Autor: Voegelin, Eric

Buch: Hitler and the Germans

Titel: Hitler and the Germans

Stichwort: Analyse: Reibung (friction) -> erste - zweite Realität (4 Punkte); Nietzsche

Kurzinhalt: The denial of the nonexistent reality of transcending toward divine being destroys the imago Dei. Man becomes dehumanized.

Textausschnitt: (1) Since nonexistent reality1 cannot be abolished, the empty space arising from its discrediting must be refilled with the symbolism of the second reality. Among other phenomena, this requirement is served by the world-immanent apocalypses of history created by Kant, Condorcet, Comte, and Marx. Because the new images of history originate in the world-immanent concupiscence of action, progressive and revolutionary activism belong essentially to them, along with revolutionary consciousness. (Fs)

(2) With the sinking of nonexistent reality to the status of non-reality, there arises the phenomenon of disillusionment, accompanied by the feeling of obligation to live one's life without the illusions of transcendence. The denial of the spirit produces the suffering of Godforsakenness. We can think of the suffering of Nietzsche, who had learned through Pascal's example what faith meant but did not want to submit himself to its discipline. (Fs)

(3) The denial of the nonexistent reality of transcending toward divine being destroys the imago Dei. Man becomes dehumanized. The suffering from the meaninglessness of a Godforsaken existence leads to outbreaks of concupiscent fantasy, to the grotesque creation of a "new man"-of Marx's and Nietzsche's supermen. (Fs)

(4) Since statements regarding the mystery of the ground of being must no longer emerge as exegesis of noetic and pneumatic experience, they become for Nietzsche masks of the world-immanent "deep spirit." The quest for the meaning of life degenerates to aesthetic operations with symbols of transcendence, to a game with masks of nonobligatory obligation. Going beyond the case of Nietzsche one can say in general: The world-immanent phenomena of power, conflict, instinct, class, nation, and race were laden with the meaning of nonexistent realities and thereby became masks of transcendence. We notice as characteristic the phenomenon of a despairing affirmation of the world-immanent game of life that takes up the problem of transcendence and loads this world-immanent game of life with a meaning it in fact docs not have. Nietzsche formulated this loading in a brilliant saying. He speaks of the life-affirming man, "who not only has learned to put up with and get on with what was and is, but who wants to have it again as it was and is to all eternity, insatiably calling out da capo, not only to himself but to the whole piece and play, and not only to a play, but basically to him who needs precisely this play-and who makes it necessary [...] What? And would this not be - circulus vitiosus deus?"2 The divine eternity is transposed into an everlasting, self-repeating game of immanence. The hiddenness of the ground becomes the superficiality of the game, and in the hiddenness proceeds the man who plays it. But is he still human? For "all that is deep, loves the mask," and the antithesis and contradictions of the masks are "the correct disguise for the shame of a God."3 In fact: circulus vitiosus deus. The game of the masks that Nietzsche's God-man plays takes the place of Plato's "serious play" of life. (Fs)