for which his helpless ? in dealing with his publishers is an insuf- ficient explanation), as may have the explosive posthumous effect of his work. While any one of his talents, taken on its own and developed to a professional
would have been sufficient for a respectable ? career as a philologist indicated this ? combination of talents this man possessed caused him to lead the life of an obscure outsider on the fringes of organized cultural life. To speak of a combination here is incorrect, since Nietzsche's was not a case of the familiar phenomenon of multiple talents. In truth, Nietzsche's talents were not a collection of abilities that developed side by side; his talents were not really separate from one another, and did not simply coexist. It was much more that, in each instance, one talent functioned through another, so that he was not, like many artists, simultaneously an artist and a musician, a poet and a philosopher, a producer and a ? and so ? but rather a musician as writer, a poet as philosopher, and a producer as theoretician. He did not practice the one discipline alongside the other, but practiced the one by practicing the other.
Nietzsche has taxed his audience with this plastic entwinement of his lan- guages and talents up to the present; no one has played as wicked a game with the appearance of being easily comprehended as he ? Nietzsche can by no means be understood by relying simply on what is there in black and white and whatever else can be learned from a synopsis of the contents. Nietzsche's fascist readers were and remain those who prove to be massively boorish when dealing with the content, unable to comprehend his great game beyond semantics, his taphysical music of gestures ? The only reader who will ulti- mately be able to approach Nietzsche's undertaking will be the one who sees what this ? displaced, finely tuned author is really about when he puts something down on paper. Thomas Mann correctly noted that he who ? ? ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE ? 7
took Nietzsche literally the sense of remaining fixated on content and se- mantic reduction ? lost. Nietzsche himself was acutely aware of the indirect and mixed elements in his writing, and during his lifetime he was never willing to put aside the opinion that he was a composer who had been mistakenly driven to literature. He also sometimes thought of himself as a poor devil who had been driven away from humanity into the realm of acrobatic divinity a fool, only a ? During the period of his greatest he experienced himself as an expressive total phenomenon that was being evaluated only by phi- listines who used the usual literary, philological, and philosophical standards of measurement. He saw himself as a philosophizing counterpart to Richard Wagner, whose aesthetic demon was also not satisfied to express itself through a single genre, and who therefore came upon the idea of the ? a symbolic arrangement using multiple media and synesthesia through which he wanted to place himself totally in the limelight.
Nietzsche's originality is evident in the fact that he developed a literary stag- ing process that had to make do without Wagner's operatic synesthesia. He had to trust his project entirely to writing, without this project being only literary in nature. Early on, friends and colleagues who were close to him realized that other forces were also at work within the psyche of the great stylist ? and pro- phetic energies; Caesarian and religion-founding impulses; psychogogic, peda- gogic, reformative and artistically demagogic drives. Nietzsche himself devel- oped a minor theory of "displaced talents" vis-a-vis Wagner, and shrewdly noted that there was something of the actor in Wagner's natural disposition that, for lack of an appropriate stage for his outrageous pretensions, spilled over into the idea of creating his own universe in the music drama. But whereas Wagner, through constant self-expansion, transformed himself from rebellious composer into a composing cultural reformer, Nietzsche ? a philologist and man of
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
to compress the entire spectrum of his impulses into the narrow medium of writing.
Thus we arrive at Nietzsche's first work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. It is obligatory reading for anyone who seeks to maintain the ties between his life and the art of making sure that it will be impossible for him ever to become simply a scholar. This art, nota bene, is not a second-choice discipline for failed scholars, stolid philologists, or flabbergasted philosophers. On the con- trary, the text is a matter of philosophie et ? of a philology with wings, and of a scholarly discipline that had risen to the level of genuine philosophical re- flection through objective/material intensity. As w i l l be shown, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music represents at the same time the birth of the Gay Science out of the spirit of ? if this Gay Science might still appear here replete with all of Nietzsche's adolescent pleasure in being
? ? ? ? ? ? ? 8 ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
The phenomenon must be understood in context. In ? at the age of twen- ty-five and without having published anything previously, Nietzsche was offered the chair in classical philology at the University of Basel solely on the basis of the recommendation of his teacher (Friedrich ? the so-called pope of the Leip- ziger philologists) and thanks to a generously unbureaucratic gesture on the part of the In his letter of ? Ritschl evaluated his candi- date as follows:
Never yet have I known a young man, or tried to help one along in my field as best I could, who was so mature as early and as young as this lives long ? I prophesy that
he will one day stand in the front rank of German philology. He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig, who ? ? ? cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is ? at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant
Ritschl was mistaken on the last ? musical nature had more to do with his existence as a philologist than his teacher was willing to admit in this moving and yet descriptive recommendation for the outsider without
What Ritschl characterized as "irrelevant" within the context of the procedure for making the appointment proved immediately to be the one element essential to Nietzsche's existence in ? Ritschl had instinctively understood that Nietz- work within the young philologist must be included here, as must be the pulsiveness and urgent drive toward self- expression that made his life ambitious and ? pregnant with ambition. Here we must also include the desire to be heard contained in his prophetic and reform-minded voices, behind which -- without engaging in evasive diagnosis or obtrusive psychologiz-
can hear the voice of Karl Ludwig ? the father he idealized, a Protestant minister who died young and whom he ? Of ? the general elements in Nietzsche's case could be trivialized under the heading "The Rectory Releases Its ? or, " I f We Wake Up to Find That We Have Been Too
In any case, music was already very much present in the first scholarly at- tempts of the newly appointed professor. His encounter with Wagner loosened the tongue of the scholar of letters; the musician began to perform through the in- strument of philology. What this overgifted scholar had appropriated from Scho- penhauer, Wagner, and the Greeks was this precise sensitivity to the modern res-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? but he did not understand what was at the core of musical and theoretical double nature. By "mu- I do not mean only that he composed and played music in the narrower sense; rather, the whole troubled mass of what was grandiose and inexpressible at
sche was a that
? ? ? ? ? ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE ? 9
onances of antiquity, to the metaphysical content of ? and to the tragic greatness of the outsider. ? in the first literary undertaking by the phenom- enal scholar, all of these motifs sounded together for the first time in a great rhe-
? torical own
His centauric talent was in the process of discovering its better put, its own
? ? Nietzsche's ? debut as brilliant as it was ? place under these auspices in the winter of ? Its brilliance has become part of cultural history, as we are reminded in editions of his ? Its catastrophic el- ement was to a great extent due to the fact that Nietzsche's vision of the birth of Greek tragedy contained more than the most well-meaning readers could have expected from ? more than the author himself dared to realize at that stage in his development. The famous ? preface of 1886 sheds some light on the reason for ? and at the same time conceals it, because the later Nietzsche no longer wanted to acknowledge the ? though less
elements in his earlier work. Its brilliance as a stylistic achievement notwith- standing, this "Self-Criticism" is a hypocritical one because, in it, the truth of the earlier ? insight into primordial pain ? stifled by the "truth" of his later work (the thesis on the will to ? This will remind us almost unavoidably of the analogous development in Freud, who sacrificed the truth of his earlier theory of seduction to the later "truth" of the theory of instinct.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Given the ? a test of Nietzsche's talents was certainly appropri- ate. Nothing was more understandable than the author's need to prove that his appointment over better-qualified applicants not only reflected a fairy-tale privi- lege but was also objectively justified by the genuine superiority of the extraor- dinary scholar and thinker. What was called for, then, was proof of his superiority, the corroboration of an academic rank that had been too easily won. He wanted more could do more. At his first opportunity to dazzle the general reading he immediately extended the oppressive excess of his vision beyond what was demanded by his subject.
That he did this is still baffling a hundred years after the fact. Who was really interested in the details of how Greek tragedy might have developed? Who, except for a few philologists of antiquity who were not interested in much would get excited about ancient he-goat choruses and the conjectured states of the souls of Attic theatergoers during Dionysian performances? Nietzsche must be credited for the fact that such obdurate lay questions no longer have to be se- riously posed today. Because of his genial intervention, which intended in part to inspire philology and in part to force it to extend beyond itself, he made sure that the philosophical and psychological concerns of humanity could develop from of the specialized concerns of philology ? one can use the term "hu- within the context of current discourse without ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 10 ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
It has often been remarked that Nietzsche's first book was, at bottom, simply a long conversation with Richard ? wooing of his fatherly friend and an ecstatic projection of himself into Wagner's heroic, immortalized dominion of art. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine The Birth of Tragedy without Wagner's
with the ominous pairing of the gods Apollo and with whom Wagner had already been operating pro ? and then continuing from the critique of the classical opera to the idea of a new German renaissance under the sign of a Wagnerian art of ? Nietzsche once made the coquettish observation that Wagner could have written the book better himself. And yet, understanding what influenced it does not grasp the phenom- enon that came to fruition in The Birth of Tragedy. You can add together the the Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and the elements from classi-
cal philology any which way you ? and never come up with Nietzsche's
For whatever the combination of sources and prototypes, the decisive element in it was the ? birth, that is, the setting loose of an infinitely consequential artistic and philosophical double-natured eloquence within which Nietzsche's powers were bound together effectively for the first ? Only someone who has long since left his imagined audience behind him can write like this
who is no longer concerned with whether his actual audience will understand him. This would explain Nietzsche's somnambulistic self-assuredness in commit- ting such a professional faux pas. In spite of his esoteric bravado, he was preach- ing to the ? which were inhabited by his great kindred ? and woe to those who were not comfortable at those ? "God have mercy on my phi- lologists if they don't want to learn ? wrote Nietzsche in the letter that accompanied the edition dedicated to Wagner in January of
It was to be expected that the word "megalomania" would sooner or later be used in reaction to such high-blown mannerisms ? Ritschl was the first to use it. In contrast to this, Wagner reacted enthusiastically. According to Wagner, the maestro wept with joy when he read the young professor's book. This is not hard to believe if we remind ourselves that Wagner was merely read- ing the mirror image of his own thoughts in Nietzsche's words, and did not stop to consider that this kind of mirroring might also represent a provocation from a different sort of confident awareness of ? There can be no doubt that Nietz- sche himself thought this and that he was attempting to understand his own de- velopment from the perspective of the dialectic of the divestment and finding of the self; in honoring the other man, he recognized an essential component in the process of liberating ? Shortly after the publication of The Birth of Trag- edy, Nietzsche expressed his obstinate opposition to total absorption in the cult of Wagner through an essay on the theory of competition in antiquity:
That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
genius, another genius. Every talent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the command of Hellenic popular
"cult of genius" ? its curious and offensive aspects notwith- standing, will take on added significance with respect to psychology in our fur- ther deliberations. During Nietzsche's time, any engendering of centaurs was possible only within the context of a genial, artistic, "everything-is-permitted"
which later gave birth to these ? these doubly destructive images from art and theory, stimulating fusions of the fundamental and the accidental. Even in ? ? he had accepted the position at Basel and had, under the liberating influence of Wagner, made his first rhetorical attempts at a philology inspired by the spirit of ? was able to express a presentiment of
literary tendencies. He wrote at this time to Erwin Rohde:
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Scholarship, art, and philosophy are growing together inside me to such an extent that one day I'm bound to give birth to Only from behind the pretense of the cult of genius was Nietzsche able to defend himself publicly from his profession's demands that he limit his self-ex- pression to topics that were customary within the profession, and that he deal privately with the so-called existential remainder. The genial mannerisms of the author can therefore be understood as indications of an understandable lack of willingness and as manifestations of an endearing incapacity -- the unwillingness to mutilate himself academically, and the inability to be the sort of scholar who is interested in nothing outside of his own narrow specialization.
Now, it would seem as obvious as it would be misleading to understand Nietzsche's literary centaurs within the context of the essay ? and to thereby dismiss the drama of civilization that is hidden behind a reduction to genre def- inition by means of a prescribed phraseology, however generous it may be. The term "essay" itself has a cockeyed ring to it: it sounds almost like a plea for leniency in the face of insufficient intellectual ? Its open form, its laxity in constructing an argument, the rhetorical liberties it takes, and the "vacation" it allows one from the task of having to provide evidence to support one's conclu-
of this would point to mitigating circumstances. We are usually only able to associate such laxity with regression, and such liberties with a lapse. To the extent that the same types of tension-release mechanisms must coexist along- side a stringent ? the intellect that is dominated by professional- ism and seriousness must concede the existence of a proviso that it calls "the
one does not have to be so particular.
But this is not at all true in Nietzsche's writing. When he lets himself go, the level of quality increases; when he opens the floodgates of his mind, the claims he makes are radicalized. And when he follows his whims, his discipline be- ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
comes more than it was. For this reason, Nietzsche's centaurs consistently take the wrong ? -- and thereby proceed
The problem that begins to make itself apparent here is so extensive that it would seem justifiable to attempt to reformulate it.
and comm. (New York: Vintage, 1967).
2. Jurgen Habermas, Der philosophische der Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ? p.
120.
3. Cf. Jurgen Habermas, in die 37 (1983), p. 759.
4. Habermas, p. 760.
5. Cf. my essays "The Prestige of the Artist under Conditions of Modernity," in Cultural Cri-
tique no. 12 (Spring 1989); "Imagination and Modernity, Or the Taming of the Human Mind," in Critique no. 5 (Winter 1987); and "Art and the Sacrificial Structure of Modernity," after- word to Jay Caplan, Framed Narratives: The Genealogy of the Beholder in Diderot (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1985).
6. SeePeterBurger,TheoryoftheAvant-Garde,trans. MichaelShaw(Minneapolis:University
of Minnesota Press, 1984).
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxiv FOREWORD
Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and ed. J. T. ? (Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), p. 38.
p.
p. 39. pp.
Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality," On Narrative, J. T. Mitchell, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 23.
Mitchell, "Foreword," ? p. viii.
Sam Weber, Institution and Interpretation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 54.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
14. Cf. ? Godzich, "After the Storyteller ? ? ? ? foreword to Ross Chambers, Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. xviii-xix.
7.
8.
9. 10.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ed. W. 12. 13.
? Preface
? What I am presenting here is more than anything else a reading of Nietzsche's early ? The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music ? minor etude of one of the most fundamental texts of modernity, an occasional study
in the most literal sense in that it was written at the sugges- tion of Gottfried Honnefelder.
In addition, this text offers an attempt to think of the concept of enlightenment in conjunction with that of the drama as a liberal continuation of several Nietz- schean suggestions. Through this modification of the concept of what constitutes enlightenment, there developed an excess of commentary on the primary text -- an excess that made it seem appropriate for me to publish these reflections inde- pendently, rather than as a postscript to Nietzsche's book, as I had originally in- tended. I would still remind the reader of how worthwhile ? how inspir-
close reading of Nietzsche's book on tragedy can
If the dramatic structure of enlightenment is borne in ? ? ra- tional thought assimilates its own phenomenological characteristic into its reflec- tiresome theoretical ? that characterizes modern philosophy will collapse. Only a consciousness that is informed by drama, I be- lieve, can escape the complementary disfigurements of a theory that has been cut loose and a practice that is out of ? thereby forcing it always to speak of the bastards created by a dialectic between the two. In the drama of conscious exist- ence, it is not theory and practice that encounter each other, but enigma and transparency, phenomenon and insight. If enlightenment does occur, it does so
? ? ? ? XXV
? ? xxvi PREFACE
not through the establishment of a dictatorship of lucidity but as the dramatic self-illumination of existence.
The ramifications of these insights for the self-interpretation of philosophy are extraordinary. As soon as it has gained a dramatic awareness of itself, it will cease to provide the world with mere opinions. The universal concept of philo- sophical thought will burst forth as a process of processes within which a world of worlds is written, experienced, gained by force, endured, stipulated, effected, and thought. Thus, philosophy will not be that which an alleged enlightenment had wanted to make of it, a resonant process of thinking by following along behind an existence that has always already just slipped past us. Philosophy will perhaps again be worthy of its name when it signifies the cocreation of universal poetry and a passionate involvement in the adventure that is called knowledge.
? Thinker on Stage: Nietzsche's Materialism
? Chapter 1
Centauric Literature
For this reason, a higher culture must give to man a double brain, as it were two brain-ventricles, one for the perceptions of science, the other for those of non-science.
Human, All-Too-Human
The classic texts are those that survive their interpretations. The more they are dissected, the more elusive they seem. The more persistently they are wooed by the intellect, the more icily they stare past their transcendental suitors. And the deeper the forces of hermeneutical interpretative illumination and philological re- construction penetrate the fabric woven by the classical ? the more adamantly that text resists the impact of
Is it enough to explain the preponderance of the classical texts over their in- terpretations by stating that the successors of genius are always incapable of keeping up with it, or that it is impossible for commentators to exhaust the es- sence of the ? Perhaps a hundred years ? when the humanities were in their infancy, it was still possible to believe that the resistant nature of the great texts could be accounted for in this way. A naive hermeneutics of this type was at home during a period in which the classical authors hovered, like secular
above those who had been born after ? kept aloft in an aura of heroic inac- cessibility by an ardently worshiping culture. Their works lent credibility to the claim that their interpreters, as the professional ministrants of the intellect, waved their incense burners over the classical texts so as to translate the eternal truths contained therein into pared-down formulas that could be understood from the limited perspective of their own times.
This is not the case today. The interpreter no longer approaches the classical texts like a believer going to mass; the philological sciences have long since grown tired of their cryptotheological service to pedantic literalism. It has become increasingly more difficult for interpreters to believe that they have a
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mission of any ? and to compile their commentary on the classical writers in the name of the eternal intellect. Instead of plunging to whatever solemn depths to find the true significance of ? they have increasingly withdrawn into a methodologically refined indifference toward all the usual pretensions of the in- tellect. A text is there, and we are here; we stand like cold-blooded barbarians before a classical ? ? indifferent to the ? perplexedly turning it over in our hands. Is it still good for anything? In any case, we can no longer presume an a priori belief in the vital significance of the eminent text. At the utmost, this significance is revealed only when an ambitious critical ego wants to make use of the material to improve itself, or when, because of a topical interest, a useful quotation is pulled at random from a historical source.
And yet the drama is just now beginning, for it is precisely whenever disillu- sionment has done its job, and the succeeding generation of the intelligentsia (whether it has grown more mature or more ? it is in any case more mod- erate and skeptical) has learned to live with what it has inherited, that what is of consequence in the great texts is revealed. Just when everyone has stopped be- lieving in them, they begin to speak to us in a new voice. When they are no longer given credit for meaning anything, they begin to enrich us in the most surprising way. When we have decided that they have no significance for us, they unobtrusively begin to reach out toward ? And just when we think that we have finally turned our backs on them and rid ourselves of them once and for ? they begin, slowly but irresistibly, to trail along behind us ? like persecutors or meddling teachers, but like inconspicuous ancestors and tutelary spirits, with whose generosity and discretion we are no longer accustomed to reckoning. When we have decided to concern ourselves henceforth only with our own par- ticular problems and are ready to indulge in existential reductionism and shake off the all-too-excessive burden of it ? it is then that we discover the voices of the classical authors in the midst of what remains ? indispensable phrase here, a beautiful passage there, occasionally the stirrings of a kindred spirit. Scattered everywhere, these are the fragments of a vocabulary ? that we find ourselves unable to relinquish precisely when we have decided to deal only with our own affairs and to withdraw from the din of the media, the ? and the barrage of estranged information with which they bombard us.
Thus we are able to arrive at Nietzsche today. He should be read within this con- must reckon with his new presence and acknowledge it as that of an author who is being allowed to return because he has been dismissed, and as that of a thinker upon whom we have stumbled because the subjects he deals with (even after the "clean-up") are themselves still ? brilliant, stimulating, and theatrical -- and in every respect as unresolved as our own. And in doing so we need not pay the least attention to the official status of his thought and to the dubiousness of his ranking as a classical writer. It is too late to be
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racking our brains over whether Nietzsche, of all people, should have been ele- vated to the status of a classical writer, and whether he, as a man and a thinker, was the right choice to have been carried on the shoulders of an army of inter- preters into the pantheon of thought. The history of reception does not, for the most ? trouble itself with the varying degrees of historical and human great- ness, and thus Nietzsche has become a classical author because of a strange mix- ture of admiration and ? though, in his case, this has long since ceased to be the well-balanced classicism of bourgeois high culture, but is, in- stead, the wild classicism of the modern period, with its dark criticisms and its burning Nevertheless, it has become common practice when discussing Nietzsche to remark that there are thinkers whose works can be studied independently of their biographies, and those whose life history and the development of their thought form an impenetrable unity. Nietzsche is said to belong to this latter category. We perceive in this platitudinous concept a trace of the injustice that can be done an author by comparing him to the classical authors. Nietzsche has not been mysti- fied to quite that ? greatness has nothing to do with his being dead. Even if we disregard for the moment the almost inhuman brilliance of his later prose, Nietzsche's contemporary and mutilated aura has nothing in common with the irritating tone and noble boredom that are otherwise so often part of the clas- sical climate.
But what is it that makes Nietzsche so contemporary now ? so con- temporary that even the admonitions that were raised against his teachings are once again notorious? What has made him once again questionable, quotable, and exemplary? Is it simply that our latest neuroses are in search of a philosoph- ical protector? Or could it be that, after decades of dealing with
and born-again moralism, our Zeitgeist is again clamoring for harder truths and an enchanting removal of restraints? Has our pervasive doubt in the possibility of progress brought us to the point of needing alternative explanations for the phe- nomena of the modern ? that create a distance between us and the monsters of history and phantoms of socialization? None of these as- sumptions is completely incorrect. But they cannot explain why it is Nietzsche's name that always comes to mind whenever we attempt to come to terms with the deepest self-doubt of the modern period and
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to make intellectual sense of the most difficult ambiguities of the present.
Before we delve deeper into one of the great texts of this author, I would
to suggest a hypothesis on the nature of Nietzsche's writing. Accordingly, his new presence could be explained not so much through his (undeniable) cultural-
and philosophical competence, the illuminative power of which is still apparent, but through a weakness that touches us more irresistibly than any strength. If Nietzsche is, as it were, still among us, it is less because of the advantages he has over us today than because of the inabilities he has in
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common with us. Nietzsche's most prophetic characteristic was his inability to be a specialist in any one discipline. He never allowed himself to be content with doing anything in a manner that was merely professionally correct; he never man- aged simply to do what was expected of him. Not that he would have been unable to meet the standards of any of the disciplines he ? opposite was the case. Nietzsche's misery began and ended in the fact that he could never be sat- isfied with pursuing one and only one subject in accordance with the established rules of the art. Certainly, he did do this to an extent in that he was undoubtedly an exceptional philologist, an astute critic of his own times, and a profound an- alyst of morals, among other things. But whenever he pursued any one of these disciplines "correctly" (indeed, he was more than correct), he always practiced at least one other at the same ? because of this was suspected of a gen- eral incorrectness.
It may therefore appear at first glance as if, in his public life, Nietzsche had fallen victim to his own double gifts. His almost inexplicable lack of success during his own lifetime may have resulted from this (a ? of success for which his helpless ? in dealing with his publishers is an insuf- ficient explanation), as may have the explosive posthumous effect of his work. While any one of his talents, taken on its own and developed to a professional
would have been sufficient for a respectable ? career as a philologist indicated this ? combination of talents this man possessed caused him to lead the life of an obscure outsider on the fringes of organized cultural life. To speak of a combination here is incorrect, since Nietzsche's was not a case of the familiar phenomenon of multiple talents. In truth, Nietzsche's talents were not a collection of abilities that developed side by side; his talents were not really separate from one another, and did not simply coexist. It was much more that, in each instance, one talent functioned through another, so that he was not, like many artists, simultaneously an artist and a musician, a poet and a philosopher, a producer and a ? and so ? but rather a musician as writer, a poet as philosopher, and a producer as theoretician. He did not practice the one discipline alongside the other, but practiced the one by practicing the other.
Nietzsche has taxed his audience with this plastic entwinement of his lan- guages and talents up to the present; no one has played as wicked a game with the appearance of being easily comprehended as he ? Nietzsche can by no means be understood by relying simply on what is there in black and white and whatever else can be learned from a synopsis of the contents. Nietzsche's fascist readers were and remain those who prove to be massively boorish when dealing with the content, unable to comprehend his great game beyond semantics, his taphysical music of gestures ? The only reader who will ulti- mately be able to approach Nietzsche's undertaking will be the one who sees what this ? displaced, finely tuned author is really about when he puts something down on paper. Thomas Mann correctly noted that he who ? ? ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE ? 7
took Nietzsche literally the sense of remaining fixated on content and se- mantic reduction ? lost. Nietzsche himself was acutely aware of the indirect and mixed elements in his writing, and during his lifetime he was never willing to put aside the opinion that he was a composer who had been mistakenly driven to literature. He also sometimes thought of himself as a poor devil who had been driven away from humanity into the realm of acrobatic divinity a fool, only a ? During the period of his greatest he experienced himself as an expressive total phenomenon that was being evaluated only by phi- listines who used the usual literary, philological, and philosophical standards of measurement. He saw himself as a philosophizing counterpart to Richard Wagner, whose aesthetic demon was also not satisfied to express itself through a single genre, and who therefore came upon the idea of the ? a symbolic arrangement using multiple media and synesthesia through which he wanted to place himself totally in the limelight.
Nietzsche's originality is evident in the fact that he developed a literary stag- ing process that had to make do without Wagner's operatic synesthesia. He had to trust his project entirely to writing, without this project being only literary in nature. Early on, friends and colleagues who were close to him realized that other forces were also at work within the psyche of the great stylist ? and pro- phetic energies; Caesarian and religion-founding impulses; psychogogic, peda- gogic, reformative and artistically demagogic drives. Nietzsche himself devel- oped a minor theory of "displaced talents" vis-a-vis Wagner, and shrewdly noted that there was something of the actor in Wagner's natural disposition that, for lack of an appropriate stage for his outrageous pretensions, spilled over into the idea of creating his own universe in the music drama. But whereas Wagner, through constant self-expansion, transformed himself from rebellious composer into a composing cultural reformer, Nietzsche ? a philologist and man of
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to compress the entire spectrum of his impulses into the narrow medium of writing.
Thus we arrive at Nietzsche's first work, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music. It is obligatory reading for anyone who seeks to maintain the ties between his life and the art of making sure that it will be impossible for him ever to become simply a scholar. This art, nota bene, is not a second-choice discipline for failed scholars, stolid philologists, or flabbergasted philosophers. On the con- trary, the text is a matter of philosophie et ? of a philology with wings, and of a scholarly discipline that had risen to the level of genuine philosophical re- flection through objective/material intensity. As w i l l be shown, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music represents at the same time the birth of the Gay Science out of the spirit of ? if this Gay Science might still appear here replete with all of Nietzsche's adolescent pleasure in being
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The phenomenon must be understood in context. In ? at the age of twen- ty-five and without having published anything previously, Nietzsche was offered the chair in classical philology at the University of Basel solely on the basis of the recommendation of his teacher (Friedrich ? the so-called pope of the Leip- ziger philologists) and thanks to a generously unbureaucratic gesture on the part of the In his letter of ? Ritschl evaluated his candi- date as follows:
Never yet have I known a young man, or tried to help one along in my field as best I could, who was so mature as early and as young as this lives long ? I prophesy that
he will one day stand in the front rank of German philology. He is the idol and, without wishing it, the leader of the whole younger generation of philologists here in Leipzig, who ? ? ? cannot wait to hear him as a lecturer. You will say, I describe a phenomenon. Well, that is just what he is ? at the same time pleasant and modest. Also a gifted musician, which is irrelevant
Ritschl was mistaken on the last ? musical nature had more to do with his existence as a philologist than his teacher was willing to admit in this moving and yet descriptive recommendation for the outsider without
What Ritschl characterized as "irrelevant" within the context of the procedure for making the appointment proved immediately to be the one element essential to Nietzsche's existence in ? Ritschl had instinctively understood that Nietz- work within the young philologist must be included here, as must be the pulsiveness and urgent drive toward self- expression that made his life ambitious and ? pregnant with ambition. Here we must also include the desire to be heard contained in his prophetic and reform-minded voices, behind which -- without engaging in evasive diagnosis or obtrusive psychologiz-
can hear the voice of Karl Ludwig ? the father he idealized, a Protestant minister who died young and whom he ? Of ? the general elements in Nietzsche's case could be trivialized under the heading "The Rectory Releases Its ? or, " I f We Wake Up to Find That We Have Been Too
In any case, music was already very much present in the first scholarly at- tempts of the newly appointed professor. His encounter with Wagner loosened the tongue of the scholar of letters; the musician began to perform through the in- strument of philology. What this overgifted scholar had appropriated from Scho- penhauer, Wagner, and the Greeks was this precise sensitivity to the modern res-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? but he did not understand what was at the core of musical and theoretical double nature. By "mu- I do not mean only that he composed and played music in the narrower sense; rather, the whole troubled mass of what was grandiose and inexpressible at
sche was a that
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onances of antiquity, to the metaphysical content of ? and to the tragic greatness of the outsider. ? in the first literary undertaking by the phenom- enal scholar, all of these motifs sounded together for the first time in a great rhe-
? torical own
His centauric talent was in the process of discovering its better put, its own
? ? Nietzsche's ? debut as brilliant as it was ? place under these auspices in the winter of ? Its brilliance has become part of cultural history, as we are reminded in editions of his ? Its catastrophic el- ement was to a great extent due to the fact that Nietzsche's vision of the birth of Greek tragedy contained more than the most well-meaning readers could have expected from ? more than the author himself dared to realize at that stage in his development. The famous ? preface of 1886 sheds some light on the reason for ? and at the same time conceals it, because the later Nietzsche no longer wanted to acknowledge the ? though less
elements in his earlier work. Its brilliance as a stylistic achievement notwith- standing, this "Self-Criticism" is a hypocritical one because, in it, the truth of the earlier ? insight into primordial pain ? stifled by the "truth" of his later work (the thesis on the will to ? This will remind us almost unavoidably of the analogous development in Freud, who sacrificed the truth of his earlier theory of seduction to the later "truth" of the theory of instinct.
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Given the ? a test of Nietzsche's talents was certainly appropri- ate. Nothing was more understandable than the author's need to prove that his appointment over better-qualified applicants not only reflected a fairy-tale privi- lege but was also objectively justified by the genuine superiority of the extraor- dinary scholar and thinker. What was called for, then, was proof of his superiority, the corroboration of an academic rank that had been too easily won. He wanted more could do more. At his first opportunity to dazzle the general reading he immediately extended the oppressive excess of his vision beyond what was demanded by his subject.
That he did this is still baffling a hundred years after the fact. Who was really interested in the details of how Greek tragedy might have developed? Who, except for a few philologists of antiquity who were not interested in much would get excited about ancient he-goat choruses and the conjectured states of the souls of Attic theatergoers during Dionysian performances? Nietzsche must be credited for the fact that such obdurate lay questions no longer have to be se- riously posed today. Because of his genial intervention, which intended in part to inspire philology and in part to force it to extend beyond itself, he made sure that the philosophical and psychological concerns of humanity could develop from of the specialized concerns of philology ? one can use the term "hu- within the context of current discourse without ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 10 ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
It has often been remarked that Nietzsche's first book was, at bottom, simply a long conversation with Richard ? wooing of his fatherly friend and an ecstatic projection of himself into Wagner's heroic, immortalized dominion of art. Indeed, it is impossible to imagine The Birth of Tragedy without Wagner's
with the ominous pairing of the gods Apollo and with whom Wagner had already been operating pro ? and then continuing from the critique of the classical opera to the idea of a new German renaissance under the sign of a Wagnerian art of ? Nietzsche once made the coquettish observation that Wagner could have written the book better himself. And yet, understanding what influenced it does not grasp the phenom- enon that came to fruition in The Birth of Tragedy. You can add together the the Schopenhauerian metaphysics, and the elements from classi-
cal philology any which way you ? and never come up with Nietzsche's
For whatever the combination of sources and prototypes, the decisive element in it was the ? birth, that is, the setting loose of an infinitely consequential artistic and philosophical double-natured eloquence within which Nietzsche's powers were bound together effectively for the first ? Only someone who has long since left his imagined audience behind him can write like this
who is no longer concerned with whether his actual audience will understand him. This would explain Nietzsche's somnambulistic self-assuredness in commit- ting such a professional faux pas. In spite of his esoteric bravado, he was preach- ing to the ? which were inhabited by his great kindred ? and woe to those who were not comfortable at those ? "God have mercy on my phi- lologists if they don't want to learn ? wrote Nietzsche in the letter that accompanied the edition dedicated to Wagner in January of
It was to be expected that the word "megalomania" would sooner or later be used in reaction to such high-blown mannerisms ? Ritschl was the first to use it. In contrast to this, Wagner reacted enthusiastically. According to Wagner, the maestro wept with joy when he read the young professor's book. This is not hard to believe if we remind ourselves that Wagner was merely read- ing the mirror image of his own thoughts in Nietzsche's words, and did not stop to consider that this kind of mirroring might also represent a provocation from a different sort of confident awareness of ? There can be no doubt that Nietz- sche himself thought this and that he was attempting to understand his own de- velopment from the perspective of the dialectic of the divestment and finding of the self; in honoring the other man, he recognized an essential component in the process of liberating ? Shortly after the publication of The Birth of Trag- edy, Nietzsche expressed his obstinate opposition to total absorption in the cult of Wagner through an essay on the theory of competition in antiquity:
That is the core of the Hellenic notion of the contest: it abominates the rule of one and fears its dangers; it desires, as a protection against the
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genius, another genius. Every talent must unfold itself in fighting: that is the command of Hellenic popular
"cult of genius" ? its curious and offensive aspects notwith- standing, will take on added significance with respect to psychology in our fur- ther deliberations. During Nietzsche's time, any engendering of centaurs was possible only within the context of a genial, artistic, "everything-is-permitted"
which later gave birth to these ? these doubly destructive images from art and theory, stimulating fusions of the fundamental and the accidental. Even in ? ? he had accepted the position at Basel and had, under the liberating influence of Wagner, made his first rhetorical attempts at a philology inspired by the spirit of ? was able to express a presentiment of
literary tendencies. He wrote at this time to Erwin Rohde:
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Scholarship, art, and philosophy are growing together inside me to such an extent that one day I'm bound to give birth to Only from behind the pretense of the cult of genius was Nietzsche able to defend himself publicly from his profession's demands that he limit his self-ex- pression to topics that were customary within the profession, and that he deal privately with the so-called existential remainder. The genial mannerisms of the author can therefore be understood as indications of an understandable lack of willingness and as manifestations of an endearing incapacity -- the unwillingness to mutilate himself academically, and the inability to be the sort of scholar who is interested in nothing outside of his own narrow specialization.
Now, it would seem as obvious as it would be misleading to understand Nietzsche's literary centaurs within the context of the essay ? and to thereby dismiss the drama of civilization that is hidden behind a reduction to genre def- inition by means of a prescribed phraseology, however generous it may be. The term "essay" itself has a cockeyed ring to it: it sounds almost like a plea for leniency in the face of insufficient intellectual ? Its open form, its laxity in constructing an argument, the rhetorical liberties it takes, and the "vacation" it allows one from the task of having to provide evidence to support one's conclu-
of this would point to mitigating circumstances. We are usually only able to associate such laxity with regression, and such liberties with a lapse. To the extent that the same types of tension-release mechanisms must coexist along- side a stringent ? the intellect that is dominated by professional- ism and seriousness must concede the existence of a proviso that it calls "the
one does not have to be so particular.
But this is not at all true in Nietzsche's writing. When he lets himself go, the level of quality increases; when he opens the floodgates of his mind, the claims he makes are radicalized. And when he follows his whims, his discipline be- ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CENTAURIC LITERATURE
comes more than it was. For this reason, Nietzsche's centaurs consistently take the wrong ? -- and thereby proceed
The problem that begins to make itself apparent here is so extensive that it would seem justifiable to attempt to reformulate it.
