In the third, penultimate part of the book “Also sprach Zarathustra”, under the heading “The Other Dance Song”, there is a kind of poem to which some of Friedrich Nietzsche’s best-known lines belong. The little work is based on the striking of the midnight bell and begins with “Eins / Oh Mensch! Be careful!” Later it says: “Ten!” But all pleasure wants eternity – / “Eleven! – wants deep, deep eternity!” After the twelfth beat, there is silence. It may mean so much that there is no longer any language for what needs to be said now, or it may mean nothing at all, or it may be anything in between. One does not know and one will not find out: the lines seem to aim at a whole which, as is so often the case with Nietzsche, is refused to mention.
Gustav Mahler used the lines as the basis for the fourth movement of his Third Symphony, and the verses also haunt the history of art and intellectual history in many different ways. The Viennese philosopher Konrad Paul Liessmann has now used it as an opportunity to reflect on it, from one verse to the other and thus in eleven long and one short chapters. With the words “Oh man”, Günther Anders reflects on people’s lack of relation to the world, then it is about artificial intelligence, which “will be superior to people in many respects”, and in the end the words are understood as an invitation to listen .
On the occasion of the fifth verse, “The world is deep”, the self-driven downplaying of the churches to “this worldly NGOs” is negotiated. Then it is asked whether the world is an illusion, and later it is explained who should dream of “geo-engineering” by answering Nietzsche’s question “Who are the masters of the earth?” don’t get upset. And in the end it should be certain that “lust” is only about itself.
Konrad Paul Liessmann: All pleasure wants eternity. Midnight temptations. Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna 2021. 320 pages, 26 euros.
Konrad Paul Liessmann is a public philosopher, in contrast to most of his colleagues, from whom one only hears something within the subject. He is well educated, with special reference to Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx and Karl May. He has written a long line of lively, astute, and well-written books, including a Critique of the Principle of the Future (“Zukunft Comes!”, 2007) and a small one Work on the beauty of everyday life (“The Universe of Things”, 2010).
His examination of the ideals of educational reform and its implementation at European universities, published under the title “Theory of Unbildung” in 2006, is among the most thorough and best that has ever been written about the fatal alignment of the education system with the supposed functioning of the private sector.
The “midnight temptations” with which Konrad Paul Liessmann tries to react to Nietzsche’s twelve chimes are not among the good books by this author. They appear arbitrary, fuzzy, associative. And they lead time and again to generalizations that cannot stand up to scrutiny: “In many schools, happiness is now a subject of instruction.” No, that is not true, just as it is not true that “technology skeptics” are considered cowards in “our time”. It seems that this philosopher needs an opponent to get down to business. The polemic is his strength, not the reasoning.