With the incredible wealth of profound thoughts in Friedrich Nietzsche, it is difficult to find a favorite thought.
One that comes very close to this is Nietzsche’s idea that, on closer inspection, every person actually has their own philosophy.
In other words, an individual’s own life and experiences from an early age shape their practical philosophy to the highest degree. It is then drawn to the appropriate texts and explanations.
At best, these in turn expand that private philosophy into a larger and freer view of the world.
The destruction of life, which I perceived as the self-destruction of my own life, was formative for me, using the example of my mother and my uncle Roland.
Due to the distance between the generations from the child’s point of view, the complexity of their lives will always remain partly hidden from me and thus also the reasons for the inner despair that led to alcohol addiction and physical and social decline in both cases, but it was intuitively clear to me that this was a dangerous maelstrom that I had to confront forcefully.
One source of strength to which I have always felt drawn to varying degrees in my life is the Christian faith.
At the age of about 8-10, I became so immersed in it that I also thought about becoming a priest. With my own extreme determination, which was sometimes difficult to distinguish from fanaticism and stubbornness, I attended early mass during the week before school started and meditated on praying the rosary.
With increasing literacy and a certain narcissistic pleasure in my own intellect, I then began to question all this with the greatest pleasure in destruction and intellectual gimmicks, especially in the context of the communion lessons that were soon to begin.
The second path to faith, after the end of my marriage and family and the accompanying feeling of being lost and ungrounded, led me to the music of Bach.
I can still see the picture in front of me: my children playing in the playground at Liesborn in Westphalia, which also had a kind of sound sculpture where you could try out your very own sound, with the beautiful abbey in the background:
All of a sudden, I realized how the music I had composed took on a new meaning:
In humility before God and his creation.
This, it seemed to me, is what made Bach’s music so great above many others: His willingness not to let his talent shine as an end in itself, but to humble himself in a certain way in order to set himself a framework of his own free will, to the perfection of which he now makes his contribution.
Building on this basic idea, I allowed myself to be guided and tried to open myself to the path that God had chosen for me.
And the more real life weighed on me, be it with unhappy relationships or material worries, the more I gained through meditation and concentration on this path that can only be found in secret.
Thus began, in a way, the “Orchestra of Cultures” and even more “Spirit of One” and the “Choir of Cultures”.
But back to my experience of my immediate life:
It seemed to me that my mother’s and uncle’s unhappiness, and to a certain extent my father’s too, stemmed from a feeling of loneliness and defencelessness on the one hand and a longing for affirmation and love on the other.
These are all perfectly understandable human desires that are probably inherent in everyone. But what if there is no equivalent on the outside of your own person?
I can’t force another person to end my loneliness. I can change my life at any time. But what if I lack the confidence to do so? What if I lack confidence in myself?
Every parent knows how difficult it is to do justice to just one child. With several children, it will be difficult to always provide concentration and love that meets every child’s needs.
So it will always be justified to blame parents for a lack of love and encouragement, and thus also for the inner emptiness and poor decisions in one’s own life.
It is easy to project the lack of love in one’s own life onto one’s partner, onto God, onto society, and if it is not reciprocated, to make them responsible for one’s own unhappiness.
But perhaps the mistake lies in the fraying of the search for meaning? The ego’s longing for confirmation and meaning in its own life is scattered in so many ways in the vague hope that as many confirmations as possible will make it easier to wake up every day.
It seems to me that a radically simple approach is best:
Assume a priori that your existence has a meaning.
Assume a priori that all existence has a meaning.
It is not even important what exactly this meaning is:
Knowledge, beauty, truth, love….
All of these are ultimately only sub-answers to the strong assertion:
That I am has a purpose.
Which one, that remains to be seen…
Similar, but different, is Goethe’s sentence from the:
“The meaning of life is life itself,”
which, however, leaves room for a slight absurdity, since it is a realization of a superior, for which one in a certain way relinquishes responsibility.
I am concerned with the willful determination of the individual:
I realize that the search for meaning in any form only leads to unhappiness and self-destruction.
Therefore, I claim my own sense.
This idea is closer to Nietzsche’s much-maligned concept of the superman.
It goes hand in hand with my life experience that despite all the difficulties in life, which can easily lead to despair and weariness, the solution is ultimately always to be found in oneself.
Prayer may also sometimes ease the initial despair and hope may lead you a few steps further.
But if we take seriously the Christian concept that man is a God-gifted being, then the highest probability of solving any problem is to be found in ourselves or, more precisely, in the God-gifted part of our being.
And no matter how hidden the solution may be: the conviction that the place of the problem (namely the ego) also holds its solution is the greatest possible power of one’s own life.
And since not only individual life is at home in each of us, but also the universal power of life, we always have access, albeit sometimes with difficulty, to this urine inspiration of the universe that spans the entire cosmos.
Everyone may develop their own ways to get there: Peace, nature, mediation, prayer, music, art, poetry… they all open up paths. The decisive factor is the inner conviction that you yourself are the source of strength.