Posted By BillHeise on May 26, 2009

[This article is a continuation of a previous article, which you can find here.]

What Has Nina Done?

My question, as a hyper-rational thinker who requires a sense of place before I leap from the palpable world that I know to mental construct that may be an illusion, is “What is she talking about? Where does she actually go?”  In her mind, she has traveled away from the West and its capitalist economy to “pure” (and non-capitalist) India, where the self may be worshiped for its ability to close the gap between the individual person and God. But it is all in her mind. None of this is real.

She’s fallen into an idealistic trap. She must forgo her individual self to gain herself back at the “higher” level. The problem with Nina’s journey as a metaphysical quest is that she exchanges her actual ontological personality for an epistemologically constructed personality without the guarantees that come from having a body.

The world may be “so bad” and it may call for escape, but that does not mean that by traveling we can arrive at the truth, not even if we forgo the West for the purer religions of the East. “The whole person does not have to travel to find himself,” Carl Jung had said.

Nina has, in my opinion, failed in her journey, a journey that was laid out in large part by Carl Jung, a figure who had given up the “common” notions of individual (and ontological) personality for the larger (epistemological) consciousness of the collective. Of course, this collective conscious was unconscious to most of us. And he himself found it, not in the West, but in the Far East. He, too, had to travel to find it.

Thus, Nina Hagen is reenacting a journey that was laid out for her by figures like Schopenhauer, Hermann Hesse, and Jung. In that journey, she exchanges known ontological but unstable personality for an unknown yet stable personality. And by doing so, she manages to raise herself above the common herd of sheep and followers.

But all of this depends on her being correct about her religious vision. And I, for one, am not so sure that I believe her. Because let’s face facts: if I believed her, then I should follow her. And if I believe her and I don’t follow her, then I must be “evil” in some way.

But there are other alternatives to believing her religious vision, which I can trace back to historical or forces (in particular, the legacy of Plato in the Western world) and not to the metaphysical sphere. Nina is simply mistaken in her belief in epistemological reality, which she gives ontological force. By not following her, therefore, away from the palpable world which I can touch and feel into an epistemological construct where everything is secure as long as I don’t ask too many questions about what she’s talking about, I’m actually doing the right thing.

What Is the Value of Nina’s Journey If She Has Failed?

This brings up the question of whether Nina is “evil.” And, yes, she has some strange views, like this one:

(while we’re on that, do you know Nina is rumoured to be an AIDS supporter? She has this really weird belief about AIDS not being a disease but rather a kind of benign spiritual condition, claiming she knows lots of infested people who feel all right and live long, and that all the real trouble comes of curing AIDS. Kinda makes me shiver in my pajamas).

If she believes these things, then what’s the value of listening to her? Could she be corrupting my mind and the minds of others?

Well, yes, if people judged human personality and behavior on the metaphysical ends that people set themselves. But, in fact, they don’t. Nina judges on the ends she sets for herself; the rest of us judge more discriminately. We like (at least I like) her extremely broad view of music, and I don’t care so much for her view on AIDS. Her corruption in one area does not entail me giving up on her entirely. I can distinguish various elements in her personality, and so can you.

In fact, her public personality can be distinguished from her private thoughts. She’s worked extremely hard to get away from her ye-ye roots, where she cannot have been all that comfortable given where she’s been, and attempted to approach a “higher” truth. She has failed in her quest.

I have said on this blog that I believe that one can live anywhere in the world and be happy if one has a sense of him or herself at their center. That is why I can live the Southside of Chicago and be happy. But I live in the United States of America, a land dedicated to the principles of freedom. Asking whether Nina should she have remained in East Germany under her communist oppressors is a different matter. Even if she was secure in her individual principles—which I don’t actually believe, by the way—there was value in escaping from the oppression of the East and heading for the West, despite the fact that the West has been dedicated to the principles of individual freedom which very often eventuates in too many encounters with the id and not enough encounters with the ends of the journey of self-satisfaction.

Despite Nina’s failure, her journey has value nevertheless. She has a powerful voice, which very few people can match, and she puts her voice in the service of a considerable amount of Western music, switching genres easily. Compare her, for instance, to Snoop Dogg, who is trying (and who deserves credit for trying) but could never approach the vocal range of Nina Hagen. She switches effortlessly from punk rock, to torch songs, two Christian anthems, to Indian music.

Whatever her beliefs are in private, her public journey is valuable because she manages to subsume so much under the banner of punk rock. Under Nina Hagen, punk becomes a radiating source of our collective consciousness. She expands our knowledge of music by her participation in all its various forms. People who would not ordinarily be interested in an album of Indian music find themselves captured by her musical intellect. Like Ray Charles in American country music, Nina can do what few others can do. She can grow our minds if we will let her in to ours. This is not to say that she could not do more. There are areas where she hasn’t covered the ground. But she has done more than most.

Nina’s Idealism

Where she fails is in her idealism. Whether she knows it or not, she is caught in a dilemma of the 1960s, a dilemma caused by the first burst of freedom of the intellectual mind after the Second World War. Intellectuals had traveled from Europe to America, and they had brought with them their European ideas on capitalism and the mind. Capitalism had always been the enemy in aristocratic Europe, because capitalism was thought to reflect the notion of unrestrained individuality without cultural (read aristocratic) restraint.

When the intellectual class arrived on American shores, they brought with them these old world notions. Allan Bloom, the author of The Closing of the American Mind, talks about the heady days of his youth, when figures were first learning about the ideas of Heidegger, Max Weber, and Nietzsche. He wishes to go back to those European ideas.

But those European ideas were already dying when he wrote his book in the late 1980s. The intellectual class had moved away from the modern optimism that we were closing in on answers to the human condition that had eluded thousands of years of inquiry before the 1960s.

In the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s–and to this day, I suspect–the Modernism that spanned the twentieth century had shifted to a Postmodernist skepticism. They were still asking the same questions. They simply didn’t feel that the answers would be forthcoming anytime soon. But they shared a vision of the mind and its “place” in the universe. Postmodern answers tended to share too many similarities with the idealism which they purportedly rejected. The Postmodernists believe, with the Moderns, that the individual mind is a stable referent in an otherwise unstable world. Derrida, one of the leaders in the postmodern movement, believed that we should go back beginning and start over with a new, more stable metaphysics grounded in the stable self in order to rescue the stable self from destabilizing forces from outside the self.

I offer a different solution. I believe that idealism can ever cross the bridge from epistemology to ontology, no matter how hard Derrida (or anyone else) tries. Moreover, I believe that this is the reason the Derrida does not try to start over from the beginning, but instead defers that work to others.

Back to Nina

Nina was the last of a dying—but even today still not dead—breed. She grasped the promise of freedom as opposed to authority, but freedom was not enough. In the end she had to surrender her “capitalist” persona for a more stable “Indian” persona, just like Schopenhauer, Hermann Hesse, and Carl Jung had taught her to do.

This failure represents the failure of the notion of the individual mind as a substitute for God in the wake of the failure of the Middle Ages. The individual mind has many advantages, but its epistemological structures will always be imperfect substitutes for the ontological realities they are intended to reflect. That doesn’t mean that human beings need to “deconstruct” our imperfect epistemological realities; it means we need to keep perfecting them by aligning them more closely with their ontological counterparts.

This means that Nina’s failure in metaphysics does not invalidate her quest in the temporal world of time, exactly the world that she considers “so bad.” Judged by the extent of her work, and not by the ends towards which she is working, Nina Hagen captures the culture of the 1980s and 1990s brilliantly. She deserves our respect for her unique ability.

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