In Nietzsche's view,
disarmament
can be realized only as an aesthetic ?
Sloterdijk - Thinker on Stage
For Nietzsche, the indispensable polarity of the Dionysian and the Apollonian began to swing out of balance in modernity.
The occasion that induced this development was the grad- ual unconditional dominance of the Apollonian, restricted to the realm of auton- omous art, thus stifling a mode of reflection that was geared toward human cul- ture as a whole.
The Dionysian, only simmering in art from afar, is ?
the rhetorical strategies of aesthetic ideology ?
repressed by the constant affirmation of a newly differentiated and separated aesthetic ?
For Nietz- sche, human culture has, ever since Socrates, been marked by what can be called a Dionysus oblivion.
Therefore, no matter to what extent the concept of the Dionysian is seen in the tradition of aesthetic ego transgressions ?
the En- lightenment, Nietzsche vehemently opposes the Enlightenment's aspirations to transform and project the "mysterious primordial unity" into a historicophiloso- phical state that can be anticipated by "enlightened" intellectuals.
He brands the transformation of the Dionysian into a ?
projection as an un- founded, structurally motivated optimism, "which, having once penetrated trag- edy must gradually overgrow its Dionysian regions and impel it necessarily to self-destruction ?
the death-leap into the bourgeois drama" (N 91).
Wherever Nietzsche polemicizes against the Enlightenment and its global moralism, he does so because it deflates the dialectical nature of the tension between the Dionysian and Apollonian as the two basic principles of life, thus striving to neu- tralize the only space from which resistance might emerge.
"For with respect to art," Socrates, "that despotic logician" and incarnation of the "theoretical man" (i.
e.
, of the modern alienated individual Schiller describes in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of ?
feels "a ?
a void, half a ?
a
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xvii
possibly neglected duty" (N 92). This very Socrates is therefore forced, at the end of his ? to address a question that he had constantly repressed and to ask himself: "Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science? " (N 93). In short, Nietzsche saw the structural integration of the aesthetic into the system of modernity as a compensatory realm surprisingly clearly. Insofar as he attempts to rescue the aesthetic from such an integration, Nietzsche's project co- incides with the project of the historical
Nietzsche blocks an "enlightened" reading of the Dionysian by radicalizing the opposition between aesthetic and daily
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experiences: "For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of exist- ence ? while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experi- ences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will- negating mood is the fruit of these states" (N 59- 60). The aesthetic introduces the possibility of transcending agonistic individualism; as such it is a precondi- tion for the acceptance of
Unlike the avant-garde, Nietzsche employs myths in order to understand the necessity for myths; he narrates myths in order to illuminate the nonmythical par excellence: social structures. The myth of the destruction of tragedy represents the functional integration of art as compensatory. Nietzsche, of course, could never agree with such a reading of his analytic method since it necessarily turns the mythical into an analogical construct that "imitates" a structural "reality" outside itself, thus defusing the disruptive power of the mythical. For if "our understanding is to content itself with the perception ? ? ? analogies" between history and society, on the one hand, and myth, on the other, then "we are re- duced to a frame of mind which makes impossible any reception of the
for the myth wants to be experienced vividly as a unique example of a universal- ity and truth that gaze into the infinite" (N ? Reading myth, as I have done, as a means of explaining the structure of modernity ends, in Nietzsche's view, in being caught in the premises of a nondialectical enlightenment. A structuralistic description of modernity that claims to explain the structure as a whole is an im- possibility for him. The gap between the "theoretical" and the "tragic" can nei- ther be comprehended scientifically nor deactivated. Only if we do not attempt to explain this gap away can society, "leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually [begin] to tremble with wanton agitations and desires" (N ? However, Nietzsche's inclination to avoid a structuralistic understand- ing of his own reading of modernity is, as I will argue later, based on the premise that a redefined aesthetic has to be kept from being contaminated by a social structure that remains "outside" and by discourses implicated by that structure. The analysis itself has to be turned into an aesthetic phenomenon. This assumes,
? ? ? ? ? xviii FOREWORD
I would like to suggest, a problematic distinction between discursive genres. If one reconceives the same project as a strategy that can be employed within a the- oretical discourse, Nietzsche's reluctance to employ means other than myth might turn out to be an unfounded epistemological precaution.
Nietzsche's essay displays an acute understanding of both the indispensable function and problematic status of ? Viewing the "impulse which calls art into being as the complement and consummation of existence ? a transfiguring mirror" (N 43), he conceives of the sign as a necessary comple- ment to existence, since only in the mirror of the sign can humans free them- selves reflectively from strictures inscribed upon their existence. Nietzsche's conception of the mythical or aesthetic sign as mirror has to be read as a political gesture of resistance. The sign, necessarily confining that which it signifies, is per definition of an Apollonian nature. By stressing the Apollonian nature of rep- resentation, Nietzsche insists on the necessity of delimitation; he even insists on the necessity of agonistic interaction: "For Apollo wants to grant repose to indi- vidual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them and by again and again calling these to mind as the most sacred laws of the world, with his de- mands for self-knowledge and measure" (N 72). Self-knowledge and measure, however, cannot be attained in the ? fashion of mirrorless reflection. Nietzsche cloaks even his epistemological and methodological reflections on the problematic status of analytic rationality in a mythical narrative. Thus, he ex- presses the status of mythical figures, prerequisite to cognition, in the figure of Socrates, whose image serves as a mirror in which Nietzsche can unfold his methodological ? If the Greeks had wanted to erase the influence of Socrates, Nietzsche maintains, they should have exiled him. The living, but geographically removed, Socrates could not have served as a sign (or, from the hindsight of a culture of the spectacle one might contend: at least not before the advent of mass communication). However, the "dying Socrates," being turned into an image through his death, "became the new ideal, never seen before"; and Greek youths prostrated themselves "before this image" (N 89). "Hence the image of the dying ? as the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission ? to make existence appear com- prehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the ? which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose, of science" (N 96). Nietzsche argues repeatedly for a two- fold necessity of myth. The image of the dying Socrates is a mythical represen- tation that strengthens the realm of science. Only in the image of its mythical representation can science sustain itself as a delimited unit; myth is a prerequisite for delimitations. The mythical image as mirror is the ? individua- tionis. In addition to such an internal mythical supplement, scientific or theoret-
? ? FOREWORD xix
thinking needs an external complement: the Dionysian tamed by its artistic
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Representation ? the Apollonian as a philosophical reflection in the guise of myth is simply a mythical circumscription of the unavoidability of represen- us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in in- dividuals ? it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they ? With the immense impact of the ? the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self- annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the image that he is seeing a single image of the world" (N ? Representation detains and obstructs that which it aims to
express.
Art as representation is ? ? mirror image in which the Dionysian man con-
templates himself" (N 63). Like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, the Dionysian of modern beings "ever anew discharges itself in an Apollinian world of images" (N 65). Aesthetic representation is "ethical" and as such, it "exacts measure"; and, "to be able to maintain" measure, ? is required (N 46). That is, self-knowledge can be obtained only through the critical reflec- tion of one's own split constitution in the medium of the aesthetic. Remaining aware that a poem is merely a ? a ? of sem- blance" only (N 50), protects against dissolution and complete "destruction of the ? ? When one "conceives of all nature," oneself included, "as willing, as desiring, as eternal longing ? by means of images,"
one "rests in the calm sea of Apollinian
In opposition to Kant's notion of an aesthetic idea and to the classical, related notion of the aesthetic contemplation of internally always complex artistic struc- tures, Nietzsche insists that aesthetic experience should be one in which we "see at the same time" that we "also [long] to transcend all seeing" (N 140). What he expects of the tragic artist is a feature of all nondomesticated art: "With the Apollinian art sphere he [the tragic artist] shares the complete pleasure in mere appearance and in seeing, yet at the same time he negates this pleasure and finds a still higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of mere appear- ance" (N 140). In regard to the necessity of representation, Apollo is indeed "the ruler in the antithetical relationship with his Other" (S 25). However, Nietz- sche aims at establishing an aesthetic culture that allows Apollonian control to be momentarily, yet elusively suspended. Such moments are supposedly able to transform the dispersion of the (modern) psyche into the productive gesture of reflexivity. In this sense, Sloterdijk's remark that "Nietzsche's dramatic thought is in the process of discovering that it is absolutely impossible for self-reflection and identity the sense of an experience of unity that could lead to content-
occur 32) is even more pertinent. When aesthetic experience is turned into a reflection of the structural interdependence of subject
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xx FOREWORD
and society/history, it generates a capacity to resist. Radical reflexivity leads to a split aesthetic state.
Nietzsche's own project wants to adhere to the possibility that "at the most essential point this Apollinian illusion" can be "broken and annihilated" (N By reflecting upon the double necessity of delimitation and transgression in the medium of tragedy, "the Apollinian delusion reveals itself as what it really is ? veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian Through such a reflection we force "the Apollinian drama ? ? ? into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollinian visibility" (130). Again, Nietzsche's dream turns out to be the dream of avant-garde art, namely, that art might be employed to sublate its rep- resentational nature and to open up a space of structural independence. In this sense Nietzsche's statement that "Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo finally, the language of Dionysus" is the poetic veiling of a culture-rev-
olutionary dream.
IV
Nietzsche's thinking starts from the tension between a phallic armoring of sub- jectivity and a boundary-dissolving ego ? Again, this distinction can be located in the tradition of the Enlightenment, particularly in the tradition of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. In Burke's essay A Philo- sophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from
for instance, which presents the first major (and most influential) theory of the sublime in the eighteenth century, the "sublime" refers to an aesthetic expe- rience based on an armored subjectivity, the "beautiful" to one implying ego Burke bases his distinction between the sublime and the beautiful on that between "self-preservation and ? in which ? means community. Whereas the beautiful implies a pleasurable relaxation of bound- aries, the sublime connotes a painful drawing of boundaries: "The passions which belong to ? turn on pain and danger; they are simply pain- ful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such ? He sees the source of this painful delight in the "absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all ? concluding that "whatever ex- cites this delight" is called sublime: "The passions belonging to self- preserva- tion are the strongest of all the
It is not by chance that Burke closely relates the human drive for "self-pres- ervation" to the antisocial or agonistic
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behavior of (male) individuals; that is, he sees agonistic behavior as a necessary attribute of the competitive and isolated existence of males. The sublime is the mode of experience in which males can enjoy aesthetically the peculiarities of their existence: "Whatever is fitted in any
? ? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxi
sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analo- gous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of Interestingly enough, Burke values the sublime more than the To him, the aesthetic reconciliation of the male principle of competitiveness with community seems to be more impor- tant than any reconciliation concerning woman. On the background of such val- uations, it follows almost logically that Burke at one point defines the sublime as a phallic representation of a fortified, agonistic male consciousness: "Now what- ever either on good or upon bad grounds tends to raise a man in his own
produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it
I mention Burke's notion of the sublime here because it can serve as an excel- lent background for Nietzsche's recanting of this tradition. Nietzsche set out to dislodge an aesthetic culture that is centered on male fortifications, even where it institutionalizes momentary forms of ego ? He tries to establish an aesthetic culture that undermines the fortification of subjectivity. In this sense he conceives of the "rebirth of Dionysus ? as the end of individuation" (N 74). Quoting Schopenhauer, he revalues "the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an ? The terror of psychic fortifications should be corrected by "the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depth of man, indeed of nature, at [the] collapse of the principium individuationis" (N 36).
However, the Dionysian does not realize itself as forgetful ecstasy, but does so in decentering reflections. That is to say, in reflecting upon our split subjectivity, we release energies that dislodge an identity-bound perception of our selves. It is this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking that understandably interests Sloterdijk most. If a "decentering of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy," is the sole means "to a legitimate constitution of subjectivity - - beyond ego and will," then the enlightened subject can "no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accordance with the rules of Apollonian
as an autonomous source of meaning, ethos, logic, and truth instead, as something medial, cybernetic, eccentric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal antagonisms, as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the ? of primordial pleasure" (S 82). An aesthetic cul- ture conceived as the site of such a decentering of subjectivity is incompatible ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxii FOREWORD
with the aesthetic culture of modernity, which functions as an imaginary projec- tion of the fulfillment of our dreams, be they personal or
Nietzsche's and Sloterdijk's readings of modernity's aesthetic culture are rel- evant to a number of current debates in the United ? To name just one: they are closely connected to crucial readings of narrative culture suggested by critics like Hayden White. In arguing "that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, White, for instance, holds that the narrativizing of events has nothing to do with an understanding of "reality" but is determined by a human desire to achieve a masterful, dominat- ing position vis-a-vis external events, which, in turn, will allow the cognizing subject to conceive of his or her own ego as a knowledgeable, ? identity. The constant attempts by human beings to arrest meaning in ideological dis- courses and, thus, to interpret the texts of the world as transparent meanings is here viewed as the result of our anxieties that we may lose our identities. Falling into the other extreme, humans tend to fortify themselves as centered identities that enter communicative interactions as contests. As in the Greek competition, the agonia, the participants in communicative struggles are necessarily interested in boosting their identities, not only by winning in their struggle against each other, ? this is supposedly the unsublatable presupposition of the agonis- tic character of human winning in the struggle against the perpetually mobile structure of language as Both the ? of lan- guage and the structural dispersal of subjectivity lead to a need to safeguard human identity from what might become a dangerous vertigo. The result of this need to protect human identity is a return to a one-sidedly rational methodology based on the epistemological premise of absolute the primacy of con-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? the ? of binary
and homogeneity over difference, ? and heterogeneity.
Such considerations are closely related to concerns that any "value attached to narrativity in the representation of real
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events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be ? White suggests, in the words of the vol- ume's editor, that "narrativity as such tends to support orthodox and politically conservative social conditions and that the revolt against narrativity in modern historiography and literature is a revolt against the authority of the social
The issues raised by White are, in the face of neoconservative and fundamen- talist attempts at reviving cultural politics that are more suited to the erection of strong superegos, indeed seminal. Totalizing narratives which have a closed ideological structure unfolding in a narrative action from an ideologically distinct starting point to an equally distinct goal are the equivalent of a centered subjec- tivity; they function within the system of modernity as lightning rods and points
the priority of identity, unity,
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxiii
of ? for a desire to achieve a unified identity ? desire generated by a split subjectivity. The narrative of ideological closure that assumes the possi- bility of "a point of view from which the whole can be comprehended, a posi- tion, therefore, that must be essentially detached from and outside of what it seeks to return to Nietzsche's terminology objecti-
of the "Apollinian that the subject can be ? autonomous source of meaning, ? logic, and The fluctuation in aesthetic expe- rience between Apollonian and Dionysian readings is far removed from a cogni- tion or knowledge of an aesthetic object; it has nothing to do with the "acqui- sition of information about an object so that our subjecthood is defined in the cognition of objects, be they things, ideas, or other human ? The only way to suspend the defusing effect of the institutionalization of autonomous art as a means of compensation might lie in the radical reflexivity unfolded in Nietzsche's project.
According to Nietzsche, disarming humans of polemical identities should be modernity's most urgent project. It is here where Sloterdijk can connect his read- ing of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a fundamental text of modernity with his own project as developed in the Critique of Cynical Reason, where he maintains that in order to survive, we will have to disidentify ourselves from everything that arms itself. The price for surviving in tomorrow's society might have to be paid in a psychic currency ? not at ? We might have to give up the security of all local identifications such as jingoistic patriotism that we achieve only at the cost of repressing alterity. Whatever fortifies itself in order to remain what it imagines itself to be, might dig its own grave.
In Nietzsche's view, disarmament can be realized only as an aesthetic ? least if and when an aesthetic culture can be established that releases the radical potential of the dialectic be- tween the Apollonian and Dionysian dimension of art.
Notes
Using the abbreviations N and S, I will quote Sloterdijk and Nietzsche in the text; the Nietz- sche text according to ? 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.
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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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? ? 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
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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
? ? ? ? ? ? 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.
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xvii
possibly neglected duty" (N 92). This very Socrates is therefore forced, at the end of his ? to address a question that he had constantly repressed and to ask himself: "Perhaps there is a realm of wisdom from which the logician is exiled? Perhaps art is even a necessary correlative of, and supplement for science? " (N 93). In short, Nietzsche saw the structural integration of the aesthetic into the system of modernity as a compensatory realm surprisingly clearly. Insofar as he attempts to rescue the aesthetic from such an integration, Nietzsche's project co- incides with the project of the historical
Nietzsche blocks an "enlightened" reading of the Dionysian by radicalizing the opposition between aesthetic and daily
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experiences: "For the rapture of the Dionysian state with its annihilation of the ordinary bounds and limits of exist- ence ? while it lasts, a lethargic element in which all personal experi- ences of the past become immersed. This chasm of oblivion separates the worlds of everyday reality and of Dionysian reality. But as soon as this everyday reality re-enters consciousness, it is experienced as such, with nausea: an ascetic, will- negating mood is the fruit of these states" (N 59- 60). The aesthetic introduces the possibility of transcending agonistic individualism; as such it is a precondi- tion for the acceptance of
Unlike the avant-garde, Nietzsche employs myths in order to understand the necessity for myths; he narrates myths in order to illuminate the nonmythical par excellence: social structures. The myth of the destruction of tragedy represents the functional integration of art as compensatory. Nietzsche, of course, could never agree with such a reading of his analytic method since it necessarily turns the mythical into an analogical construct that "imitates" a structural "reality" outside itself, thus defusing the disruptive power of the mythical. For if "our understanding is to content itself with the perception ? ? ? analogies" between history and society, on the one hand, and myth, on the other, then "we are re- duced to a frame of mind which makes impossible any reception of the
for the myth wants to be experienced vividly as a unique example of a universal- ity and truth that gaze into the infinite" (N ? Reading myth, as I have done, as a means of explaining the structure of modernity ends, in Nietzsche's view, in being caught in the premises of a nondialectical enlightenment. A structuralistic description of modernity that claims to explain the structure as a whole is an im- possibility for him. The gap between the "theoretical" and the "tragic" can nei- ther be comprehended scientifically nor deactivated. Only if we do not attempt to explain this gap away can society, "leavened to the very lowest strata by this kind of culture, gradually [begin] to tremble with wanton agitations and desires" (N ? However, Nietzsche's inclination to avoid a structuralistic understand- ing of his own reading of modernity is, as I will argue later, based on the premise that a redefined aesthetic has to be kept from being contaminated by a social structure that remains "outside" and by discourses implicated by that structure. The analysis itself has to be turned into an aesthetic phenomenon. This assumes,
? ? ? ? ? xviii FOREWORD
I would like to suggest, a problematic distinction between discursive genres. If one reconceives the same project as a strategy that can be employed within a the- oretical discourse, Nietzsche's reluctance to employ means other than myth might turn out to be an unfounded epistemological precaution.
Nietzsche's essay displays an acute understanding of both the indispensable function and problematic status of ? Viewing the "impulse which calls art into being as the complement and consummation of existence ? a transfiguring mirror" (N 43), he conceives of the sign as a necessary comple- ment to existence, since only in the mirror of the sign can humans free them- selves reflectively from strictures inscribed upon their existence. Nietzsche's conception of the mythical or aesthetic sign as mirror has to be read as a political gesture of resistance. The sign, necessarily confining that which it signifies, is per definition of an Apollonian nature. By stressing the Apollonian nature of rep- resentation, Nietzsche insists on the necessity of delimitation; he even insists on the necessity of agonistic interaction: "For Apollo wants to grant repose to indi- vidual beings precisely by drawing boundaries between them and by again and again calling these to mind as the most sacred laws of the world, with his de- mands for self-knowledge and measure" (N 72). Self-knowledge and measure, however, cannot be attained in the ? fashion of mirrorless reflection. Nietzsche cloaks even his epistemological and methodological reflections on the problematic status of analytic rationality in a mythical narrative. Thus, he ex- presses the status of mythical figures, prerequisite to cognition, in the figure of Socrates, whose image serves as a mirror in which Nietzsche can unfold his methodological ? If the Greeks had wanted to erase the influence of Socrates, Nietzsche maintains, they should have exiled him. The living, but geographically removed, Socrates could not have served as a sign (or, from the hindsight of a culture of the spectacle one might contend: at least not before the advent of mass communication). However, the "dying Socrates," being turned into an image through his death, "became the new ideal, never seen before"; and Greek youths prostrated themselves "before this image" (N 89). "Hence the image of the dying ? as the human being whom knowledge and reasons have liberated from the fear of death, is the emblem that, above the entrance gate of science, reminds all of its mission ? to make existence appear com- prehensible and thus justified; and if reasons do not suffice, myth has to come to their aid in the ? which I have just called the necessary consequence, indeed the purpose, of science" (N 96). Nietzsche argues repeatedly for a two- fold necessity of myth. The image of the dying Socrates is a mythical represen- tation that strengthens the realm of science. Only in the image of its mythical representation can science sustain itself as a delimited unit; myth is a prerequisite for delimitations. The mythical image as mirror is the ? individua- tionis. In addition to such an internal mythical supplement, scientific or theoret-
? ? FOREWORD xix
thinking needs an external complement: the Dionysian tamed by its artistic
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Representation ? the Apollonian as a philosophical reflection in the guise of myth is simply a mythical circumscription of the unavoidability of represen- us out of the Dionysian universality and lets us find delight in in- dividuals ? it presents images of life to us, and incites us to comprehend in thought the core of life they ? With the immense impact of the ? the concept, the ethical teaching, and the sympathetic emotion, the Apollinian tears man from his orgiastic self- annihilation and blinds him to the universality of the Dionysian process, deluding him into the image that he is seeing a single image of the world" (N ? Representation detains and obstructs that which it aims to
express.
Art as representation is ? ? mirror image in which the Dionysian man con-
templates himself" (N 63). Like the chorus in the Greek tragedy, the Dionysian of modern beings "ever anew discharges itself in an Apollinian world of images" (N 65). Aesthetic representation is "ethical" and as such, it "exacts measure"; and, "to be able to maintain" measure, ? is required (N 46). That is, self-knowledge can be obtained only through the critical reflec- tion of one's own split constitution in the medium of the aesthetic. Remaining aware that a poem is merely a ? a ? of sem- blance" only (N 50), protects against dissolution and complete "destruction of the ? ? When one "conceives of all nature," oneself included, "as willing, as desiring, as eternal longing ? by means of images,"
one "rests in the calm sea of Apollinian
In opposition to Kant's notion of an aesthetic idea and to the classical, related notion of the aesthetic contemplation of internally always complex artistic struc- tures, Nietzsche insists that aesthetic experience should be one in which we "see at the same time" that we "also [long] to transcend all seeing" (N 140). What he expects of the tragic artist is a feature of all nondomesticated art: "With the Apollinian art sphere he [the tragic artist] shares the complete pleasure in mere appearance and in seeing, yet at the same time he negates this pleasure and finds a still higher satisfaction in the destruction of the visible world of mere appear- ance" (N 140). In regard to the necessity of representation, Apollo is indeed "the ruler in the antithetical relationship with his Other" (S 25). However, Nietz- sche aims at establishing an aesthetic culture that allows Apollonian control to be momentarily, yet elusively suspended. Such moments are supposedly able to transform the dispersion of the (modern) psyche into the productive gesture of reflexivity. In this sense, Sloterdijk's remark that "Nietzsche's dramatic thought is in the process of discovering that it is absolutely impossible for self-reflection and identity the sense of an experience of unity that could lead to content-
occur 32) is even more pertinent. When aesthetic experience is turned into a reflection of the structural interdependence of subject
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xx FOREWORD
and society/history, it generates a capacity to resist. Radical reflexivity leads to a split aesthetic state.
Nietzsche's own project wants to adhere to the possibility that "at the most essential point this Apollinian illusion" can be "broken and annihilated" (N By reflecting upon the double necessity of delimitation and transgression in the medium of tragedy, "the Apollinian delusion reveals itself as what it really is ? veiling during the performance of the tragedy of the real Dionysian Through such a reflection we force "the Apollinian drama ? ? ? into a sphere where it begins to speak with Dionysian wisdom and even denies itself and its Apollinian visibility" (130). Again, Nietzsche's dream turns out to be the dream of avant-garde art, namely, that art might be employed to sublate its rep- resentational nature and to open up a space of structural independence. In this sense Nietzsche's statement that "Dionysus speaks the language of Apollo; and Apollo finally, the language of Dionysus" is the poetic veiling of a culture-rev-
olutionary dream.
IV
Nietzsche's thinking starts from the tension between a phallic armoring of sub- jectivity and a boundary-dissolving ego ? Again, this distinction can be located in the tradition of the Enlightenment, particularly in the tradition of the distinction between the sublime and the beautiful. In Burke's essay A Philo- sophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful from
for instance, which presents the first major (and most influential) theory of the sublime in the eighteenth century, the "sublime" refers to an aesthetic expe- rience based on an armored subjectivity, the "beautiful" to one implying ego Burke bases his distinction between the sublime and the beautiful on that between "self-preservation and ? in which ? means community. Whereas the beautiful implies a pleasurable relaxation of bound- aries, the sublime connotes a painful drawing of boundaries: "The passions which belong to ? turn on pain and danger; they are simply pain- ful when their causes immediately affect us; they are delightful when we have an idea of pain and danger, without being actually in such ? He sees the source of this painful delight in the "absolute and entire solitude, that is, the total and perpetual exclusion from all ? concluding that "whatever ex- cites this delight" is called sublime: "The passions belonging to self- preserva- tion are the strongest of all the
It is not by chance that Burke closely relates the human drive for "self-pres- ervation" to the antisocial or agonistic
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behavior of (male) individuals; that is, he sees agonistic behavior as a necessary attribute of the competitive and isolated existence of males. The sublime is the mode of experience in which males can enjoy aesthetically the peculiarities of their existence: "Whatever is fitted in any
? ? ? ? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxi
sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analo- gous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of Interestingly enough, Burke values the sublime more than the To him, the aesthetic reconciliation of the male principle of competitiveness with community seems to be more impor- tant than any reconciliation concerning woman. On the background of such val- uations, it follows almost logically that Burke at one point defines the sublime as a phallic representation of a fortified, agonistic male consciousness: "Now what- ever either on good or upon bad grounds tends to raise a man in his own
produces a sort of swelling and triumph that is extremely grateful to the human mind; and this swelling is never more perceived, nor operates with more force, than when without danger we are conversant with terrible objects, the mind always claiming to itself some part of the dignity and importance of the things which it
I mention Burke's notion of the sublime here because it can serve as an excel- lent background for Nietzsche's recanting of this tradition. Nietzsche set out to dislodge an aesthetic culture that is centered on male fortifications, even where it institutionalizes momentary forms of ego ? He tries to establish an aesthetic culture that undermines the fortification of subjectivity. In this sense he conceives of the "rebirth of Dionysus ? as the end of individuation" (N 74). Quoting Schopenhauer, he revalues "the tremendous terror which seizes man when he is suddenly dumfounded by the cognitive form of phenomena because the principle of sufficient reason, in some one of its manifestations, seems to suffer an ? The terror of psychic fortifications should be corrected by "the blissful ecstasy that wells from the innermost depth of man, indeed of nature, at [the] collapse of the principium individuationis" (N 36).
However, the Dionysian does not realize itself as forgetful ecstasy, but does so in decentering reflections. That is to say, in reflecting upon our split subjectivity, we release energies that dislodge an identity-bound perception of our selves. It is this aspect of Nietzsche's thinking that understandably interests Sloterdijk most. If a "decentering of the subject, which bids a respectful adieu to the fiction of autonomy," is the sole means "to a legitimate constitution of subjectivity - - beyond ego and will," then the enlightened subject can "no longer constitute itself as it had wanted to in accordance with the rules of Apollonian
as an autonomous source of meaning, ethos, logic, and truth instead, as something medial, cybernetic, eccentric, and Dionysian, as a site of sensibility within the ruling cycles of forces, as a point of alertness for the modulation of impersonal antagonisms, as a process of self-healing for primordial pain, and an instance of the ? of primordial pleasure" (S 82). An aesthetic cul- ture conceived as the site of such a decentering of subjectivity is incompatible ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? xxii FOREWORD
with the aesthetic culture of modernity, which functions as an imaginary projec- tion of the fulfillment of our dreams, be they personal or
Nietzsche's and Sloterdijk's readings of modernity's aesthetic culture are rel- evant to a number of current debates in the United ? To name just one: they are closely connected to crucial readings of narrative culture suggested by critics like Hayden White. In arguing "that narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, White, for instance, holds that the narrativizing of events has nothing to do with an understanding of "reality" but is determined by a human desire to achieve a masterful, dominat- ing position vis-a-vis external events, which, in turn, will allow the cognizing subject to conceive of his or her own ego as a knowledgeable, ? identity. The constant attempts by human beings to arrest meaning in ideological dis- courses and, thus, to interpret the texts of the world as transparent meanings is here viewed as the result of our anxieties that we may lose our identities. Falling into the other extreme, humans tend to fortify themselves as centered identities that enter communicative interactions as contests. As in the Greek competition, the agonia, the participants in communicative struggles are necessarily interested in boosting their identities, not only by winning in their struggle against each other, ? this is supposedly the unsublatable presupposition of the agonis- tic character of human winning in the struggle against the perpetually mobile structure of language as Both the ? of lan- guage and the structural dispersal of subjectivity lead to a need to safeguard human identity from what might become a dangerous vertigo. The result of this need to protect human identity is a return to a one-sidedly rational methodology based on the epistemological premise of absolute the primacy of con-
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? the ? of binary
and homogeneity over difference, ? and heterogeneity.
Such considerations are closely related to concerns that any "value attached to narrativity in the representation of real
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events arises out of a desire to have real events display the coherence, integrity, fullness, and closure of an image of life that is and can only be ? White suggests, in the words of the vol- ume's editor, that "narrativity as such tends to support orthodox and politically conservative social conditions and that the revolt against narrativity in modern historiography and literature is a revolt against the authority of the social
The issues raised by White are, in the face of neoconservative and fundamen- talist attempts at reviving cultural politics that are more suited to the erection of strong superegos, indeed seminal. Totalizing narratives which have a closed ideological structure unfolding in a narrative action from an ideologically distinct starting point to an equally distinct goal are the equivalent of a centered subjec- tivity; they function within the system of modernity as lightning rods and points
the priority of identity, unity,
? ? ? ? FOREWORD xxiii
of ? for a desire to achieve a unified identity ? desire generated by a split subjectivity. The narrative of ideological closure that assumes the possi- bility of "a point of view from which the whole can be comprehended, a posi- tion, therefore, that must be essentially detached from and outside of what it seeks to return to Nietzsche's terminology objecti-
of the "Apollinian that the subject can be ? autonomous source of meaning, ? logic, and The fluctuation in aesthetic expe- rience between Apollonian and Dionysian readings is far removed from a cogni- tion or knowledge of an aesthetic object; it has nothing to do with the "acqui- sition of information about an object so that our subjecthood is defined in the cognition of objects, be they things, ideas, or other human ? The only way to suspend the defusing effect of the institutionalization of autonomous art as a means of compensation might lie in the radical reflexivity unfolded in Nietzsche's project.
According to Nietzsche, disarming humans of polemical identities should be modernity's most urgent project. It is here where Sloterdijk can connect his read- ing of Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy as a fundamental text of modernity with his own project as developed in the Critique of Cynical Reason, where he maintains that in order to survive, we will have to disidentify ourselves from everything that arms itself. The price for surviving in tomorrow's society might have to be paid in a psychic currency ? not at ? We might have to give up the security of all local identifications such as jingoistic patriotism that we achieve only at the cost of repressing alterity. Whatever fortifies itself in order to remain what it imagines itself to be, might dig its own grave.
In Nietzsche's view, disarmament can be realized only as an aesthetic ? least if and when an aesthetic culture can be established that releases the radical potential of the dialectic be- tween the Apollonian and Dionysian dimension of art.
Notes
Using the abbreviations N and S, I will quote Sloterdijk and Nietzsche in the text; the Nietz- sche text according to ? 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.
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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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? ? 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
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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
? ? ? ? ? ? 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.
