Ulrich Horstmann - The Beast

Horstmann’s writing has lost nothing of its importance. The keyword for the reading of the “beast” suggested in the epilogue comes from Michael Pauen and is “secondary pessimism”. In contrast to the crisis hypothesis, which explains pessimism as a reaction to historical experiences of deficit, it can be shown that Horstmann’s pessimism is a form of enactment of critique and critic, an essence of mythopoeic passion, which is therefore both capable and literarily justified in an aestheticization of suffering, the transformation of horror into pleasure.

We have here a work that dares to rethink the anthropofugal perspective in post-war Germany, which begins shallowly with Schopenhauer but has never been named anything like it, and, as it were, to shape it consistently. Horstmann himself defines the anthropofugal perspective: What is meant is a distancing of the “beast” from itself and its history, an impartial observation, a “suspension of the seemingly universal offer of sympathy with the species” to which the reflector himself belongs, a capping of affective ties, simply — it could be said — a philosophical reflection from the observer’s perspective, which withdraws from the world-immanent insanity, which often appears precisely as “reason,” out of its own responsibility.

What Horstmann wrote here hardly longer than in six weeks, until the manuscript was finished, is nothing less than the announcement of the imminent self-abolition of the “beast” man, whereby “man” is for him a terminological euphemism. Those who feel called to say this see man, the potential beast, as Horstmann does, from the anthropofugal perspective of indifference to the hubris of man’s never-ending claims to happiness in the present. This perspective is gaining ground today, and so already in 2001 the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner wrote that he loved life too much to want to be happy. (Bruckner: Damned to Happiness, 2001, p. 14)
Horstmann, in turn, goes even further, as German philosophers often did in a manner characteristic of the genre, as it were: He traces an interesting arc of anthropofugal thought beginning with Paul Thiry d’Holbach’s (1723–1789) “System of Nature,” which first recognized that the organic is a great reciprocal strangling, snaring, and incorporating without end. To denounce and fully overcome the prison of generic narcissism, Horstmann lands on Schopenhauer’s (1788–1860) view “that we had better not be there.” This arc of thinking in the service of anthropofugal art, which Horstmann spends a lot of energy describing as “anthropofugal reason,” may seem somewhat alien to outsiders, but those who look more closely recognize, that in the shadow of academic expertise and scientific faithfulness to the line, here merely something comes to light that is aware of the “beauty of human emptiness” and no longer wants to acknowledge the “whinging egoism of our species for several centuries” — one could think also within the West German academic guild. As a result of (military) technological progress, it has now actually become surmountable. It is about a mental — philosophical — perspective of the great inferno.
Besides Eduard Hartmann (1842–1906) and the methodical modification of Nietzsche’s thinking, that life does not serve the goal of nihilism and the related revaluation of all values, but annihilism — i.e. In the same way, Horstmann’s thought that life does not serve the goal of nihilism and the related revaluation of all values, but rather annihilism — i.e. the self-suspension of the “beast” together with its greed for truth -, features of an “anthropofugal enlightenment” appear here, which is directed against the speculative defeatism of peace research and the self-congratulatory celebratory speeches of the inner-academic or inner-political guild. Horstmann’s partisanship for the anthropofugal tendencies finally finds confirmation in Ludwig Klages’ (1872–1956) “Unabwendbarkeit des Untergangs,” which propagates the withdrawal of man and idolizes a preconscious vital. Further, in E.M. Cioran (1911–1995), with his designation of man as a “knowing stillborn:” “What is this mass of puppets stuffed with red corpuscles to give birth to history along with its grimaces.”

The reader here has before him in every line the concentrated energy of longing for an inorganic state, an anthropofugal perspective as a longing for peace, as a longing for that which this perspective — at least world-immanently — abhors,preconsciously and presocially: peace, which is only consistently realized as peace of nothingness. Thus, in the face of never-ending misery in the world, Horstmann justifies the concept of “responsible annihilism”, a minority perspective that dares to think the self-extinction of man and every single individual as a spiritual experiment and out of intellectual passion. Disappointing here are only a few aspects in this intellectual steel storm against the bastions of supposedly comprehensively attainable happiness.

Horstmann does not mention the life and work of what is actually the first straight living and dying anthropofugal thinker, namely Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876). This philosopher, of whom Horstmann may not have known in his first edition, should have been mentioned in expanded form in the new edition of his book. Another error of Horstmann is his attitude towards German Idealism, about which he says: “(…) — German Idealism and its spread handling of the Absolute was a philosophical aberration of a kind (…).” Unfortunately, it is not mentioned here that it was precisely the representative of German Idealism G.W.F. Hegel and not Klages, Nietzsche or Cioran, who in his “Phenomenology of Spirit” (1807) already anticipated the thought process of the death of God, the annihilation and divestiture of man from this consciousness of inner-worldly suffering and pain, which became topical only with the nihilists or annihilists at the end of the 19th century. There, Hegel wrote about the “divestiture of substance” in man: “That, on the other hand, is conversely the tragic fate of the certainty of oneself, which is supposed to be in and for itself. It is the consciousness of the loss of all beingness in this certainty of itself and of the loss of this very knowledge of itself — of substance as well as of self; it is the pain that expresses itself as the hard word that God has died.” (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Suhrkamp edition 1986, p. 547)

In German Idealism, the flirtation with the Absolute as the dialectical synthesis of life and death, of suffering and happiness, was fierce and very rich in variations, did not lead to a stable connection, but also does not justify the designation as thinking of an “aberration.” For in German Idealism God does not exist beyond the world, but is present as spirit in the human spirit. Man has an important role: God can find and attain his self-consciousness only by means of the finite human spirit. Thus, the elements of necessary human finiteness and annihilation as well as the moment of the potential self-empowerment of man to annihilate his self — through which God exists — also arise in German Idealism. The God sensed in the finite human spirit can only become God through man’s finitude, his natural or self-empowering annihilation, which in turn can mean an anthropofugal tendency. Here Horstmann should have applied methodological depth instead of certain affects, because the synthesis between anthropofugality and idealism is possible: e.g. also when the real-dialectician and anthropofugal successor of Schopenhauer Julius Bahnsen (1830–1881) in his “Mosaics and Silhouettes” (1877) speaks of a “phenomenology of the will” and thus connects the anthropofugal tendency of Schopenhauer with its doctrine of the will as a priori with the phenomenological principle of the idealist Hegel, who recognized the essential view of inner-worldly things through human consciousness as well as the self-discovery of human spirit through self-fathoming self-reflection.

Perhaps Bahnsen is the key to the reconciliation of German Idealism with the reactio of anthropofugality beginning with Schopenhauer. Classical German philosophy, at any rate, lacks no such connection thanks to its intellectual abundance; it literally cries out for a synthesis of its dialectically diametrically opposed poles. — Horstmann’s book puts a new focus on an important perspective in the so-called “modern age”. It definitely belongs to such thinking, which would like to call itself “vital”, but would have to be classified in a whole of “German philosophy”.