This is what Nietzsche has been to the German conscience since the end of World War II: a convict for some, a participant or accomplice in a heinous act whose traces have not yet been erased by the years, a creditor for others, an aggressor, a lover, and a forcibly and rapistically absconded person. In this conflicting whirlwind, Peter Sloterdijk intervenes once again to present some aspects of Nietzsche’s work and person in this book under a different light: Nietzsche the giver, the wasteful spendthrift who provokes generosity, Nietzsche who is like the midday sun that ignites and dazzles for no reason other than to remind us of the infinite energy that establishes life. Sloterdijk, who is dusting off Nietzsche today, is this German philosopher around whom a heated, sharp and sometimes passionate debate is now taking place. He follows in the footsteps of Nietzsche as Nietzsche followed in the footsteps of Diogenes. Sloterdijk today does not dust off Nietzsche to revive him as an idol or a school, but as a philosopher in the sense of a “lover of wisdom,” a lover who is involved to the point of annihilation in his love, and as a thinking mechanism free from all schools and systems, a mechanism that feeds on questions and confusion and spends all its energies in scattering values and certainties, celebrating the freedom of the individual as an infinite range of possibilities for creation and response. The “ethics” of life.
Sloterdijk digs up the first questions that were and still are nagging within the texts, he removes the dust of vulgarity resulting from the exalted spell-casting circulation, and rubs them so that they shine again with the brilliance of their first provocative joy – his joyful, playful provocation that continues to involve the attentive reader and the thinker who does not fall asleep in certainty within the whirlpool of permanent questioning. Not only the questioning about the world, society, political and social relations, but about thought and the thinker and his relationship with himself, his freedom, his individuality and his uniqueness in the first place. This text by Peter Sloterdijk that is in the reader’s hands may embody at least one aspect of the Nietzschean mentality. Provocation! It provokes us to reread Nietzsche as a voluntary spendthrift.
Be the first to review “Nietzsche’s Fifth Gospel”