Nietzsche Screams
Today is September 11. Every form of media makes reference to the event in Manhattan occurring 25 years ago. It’s unremarkable that memories of the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings mean many things. There is no univocal, “correct” meaning. Many people died on that day, and the carnage was not limited to a single day of September 11th. Nor was the slaughter confined to Manhattan. Violent bloodletting spread to Iraq and Afghanistan. Martin Heidegger wrote in 1954:
Learning, then,
cannot be brought about
by scolding.
Even so, a man who teaches
must at times grow noisy.
In fact, he may have to scream and scream,
although his aim is to make his students
learn so quiet a thing as thinking.
Nietzsche, most quiet and shiest of men,
knew of this necessity.
He endured the agony of having to scream.
in a decade when the world at large
still knew nothing of world wars,
when faith in “progress” was virtually
the religion of civilized peoples and nations,
Nietzsche screamed out into the world:
“The wasteland grows…”
He thus put the question to his fellowmen
and above all to himself:
“Must one smash their ears before they learn
to listen with their eyes? Must one
clatter like kettledrums
and preachers of repentance?”*
But riddle upon riddle!
What was once the scream
“The wasteland grows…,” now threatens
to turn into chatter.
What Is Called Thinking by Martin Heidegger, trans. by J. Glenn Gray, Part I, Lecture V
Here is a sample of stories featured in today’s The New York Times:
The forever war. Al Qaeda, the terrorist group American troops went abroad to fight in the weeks after 9/11, is still a force in Afghanistan. By one estimate, the war on terror cost more than $8 trillion and 900,000 lives. This collection of images from 25 years of conflict is sobering. (The photograph from a 2009 suicide bombing in Kabul, in particular, has stayed with me all this time.)
The site. A quarter-century after the attack, the apartment building designed to replace 5 World Trade Center still hasn’t gone up. Around the corner, the 9/11 Museum is struggling to stay afloat. About one in three Americans was born after Sept. 11; it may have shaped their lives, but their memories are not seared.
The historical significance. At the time, it seemed that something was ending and another thing, maybe worse, was beginning. But was it? Charles Homans argues that life does not divide into neat geopolitical demarcations. Instead, 9/11 “is a middle chapter in the story of American fracture rather than the pyrotechnic beginning.”
