Nietzsche's philosophy in the light of our experience

Nietzsche's philosophy in the light of our experience is an essay by Thomas Mann , written between February 19 and March 17, 1947 (Tgb.). In an abridged version and in English, the text was initially given as a lecture, first on April 29, 1947 in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress in Washington and then in other cities.

First single print (1948), paperback and pages of text made from inferior post-war paper

Content aspects

Genialization through illness

Right at the beginning Thomas Mann talks about Nietzsche's syphilitic brain disease. With a delicate constitution, his genius has dragged him into "a wild and drunken prophecy of barbaric force, hardened conscience, evil, which renounces any piety and rages against its own nature" . - “But this genius has another name. It reads: illness “ . Nietzsche owes his ingenuity to her, "his stylistically dazzling books, sparkling with bold insults of his time, psychologically more and more radical, shining in increasingly glaring white light" .

So spoke Zarathustra and Nietzsche's intoxicating self-awareness

In his late work Ecce homo , Nietzsche glorified his attitude towards life while writing Also Spoke Zarathustra and thus himself in full naivety - in amazement, exuberant self-esteem and blatant hubris and this again with stylistic mastery. The talk is of “enlightenments, raptures, whisperings, divine feelings of strength and power.” Nietzsche calls his Zarathustra an act against which “the rest of human achievement appears to be poor” and conditional. A Goethe, a Shakespeare, a Dante could not breathe for a moment at the height of this book. Thomas Mann considers these statements to be the symptoms of a "pernicious state of irritation [it]" of the brain that preceded Nietzsche's mental breakdown of 1889.

Thomas Mann mocks the figure of Zarathustra as a "faceless and shapeless fiend and wingman" , a "shadow of helpless grandeur, often touching and mostly embarrassing - a non-figure who wavers on the border of the ridiculous."

Nietzsche's world of thought

The core idea of ​​his philosophy amounts to a branding of knowledge, science and ultimately of morality, since these are the mortal enemies of life and instinct, also of intellectual life and art. Thomas Mann summarizes this connecting view of life, art and instinct under the term culture. Nietzsche thus defends life against pessimism and its adversary, the afterlife promises and the nirvana offers of salvation, but also defends life against do-gooders who “talk about justice and work towards the socialist slave revolt” . For Nietzsche, justice is “the green pasture happiness of the herd animals.” His tragic wisdom amounts to the recognition of the injustice, hardship and cruelty of life.

Morality, especially Christian morality, is "revealed as something thoroughly poisonous, rancid and hostile to life." Thomas Mann in no way ignores the relevance of these views to the time. It is reminiscent of the race against the hyped morality of the " Victorian , the bourgeois age" . On this point there is a spiritual kinship between Nietzsche and the English esthete Oscar Wilde .

Thomas Mann sees the zenith of Nietzsche's work in Beyond Good and Evil (1886) and Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), not in the popular "Zarathustra" with the "biblical attitude" . His predominantly aphoristic life's work had "gradually degenerated into an incredibly sophisticated and hectically cheerful, and finally adorned with the bell cap of the world-fun-maker."

Nietzsche's half-hearted hostility to Wagner and Christianity

Initially an admirer of Wagner, Nietzsche had become his hateful antipode . He had called Wagner a "bad histrion [actor] and a depraved spoiler" . And yet he remained a Wagner addict. In the autobiography "Ecce homo" Nietzsche called Wagner's hour of death "suddenly a holy hour" , and the Antichrist gave this autobiography the "most Christian title" . Already psychotic, he signed a message (one of the so-called ´Sanity notes´) with "The Crucified" .

"The person of Jesus of Nazareth, he was unaffected by his hatred of historical Christianity, again at the end of the cross will, he loved depths of his soul, and he strode himself voluntarily." A "Holy of immorality" calls him Thomas Mann.

Two fatal errors of Nietzsche

Thomas Mann sees the first in the supposedly necessary rehabilitation of instinct, “in the diligent misunderstanding of the power relations between instinct and intellect on earth, as if this were the dangerously dominating thing, and the time of greatest need was to save instinct from it. If one thinks, as in the great majority of people, the will [in the Schopenhauerian sense], the instinct, the interest dominate and suppress the intellect, reason, the sense of justice, then the opinion gains something absurd that one must overcome the intellect through the Instinct."

The second of Nietzsche's errors, according to Thomas Mann, postulates life and morality as opposites. “The truth is that they belong together. Ethics is life support and the moral person a real citizen of the world - maybe a bit boring, but extremely useful. […] The real opposition is that of ethics and aesthetics. ” The thesis is based on Thomas Mann's experience with aestheticism at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century.

In addition, Thomas Mann considers Nietzsche's “enthusiastic protection of life” as “a massive and senseless figment of the will to power in it” as inadequately justified and questionable.

The enemy images Christianity and socialism

Nietzsche sees Christianity as the cradle of socialism, which he calls herd animal morality. Peace and human happiness on earth are effeminate values. The heroic man is tough against himself and others. The human species only survives through human sacrifice. Christianity is the counter-principle of selection in the Darwinian sense.

Nietzsche and Fascism

In Hitler's Germany, Nietzsche's appeal " to shape future people by breeding and, on the other hand, by exterminating millions of failures" was implemented millions of times. His justification for war - "Life is a consequence of war, society itself is a means to war" - met Hitler and his followers. Today, "Nietzsche's rodomontads of the culture-preserving and selective function of war appear as the fantasies of an inexperienced, the son of a long peace and security epoch with ´mental-safe facilities´, which is beginning to get bored with itself."

Thomas Mann protects Nietzsche from the Nazis. “You shouldn't be fooled. Fascism [sic] as a mass catch, as the last rabble and the most wretched cultural penniless that has ever made history, is deeply alien to the spirit of those for whom everything revolved around the question, 'What is noble?'. " Under " culture-renewing barbarism " Nietzsche understood something different from what the Nazis had suggested to the Germans.

Nietzsche's anticipations

For the - Marxistly formulated - petty bourgeoisie of the proletariat, Nietzsche had demanded: "Keep the ways to work for small assets open."

He saw the emergence of Russia as a great power coming: "The power divided between Slavs [sic] and Anglo-Saxons" , by which the culturally shaped Europe is dominated as Greece once was ( "under the rule of Rome" ).

Nietzsche's position in philosophy

Nietzsche was the most perfect and most hopeless esthete that history knew. His philosophy justifies life only as an aesthetic phenomenon, as a heroic life course, far removed from all utilitarianism and eudaemonism . This demand can not be reconciled with the “strictly moralistic world view” of socialism. Nietzsche's intellectual radicalism drove him "to the point of grotesque error." He remains "a figure of tender and venerable tragedy" .

Commentary by Thomas Mann

A letter to Ernst Heimeran dated March 23, 1946 formulated the central idea: “A renewed direct study of Nietzsche's writings made me aware of the continuity and unity as well as the undoubted degeneration of his thinking. From the beginning, the idea of ​​the sole justification of life as an aesthetic phenomenon and of its necessarily perspective, illusory character, which includes all of later anti-moralism and, certainly under the influence of the brain poison, in a hectic and pitiful glorification, is decisive of evil degenerates - quite impossible and often downright ridiculous for us today who have got to know evil in all its vulgar nonsense. "

To the history of origin

Thomas Mann made the decision to give his next lecture on Nietzsche in the Library of Congress on October 6, 1945 (Tgb.). At the end of December, the preliminary working title was fixed: “Nietzsche and German Destiny” (on December 25, 1945 to Agnes Meyer). The diary entry begins on April 1, 1946: “Morning notes on 'Nietzsche'.” On the same day, a lung operation is necessary. The longer hospital stay interrupts the essayistic work. The second phase of work begins on February 6, 1947, initially with preparations. The text was written between February 17 and March 13, 1947. For the lecture, Erika Mann condensed the text into half of the print version (cf. The Origin of Doctor Faustus ).

Position in the complete works

While working on Doctor Faustus , Thomas Mann wrote three essays: Germany and the Germans , Dostojewski - with measures and this Nietzsche essay. It is more closely related to the Faustus novel than the other two essays. Nietzsche's biography served Thomas Mann as a template for Adrian Leverkühn's life and as evidence of a genialization through illness, which Thomas Mann saw as proven in Nietzsche. However, this pathophysiological link is scientifically controversial.

Nietzsche was still a psychological teacher to the young Thomas Mann. The story by Tobias Mindernickel (1898) is influenced by Nietzsche's criticism of Schopenhauer's ethic of compassion . Compassion - that was the original title of the novel - is denounced and parodied here in the sense of Nietzsche as resentment . In Gladius Dei (1902), a Savonarola parody, Thomas Mann follows Nietzsche's criticism of Christianity (e.g. in Nietzsche's Antichrist ). After the National Socialists had distorted Nietzsche's philosophy (and Darwin's theory of evolution) into aggressive anti-humanism, Thomas Mann moved away from Nietzsche in 1948 and dismantled him with a sharp pen. The former psychological authority met the same fate as Richard Wagner, Mann's former artistic role model. Richard Wagner's essay Suffering and Greatness (1933) sparked outrage in the Munich art scene. In post-war Germany, however, Nietzsche's questioning was accepted uncritically. In fact, at this time and in the following years, several writings appeared in Germany that made Nietzsche the intellectual progenitor of National Socialism far less differentiated than Thomas Mann. A few decades later, Nietzsche's rehabilitation came to a certain extent, albeit from abroad. Mazzino Montinari , the spiritus rector of the new Nietzsche image, came to Nietzsche through studying Thomas Mann.

A third great man whom Thomas Mann admired and whom he wanted to expose to fatal ridicule is Goethe. It didn't come to that. Thomas Mann did not realize the novella plan “Goethe in Marienbad”, but took care that the plot became sufficiently well known: old Goethe, in love and exhilarated, should stumble in front of the adored Ulrike von Levetzow and fall down lengthways - and Ulrike forward Burst into tears of shame.

Contemporaries who felt Thomas Mann's artist rivalry were Gerhart Hauptmann and Arnold Schönberg . Hauptmann was outraged to see himself caricatured as the great speaker Peeperkorn in The Magic Mountain . Schönberg was deeply offended that in Doctor Faustus his avant-garde twelve-tone technique was ascribed to the godless pact of a syphilitic maniac with the devil.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ On July 5, 1936, Thomas Mann had already recorded in his diary: "Zarathustra" reading. I will never love this book, purely as a work of language. The old aversion proved its worth again.
2. ↑ Thomas Mann gives an example of this “right earth citizen” with the figure of Mr. Klöterjahn in his novella Tristan (1903). Citizenship is ironized less drastically in almost every work by Thomas Mann.
3. ↑ Also thematized in the novella Tristan: An artist and esthete drives a young woman to her death for the sake of a small artistic event.
4. ↑ As a love of fate
5. ^ Haack, H.-P .: Genialization through illness. Neurology 10/2003, pp. 509-515
6. ↑ Goethe in Marienbad. Novella plan that Thomas Mann dealt with repeatedly between 1911 and 1920. See Poets about their poetry for more information. Thomas Mann. Heimeran / S. Fischer 1975, p. 393 ff.
7. ^ Wysling, Hans and Cornelia Bernini: The correspondence between Thomas Mann and Gerhart Hauptmann. In: Thomas Mann Yearbook Vol. 6 and 7. Frankfurt am Main 1993, 1994
8. ↑ Schoenberg, E. Randol: Apropos Doctor Faustus. Correspondence between Arnold Schönberg and Thomas Mann 1930 - 1951. Vienna: Czernin9009, p. 20. - In his self-comments, Thomas Mann mentions the serial technology Teufelswerk (on February 14, 1948 to Otto Basler, on March 22, 1948 to Albert Moeschinger) and is afraid of amusement : "Schönberg will terminate my friendship." (on September 28, 1944 to Agnes E. Meyer)

See also

Nietzsche reception

Text output

• Thomas Mann: Nietzsche's philosophy in the light of our experience. Suhrkamp vorm. S. Fischer, [Berlin:] 1948, 52 pages
• Thomas Mann: Essays 1945 - 1955. Edited by Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1997, Vol. 6, therein pp. 56-92; Commentary pp. 400-427
• Th. M .: "Nietzsche's philosophy in the light of our experience," in Collected Works in 13 Volumes, Volume 9, pp. 675–713, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974 (also as TB)

Web links

Thomas Mann and Friedrich Nietzsche at f-nietzsche.de. Private website with commented statements by Mann about Nietzsche between 1924 and 1947.