I f life is then the will to power is only one of its possible exegeses
probably
not the fundamental one, for a faculty ?
Sloterdijk - Thinker on Stage
?
CAVE EM
embodiment of ? the lies we have ? be seen in this light, not as the expression of an extravagant overestimation of self, but as part of a stringent logic that governs a new understanding of art and truth. ? to be al- lowed to show, in a self- affirming way, what he is or what he wants to be, the frenetic and unprotected representer of self must overthrow what was previously known as culture ? entire system of altruistic and dualistic values with its poi- sonous cargo of restraints, ? and self-negating impulses.
Interpretation is unavoidable here; if what Nietzsche says about the truth is right, there would then be two terrible, which drives us along ahead of it by dint of its unendurability, and one which surrounds us as necessary illusion and as life-enhancing benefactor. As something that is necessary, this i l - lusion (Schein) has retained a strange ontological dignity and imperviousness -- it also retains an ultimate transparency toward bad things that are unimaginable, but is not absorbed into this transparency. The "illusion" therefore cannot be reduced to truth, and there is no longer in any way, as there has been throughout the entire tradition of metaphysics, the "illusion" of a ? even now, what is unbearable in the world precedes the bearable illusion. For all that, it does not impair the self-will of what is bearable. The illusion subsequently be- comes autonomous and necessary a ? What more would it need to flour- ish?
Only now does the impact upon philosophy of what had come into the world in the form of The Birth of Tragedy become apparent. Anyone who might not have deciphered it from Nietzsche's awkward and precocious expositions on the composition of the chorus would ultimately have it forced upon him by the sub- sequent development of the motif. For what the ancient ? self-en- tranced mass of sound that no longer represents Dionysus, but is
wanted to indicate is expressed directly and affirmatively in Nietzsche's aesthet- ic-metaphysical work, and especially in the presentation of ? wit, to hell with deeper meanings! To hell with higher truths! Let's call a halt to the
of the preexistence of meaning with respect to its ? Long live the signified Long live noise and smoke! Long live the sound and the image! Long live the illusion of the autonomous symbol, the absolute dramatic
truths, abysses, ? must tend to themselves from now on. We no longer concern ourselves with them, because everything we are meant to concern ourselves with must be illusion: endurability, perspicuity, conceivability
image, sound, body, stimulation, contiguity, demeanor, taste. It is enough to open one's eyes. Where are the unbearable truths? In this in- a life-dispensing distance separates us from them, and if we look directly ahead of us and lend an attentive ear to the present, we will see and hear the present illusion in its relative endurability. We will be able to do this to an even greater extent if art should occur in our presence, if choruses sing or if
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 42 CAVE
Zarathustra allows his word-music to resound: "From out of an never-ending abundance of light and depth of happiness it falls, drop for drop and word for tender languor is the tempo of this speech. " What blossoms forth here is an intermediate world of sounds and surfaces, not merely bearable but actually inspiring, whose presence conceals the abyss of the terrible truth. It is only a matter of dwelling on the interplay of signs and sensualities and of not sinking into trying to imagine something that is ? theoreticians and those who are absentminded do unremittingly. If, as it seems, the principal truth of primor- dial pain itself brings about a world of bearable secondary truths, we can hold on to the latter as long as we are able to succeed in not thinking about " i t , " and do not break out of cheerful observation into ? Accordingly, we may nei- ther remember primordial pain abstractly nor anticipate its return imaginatively. Whatever was, and will be again, must take care of itself in its own good time. But he who seeks to get a grasp on neither the pain of birth nor that of death and thus lets the matter of the unbearable and the unimaginable drop ? can dis- cover before him, with no further ado, an intermediate world made up of sensual
presences. The average human destiny is fulfilled in ? only in this between or intermediate world (Nietzsche uses this expression in The Birth of Tragedy for the Olympian sphere). And yet, in this intermediate world, the pe- nultimate is perceived as the ultimate, and the tentative as the conclusive. It exists because man engages in the ephemeral as if it were the permanent. The blossom of the intermediate world is art, which in rare instances can ascend to the level of the ? a type of art that itself is the highest form of philosophy. Within it, the illusion of the illusion has become reflexive, and betrays itself, at a dizzying height, as a happy lie and as the most genuine deception. Nothing comes closer to the truth than whenever the beautiful places itself as a fragile, endurable thing before the foundation of the unbearable. " I f philosophy is art
then, to paraphrase Heidegger, it is the art of existing in an endurable way, of being exempted from the
Thus, the idea of scrutinizing oneself in the process of the play of aesthetics becomes one of the points of junction in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Nietzsche's philosophical perception. The phenomenon of art as the living manifestation of lying, image-creating, in- ventive energy offers an enticing opportunity for the ? of a life that is compelled to seek. For it may be that individuals with a deep wound and a great sense of compulsion, even though there is no chance of their occupying a defined form of self-existence and finding comfort in a specific mask, are still free to experience themselves within the context of their own aesthetic efforts and to say to ? At least in that which I can reveal of myself as an artist I can leave behind my own truth, the truth of myself, even if it might soon be superseded and ? I no longer need to have any doubt, at least in what the course taken by the storm of the production of myself has exposed of me, and even if it were true that I, like all individuated life, am only a plunge from the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 43
unbearable into the unbearable, here, at this point in the course of the plunge, I am enduring myself as best I can. I am with myself, and I no longer have to skeptically undermine the fact of my being real as a knowing mask. Fingo ergo There is thus still so much invested in the most unstable self-production that it has placed itself in the world once and for all as a fragment of a real illusion. Through it, the aesthetic subject gains, through the vortex of self-doubt, its
_and perhaps only -- foretaste of an irreducible existence that is superior to any penetration. There is something there; it can see itself and it can be seen. It can even, semiempirically in its own defense, accept itself and validate itself. The world could collapse without any doubt having to arise in what pure self- perception called to the artist at the instance of his expenditure: This is what I
? ? ? ? That happened to
of much use as a work of
be ephemeral, but my
participation in an artistic phenomenon.
I was necessary in achieving this ? It may not be whatever speaks in it spoke through ? I may is negated in what became real through my
? ? Whatever Nietzsche addresses, the movement of his self-awareness is bound to the tracer path (Leuchtspur) of his great literary publications. In that it is actually he who objectifies himself, mask for mask, he begins to exert upon himself a powerful allure of ? ? if he wanted to persuade himself to finally declare himself found. After all, what ultimately looked back at him from the mirror was no longer a short-winded philologist or an intellectually dependent devotee of Schopenhauer and Wagner, but the image of a man who believed that he had reason to look upon himself as a genius and a philosophizing
The author of The Gay Science, the poet of ? the first psychologist of his time, the reassessor of all values; what Nietzsche had before him as his ob- jectified self was in reality nothing ? Yet what is it that seduces him into plunging into his own image, like Narcissus, in order to drown in himself?
There can be no doubt that the daring presenter of himself also had a chance, even at the dangerous heights at which his performance of self was enacted, to withdraw from his masks and let them remain as ephemeral countenances, that
as transitory incarnations of a ? No search is programmed a priori as flight from pain into ? the thinking actor understands his own play as a play and sufficiently draws on the commitment of life to what can be endured. In this way he could carry his "psychonautical circle" to its conclu- and burn the last deadly phantoms of the divine incarnation behind him. Actually, in his post-Zarathustrian period (whenever his compulsion to suffer gave way), Nietzsche sometimes comes very close to an amorphous tranquil-
least until the images finally deluge and devastate him.
With this, our dramaturgical meditation on ? metamorphoses comes to a critical point. Which "mask" would be left for the thinker on the stage after
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 44 CAVE
he played himself out to the very limit of what could be incarnated in the tortu- ously sublime figure of Zarathustra? Where would he ? the gestures of a post- playfulness? How would he elevate his impossible prophetic
exhibition through a fifth masking, and make the attempt to incarnate listically in Dionysus something he could survive? Is not a denial the only thing that remains after a theatrical explosion of this kind, whether it be in the form of a retreat into madness, a resignation into silence, or a metamorphosis into the wise fool? Nietzsche captured with his characteristic precision his experience of the self in the difficult position of a Zarathustra who has left the stage without having a new role:
Except for these ten days of work [a reference to the enthusiastic days spent in writing Zarathustra -- the years during and above all after Zarathustra were a disaster without One pays dearly for the privilege of being immortal; one dies many times during one's own lifetime to make up for it. There is something I call the "rancor" of greatness: everything great, whether a work or a deed, turns, once it has been accomplished, against him who has accomplished it. Precisely
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
because of the fact that he has accomplished it, he is now can no longer endure his own accomplishment, he can no longer look it in the face. To have something behind one that one never could have wanted, something that will be bound up in the fate of
now have it upon ? ? It almost crushes one to death the rancor of greatness! (KSA 6, pp.
Is not the plot of the drama also laid open here? This unhappy compulsion to see behind what he himself is doing? This incessant doubling of the self into what is
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? spontaneous and what is remembered? This despairing
to take possession of himself as the incarnation of the ? grandiose of self-
attempt
? representations? This is indeed the "rancor of
through its ? to suffocate that which wants to reunite it with its ego. What cannot be questioned is that Nietzsche experienced himself often enough in authentic medial terms; he knew the resignation of doubt and an almost somnam- bulistic constancy in the articulation of his
But his inherent makeup undid the liberating effect of such experiences time and time again; what repeatedly prevailed was the subsequent ego-centered (ich- haft) ? of nonegotistical creative ? Thus, Nietzsche con- stantly doubled himself into the praise giver and the recipient of that praise; in spite of all his psychological wisdom, he consistently fell back into the posture of one who felt it necessary either to be praised and valued by others or, for lack of recognition, to sing his own praises. Because of this, he remained condemned to exploit himself permanently and to capitalize eternally on his own vitality and intellectual power. His new ideas were consistently devoured by the oldest struc-
it is compelled,
? ? CAVE ? n 45
ture of ? and the dead ? compulsion toward ? always pre- vailed at the expense of any vital efforts. As long as he remained trapped within this structure of he was far from freeing himself from the terror of values these circumstances, even a "reassessment of all values" pro- vided no release. The point of crisis occurs when it becomes apparent that an incarnation of the gods is more likely than a "twilight of the ? It is more likely that the subject will flay itself to death as the raw material for a revaluation of self than that its value system will release it. Nietzsche's structure is predeter- mined in favor of a suffering grandiosity that creates value; in having to decide between existential happiness and value- creating greatness, this structure as it exists within him always chooses that which, at the cost of a terrible self-sacri- fice, serves the process of the creation of
I believe the complex of ideas that was involved in developing Nietzsche's the- orem of the will to power can best be understood by bearing the foregoing in Perhaps it is a bad habit within the field of Nietzsche research and an ex- ample of the most dangerous type of carelessness that its scholars specialize in either the earlier or the later Nietzsche and interpret the aphorisms on the will to power as representing his fundamental philosophical teaching ? since we now know that this "major work" is counterfeit, having been compiled by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth. In contrast to this, we must insist that the early Nietzsche was correct in his assessment of the most important matters in a way that the later Nietzsche was not. And as often as it has also been noted that the Nietzsche of ? and The Will to Power is much closer to the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy than the Nietzsche of the middle period, who presented himself as a playactor of positivism, this proximity has for the most part never
been properly related back to Nietzsche's prototypes of truth
at the beginning and end of his philosophical career. A joining of this beginning and end reveals that the tenets of the will to power represent positive versions (Positivierungen) -- as dubious as they are ? the negative model we have read in The Birth of Tragedy. The earlier prototype of truth ("the unbearable inflicts upon us the compulsion toward art") was, on its path toward a suspect metaphysics of energetic ? transformed into an affirmative ? divested of its memory of the dialectics of the unbearable, and paraphrased into the later prototype of truth: "The will to power establishes a life- enhancing
Even for the early Nietzsche, life, viewed sub specie artis, is essentially a composing ? self-representation, whose movement struggles away from the unendurable toward what can be endured, and suggests both a volition and a compulsion toward art. Hence, the will to art ? ? thanks to a constitutive mystification -- in its own interests ? sich selbst) as the primary element. For
of critical reflection, however, it is recognizable as the secondary, sub- element precisely because it is grounded in the self-veiling of the unen- We are only indirectly aware of what we are unable to endure as such in
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 46 CAVE
the form of traces of memory that the catastrophe of individuation has left behind within us, or in the shuddering contemplation of the convulsions of those who take the secret of their immediate encounter with the unendurable with
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
them when they perish. For this reason, the will to illusion in no way originates in and of itself, but is grounded in a compulsion toward illusion. But when we hear the theorem of the will to power, our recollection of this more complex structure seems to have been obliterated in an almost ingenious way. Nietzsche's later thought allows the will to power to ascend to the highest rank and any previous urgency to disappear in the fact of
In this, Nietzsche'a basic aesthetic-ontological hypotheses are initially plau- sible. If individuated life is essentially a composing of self-representation above a foundation of painful pleasure ? and impulsiveness, then one can certainly be of the opinion that the universal concert to a great extent is composed of the noise of these compositions of self, which resound against each other and are dependent on each other. Since life is already compelled to art because it has been afflicted with individuation, it must discover within itself the yearning that the philosopher identifies as a will to power and that more than anything signifies the will to implement one's own true lie of life and art at the expense of others. Even if this process were to function in this way, the will to power would still have been ? in a compulsion toward the will to power. Certainly, no vital composition of self can exist without a will toward its own realization; still, the (active) composition of self as such is based on a compulsion toward compo- sition and a faculty for composition ? that pre- cedes all volition.
Now we can see how Nietzsche deviates from his earlier insight vis-a-vis sub- jectivity and the metaphysics of volition.
I f life is then the will to power is only one of its possible exegeses probably not the fundamental one, for a faculty ? must precede any volition. Thus the axiom of the will to power seems plausible only to those who have in mind a sort of social Dar- winism with Hobbesian undertones that has been transposed into the realm of aesthetics ? it were, in the form of an artistic struggle of all against all with the final survival of the fittest. That Nietzsche himself operated with such halluci- nations of an absolute polemics (having been influenced by, not least of all, Darwin, who was his contemporary) need not be demonstrated. In truth, how- ever, the self-composing structure of life can develop optimally only once it has taken possession of a faculty. By this I mean that the will to power is a perversion of the right to strength. Wherever a will to power is proposed as the ultimate wisdom, the subject already mistrusts his own power to compose himself, and attempts to think himself into safety by means of the application of ? A will to power need not be presupposed as long as the right to strength is confident in itself.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 47
We have already indicated the extent to which an inability to believe in his own self actuated Nietzsche's logical mechanism. Whenever strength feels its re- lease obstructed by a surplus of restrictive counterforce, it must want to maintain itself all that much more in its remaining expression. Its intention to be itself has at its base not the structure of a will to power but that of a will toward being able to want, which suggests nothing other than the phantasm of the restoration of naive, uninterrupted, unfettered strength, which can to the same extent that it
and ? occasionally ? wants. Probably Nietzsche's most serious psychologi- cal and philosophical error was displacing will from the status of the occasional to that of the
Accordingly, the construction of the will to power betrayed itself as a symp- tom of excessively restricted strength ? situation that is by no means equivalent to weakness but, quite the contrary, suggests strength with a bad conscience. It is an energy that has not grown into its condition of restraint. For this reason, it
for a release from ? speak freely of itself through an immoralistic act of unleashing, certainly not in order to leave the door open to malice as such, but so as to be able to applaud an absolute expression of strength. It is hardly necessary to state that this applause has been inspired by a Utopia of the innocence of the body, a Utopia in which the traumas (Traumata) of the civ- ilizing process register their protest. It is impossible not to overhear in this the voice of a wounded ? in this it is dialectically interconnected, as revolt, with a destiny of oppression. It is, like every "kynical" ? act, a contri- bution on the part of ? to the success of which must release from the soul a whole world of moral restraints and to this end also en- gages in volition and provocations.
I would suggest that Nietzsche's tenets that pertain to the will to power be un- derstood primarily as a subjective reclaiming of older quasi-fundamental onto- insights and, second, that this reclaiming be integrated into the psycho- drama of the thinker as an act of Dionysian (Kynismus). The will to power is, in my view, not a thesis that should be read in the indicative, but a hypothetical dramaturgical pose. Its truth-value cannot be dis- cussed in terms of a "final statement," but only as that of an intellectual dose to be administered in the midst of a crisis of strength. Contrary to Heidegger, I would not read Nietzsche's corresponding statements on the subject as represent- ing without exception the termination of European metaphysics in an active ni- hilism, however seductive this master interpretation may be. It is suggestive as an interpretation of individual lines of thought in Nietzsche's work, but its plausi- bility collapses as we look more closely at the dramatic tangle of Nietzsche's games of reflection. The will to power: I read it as a self- therapeutic and, if you allopathic prescription, which pursues the fundamental ontological motif of by means of a radically subjective jargon. For the essence of the vo- lition of the will to power indicates something that would lead
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
away from the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 48 CAVE
will: it "wills" tranquillity in the sense of an ability to entrust oneself to the lim- itations of one's life and in the sense of permitting oneself to let go, which in turn leads to the pure intelligent ability to be. But in order to permit what he wants, he needs ? become malevolent through experience--the protective arma- ment of a sovereignty that would no longer feel compelled to defer to judgments and
Only because of this, Zarathustra must proclaim the ethos of liberation from all the old authorities with the intonation of a ? Because Nietz- sche cannot trust his own ability to compose himself, he must appear as the leg- islator of freedom from the law. His energy is expended almost entirely in de- claring its unrestrained permission to expend ? One can sum up the dramatic mechanism behind Nietzsche's appearance in the mask of the Antichrist in this single statement: "I want to be permitted. " This desire for permission, however, is only the parody of an ability that must already be present for a long time before a volition can be activated. Because the condition of having to want is behind this volition, volition and compulsion belong within the same sphere of
Perhaps Nietzsche, because of his tenacious insistence on the will, is unable to experience how a liberating "You are able to" would anticipate his "I want to. " Like most of the moralists of the modern era, he has failed to appreciate that the origins of justice lie in ? is, the acceptance of a great abun-
not in prohibition, as a narrow-minded dialectics would have it, and also not in the proprietary appropriateness of a decisive establishment of values that will be the determining factor in Nietzsche's immoralistic concept of justice. (I will return to this theme in Chapter ? Any attitude that maintains an attitude of "I want to be permitted" inevitably remains the inversion of "You may not. " The rebellious will neglects experience in order to relinquish itself to a struggle- free ability to exist beyond subjugation and revolt. The experience of being upheld by a legitimate authority suggests nothing ? At the same time, this would be the experience of a self-love that is neither aggressive nor meek, and which admits that a love has accommodated it. These experiences have only one thing in common: they do not allow themselves to be induced by volition. For Nietzsche, however, all that remained in this sphere was the attitude of standing firm in the face of an almost fatal state of
Of course, tranquillity is never achieved through a will to tranquillity. If the composition of self prefers to take place behind the protective shield of a self- betraying will to power, then the self-expression of he who is composing himself is not released but rather ensnared in the paroxysms of a forced spontaneity. impudence elevates itself to the level of a ? falsely
opinions will burst forth that are merely allegories of impertinence, and that signify anything but this self, in the positive sense of the word. Nietz- sche knew this as well: "We always find ourselves, in the initial stages of all vices, so very near to virtue! " No one understood better than this, the gentlest of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 49
that virtue is at the root of every vice. In him, his "superrefine- (to use Lou Andreas-Salome's expression) was at the root of an allegorical brutality. As the will to malice, impudence must become the parody of a divinely
naive unaffectedness that flutters before all efforts to achieve
Nietzsche's audience will view his final performance with great anxiety. They observe a man who will have to entrust his last insights to his failure. From now on observing him will be ? Anyone who, like this author, is compelled on principle to want a fundamental ruthlessness merely to expose the space in which he could come to "himself" appears as someone who is about to fall apart. An active nihilism offers only a terrible substitute for a man's ability to remain on friendly terms with himself. The revolt may not, in any case, be substantiated. Through his frantic proclamation of egotism as the reversal of the centuries-old lies of ? the thinker risked himself, becoming the battleground for a ruth- less battle of principles in which his own well-being could play only a minor
as had been true in the oldest altruistic ? In that Nietzsche produced allegories of egotism from himself (aus ? with increasing vehemence, he forgot the minimum of legitimate egotism that would have been necessary to render his terrible astuteness endurable for the poor animal behind the masks. Through the efforts of his will toward egotism, Nietzsche neglected to accept himself as a being ? without the support of a principle and on the basis of his own preexisting nature, had already always had permission to be egotistical. He wanted to transfer what had been conceded and allowed all along into something
so as to no longer rely on anything except the isolation of all good spirits. Did he not in this way venture too near to the terrible truth?
In his finale, Nietzsche proclaimed the unprecedented ? the most ex- treme releases from restraint, the ultimate intensifications. And yet no one re- sponded to him; the thinker remained alone with his paradox, and his freedom was tantamount to a metaphysical punishment. Like a Bajazzo of egotism, he ascended from his isolation in order to take the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
stage, and presented to his audi- ence the gift of freedom, which he himself had taken but never actually received. Perhaps his greatness lay in the fact that he gave what he himself lacked, and his undoing in the fact that he never received as a gift what he wanted to pass on to others. Against his will, he was the last altruist.
? ? ? ? ? ? Chapter 4
Dionysus Meets Diogenes; or, The Adventures of the Embodied Intellect You shall create a higher body, a movement, a self-propelled wheel. Thus Spoke
"On Child and Marriage"
The construction of the tragic stage in The Birth of Tragedy, as we have sug- gested, was in itself a preparation for the appearance of Zarathustra. The Nietz- sche of the early ? however, was as little aware of this as his contemporary readers were. What he did sense very clearly, though, was that the first tremor of a philosophical earthquake had been registered in this book. Bearing this in mind, what did the resistance of his colleagues and the silence of his profession signify? Even the masquerade of Apollo and Dionysus would have seemed only a matter of secondary importance in the face of this ? For what the young Nietzsche had set in motion by positioning in the wings of the tragic stage a spec- tator named Socrates ? represented a whole universe of wayward philoso-
soon prove more important than what was apparently taking place on the stage itself. It seemed almost as if Nietzsche wanted to supply evi- dence in support of the tenet that all decisive blows were dealt with the left
to express it better, that the real dramas were being acted out along the edges of the
I will ? an occasional subversion of the ? retell the play within the play, and to tell it in such a way that a three- dimensional image of the dramatic process
What is happening? On his way across the tragic stage of art, Nietzsche ex- perienced nolens volens that, in the festival performances named after Dionysus, Dionysus himself is no longer a match for the Apollonian compulsion to sym- bolize. Certainly, the magic spell of tragedy depends on the cultlike chanting of the he-goats; and yet one aspect of the matter is also that a he-goat who can do
? ? ? ? ? 50
? ? ? ? DIONYSUS MEETS DIOGENES
nothing but chant eventually cuts a tragic figure. Were there not, before there was music, truer ecstasies and more impervious raptures that had fallen victim to the Doric process of precensorship? Would the god of intoxication acquiesce to such curtailments? Would he not be compelled to fly into a rage over this aesthetic swindle of sacrifice? Had not the form his revenge would take already been pre- determined by destiny?
An unobstrusive figure appears in the wings of the theater. His name is So- we should caution the reader that this is a pseudonym, or at least not the man's full name. This figure indicates no understanding for the sublimity of the play, and does not take part in the artistic intoxication of the others. He sits fidgets back and forth, shakes his head, and yawns. Sometimes he even speaks out loud in between, spontaneously offering theoretical suggestions on the progression of the plot. According to him, the heroes would not have to unavoidably perish if only they could keep this or that in ? By ? Could it be that a philosopher has lost his way and wandered into a tragic theater? The strange visitor behaves loathsomely. And yet, during the terrible convolutions of the hero's agony, he exhibits the most malicious ? and always seems to want to say: It doesn't have to be this ? things could be otherwise; destiny doesn't follow a fixed ? ought to let something other than this occur to us! The true disciple of Dionysus can only turn away in disgust from so much insincerity. Whoever is so lacking in good taste that he does not take life seriously as a tragedy cannot be proper company for a well-schooled Dionysian. Or can it
be that he is proper company precisely because of this?
the most resolute partisan of tragedy will not deny that a Diony- sian pleasure must complement Dionysian pain ? not only complement but constitute and surpass ? The fact that this pleasure hides behind the masks
of optimism and comfort would correspond completely to the abysmal superfi- ciality that one must credit to the playful god of intoxication. Is it not part of the essence of tragedy that it is reflected in comedy? Does not the pain want to vanish so that pleasure can stake its own claim to eternity?
In any case, the Dionysian ? ? or should one say fan of Dionysus -- is alarmed. He knows there is someone in the audience whom must dismiss as contemptible at first glance, but whom he also cannot afford to let out of his sight; his presence has something unsettling about it. Perhaps he an unforeseen incarnation of a god? He looks like an idiot, a tramp, like a who can know for sure? Perhaps he is a cunning mask of a god, which would lead us to conclude that he is a smiling god? From his smiles, deities have sprung forth; from his tears have sprung forth ? goes the On the other hand, one never imagined that the laughter of a god could be insipid. This guy always laughs at the wrong moment; he laughs off the mark, speaks when he shouldn't, he sits where he ? he understands
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
nothing of the dramas of individuation, nothing of the metaphysical convolutions
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 52 ? DIONYSUS MEETS DIOGENES
of heroes, and nothing of the murderous violence inherent in the dilemmas. For if he did understand, how could he still laugh? If he were prepared to unite in compassion with the god, how could he then abandon himself to his vulgar gaiety, rubbing his belly and, under the open sky of the tragic stage, reduce the deity to a good man?
A l l of this ? the shallow buffoon hangs about obstinately in the retinue of the deity. The only thing that can be noted to his credit is that he does not allow himself to be thrown off by any of the contempt shown toward him. He avoids all questions as to what he is looking for here or whether he belongs there at all with an ironic wink, as if he does not quite comprehend what the words "look for" or "belong" mean. The more sublime things become, the more id- iotic his laughter sounds. The more ceremoniously the symbols are spread out, the more energetically he shakes his ugly head and makes counterproposals in the face of ? Is he not a stain on the magnificent vestments of Dionysus?
But maybe he also has something to do with the terrible truth of the god perhaps it is his embarrassing mission to favor the mediocre over the profound? Perhaps he has been given the terrible duty of informing us that the truth is really not so terrible after ? We would then have to concede that Dionysus was not the most terrible of all deities because his terror is not ? A god in whom we sincerely want to believe should at least not be ironic: Dionysus is up to no good with the sincere believers among his
One of the greatest intuitions contained in Nietzsche's first book is revealed by its coupling of the dramatic resusitation of tragic wisdom with the birth of the Gay if this is done in a very enigmatic and imperceptible way. The intrinsic polarity Nietzsche treats in his book is precisely not that between the Apollonian and the the dramatic theme of the book is the relationship between the tragic and the An attentive reader must be astonished by how easily the compromise between the two deities of art is accomplished by Nietzsche the philologist, while, on the other hand, he has considerable difficulty removing the world of tragic art from the world of nonart, of mundanity, of ra- tionality and theoretical ? a word, from what he terms Socratic cul- ture.
embodiment of ? the lies we have ? be seen in this light, not as the expression of an extravagant overestimation of self, but as part of a stringent logic that governs a new understanding of art and truth. ? to be al- lowed to show, in a self- affirming way, what he is or what he wants to be, the frenetic and unprotected representer of self must overthrow what was previously known as culture ? entire system of altruistic and dualistic values with its poi- sonous cargo of restraints, ? and self-negating impulses.
Interpretation is unavoidable here; if what Nietzsche says about the truth is right, there would then be two terrible, which drives us along ahead of it by dint of its unendurability, and one which surrounds us as necessary illusion and as life-enhancing benefactor. As something that is necessary, this i l - lusion (Schein) has retained a strange ontological dignity and imperviousness -- it also retains an ultimate transparency toward bad things that are unimaginable, but is not absorbed into this transparency. The "illusion" therefore cannot be reduced to truth, and there is no longer in any way, as there has been throughout the entire tradition of metaphysics, the "illusion" of a ? even now, what is unbearable in the world precedes the bearable illusion. For all that, it does not impair the self-will of what is bearable. The illusion subsequently be- comes autonomous and necessary a ? What more would it need to flour- ish?
Only now does the impact upon philosophy of what had come into the world in the form of The Birth of Tragedy become apparent. Anyone who might not have deciphered it from Nietzsche's awkward and precocious expositions on the composition of the chorus would ultimately have it forced upon him by the sub- sequent development of the motif. For what the ancient ? self-en- tranced mass of sound that no longer represents Dionysus, but is
wanted to indicate is expressed directly and affirmatively in Nietzsche's aesthet- ic-metaphysical work, and especially in the presentation of ? wit, to hell with deeper meanings! To hell with higher truths! Let's call a halt to the
of the preexistence of meaning with respect to its ? Long live the signified Long live noise and smoke! Long live the sound and the image! Long live the illusion of the autonomous symbol, the absolute dramatic
truths, abysses, ? must tend to themselves from now on. We no longer concern ourselves with them, because everything we are meant to concern ourselves with must be illusion: endurability, perspicuity, conceivability
image, sound, body, stimulation, contiguity, demeanor, taste. It is enough to open one's eyes. Where are the unbearable truths? In this in- a life-dispensing distance separates us from them, and if we look directly ahead of us and lend an attentive ear to the present, we will see and hear the present illusion in its relative endurability. We will be able to do this to an even greater extent if art should occur in our presence, if choruses sing or if
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 42 CAVE
Zarathustra allows his word-music to resound: "From out of an never-ending abundance of light and depth of happiness it falls, drop for drop and word for tender languor is the tempo of this speech. " What blossoms forth here is an intermediate world of sounds and surfaces, not merely bearable but actually inspiring, whose presence conceals the abyss of the terrible truth. It is only a matter of dwelling on the interplay of signs and sensualities and of not sinking into trying to imagine something that is ? theoreticians and those who are absentminded do unremittingly. If, as it seems, the principal truth of primor- dial pain itself brings about a world of bearable secondary truths, we can hold on to the latter as long as we are able to succeed in not thinking about " i t , " and do not break out of cheerful observation into ? Accordingly, we may nei- ther remember primordial pain abstractly nor anticipate its return imaginatively. Whatever was, and will be again, must take care of itself in its own good time. But he who seeks to get a grasp on neither the pain of birth nor that of death and thus lets the matter of the unbearable and the unimaginable drop ? can dis- cover before him, with no further ado, an intermediate world made up of sensual
presences. The average human destiny is fulfilled in ? only in this between or intermediate world (Nietzsche uses this expression in The Birth of Tragedy for the Olympian sphere). And yet, in this intermediate world, the pe- nultimate is perceived as the ultimate, and the tentative as the conclusive. It exists because man engages in the ephemeral as if it were the permanent. The blossom of the intermediate world is art, which in rare instances can ascend to the level of the ? a type of art that itself is the highest form of philosophy. Within it, the illusion of the illusion has become reflexive, and betrays itself, at a dizzying height, as a happy lie and as the most genuine deception. Nothing comes closer to the truth than whenever the beautiful places itself as a fragile, endurable thing before the foundation of the unbearable. " I f philosophy is art
then, to paraphrase Heidegger, it is the art of existing in an endurable way, of being exempted from the
Thus, the idea of scrutinizing oneself in the process of the play of aesthetics becomes one of the points of junction in
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
Nietzsche's philosophical perception. The phenomenon of art as the living manifestation of lying, image-creating, in- ventive energy offers an enticing opportunity for the ? of a life that is compelled to seek. For it may be that individuals with a deep wound and a great sense of compulsion, even though there is no chance of their occupying a defined form of self-existence and finding comfort in a specific mask, are still free to experience themselves within the context of their own aesthetic efforts and to say to ? At least in that which I can reveal of myself as an artist I can leave behind my own truth, the truth of myself, even if it might soon be superseded and ? I no longer need to have any doubt, at least in what the course taken by the storm of the production of myself has exposed of me, and even if it were true that I, like all individuated life, am only a plunge from the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 43
unbearable into the unbearable, here, at this point in the course of the plunge, I am enduring myself as best I can. I am with myself, and I no longer have to skeptically undermine the fact of my being real as a knowing mask. Fingo ergo There is thus still so much invested in the most unstable self-production that it has placed itself in the world once and for all as a fragment of a real illusion. Through it, the aesthetic subject gains, through the vortex of self-doubt, its
_and perhaps only -- foretaste of an irreducible existence that is superior to any penetration. There is something there; it can see itself and it can be seen. It can even, semiempirically in its own defense, accept itself and validate itself. The world could collapse without any doubt having to arise in what pure self- perception called to the artist at the instance of his expenditure: This is what I
? ? ? ? That happened to
of much use as a work of
be ephemeral, but my
participation in an artistic phenomenon.
I was necessary in achieving this ? It may not be whatever speaks in it spoke through ? I may is negated in what became real through my
? ? Whatever Nietzsche addresses, the movement of his self-awareness is bound to the tracer path (Leuchtspur) of his great literary publications. In that it is actually he who objectifies himself, mask for mask, he begins to exert upon himself a powerful allure of ? ? if he wanted to persuade himself to finally declare himself found. After all, what ultimately looked back at him from the mirror was no longer a short-winded philologist or an intellectually dependent devotee of Schopenhauer and Wagner, but the image of a man who believed that he had reason to look upon himself as a genius and a philosophizing
The author of The Gay Science, the poet of ? the first psychologist of his time, the reassessor of all values; what Nietzsche had before him as his ob- jectified self was in reality nothing ? Yet what is it that seduces him into plunging into his own image, like Narcissus, in order to drown in himself?
There can be no doubt that the daring presenter of himself also had a chance, even at the dangerous heights at which his performance of self was enacted, to withdraw from his masks and let them remain as ephemeral countenances, that
as transitory incarnations of a ? No search is programmed a priori as flight from pain into ? the thinking actor understands his own play as a play and sufficiently draws on the commitment of life to what can be endured. In this way he could carry his "psychonautical circle" to its conclu- and burn the last deadly phantoms of the divine incarnation behind him. Actually, in his post-Zarathustrian period (whenever his compulsion to suffer gave way), Nietzsche sometimes comes very close to an amorphous tranquil-
least until the images finally deluge and devastate him.
With this, our dramaturgical meditation on ? metamorphoses comes to a critical point. Which "mask" would be left for the thinker on the stage after
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 44 CAVE
he played himself out to the very limit of what could be incarnated in the tortu- ously sublime figure of Zarathustra? Where would he ? the gestures of a post- playfulness? How would he elevate his impossible prophetic
exhibition through a fifth masking, and make the attempt to incarnate listically in Dionysus something he could survive? Is not a denial the only thing that remains after a theatrical explosion of this kind, whether it be in the form of a retreat into madness, a resignation into silence, or a metamorphosis into the wise fool? Nietzsche captured with his characteristic precision his experience of the self in the difficult position of a Zarathustra who has left the stage without having a new role:
Except for these ten days of work [a reference to the enthusiastic days spent in writing Zarathustra -- the years during and above all after Zarathustra were a disaster without One pays dearly for the privilege of being immortal; one dies many times during one's own lifetime to make up for it. There is something I call the "rancor" of greatness: everything great, whether a work or a deed, turns, once it has been accomplished, against him who has accomplished it. Precisely
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
because of the fact that he has accomplished it, he is now can no longer endure his own accomplishment, he can no longer look it in the face. To have something behind one that one never could have wanted, something that will be bound up in the fate of
now have it upon ? ? It almost crushes one to death the rancor of greatness! (KSA 6, pp.
Is not the plot of the drama also laid open here? This unhappy compulsion to see behind what he himself is doing? This incessant doubling of the self into what is
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? spontaneous and what is remembered? This despairing
to take possession of himself as the incarnation of the ? grandiose of self-
attempt
? representations? This is indeed the "rancor of
through its ? to suffocate that which wants to reunite it with its ego. What cannot be questioned is that Nietzsche experienced himself often enough in authentic medial terms; he knew the resignation of doubt and an almost somnam- bulistic constancy in the articulation of his
But his inherent makeup undid the liberating effect of such experiences time and time again; what repeatedly prevailed was the subsequent ego-centered (ich- haft) ? of nonegotistical creative ? Thus, Nietzsche con- stantly doubled himself into the praise giver and the recipient of that praise; in spite of all his psychological wisdom, he consistently fell back into the posture of one who felt it necessary either to be praised and valued by others or, for lack of recognition, to sing his own praises. Because of this, he remained condemned to exploit himself permanently and to capitalize eternally on his own vitality and intellectual power. His new ideas were consistently devoured by the oldest struc-
it is compelled,
? ? CAVE ? n 45
ture of ? and the dead ? compulsion toward ? always pre- vailed at the expense of any vital efforts. As long as he remained trapped within this structure of he was far from freeing himself from the terror of values these circumstances, even a "reassessment of all values" pro- vided no release. The point of crisis occurs when it becomes apparent that an incarnation of the gods is more likely than a "twilight of the ? It is more likely that the subject will flay itself to death as the raw material for a revaluation of self than that its value system will release it. Nietzsche's structure is predeter- mined in favor of a suffering grandiosity that creates value; in having to decide between existential happiness and value- creating greatness, this structure as it exists within him always chooses that which, at the cost of a terrible self-sacri- fice, serves the process of the creation of
I believe the complex of ideas that was involved in developing Nietzsche's the- orem of the will to power can best be understood by bearing the foregoing in Perhaps it is a bad habit within the field of Nietzsche research and an ex- ample of the most dangerous type of carelessness that its scholars specialize in either the earlier or the later Nietzsche and interpret the aphorisms on the will to power as representing his fundamental philosophical teaching ? since we now know that this "major work" is counterfeit, having been compiled by Nietzsche's sister, Elisabeth. In contrast to this, we must insist that the early Nietzsche was correct in his assessment of the most important matters in a way that the later Nietzsche was not. And as often as it has also been noted that the Nietzsche of ? and The Will to Power is much closer to the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy than the Nietzsche of the middle period, who presented himself as a playactor of positivism, this proximity has for the most part never
been properly related back to Nietzsche's prototypes of truth
at the beginning and end of his philosophical career. A joining of this beginning and end reveals that the tenets of the will to power represent positive versions (Positivierungen) -- as dubious as they are ? the negative model we have read in The Birth of Tragedy. The earlier prototype of truth ("the unbearable inflicts upon us the compulsion toward art") was, on its path toward a suspect metaphysics of energetic ? transformed into an affirmative ? divested of its memory of the dialectics of the unbearable, and paraphrased into the later prototype of truth: "The will to power establishes a life- enhancing
Even for the early Nietzsche, life, viewed sub specie artis, is essentially a composing ? self-representation, whose movement struggles away from the unendurable toward what can be endured, and suggests both a volition and a compulsion toward art. Hence, the will to art ? ? thanks to a constitutive mystification -- in its own interests ? sich selbst) as the primary element. For
of critical reflection, however, it is recognizable as the secondary, sub- element precisely because it is grounded in the self-veiling of the unen- We are only indirectly aware of what we are unable to endure as such in
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 46 CAVE
the form of traces of memory that the catastrophe of individuation has left behind within us, or in the shuddering contemplation of the convulsions of those who take the secret of their immediate encounter with the unendurable with
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
them when they perish. For this reason, the will to illusion in no way originates in and of itself, but is grounded in a compulsion toward illusion. But when we hear the theorem of the will to power, our recollection of this more complex structure seems to have been obliterated in an almost ingenious way. Nietzsche's later thought allows the will to power to ascend to the highest rank and any previous urgency to disappear in the fact of
In this, Nietzsche'a basic aesthetic-ontological hypotheses are initially plau- sible. If individuated life is essentially a composing of self-representation above a foundation of painful pleasure ? and impulsiveness, then one can certainly be of the opinion that the universal concert to a great extent is composed of the noise of these compositions of self, which resound against each other and are dependent on each other. Since life is already compelled to art because it has been afflicted with individuation, it must discover within itself the yearning that the philosopher identifies as a will to power and that more than anything signifies the will to implement one's own true lie of life and art at the expense of others. Even if this process were to function in this way, the will to power would still have been ? in a compulsion toward the will to power. Certainly, no vital composition of self can exist without a will toward its own realization; still, the (active) composition of self as such is based on a compulsion toward compo- sition and a faculty for composition ? that pre- cedes all volition.
Now we can see how Nietzsche deviates from his earlier insight vis-a-vis sub- jectivity and the metaphysics of volition.
I f life is then the will to power is only one of its possible exegeses probably not the fundamental one, for a faculty ? must precede any volition. Thus the axiom of the will to power seems plausible only to those who have in mind a sort of social Dar- winism with Hobbesian undertones that has been transposed into the realm of aesthetics ? it were, in the form of an artistic struggle of all against all with the final survival of the fittest. That Nietzsche himself operated with such halluci- nations of an absolute polemics (having been influenced by, not least of all, Darwin, who was his contemporary) need not be demonstrated. In truth, how- ever, the self-composing structure of life can develop optimally only once it has taken possession of a faculty. By this I mean that the will to power is a perversion of the right to strength. Wherever a will to power is proposed as the ultimate wisdom, the subject already mistrusts his own power to compose himself, and attempts to think himself into safety by means of the application of ? A will to power need not be presupposed as long as the right to strength is confident in itself.
? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 47
We have already indicated the extent to which an inability to believe in his own self actuated Nietzsche's logical mechanism. Whenever strength feels its re- lease obstructed by a surplus of restrictive counterforce, it must want to maintain itself all that much more in its remaining expression. Its intention to be itself has at its base not the structure of a will to power but that of a will toward being able to want, which suggests nothing other than the phantasm of the restoration of naive, uninterrupted, unfettered strength, which can to the same extent that it
and ? occasionally ? wants. Probably Nietzsche's most serious psychologi- cal and philosophical error was displacing will from the status of the occasional to that of the
Accordingly, the construction of the will to power betrayed itself as a symp- tom of excessively restricted strength ? situation that is by no means equivalent to weakness but, quite the contrary, suggests strength with a bad conscience. It is an energy that has not grown into its condition of restraint. For this reason, it
for a release from ? speak freely of itself through an immoralistic act of unleashing, certainly not in order to leave the door open to malice as such, but so as to be able to applaud an absolute expression of strength. It is hardly necessary to state that this applause has been inspired by a Utopia of the innocence of the body, a Utopia in which the traumas (Traumata) of the civ- ilizing process register their protest. It is impossible not to overhear in this the voice of a wounded ? in this it is dialectically interconnected, as revolt, with a destiny of oppression. It is, like every "kynical" ? act, a contri- bution on the part of ? to the success of which must release from the soul a whole world of moral restraints and to this end also en- gages in volition and provocations.
I would suggest that Nietzsche's tenets that pertain to the will to power be un- derstood primarily as a subjective reclaiming of older quasi-fundamental onto- insights and, second, that this reclaiming be integrated into the psycho- drama of the thinker as an act of Dionysian (Kynismus). The will to power is, in my view, not a thesis that should be read in the indicative, but a hypothetical dramaturgical pose. Its truth-value cannot be dis- cussed in terms of a "final statement," but only as that of an intellectual dose to be administered in the midst of a crisis of strength. Contrary to Heidegger, I would not read Nietzsche's corresponding statements on the subject as represent- ing without exception the termination of European metaphysics in an active ni- hilism, however seductive this master interpretation may be. It is suggestive as an interpretation of individual lines of thought in Nietzsche's work, but its plausi- bility collapses as we look more closely at the dramatic tangle of Nietzsche's games of reflection. The will to power: I read it as a self- therapeutic and, if you allopathic prescription, which pursues the fundamental ontological motif of by means of a radically subjective jargon. For the essence of the vo- lition of the will to power indicates something that would lead
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
away from the
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 48 CAVE
will: it "wills" tranquillity in the sense of an ability to entrust oneself to the lim- itations of one's life and in the sense of permitting oneself to let go, which in turn leads to the pure intelligent ability to be. But in order to permit what he wants, he needs ? become malevolent through experience--the protective arma- ment of a sovereignty that would no longer feel compelled to defer to judgments and
Only because of this, Zarathustra must proclaim the ethos of liberation from all the old authorities with the intonation of a ? Because Nietz- sche cannot trust his own ability to compose himself, he must appear as the leg- islator of freedom from the law. His energy is expended almost entirely in de- claring its unrestrained permission to expend ? One can sum up the dramatic mechanism behind Nietzsche's appearance in the mask of the Antichrist in this single statement: "I want to be permitted. " This desire for permission, however, is only the parody of an ability that must already be present for a long time before a volition can be activated. Because the condition of having to want is behind this volition, volition and compulsion belong within the same sphere of
Perhaps Nietzsche, because of his tenacious insistence on the will, is unable to experience how a liberating "You are able to" would anticipate his "I want to. " Like most of the moralists of the modern era, he has failed to appreciate that the origins of justice lie in ? is, the acceptance of a great abun-
not in prohibition, as a narrow-minded dialectics would have it, and also not in the proprietary appropriateness of a decisive establishment of values that will be the determining factor in Nietzsche's immoralistic concept of justice. (I will return to this theme in Chapter ? Any attitude that maintains an attitude of "I want to be permitted" inevitably remains the inversion of "You may not. " The rebellious will neglects experience in order to relinquish itself to a struggle- free ability to exist beyond subjugation and revolt. The experience of being upheld by a legitimate authority suggests nothing ? At the same time, this would be the experience of a self-love that is neither aggressive nor meek, and which admits that a love has accommodated it. These experiences have only one thing in common: they do not allow themselves to be induced by volition. For Nietzsche, however, all that remained in this sphere was the attitude of standing firm in the face of an almost fatal state of
Of course, tranquillity is never achieved through a will to tranquillity. If the composition of self prefers to take place behind the protective shield of a self- betraying will to power, then the self-expression of he who is composing himself is not released but rather ensnared in the paroxysms of a forced spontaneity. impudence elevates itself to the level of a ? falsely
opinions will burst forth that are merely allegories of impertinence, and that signify anything but this self, in the positive sense of the word. Nietz- sche knew this as well: "We always find ourselves, in the initial stages of all vices, so very near to virtue! " No one understood better than this, the gentlest of
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 49
that virtue is at the root of every vice. In him, his "superrefine- (to use Lou Andreas-Salome's expression) was at the root of an allegorical brutality. As the will to malice, impudence must become the parody of a divinely
naive unaffectedness that flutters before all efforts to achieve
Nietzsche's audience will view his final performance with great anxiety. They observe a man who will have to entrust his last insights to his failure. From now on observing him will be ? Anyone who, like this author, is compelled on principle to want a fundamental ruthlessness merely to expose the space in which he could come to "himself" appears as someone who is about to fall apart. An active nihilism offers only a terrible substitute for a man's ability to remain on friendly terms with himself. The revolt may not, in any case, be substantiated. Through his frantic proclamation of egotism as the reversal of the centuries-old lies of ? the thinker risked himself, becoming the battleground for a ruth- less battle of principles in which his own well-being could play only a minor
as had been true in the oldest altruistic ? In that Nietzsche produced allegories of egotism from himself (aus ? with increasing vehemence, he forgot the minimum of legitimate egotism that would have been necessary to render his terrible astuteness endurable for the poor animal behind the masks. Through the efforts of his will toward egotism, Nietzsche neglected to accept himself as a being ? without the support of a principle and on the basis of his own preexisting nature, had already always had permission to be egotistical. He wanted to transfer what had been conceded and allowed all along into something
so as to no longer rely on anything except the isolation of all good spirits. Did he not in this way venture too near to the terrible truth?
In his finale, Nietzsche proclaimed the unprecedented ? the most ex- treme releases from restraint, the ultimate intensifications. And yet no one re- sponded to him; the thinker remained alone with his paradox, and his freedom was tantamount to a metaphysical punishment. Like a Bajazzo of egotism, he ascended from his isolation in order to take the
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
stage, and presented to his audi- ence the gift of freedom, which he himself had taken but never actually received. Perhaps his greatness lay in the fact that he gave what he himself lacked, and his undoing in the fact that he never received as a gift what he wanted to pass on to others. Against his will, he was the last altruist.
? ? ? ? ? ? Chapter 4
Dionysus Meets Diogenes; or, The Adventures of the Embodied Intellect You shall create a higher body, a movement, a self-propelled wheel. Thus Spoke
"On Child and Marriage"
The construction of the tragic stage in The Birth of Tragedy, as we have sug- gested, was in itself a preparation for the appearance of Zarathustra. The Nietz- sche of the early ? however, was as little aware of this as his contemporary readers were. What he did sense very clearly, though, was that the first tremor of a philosophical earthquake had been registered in this book. Bearing this in mind, what did the resistance of his colleagues and the silence of his profession signify? Even the masquerade of Apollo and Dionysus would have seemed only a matter of secondary importance in the face of this ? For what the young Nietzsche had set in motion by positioning in the wings of the tragic stage a spec- tator named Socrates ? represented a whole universe of wayward philoso-
soon prove more important than what was apparently taking place on the stage itself. It seemed almost as if Nietzsche wanted to supply evi- dence in support of the tenet that all decisive blows were dealt with the left
to express it better, that the real dramas were being acted out along the edges of the
I will ? an occasional subversion of the ? retell the play within the play, and to tell it in such a way that a three- dimensional image of the dramatic process
What is happening? On his way across the tragic stage of art, Nietzsche ex- perienced nolens volens that, in the festival performances named after Dionysus, Dionysus himself is no longer a match for the Apollonian compulsion to sym- bolize. Certainly, the magic spell of tragedy depends on the cultlike chanting of the he-goats; and yet one aspect of the matter is also that a he-goat who can do
? ? ? ? ? 50
? ? ? ? DIONYSUS MEETS DIOGENES
nothing but chant eventually cuts a tragic figure. Were there not, before there was music, truer ecstasies and more impervious raptures that had fallen victim to the Doric process of precensorship? Would the god of intoxication acquiesce to such curtailments? Would he not be compelled to fly into a rage over this aesthetic swindle of sacrifice? Had not the form his revenge would take already been pre- determined by destiny?
An unobstrusive figure appears in the wings of the theater. His name is So- we should caution the reader that this is a pseudonym, or at least not the man's full name. This figure indicates no understanding for the sublimity of the play, and does not take part in the artistic intoxication of the others. He sits fidgets back and forth, shakes his head, and yawns. Sometimes he even speaks out loud in between, spontaneously offering theoretical suggestions on the progression of the plot. According to him, the heroes would not have to unavoidably perish if only they could keep this or that in ? By ? Could it be that a philosopher has lost his way and wandered into a tragic theater? The strange visitor behaves loathsomely. And yet, during the terrible convolutions of the hero's agony, he exhibits the most malicious ? and always seems to want to say: It doesn't have to be this ? things could be otherwise; destiny doesn't follow a fixed ? ought to let something other than this occur to us! The true disciple of Dionysus can only turn away in disgust from so much insincerity. Whoever is so lacking in good taste that he does not take life seriously as a tragedy cannot be proper company for a well-schooled Dionysian. Or can it
be that he is proper company precisely because of this?
the most resolute partisan of tragedy will not deny that a Diony- sian pleasure must complement Dionysian pain ? not only complement but constitute and surpass ? The fact that this pleasure hides behind the masks
of optimism and comfort would correspond completely to the abysmal superfi- ciality that one must credit to the playful god of intoxication. Is it not part of the essence of tragedy that it is reflected in comedy? Does not the pain want to vanish so that pleasure can stake its own claim to eternity?
In any case, the Dionysian ? ? or should one say fan of Dionysus -- is alarmed. He knows there is someone in the audience whom must dismiss as contemptible at first glance, but whom he also cannot afford to let out of his sight; his presence has something unsettling about it. Perhaps he an unforeseen incarnation of a god? He looks like an idiot, a tramp, like a who can know for sure? Perhaps he is a cunning mask of a god, which would lead us to conclude that he is a smiling god? From his smiles, deities have sprung forth; from his tears have sprung forth ? goes the On the other hand, one never imagined that the laughter of a god could be insipid. This guy always laughs at the wrong moment; he laughs off the mark, speaks when he shouldn't, he sits where he ? he understands
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
nothing of the dramas of individuation, nothing of the metaphysical convolutions
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 52 ? DIONYSUS MEETS DIOGENES
of heroes, and nothing of the murderous violence inherent in the dilemmas. For if he did understand, how could he still laugh? If he were prepared to unite in compassion with the god, how could he then abandon himself to his vulgar gaiety, rubbing his belly and, under the open sky of the tragic stage, reduce the deity to a good man?
A l l of this ? the shallow buffoon hangs about obstinately in the retinue of the deity. The only thing that can be noted to his credit is that he does not allow himself to be thrown off by any of the contempt shown toward him. He avoids all questions as to what he is looking for here or whether he belongs there at all with an ironic wink, as if he does not quite comprehend what the words "look for" or "belong" mean. The more sublime things become, the more id- iotic his laughter sounds. The more ceremoniously the symbols are spread out, the more energetically he shakes his ugly head and makes counterproposals in the face of ? Is he not a stain on the magnificent vestments of Dionysus?
But maybe he also has something to do with the terrible truth of the god perhaps it is his embarrassing mission to favor the mediocre over the profound? Perhaps he has been given the terrible duty of informing us that the truth is really not so terrible after ? We would then have to concede that Dionysus was not the most terrible of all deities because his terror is not ? A god in whom we sincerely want to believe should at least not be ironic: Dionysus is up to no good with the sincere believers among his
One of the greatest intuitions contained in Nietzsche's first book is revealed by its coupling of the dramatic resusitation of tragic wisdom with the birth of the Gay if this is done in a very enigmatic and imperceptible way. The intrinsic polarity Nietzsche treats in his book is precisely not that between the Apollonian and the the dramatic theme of the book is the relationship between the tragic and the An attentive reader must be astonished by how easily the compromise between the two deities of art is accomplished by Nietzsche the philologist, while, on the other hand, he has considerable difficulty removing the world of tragic art from the world of nonart, of mundanity, of ra- tionality and theoretical ? a word, from what he terms Socratic cul- ture.
