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
?
?
Sloterdijk - Thinker on Stage
txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
constant; ideals perish in the cold, and yet the fire of idealism continues to wander about, objectless and passion- ately desiring. The period of self-deception has ended, without the reservoirs from which the lies were supplied having been exhausted.
With this turning point, Nietzsche has begun to grow into a thinker whose thought will have incalculable long-range effects. Now we can understand why, when compared to Nietzsche's critique, all other forms of a critique of ideology seem short-winded and reveal themselves to be almost scandalously in want of a self-critical alertness. His realism thinks, as it were, a whole epoch ahead of itself. In his play with the masks of the deities of antiquity, he has already begun to gaze into the abyss of a self-doubt that cannot be assuaged, from which arose the phenomenon of the fundamental untenability of reflexive ? What he gained from this is as disturbing as it is ? insight into the exis- tential inevitability of the lie. One can imagine what would become of philoso- phy if this conjectured insight were to prove true! To a much greater extent, one is not able to imagine it!
The compulsion to lie has its base in the nature of truth ? the young Nietzsche presumes to define it with the unabashed confessional willingness of the unbroken genius, as well as with the relaxed receptivity of a man who con- siders it a distinction to be a student of an important intellect, Schopenhauer. But what is this truth, part of whose fundamental nature it is to make us lie? Nietz- sche says it plainly: the truth lies in primordial pain (Urschmerz), which has im- posed the fact of individuation on each life. Using the expression "primordial pain" in the singular is in any case paradoxical, since there are as many centers of primordial pain as there are individuals. To be condemned to individuality is the most painful of all pains; as regards human subjects it is at the same time the truest of all truths. If, however, "truth" means primordial pain for the individual who has been "thrown" into being (ins Dasein ? then it is in its specific nature to signify insufferability for us. We are therefore able to want not to rec- ognize it at all ? if we do surmise anything at all of it in its immediateness, we do so only because the veil of pretense and representation that usually con-
? ? ? ? ? 38 CAVE
it has been opportunely pulled understand more than will do us good.
so that ? racked with suddenly
? ? ? ? ? This would mean that the known forms of the "search for truth,"
those of the philosophers, the metaphysicians, and the religious are, in reality, only organized lies that have become respectable and institutionalized attempts escape that have disguised themselves behind the diligent mask of the desire for knowledge. What had previously pretended to be a path toward truth was in re- ality a single thrust away from it, a thrust away from what was unbearable
to the provisory tolerability of comfort, security, edification, and transcendent worlds. After Nietzsche, it is almost impossible to overlook the fact that most previous philosophy was nothing more than an ontological whitewashing. With its whole pathos of loyalty to the truth, it committed an act of betrayal -- as nec- essary as it was ? the unbearable truth, to the benefit of a meta- physical optimism and those fantasies of redemption that project themselves into the beyond.
If, however, truth is not something that can be be ? and if any search for it is defined in advance as terrifying, intellectual candor finds itself in a position it had not expected to be ? Truth no longer reveals ? it reveals itself at
the seeker and the researcher, who actually want to elude it, but instead to him who exhibits the deliberateness and courage required to not seek it. To be sure, how he exhibits these qualities of courage and deliberateness remains his secret, and it is certainly conceivable that enough will always remain from the search for truth as is necessary for the search for deliberateness and courage, without which a nonseeking consciousness could not develop. He who does not seek the truth must believe himself capable of enduring it. A l l problems of truth are therefore ultimately confluent with the question of how to endure what is unendurable. Perhaps this is why there are ultimately no techniques for finding truth in the existential sense; in the labyrinth, one looks not for secure knowledge but for the way out.
One may not therefore dismiss Nietzsche's entreaties of heroism, and tragic wisdom as mere manifestations of pompous and the man- nerisms of masculinity, regardless of the extent to which the latter do in fact play into his ? Courage is necessary within Nietzsche's enlightenment, prima- rily for taking part in the phenomena of truth ? because, for him, it is no longer a matter of a game of hide-and-seek, but one of experimen- tation and constancy, which remains, if possible, in the vicinity of the terrible truth. For this reason (according to Nietzsche), anyone who wants to speak of truth without using quotation marks would have to first prove himself as a non- seeker, a nonescapist, a nonmetaphysician.
With the acknowledgment of primordial pain as the basis of all other bases, Nietzsche's early thought places itself under a tragic, theatrical, and psycholog- ical sign (Zeichen). If truth means the unendurable, then knowledge of truth ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 39
cannot be abruptly defined as enduring the ? It is that which is unen- durable itself that forces us, incircumstantially, to
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
maintain an unwavering dis- tance from it. Accordingly, the truth about the terrible truth is this: we must always have just missed it, and, furthermore, we will never be able to have the sincere volition ? to recognize it in its relentless presence ? For we are able to want only what we can still endure. According to Nietzsche, knowledge of the truth therefore also means always having been placed at a pro- tective distance from what is unbearable.
is the key word in the new tragic theory of knowledge, after which the old optimistic theory of the desire for unity was at an end. Philoso- phers, seekers, and dreamers might therefore continue to speak of identity and unity, but the thinkers of the future, the psychologists, know better. Their the- matic is that of distance, duality, difference. He who knows about distance has made the optics of a philosophical psychology his own. The psychologist also knows that he is enduring just as little of the whole truth as anyone else, but through this knowledge he gains a point of orientation toward which the general theater of self-deception and liar's play of life can be referred. The psychologist is well aware that everything is merely theater: through his personal union with the tragic theoretician of knowledge, he also knows, however, that it would make no sense to want to close this theater in the name of truth. Indeed, the terrible truth is the mother of theater. In accordance with its nature, we maintain an ir- revocable distance from it, a distance that so radically determines our everyday existence in the world that, even with the staunchest will to truth, we are not at liberty to distance ourselves from this condition of distance. As a rule, it is im- possible to survive the final dissolution of the distance that exists between us and the unimaginable reality of the terrible truth. Nietzsche's phrase "W e have art in order not to die of the truth" can also be read in this way: we maintain a distance from truth so that we will not have to experience it directly. To speak ontologi-
old ? us in order to in turn protect us from having
the
There can be no doubt here: wearing the mask of the theoretician of knowl- edge, Nietzsche has made an unprecedented appearance on the stage of philoso- phy. Do we now understand that this was no longer ? and never was? Do we recognize how something new and unbounded has taken shape within this philosophical project ? ? something new as pertains to truth as the oldest liar, whose wealth of discoveries is not exhausted as long as life itself attends to anything unbearable that might want to save itself in the liar's theater of inven- tions and research along the brink of the unbearable? Do we appreciate what ram- ifications the idea of distance will have? If it is indeed valid, then our position truth (independent of all our conceits of seeking and finding) must be one of an unavoidable evasiveness and a distance from which we cannot distance ourselves. If the terrible truth always keeps us at a distance, we are no longer able ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 40 CAVE
ever simply to "grasp" it. Whatever we may say about it, it is no longer actually j there in what is being said. We can therefore no longer succumb to the illusion that a condition of living without illusions is possible for ? We are condemned to simulation by truth itself. For us, illusion would be the most appropriate way to conduct ourselves toward the terrible ? We would grasp the truth only in that we have already eluded it as far as possible.
All of this will bring forth unimaginable ? since the possibility of our ever fully expressing the truth henceforth becomes a chimera. The terrible truth does indeed precede all ? but this preexistence does not mean that the former could be "expressed" or represented in the latter in the way in which the idea is expressed in the symbol or the object in the sign ? The ter- rible truth is in everything we express and represent, but it is no longer present; it is not this terrible truth that guarantees the truth-value of individual assertions. This could be formulated as follows: from this point on, any assertion remains, as it were, alone. Representations have been abandoned by what they allegedly rep-
truth ? must rely on themselves without the sanction of the final authority. The "whole truth" no longer plays along; it is no longer there in its supposed representations. Thus the signs remain unto themselves ? on nothing but their own internal relationships, their own system, their own gram- mar, their own "world. "
With this, the catastrophe of signs that have been abandoned by the "whole" truth is initiated, a catastrophe that is bitter, but also stimulating. The first char- acter to carry out the prospects and the risks involved in the ambivalent disaster across the stage in an affirmative way will be called ? It is no coinci- dence that this herald of ? is at the same time a rediscoverer of pro- phetic ? Thus Spoke Zarathustra ? in my ? an
the possibility of theater after the end of the "representation" of truth on stage, an experiment that has not been thought out to its conclusion to this day. It is the first hypothesis on the possibility of an absolute play in the form of unprotected pure self-expression; it is the incarnation of the transition from plays that repre- sent to those that present, and an exercise in the semantics of
that is, in speaking in the ? "truth. " Zarathustra's manipulation of language (Wortergreifung) is like a sound that has been transcribed into a linguis- tic music that, in its notes, carries out a fervent revenge on everything that could hinder the resounding of his voice. It ? so to speak, a nihilism that has become music, or a melody that has become immoralism; it would no longer permit any court in the world to either allow or forbid its ringing out and, relying only
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
on the small autonomy of its real sounding, will submit itself to no foreign or external standard. Zarathustra's song is the daring self-staging of the Dionysian release from restraints ? that bursts forth on the stage as the unprotected self- affirmation of a language. That Nietzsche also disguises himself as the An- tichrist and presents himself as someone who will save us from morality
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 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.
constant; ideals perish in the cold, and yet the fire of idealism continues to wander about, objectless and passion- ately desiring. The period of self-deception has ended, without the reservoirs from which the lies were supplied having been exhausted.
With this turning point, Nietzsche has begun to grow into a thinker whose thought will have incalculable long-range effects. Now we can understand why, when compared to Nietzsche's critique, all other forms of a critique of ideology seem short-winded and reveal themselves to be almost scandalously in want of a self-critical alertness. His realism thinks, as it were, a whole epoch ahead of itself. In his play with the masks of the deities of antiquity, he has already begun to gaze into the abyss of a self-doubt that cannot be assuaged, from which arose the phenomenon of the fundamental untenability of reflexive ? What he gained from this is as disturbing as it is ? insight into the exis- tential inevitability of the lie. One can imagine what would become of philoso- phy if this conjectured insight were to prove true! To a much greater extent, one is not able to imagine it!
The compulsion to lie has its base in the nature of truth ? the young Nietzsche presumes to define it with the unabashed confessional willingness of the unbroken genius, as well as with the relaxed receptivity of a man who con- siders it a distinction to be a student of an important intellect, Schopenhauer. But what is this truth, part of whose fundamental nature it is to make us lie? Nietz- sche says it plainly: the truth lies in primordial pain (Urschmerz), which has im- posed the fact of individuation on each life. Using the expression "primordial pain" in the singular is in any case paradoxical, since there are as many centers of primordial pain as there are individuals. To be condemned to individuality is the most painful of all pains; as regards human subjects it is at the same time the truest of all truths. If, however, "truth" means primordial pain for the individual who has been "thrown" into being (ins Dasein ? then it is in its specific nature to signify insufferability for us. We are therefore able to want not to rec- ognize it at all ? if we do surmise anything at all of it in its immediateness, we do so only because the veil of pretense and representation that usually con-
? ? ? ? ? 38 CAVE
it has been opportunely pulled understand more than will do us good.
so that ? racked with suddenly
? ? ? ? ? This would mean that the known forms of the "search for truth,"
those of the philosophers, the metaphysicians, and the religious are, in reality, only organized lies that have become respectable and institutionalized attempts escape that have disguised themselves behind the diligent mask of the desire for knowledge. What had previously pretended to be a path toward truth was in re- ality a single thrust away from it, a thrust away from what was unbearable
to the provisory tolerability of comfort, security, edification, and transcendent worlds. After Nietzsche, it is almost impossible to overlook the fact that most previous philosophy was nothing more than an ontological whitewashing. With its whole pathos of loyalty to the truth, it committed an act of betrayal -- as nec- essary as it was ? the unbearable truth, to the benefit of a meta- physical optimism and those fantasies of redemption that project themselves into the beyond.
If, however, truth is not something that can be be ? and if any search for it is defined in advance as terrifying, intellectual candor finds itself in a position it had not expected to be ? Truth no longer reveals ? it reveals itself at
the seeker and the researcher, who actually want to elude it, but instead to him who exhibits the deliberateness and courage required to not seek it. To be sure, how he exhibits these qualities of courage and deliberateness remains his secret, and it is certainly conceivable that enough will always remain from the search for truth as is necessary for the search for deliberateness and courage, without which a nonseeking consciousness could not develop. He who does not seek the truth must believe himself capable of enduring it. A l l problems of truth are therefore ultimately confluent with the question of how to endure what is unendurable. Perhaps this is why there are ultimately no techniques for finding truth in the existential sense; in the labyrinth, one looks not for secure knowledge but for the way out.
One may not therefore dismiss Nietzsche's entreaties of heroism, and tragic wisdom as mere manifestations of pompous and the man- nerisms of masculinity, regardless of the extent to which the latter do in fact play into his ? Courage is necessary within Nietzsche's enlightenment, prima- rily for taking part in the phenomena of truth ? because, for him, it is no longer a matter of a game of hide-and-seek, but one of experimen- tation and constancy, which remains, if possible, in the vicinity of the terrible truth. For this reason (according to Nietzsche), anyone who wants to speak of truth without using quotation marks would have to first prove himself as a non- seeker, a nonescapist, a nonmetaphysician.
With the acknowledgment of primordial pain as the basis of all other bases, Nietzsche's early thought places itself under a tragic, theatrical, and psycholog- ical sign (Zeichen). If truth means the unendurable, then knowledge of truth ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? CAVE 39
cannot be abruptly defined as enduring the ? It is that which is unen- durable itself that forces us, incircumstantially, to
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
maintain an unwavering dis- tance from it. Accordingly, the truth about the terrible truth is this: we must always have just missed it, and, furthermore, we will never be able to have the sincere volition ? to recognize it in its relentless presence ? For we are able to want only what we can still endure. According to Nietzsche, knowledge of the truth therefore also means always having been placed at a pro- tective distance from what is unbearable.
is the key word in the new tragic theory of knowledge, after which the old optimistic theory of the desire for unity was at an end. Philoso- phers, seekers, and dreamers might therefore continue to speak of identity and unity, but the thinkers of the future, the psychologists, know better. Their the- matic is that of distance, duality, difference. He who knows about distance has made the optics of a philosophical psychology his own. The psychologist also knows that he is enduring just as little of the whole truth as anyone else, but through this knowledge he gains a point of orientation toward which the general theater of self-deception and liar's play of life can be referred. The psychologist is well aware that everything is merely theater: through his personal union with the tragic theoretician of knowledge, he also knows, however, that it would make no sense to want to close this theater in the name of truth. Indeed, the terrible truth is the mother of theater. In accordance with its nature, we maintain an ir- revocable distance from it, a distance that so radically determines our everyday existence in the world that, even with the staunchest will to truth, we are not at liberty to distance ourselves from this condition of distance. As a rule, it is im- possible to survive the final dissolution of the distance that exists between us and the unimaginable reality of the terrible truth. Nietzsche's phrase "W e have art in order not to die of the truth" can also be read in this way: we maintain a distance from truth so that we will not have to experience it directly. To speak ontologi-
old ? us in order to in turn protect us from having
the
There can be no doubt here: wearing the mask of the theoretician of knowl- edge, Nietzsche has made an unprecedented appearance on the stage of philoso- phy. Do we now understand that this was no longer ? and never was? Do we recognize how something new and unbounded has taken shape within this philosophical project ? ? something new as pertains to truth as the oldest liar, whose wealth of discoveries is not exhausted as long as life itself attends to anything unbearable that might want to save itself in the liar's theater of inven- tions and research along the brink of the unbearable? Do we appreciate what ram- ifications the idea of distance will have? If it is indeed valid, then our position truth (independent of all our conceits of seeking and finding) must be one of an unavoidable evasiveness and a distance from which we cannot distance ourselves. If the terrible truth always keeps us at a distance, we are no longer able ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 40 CAVE
ever simply to "grasp" it. Whatever we may say about it, it is no longer actually j there in what is being said. We can therefore no longer succumb to the illusion that a condition of living without illusions is possible for ? We are condemned to simulation by truth itself. For us, illusion would be the most appropriate way to conduct ourselves toward the terrible ? We would grasp the truth only in that we have already eluded it as far as possible.
All of this will bring forth unimaginable ? since the possibility of our ever fully expressing the truth henceforth becomes a chimera. The terrible truth does indeed precede all ? but this preexistence does not mean that the former could be "expressed" or represented in the latter in the way in which the idea is expressed in the symbol or the object in the sign ? The ter- rible truth is in everything we express and represent, but it is no longer present; it is not this terrible truth that guarantees the truth-value of individual assertions. This could be formulated as follows: from this point on, any assertion remains, as it were, alone. Representations have been abandoned by what they allegedly rep-
truth ? must rely on themselves without the sanction of the final authority. The "whole truth" no longer plays along; it is no longer there in its supposed representations. Thus the signs remain unto themselves ? on nothing but their own internal relationships, their own system, their own gram- mar, their own "world. "
With this, the catastrophe of signs that have been abandoned by the "whole" truth is initiated, a catastrophe that is bitter, but also stimulating. The first char- acter to carry out the prospects and the risks involved in the ambivalent disaster across the stage in an affirmative way will be called ? It is no coinci- dence that this herald of ? is at the same time a rediscoverer of pro- phetic ? Thus Spoke Zarathustra ? in my ? an
the possibility of theater after the end of the "representation" of truth on stage, an experiment that has not been thought out to its conclusion to this day. It is the first hypothesis on the possibility of an absolute play in the form of unprotected pure self-expression; it is the incarnation of the transition from plays that repre- sent to those that present, and an exercise in the semantics of
that is, in speaking in the ? "truth. " Zarathustra's manipulation of language (Wortergreifung) is like a sound that has been transcribed into a linguis- tic music that, in its notes, carries out a fervent revenge on everything that could hinder the resounding of his voice. It ? so to speak, a nihilism that has become music, or a melody that has become immoralism; it would no longer permit any court in the world to either allow or forbid its ringing out and, relying only
Peter-Sloterdijk-Thinker-on-Stage. txt[3/29/23, 1:19:20 AM]
on the small autonomy of its real sounding, will submit itself to no foreign or external standard. Zarathustra's song is the daring self-staging of the Dionysian release from restraints ? that bursts forth on the stage as the unprotected self- affirmation of a language. That Nietzsche also disguises himself as the An- tichrist and presents himself as someone who will save us from morality
? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? ? 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.
