![]() ![]() He yearns to turn the ridiculous of an error-strewn intellectual tradition into the experiential sublime, so that the sublime might yield to freedom. ![]() 'Is modernity not defined,' Sloterdijk posits, 'by a consciousness that was ahead of the monstrousness of facts, for which discourses about art and human rights only ever consist in compensation and first aid?' No form of discipleship could emerge from such a fractured consciousness, for all that Nietzsche's work is driven throughout by the polemic force of manifestos. The magnum opus, Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883) is 'a book for everyone and no-one', as its subtitle has it, making at once a call to the whole of humanity while recognising that there is literally nobody who could possibly heed it, no ideal reader to follow the author into the happiness of voluntary exile beyond the fringes of Christendom.įor this journey to the far shores and on, interrupted by his own collapse into insanity in Turin in 1889, clutching for pity's and fury's sake to the neck of a beaten carthorse, he is recognised as having foreseen the disconnect in the coming century between thought and reality. Sloterdijk defines Nietzsche's hubris as 'hetero-narcissism', the heroic affirmation of whatever there is of otherness in the self. His final texts – Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, Ecce Homo – are among the most febrile shouts of liberty in the philosophical lineage, but they are marked by the paradox of their author's consciousness of his own unfeasibility. Nietzsche, an enthusiastic reader in his youth of Ralph Waldo Emerson, much of whose 1841 essay 'Self-Reliance' sounds eerily premonitory of the sage of Sils-Maria, derives some of his bombast from the mature style of Schopenhauer, and much of his heretical energy from the rebels and outcasts of the evangelical tradition. Around 1810, Thomas Jefferson produced an intricately worked redaction of the Gospels for plain-thinking Americans, a work that amounted to skipping over the sillier pronouncements of the Saviour, and concentrating on the good bits. Importantly, however, he recast them as five books rather than the canonical four, so that, by corresponding to the five senses of humanity, they could be made to address their recipients through the immoderation of their earthly sensuality. In the ninth century, the Franconian divine Otfrid von Weissenburg sketched out one of the earliest anticipations of the European Reformations when he translated the Gospels into the Frankish vernacular, so that ordinary people might hear the good news at first hand. In the opening section of the study, Sloterdijk speaks of the hidden, but no less hubristic, tradition of rewriting the Gospels. He is the last philosopher to write before the modernist crisis of language, which he did so much to help bring about. Standing at the dawn of humanity's plunge into irrationality, he is also the end-result of a tradition of self-assertion that expressed itself through the hubris of nations with regard to their own cultures, and their belligerent intentions towards their rivals, before devolving to the individual level, where it described an arc from the amour-propre of the Enlightenment through Romantic self-interest to the psychological narcissism of the 20th century. Peter Sloterdijk's Nietzsche, celebrated here in the transcript of a talk given in Weimar on the centenary in 2000 of the German philosopher's death, is first and foremost the iconoclast of language, which is to say of classical philosophical discourse.
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