No More Learning

If the philosopher wished to recommend himself as the educator of the never-before-seen type of human being guided by reason, he had to arrogate to himself the right to establish new yardsticks for what it means to become an adult in the city and the empire. And in fact, the mean- ing of what it meant to become an adult changed radically in the transition from tribal societies to political and imperial structures.
Anyone who wanted to become an adult in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bce had to prepare himself to take on power on a scale that was historically all but unknown—or at the least make the burdens of power his own. As teachers of what it meant to become an adult, the philosophic educators thus became mid- wives at the risky birth of human beings transposed into larger, more powerful worlds. Preventing these births from resulting in monstrosities required an art that balanced the new plenitude of power with a new prudence and circumspection.
From the time of the oldest tribal cultures, symbolic births at the threshold to adulthood have been a matter for ritual initia- tions. The modern paideia invariably has followed in the footsteps of that tradition; in this area it stands as the successor to—and also the enemy of—shamanism, where the latter not only refers to an archaic healing art, but simultaneously encompasses the authority to initiate the younger generation into the mysteries of adult life. In the cosmopolitan polis, however, it had become impossible to perform initiatory tasks only with shamanic tech- niques; the democratic, combative city no longer favored the trance. After Socrates and Plato, it was not possible to regard as grown up only the person of whom the ancestors and gods of the tribe had taken possession. Urban forms of life demanded a new
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type of adult, one to whom the gods did not get too close—this means at the same time they stimulate a type of intelligence that shifts from tradition and repetition to study and “memory. ” Rev- elation and evidence are no longer created through ecstasies, but through reasoned conclusions: truth itself has learned to write; entrained sentences lead one to it. That is why the meaning of memory is radically altered in Plato’s body of teachings: according to Plato, what we should have remembered at all costs we lost as we plunged into this world; what we learn by heart here is con- fused or useless. Henceforth, “remembrance” of a prenatal, a priori, or pure knowledge is to render the mythological and rhapsodic memory culture superfluous: thus begins the revolution of knowl- edge through the a priori.
With some liberty one could compare the Platonic procedures with a psychoanalysis in which we recall, not repressed primor- dial scenes, but clouded archetypes and obscured mathematical essences. Whether such remembrances can achieve full trans- parency may remain questionable. In any case, to Plato, thinking under human conditions means no longer sharing the full lucidity of the heavens. Mortals, as long as they are present in these bod- ies, pay their dues to the difference of all differences: because they know most things only vaguely, they suffer the rupture between the transparency up there and the clouded view down here. We are condemned to having to deal with an addition of darkness in all things. Philosophy is at the least an endeavor to illuminate the twilight we inhabit.
It was logical that the philosophical discourse began to push back the traditional myths and opinions; in place of fairy tale– infatuated stupor and rhapsodic enthusiasm, it aspired to a state of “critical” soberness, which has ever since been considered the working climate of authentic philosophizing. To be sure, with its doctrine of beautiful manias and sobria ebriatas (sober drunken- ness), Platonism still entered into a compromise between criticism
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and enthusiasm, even if such concessions were foreign to the later, dry schools. To the extent that it was enlightenment, philosophy could do nothing other than disenchant the old-religious consti- tutions of the soul and the crude stories of the gods; but to the degree to which it swore its disciples to an absolute, highest good, it simultaneously set in motion a reenchantment through the liv- ing universality. Only where this higher enchantment failed—for example, under the impression that argumentation created more problems than it solved—did skepticism and the unproductive spinning of the analytical wheels arise. When that happened, con- tinuous reflection could also become a symptom of schizoid alien- ations: for instead of illuminations from the True-Good-Beautiful, those alienations see everywhere only depressive grays. In fact, late classical philosophy already furnished the arguments for a self-weariness. In this regard, the academicism of the ancients is kin to its contemporary counterpart.
In the optimistic early years, philosophical reeducation intended no less than to change the soul and enthusiasm of indi- viduals; its goal was to turn confused children of the city into adult cosmopolitans, inner barbarians into civilized inhabitants of the empire, intoxicated opinion-holders into thoughtful lovers of knowledge, doleful slaves to the passions into cheerful indi- viduals in control of themselves. At the beginning of European pedagogy there was a time when the word school always meant school of refinement. The modern term education hardly reflects any of this ambition of philosophy’s original project; but even our contemporary notion of philosophy, where it refers to the activi- ties of sullen faculty and the endless discourse of a subculture of jealous mental athletes, barely recalls the solemn seriousness of the Platonic enterprise—to begin, on the basis of a school, with a redefinition of what it means to be human. We must give credit to intellectual historians like Paul Rabbow and Pierre Hadot for protesting against the modern intellectualistic and cognitivist
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misunderstanding of ancient philosophy, and for reminding us instead of its tenacious self-educational pathos. 10 Philosophy that would not have operated as a transformative exercise (ask- esis) would have remained suspect to its ancient acolytes also as a source of knowledge. When Diogenes of Sinope succeeded in having Alexander step aside so that he would not block the sun, the goal of the exercise was also achieved. In this sense the wise pantomimes of kynicism are the equal of loquacious Platonism. To the man from Sinope belongs half of everything that the expres- sion “unwritten teachings” can refer to.
Without question, philosophy after Socrates and Plato was in pursuit of disenchantment. With that, the new schools opposed the unreflective habits of the state of being half-awake. Deliber- ateness is still the most modern and most improbable condition, since the old collective ecstasies have not yet relinquished their ancient power. Indeed, behind the Athenian philosophers stood not only their archaic colleagues, the shamans and iatromancers, the seer-healers of ancient Greece, but also the Homeric rhap- sodes and the poet-theologians of the Dionysian cult. Breaking with them was the historical mission of philosophy. After Socrates, all philosophers were nouveaux philosophes; they had to be new to the extent that they were involved in the media revolution of writ- ten culture and urban rhetoric. As such, they act as agents of an epochal transformation in the ancient relationships of knowl- edge. They respond to the fact that henceforth every thinker had to become a writer of his knowledge. The discourses about Being, god, the soul—ontology, theology, psychology—enter into the lines of continuous prose texts and thus always present them- selves also as ontography, theography, and psychography. The lines of the philosophical text are discrete ways to the truth; they are antiquity’s data highways to absolute information. Soon, however, there would be too many lines; the “paths” become alarmingly elongated, so much so that doubts arise as to whether the lovers
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of wisdom can still attain real knowledge in their lifetime; is it not possible that these strange arguers ended up possessing only libraries and not enlightenment?
Be that as it may, because the philosopher as author led the way on this long and steep path, a new mode of authority was born: that of authorship, which rests on the psychagogic power of the written word. Plato’s infamous polemic against the poets does not attest to an amusical aversion to pretty words; rather, it expresses an unavoidable media competition between the new, soberly composed discourse about god, the soul, and the world, and the old, trance-inducing rhapsody and the intoxicating and convul- sive theater-theology. Plato presented himself as a medium—as it were—of the god of the philosophers, who was proclaiming through him the commandment: I am an image-less god, you shall no longer have any sung and versified gods beside me. Henceforth it was no longer the tone and the verse that created the true music, but the prose argument and the dialectical thought process. Thus the Platonic opus not only marks the epochal threshold between orality and literacy, but also stands at the boundary between the older, musical-rhapsodic transmission of knowledge and the now prosaic-communicative procurement of knowledge.
What accounts for the charm of the Platonic texts is that they, unlike the Aristotelian treatises and the entire academic litera- ture, still reveal the closeness to the manner of speech of the wise singers and the pious dramaturges. For more than two millennia the tone of philosophy has remained fixed to that of the thesis- formulating prose tractate—until modern times, when, after a few preludes in Renaissance philosophy (Bruno, in particular), another rapprochement between the poetic and the discursive prose takes place in authors such as Novalis, Nietzsche, Valéry, and Sartre. Viewed as a whole, the massif of classical philosophy between Plato and Husserl is one of the most stupendous conse- quences of literacy. Therein lies one of the reasons why precisely
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today—at the dawn of another media revolution—rereading our philosophical tradition promises to become a fruitful enterprise.
In terms of its self-conception, the modern world is carrying out a comprehensive anti-Platonic experiment. This appears to have become possible only because the grounding of knowledge and action in the “ancient European” idea of a supreme Good could be abandoned. The dominant technological pragmatism of the modern era was given free rein only after the metaphysical inhibitions standing in the way of unlimited moral and physi- cal experimentation had been removed, or at least enfeebled. From this perspective it becomes understandable why moder- nity is dominated by a postmetaphysical disinhibition. Within that disinhibition, liberation and destabilization are ambiva- lently interwoven. The consequences of the uncoupling from the metaphysical foundation—deconstructivists would say: from the foundation-illusion—are twofold: the empowerment to engage in unrestrained projecting is paid for by the discovery of an inter- nal abyss. The fact that a deep-seated discomfort with modernity exists today among so many contemporaries has to do undoubt- edly with the ambivalent experience of a steady increase in power and an unstoppable erosion of security. When ambivalence prevails, positive balance sheets are difficult to come by. A grow- ing number of people are doubtful—with ever more compelling justifications—that the world experiment of the modern age still amounts to a global sweepstakes: too obvious by now is the ris- ing tide of risks and losses. If one wanted to name the principle that rules the ecology of the modern mind, one would have to lay bare why modernization brings with it ineluctably progress in the awareness of being adrift. Were it possible to make this sufficiently clear to all the actors and audiences of the modern game, it would also become evident to them why this tendency cannot be reversed through a flight to the ancient foundations. The fundamentalism that arises today around the world out of
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the mistrust of modernity can never offer more than makeshift constructs for the helpless; it produces only semblances of secu- rity without deeper knowledge; in the long term, it destroys the infected societies with the drug of false certainty. A good antidote to the fundamentalist temptation is to open once again the book of European philosophical knowledge and retrace the lines and paths of ancient thinking—to the extent that the brevity of life allows us to venture upon such elaborate recapitulations.
The motto “think again” presupposes the summons to read in a new way. All fruitful rereading benefits from the refractions and shifts in perspectives that are inherent in our retrospective view of traditions, provided we are conscious contemporaries of the ongoing upheavals in the conditions of knowledge and com- munication within the emerging telematic global civilization. There are many indications that the current generations will pass through a rupture in the shape of the world which—in profundity and momentousness—is at least as important as the one that gave rise to classical philosophy twenty-five hundred years ago. A study of that ancient rupture could therefore inspire an understanding of the present one.
We will not gain better knowledge today without participat- ing in the adventures that await us in the revision of our own history. A new aggregate state of intelligence will extract new information also from the old schools of philosophical knowl- edge: this can mean that one is ready and willing, with Plato and in spite of Plato,11 to work on actualizing our intelligence.
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aristotle
In the fourth century bce, the genius of the European concep- tion of knowledge revealed itself for the first time in its monu- mental completeness. Astonishing for the wealth of his interests,
the scope of his writings, and the perspicuity of his conceptual distinctions, Aristotle stands like a portal figure of near-mythic force at the entrance to the high European schools of knowledge. Considering what he accomplished in his lifetime as a thinker and writer, the idea suggests itself that what would come to be called the university from the Middle Ages on was anticipated in the figure of a single man. The mind of Aristotle was the senate— as it were—of a university with a wealth of departments. In him, the natural sciences and humanities—if one may use such anach- ronistic language—merged in the breadth of their range, already presided over by the philosophical doctrine of the first things, also called theology. In a few disciplines—logic, for example—
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Aristotle was both pioneer and completer in one. It comes as no surprise that the history of the European university during its first, medieval half (lasting four hundred years) was simultane- ously the history of Latinized Aristotle studies. If a scholastic theologian during this time wished to invoke the authority of the great Greek, he could do so safely with the phrase ut ait philosophus: “as the philosopher states. ” Never has a thinker been honored as Aristotle was with this formula. When early modern thought broke out of the lead chamber of scholastic authoritarianism, it was once more the name “Aristotle”—this time with a negative accentuation—that marked this development. The cry: “Aristotle errs here! ” could have become the watchword for a risk-embracing independence in the reexamination of fields of knowledge that had become excessively scholastic and convoluted.
A look at Aristotle’s life work reveals that the “theoretical life”—the often-invoked bíos theoretikós—of the ancient lover of wisdom must not be misunderstood in the sense of a modern conception of leisure. What the Romans later used to call the vita contemplativa was often nothing other than the vita activa of philo- sophical investigations. The theory itself was grounded in asceti- cism, in unflagging practice, in the daily exertion of the logical and moral powers. Philosophers are athletes of conceptual categories. To be sure, intellectual asceticism is not without is own pleasures; when Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, put forth the proposition that all humans by nature strive for knowledge, he was generalizing into an anthropological thesis what was for him a permanent, personal experience: in its unceasing movement, the active intellect takes pleasure in itself. A small likeness to the divine becomes evident in this knowledge-narcissism. Even in its driest enumerations and most industrious distinctions, the Aristotelian intellectual edifice still attests an original connection between knowledge and joy.
Occasionally the question has been raised whether Aristotle is not compromised as an educator and teacher of wisdom because
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he failed to prevent Alexander, the so-called Great. What reso- nates in this question is also the conviction that philosophy attains its goal only when it has transformed every will to power and all manic ambition. That would amount to judging the scholar with the yardstick of the wise man. Wisdom in the effusive or esoteric sense was not Aristotle’s thing. For him, the word sober-mindedness described the humanly possible. From Aristotle one could cer- tainly learn how to appropriately carry out logical and empirical investigations, but not how to die in confused passions in order to be reborn in enlightened self-control. Aristotle was not able to turn his brilliant, wild pupil into the philosopher-king Plato had called for; after years of interacting with the greatest thinker of his time, there remained alive in Alexander the belief that there was something bigger than philosophy. For Aristotle, in turn, there were more important things than putting a philosophical bridle on a prince’s son hungry for greatness. Alexander’s Egyptian and Indian adventures may have kindled the straw fire of Macedonian imperialism; what was on the agenda for him, the logician and scientist, were Alexandrian campaigns of curiosity, which were to go much further than all politics great and small. Across indus- trious decades, Aristotle created an empire of knowledge, whose subsequent history—if one desired to recount it in detail—would become nothing less than the epic of European sciences right up to the threshold of the modern period.
The Aristotelian empire in books, once their author was no longer alive, had to fragment—like Alexander’s successor king- doms—into individual disciplines. More so than virtually any thinker before him, Aristotle was aware that the edifice of knowl- edge could be consolidated only as a joint undertaking by many generations, and that the investigative intelligence must prove and optimize itself over time. Later scholars could learn from him what pose they should strike in the sequence of generations of the sci- ences: one of self-conscious gratitude toward one’s predecessors,
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or one of discrete pride—if personal, new accomplishments justi- fied it—toward posterity. Thus, Aristotle is a man of the middle also with respect to the tradition of knowledge. As both a natural scientist and an ethicist he glorified the wonder of Being in what is constant and normal.
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augustine
Augustine stands before posterity as the only intellectual personality of the early Christian era who is spiritually and psychologically illuminated down to the minutest detail—in fact, he may be the most clearly visible personality of antiquity, the only individual of world history before the Renaissance of whom we have close-ups, so to speak. This precarious privilege of trans- parent visibility does not mean that Augustine, clearly still bound entirely to ancient notions of the world and humanity, antici- pated certain tendencies of modern individualism or aspects of modern portrait culture. And he is definitely not an existential- ist ante litteram. That Augustine exposed himself to his contem- poraries and posterity so radically through his work, not least by virtue of his epochal Confessiones, which made him the patriarch of a literature of self-revelation, is the result of a theological process that the bishop of Hippo waged—victoriously—against himself.
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We possess such a movingly concrete, human, and intellectually profound picture of Augustine largely because he himself gath- ered the evidence of his conduct and his sinful propensities as evidence against himself and tried to cast them into the cleansing fire of the confession. Augustine became and has remained vis- ible because he took himself seriously as the exemplar of a human being who, with God’s help, ended up taking God more seriously than himself.
“Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and yet so new, late have I loved you. ” This habit of self-revelation shows how far Augustine—although he remained committed to the Platonic parameters as a philosophizing theologian—had moved away from the Hellenistic motives of philosophizing about origins. For while philosophical Hellenism was largely characterized by the elevation of the knowing soul to the lofty objects of its contem- plation, what prevails in the Augustinian discourse of God and humankind is a continuously radicalizing ambivalence. When Augustine endows the human interior with the highest accolades as the vessel of the traces of God, he simultaneously yields to an irresistible urge to debase humankind beneath a transcendental majesty. In this regard, Augustine’s work does not merely mark the Latin phase in the gradual Hellenization of Christianity, in which scholars believe they can discern the principle of the early history of Christian doctrine. The phenomenon of Augustine has become fateful in the history of ideas and mentalities because through him, the most stirring idea of the ancient world, Plato’s construct of love as a homesickness for the preexistential Good that is intuited, was subjected to a momentous, darker reinter- pretation, indeed, a reversal. For the Platonists, the descent of the soul into the body leads to an obfuscation of memory, from which the incarnated soul recovers to the extent to which it conforms to its calling: to purify and perfect within itself the memory of the Good. The soul of the darker Augustinianism, by contrast,
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is stained by an incurable corruption. That is why its labor of remembering the ultimate Good ends in the despairing realiza- tion that, by its own effort, it will never be able to return to the unspoiled participation in the light of the Good.
This Augustinian turn—of which it is impossible to decide whether it has the character of a discovery (that is, insight) or invention (that is, projection)—leads to the Christian catastro- phe of philosophy. It inaugurates a more or less manifestly mel- ancholic millennium in which human reason will be unable to recover from the trauma of its one-sided dissociation from the Best. But it is only under the banner of what is on the human side an irreparable separation that the motif of a love unilater- ally aggregated in God can become all-powerful. Where mutual- ity is lost and the kindness of humanity has dissolved into noth- ing, that is where the realm of grace begins. Philosophy may well contemplate the gift, but the kingdom of theology establishes itself through the new guiding concept of grace. The doctrine of grace serves to provide doctrinal pastoral care for the state of human forlornness under God. Augustine opened the sluice gates through which elemental masochistic energies have been pouring into European thinking ever since; with a radicalism that virtually raised him to the rank of a higher power, he elevated incurable human nature to the primary motif of his interpretation of reality. Thereafter, not even love as such can heal, unless it is divine love, restored and granted by Christ. But even as such, it remains over- shadowed by an agonizing particularity: for now the love of God no longer has the character of an affection that is universal and allows for unconditional participation, but has that of a strongly selective, patronizing pardon.
In the end, where the human being who loves merely in a human way, that is, the egotist who must always have himself and his desires in mind, steps onto the stage, the later Augustine sees always the stigma of loss and the trace of an original guilt that
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reaches deeper than any possibility of redemption and anything humans could achieve. One might say that Augustine in this way uncouples philosophy from its classical, manic constitution and places it under the auspices of depression. For him, too, the human being as such is already a futile passion, but the reason behind this futility is not, as in modern existentialisms, the absurd structure of the conditio humana. The Augustinian person leads a lost and wasted life because the stain of original sin essentially excludes him from the feeling of security within God, and because he must bear the uncertainty of salvation in the extreme. For Augustine, what is unredeemable in humanity is forever combined with the uncertain in the impenetrability of God. To be sure, for a small handful there continues to exist the fullness of salvation and free access to the glory of the source. But the nature-given participa- tion of the human soul in the splendor of the absolute Good is no longer sufficient to offer an adequate reason for its self-rescue and its secure return to the Best. Within the Augustinian realm, even the most pious retain a reason to doubt their salvation to the very end.
The intellectual optimism of the Hellenes is bound to fail in the face of these insights into God’s selectivity. Under Augustine’s melancholy mediation, God’s self-sufficiency grows into a for- tress that is impregnable to humans, and into which only those are accepted who, by virtue of an impenetrable act of God’s will, have remained from the outset among those who are not doomed. Augustine’s masochistic fundamental operation springs from the identification with a God against whom the human soul is always in the wrong, and whom it would have to unconditionally acknowledge as being in the right even if it is among the damned.
Just as Pascal would one day wager on the existence of God in the face of the uncertainty of revelation, Augustine, in the face of the uncertainty of being a chosen one, wagered on uncondi- tional resignation. His psychological genius lies in the fact that
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he ferrets out within the person the self-asserting “I” unwilling to resign itself, in all its new guises and defensive positions. And precisely this observation that the human being never yields fully and without ulterior thoughts inspired Augustine to conduct this model trial against his youthful vanities, and also against the illusions of his middle years, with which he had tried to save his neck within Christian philosophism. As God’s prosecutor, the formidable bishop leads the prosecution against himself and all other comrades-in-fate in the all-too-human self-centeredness. He exposes himself, the defendant accused of original sin and original rebellion, in all the hiding places of his unresigned self- will. In the process he draws out into the light that it is not only truth that dwells within the human being, but also the reason for despair, narcissistic wickedness, ungodly corruption, and the trace of Satanic separatism.
What Augustine accomplished here was no less than the fundamental inquisition against human self-love, which would become a constant in the history of Western mentality: we find it still in Fichte’s verdict against the finite “I” enthralled with itself, in Schelling’s analysis of selfishly misused human freedom, in Dostoevsky’s definition of man as “a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful,” in Sigmund Freud’s later theorems of human autoeroticism, in Jacques Derrida’s critique of the word that hears itself talking, and in the neoconservative lamentations about mass individualism—all are part of the history of the antinarcissistic inquisition launched by Augustine and the Catholic Fathers. The axiom of the trial against the separated, self-absorbed human being is that he who wishes to be pleasing to God must be dis- pleased with himself. The truth about the truth is that it should be dreadful to those affected.
Modernity has discovered that humanity can be displeased with itself even without God. Truth and depression unfold together in a correlation that is conceivable also without God’s immense
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sadism and without God’s immense grace. It is Augustine’s con- tributions to the interpretation of the human separation from the good foundation and his keen deconstruction of human self- protections that secure the Christian classic author an inexhaust- ible post-Christian readership.
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Bruno
Among the glittering series of Renaissance philosophers who began to lead early modern European thought out of the hegemony of all-powerful Christian scholasticism, the charred silhouette of Giordano Bruno stands out impressively. Ever since his death at the stake in Rome in February of 1600, his name— shrouded by rumors of pantheistic nefariousness and cosmologi- cal daring—has been a fixture in the annals of martyrdom of the modern free spirit. The vagaries of his posthumous fate have retained something of the erratic luster and misfortune of his life story. They create the impression that his followers and inter- preters spent more time poking around in his ashes than reading his writings.
In fact, intellectual history knows few authors whose afterlife has been so heavily shaped by projections and monopolizations on the part of enraptured sympathizers for their own interests.
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And so the history of the reception of Bruno is, with few excep- tions, that of a well-intentioned legasthenia; many a descendant in need of someone to lean on has put into Bruno’s mouth what he would have said had he been the person people liked to imag- ine he was. Thus, ally-seekers of every stripe have hitched him to their cause, with anticlericalists and pantheists leading the way; in recent years, even a certain Catholic pietism has tried to lay hold of him. People are eager to make it seem like they were burned at the stake by his side in order to benefit from his aura as a victim. This kind of obtrusiveness may be a typical mechanism for the history of dissident philosophers. To the extent that it is based on a lack of better understanding, it is largely due to the fact that Latin has been a dead language among Europe’s educated elite since the nineteenth century, as a result of which Bruno’s critical texts, written in Latin, were long buried as though in a tomb. Any- one who wants to expose himself to the power and greatness of Bruno’s thinking in its most impressive manifestations must first endeavor to liberate the “magician” Bruno, the memory artist, the materiosoph, the image-ontologist, and the teacher of nimble transformation from his Latin crypt so as to ponder his ideas in the light of modern languages.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Elisabeth Samsonov, who— inspired not least by the work of the grand old dame of Renais- sance scholarship Frances A. Yates—has begun to provide Ger- man readers access to some of Bruno’s long-forgotten Latin writings. His work attests to a misunderstood aspect of the myth of the modern era: it illustrates the birth of modernity out of the spirit of a philosophy of imagination. In the wake of the rediscov- ery of Bruno’s doctrine of the world-constituting achievements of “imagination,” the lazy penchant of intellectual historians to construct modern thought entirely on the basis of Descartes becomes more dubious than ever. One must go back to the uni- verse of Bruno, Shakespeare, and Bacon to find the keys to largely
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unknown treasuries of incipient modernity. Like hardly a thinker before him, Bruno immersed himself into the cosmo-dynamic of memories. With his insights into the nature and function of memoria, Giordano Bruno can become the contemporary of those who today huddle around the brain as if it were the locus of the riddle of the universe. Because he emphasized the ars-character of remembrance and memory, Bruno is the first “art” philosopher of the modern era.
It is high time to blow off the dust from Bruno’s manuscripts to reveal what alone honors a thinker who was a master of Italian and Latin prose: the luminous literalness of his real thoughts.
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Descartes
Few periods in the history of thought have become as alien to contemporaries as the seventeenth century, which is usu- ally presented by the history books as the founding era of mod-
ern philosophy. It is, in fact, hardly possible for those born and thinking later to project themselves into a time when figures like Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes were still New Philosophers. Blinded by the historical import of the impulses that have come to be associated with these luminar- ies, we are barely still able to return with an unbiased eye to the epoch when what posterity liked to call the project of modernity was hardly more than a lively exchange of letters between a few dozen correspondents.
The optical illusions of history make what was initially merely a sophisticated premonition of the inner link between power and method seem like the departure into the age when technology
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seized power. The peculiarities of this seventeenth century also include the semimythical quality of its eminent authors: their attempts were credited as laying down foundations, and their programs as epochal turning points. It was not long before the conservative enemies of modernity eagerly adopted this mytho- logical mode, with the result that Descartes’s name could become a symbol for an immoderately self-confident humanity’s frivolous deviation from the divinely ordained order of things. It is not surprising that the restoration of the nineteenth century wanted to count Descartes—whose works had been on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books—among the distant pro- genitors of the French Revolution, as though it were only two or three steps from the foundation of thinking in the principle of cogito to the dissolution of all things. Descartes’s world, of course, is not that of the bourgeois revolution, but that of the wars of religion. The pathos with which he pursues the distinc- tion between certainties and probabilities in his fundamental works was also fed by the object-lesson that the religious civil war provided to contemporaries. For what else was the Thirty Years’ War between the confessional parties (which overlapped with virtually all of Descartes’s adult life) than the battle between mere probabilities that had leapt from the theological seminaries onto the battlefield?
Descartes countered this bearing of arms by the fanatics of probability with his avowal of absolute evidence and the secure and peaceful process of his method. Where method and evidence had won the upper hand, the philosopher suggested, armed reli- gious fanaticism and the presumptuous assertion of positions would have to make way, and what was left after the end of the war of inexactitudes could—ideally—be nothing other than the peaceful advance of all truth-loving minds along the secure paths of regulated and connecting reason. Descartes’s grand idea was to move thinking into a realm devoid of strife.
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In the history of thought there is probably no other author in whom the word method was charged with so many promises as in the case with Descartes. We clearly hear pacifist resonances in the overtones of the new idea of precision: this idea stands for self-confidence and solidarity, generosity and entrepreneurial spirit all in one. In his conception of method, Descartes publicly announced his renunciation of the dogmatic ballast of the Aris- totelian universities. In an elegant and antiauthoritarian man- ner, Cartesian reflection rebuffed the claims of tradition and its professors: he who has the power to begin anew need no longer engage in dialogues with the dead; he who turns a new page is for now exempt from the dialogue with history. With this mindset, the new philosopher no longer took a fancy to the argumenta- tive contests of a powerless and self-referential Sorbonne culture, which had long since lost the connection to the arts, the work- shops, and the counting houses. With the word method, Descartes threw open the windows on the present, and it turned out that this was a time when an invigorated human ability demanded to be placed on a new logical and moral foundation. It was as though Descartes, in so doing, had created, alongside the old nobility of blood and sword and the younger noblesse de robe, a separate nobil- ity of method, which recruited its members from all strata, pro- vided they were willing to swear an oath to clarity and lucidity. From the outset there was no doubt about the antifeudal char- acter of this group of individuals with new skills. Even if the philosophizing nobleman Descartes never gave reason to doubt his dual awareness of nobility, the inherited and the self-created, subsequent generations of bourgeois intelligentsia did recog- nize in him their natural ally. The Cartesian nobility of compe- tence gave rise to the class of minds who thought for themselves and without bias, a class that has formed the critical ferment of the European intelligentsia from the early modern period on. Still today, and not entirely without reason, the myth of the
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rationalistic national character of the French invokes the Carte- sian privileges of lucidity.
Within the history of theory, the phenomenon of Descartes describes a radical currency reform of reason. In an era of a gal- loping discourse inflation—triggered by unrestrained allegori- cal mechanisms and excrescences of theological word games— Descartes created a new criterion for what constituted meaning- ful speech, built upon the gold standard of evidence.
The neces- sary conciseness of this criterion arises from the stipulation that from true propositions must always follow, on the one hand, good dispositions and, on the other, useful machines. As the author of the Discours de la méthode would declare: “Being of no use to anybody means the same as being worthless. ”
If Descartes’s name remained controversial through the ages, it was largely because he symbolized, more so than almost anyone else, the victory of the engineers over the theologians. He paved the way for a thinking that opened itself unconditionally to the task of the epoch: the building of machines. As a result, the non- machine-building forms of intelligence rightly feel devalued or repudiated by the Cartesian impulse. As the creator of the analyti- cal mythos, Descartes simultaneously created the “metaphysics”— as it were—of machine-building, in that he began to break down all of existence into the simple, smallest parts, and sought to make known the rules that govern their composition. By committing thought entirely to the back and forth of analysis and synthesis, he made reason itself conform to engineering and stripped it of its ancient, contemplative muse. Thoughts now become internalized forms of work, and the life of the mind itself is put on the path toward the production of useful things. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to believe that Descartes’s fundamental mechanistic con- viction had to lead invariably to a break with theological tradi- tion. Precisely in the methodologically new beginning of scientific thought, providing a foundation proves to be the real metaphysical
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activity. But since in the great philosophical rationalism only God can furnish the foundation of foundations, modern philosophy of the Cartesian type remains characteristically suspended between theology and machine theory. There is good reason why the great systems-architects of German Idealism celebrated Descartes as their precursor. For them, as for the great Frenchman, laying the foundation was the piety of thought. But the fact that conscious- ness had now been brought into the function of laying the foun- dation constituted the modernity of the transcendental approach. Only the dissolution of the foundation in the philosophy of con- sciousness in the twentieth century turned the Cartesian universe completely into a historical artifact. Descartes’s work remains rel- evant as a testimony to the very interlacing of science and con- templation that today, more so than ever before, imparts to philo- sophical thought its precarious dignity.
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Pascal
To anyone who was trained through authors like Goethe and Nietzsche to think in terms of elective affinities and elective enmities across epochs, the Pascalian renaissance of the
twentieth century presents itself as one of the most appropri- ate receptions in modern intellectual history. It is but a single step from the obvious to the necessary, and it was inevitable that the thinkers of Christian and non-Christian existentialism dur- ing the first half of the twentieth century sensed a kindred soul in Pascal. Did his own discomforts not anticipate those of our time? Was his melancholy not already that of a later modernity weary of Enlightenment? Was his discourse about humans not already congenial with the self-experience of a civilization that, in the twentieth century, struck fear and terror into the heart of humanity like never before: fear of itself and of the degeneration of its lofty projects?
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When Pascal, in a memorable turn of phrase, called the human being a “thinking reed,” who would not have understood this as an emblem for our newly experienced fragility? And when he spoke of humanity as a deposed king, who would not have thought about the large sociopolitical projects of our age, and of the end to the demiurgic excesses? The character masks of our time include the dethroned history-maker and the unmasked phyturgos (creator of nature)—two figures who seem to have stepped right out of Pas- cal’s anthropological Pensées. However, one cannot attribute Pas- cal’s remarkable accessibility—at least in some portions of his work—to the fact that his protoexistentialist tones facilitated the projective appropriations by those who later saw themselves as kindred spirits.
Pascal attracts the attention also of radical revisionist interests, whose intent is to deconstructively rethink the entire context of the Platonic-Christian history of ideas on the basis of fundamen- tal positions that are vitalistic or subject-critical. Nietzsche dem- onstrated how this relationship of elective enmity does not spare the luminaries of the ancient world: with a power of instantia- tion bordering on violence, the arch-deconstructionist Nietzsche challenged the founders of the moralized metaphysical view of the world—Socrates, Paul, and Augustine—to a duel on a battle- field that transcends the epochs. In this clash of the titans, Pascal is called upon as a fellow combatant, because Nietzsche perceives him as the highest reembodiment of the Augustinian genius on modern soil. Like his great predecessor, Pascal embodies a type of intelligence that is proud enough to be open to humiliations. It is only from a certain height of aspirations that the mind becomes vulnerable to the experience of failing itself. Inspired by Augustinian insights into human brokenness, Pascal began with a remapping of the scope of human greatness and human wretch- edness. In the process, not only did he uncover—in an original revelation—the correlation of knowledge and interest, which has
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remained alive down to contemporary discursive constellations, but he also exposed in classic fashion the dialectic between the rise in capabilities and the escalating experience of powerless- ness. In this regard he has become, deeper and more discrete than Descartes, the ancestor of modernity. But while Descartes tends to address his readers in a matutinal temper and in program- matic departures, Pascal is an author for nocturnal reading and an accomplice of our intimately fractured afterthoughts.
Nietzsche’s protracted aversion to the melancholy Christian mathematician is a testament—as eloquent as it is fair-minded (within limits)—to the author’s strengths. In Pascal, Nietzsche discovered what is to be most valued in an intellectual person: the sense of intellectual honesty that is also capable of turning against one’s own interest: fiat veritas, pereat mundus. Yet he simultaneously notices in him what he recognizes as the biggest danger: the pen- chant for miserabilism and for letting oneself sink into an affir- mative infirmity. If the non-Christian were to be instructed by the paradoxical Christian, it is chiefly where the latter pronounces his final verdict on the human condition: did Pascal not in fact anticipate Nietzsche’s theorem of the will to power with his talk of the désir de dominer in his Provincial Letter No. 14?
But when it comes to recapturing for the humanity of the future the possibility of a metaphysically unpoisoned self-love, Pascal is no ally, but an instructive and estimable opponent. He remains an indispensable ally for all those who wish to have self-understand- ing precede self-love. Pascal embodies the fundamental conflict of the modern world with an almost archaic intensity: the con- tradiction between the operative and the meditative mind. Were the modern scientific system capable of having something like a conscience, Pascal would have to be its guilty conscience, for his work attests to how the incisive and the profound mind could be conjoined. Together with Thomas Hobbes, Jean Baptiste Racine, and John Milton, Pascal stands as a dark, doubt-riven portal figure
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at the entryway to the modern world. The shadows of his pen- siveness had time to fall upon future generations. His paradoxes have imprinted their marks upon French literature down to the present: when Sartre still insisted on disliking himself in order to tear himself away from his own lethargic existence, or when Michel Leiris embraced the happiness of pronouncing his unhap- piness, these statements and attitudes move within a sphere that Pascal’s generous dialectic helped to create. If the intellectual his- tory of the last centuries were an account of the conjunctures of the absurd, Pascal’s place within it would be forever secure. He is the first among the philosophical secretaries of modern despair.
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leiBniz
Since the early nineteenth century, the public perception of philosophy in Germany has been shaped above all by two functional roles or character masks: that of the university teacher
and that of the freelance writer. With German Idealism, a clus- ter of professors had occupied the heavens of grand theory; now, civil-servant idealists in the late-feudal state enshrined the precarious unity of throne and philosophy. In figures with the stature of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, the type of the profes- sor of philosophy attained the preeminent position within the res publica of the learned; Schelling’s gnosticizing princedom of theory provided a model for later prophesying from the lectern. In sharp contrast to this, in terms of both typology and the ecol- ogy of ideas, philosophical writers, especially during the post- 1848/1849 period and the era of Wilhelm II, created new strate- gies for literary and political communication with their public
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via contemporary marketplaces of ideas. As freelance writers, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Marx, and Nietzsche played the essen- tial part in surpassing the professors through the philosophy of the writers.
If one looks back at the phenomenon of Leibniz through the lens of this typology, his figure appears strangely remote and dis- torted. Seen against the backdrop of the philosophical imagines and investigative images of the twentieth century, the genius of Leibniz falls into a typological gap in which he becomes all but invisible—and if contemporary thought has not known how to reestablish a convincingly fruitful relationship with the work of the philosopher and scientist, the main reason is that it no longer understands the kind of type Leibniz was.
To understand the oeuvre and theoretical temperament of this great scholar and comprehend them on his own terms, it is imper- ative to reconstruct the typological locus or the field in which Leibniz pushed himself up to such monumental and polymor- phous height. The Leibnizean field of theory sees the merger of two shaping forces that cannot be adequately grasped from either the professorial or the literary form of philosophical thought. The first matrix of the Leibnizean Wissenskunst (knowledge-art) is the magical universal science of the Renaissance along with its sub- sequent developments during the Baroque. Leibnizean univer- salism, which a romanticizing history of philosophy erroneously turned into a matter of genius, represented in truth the outflow of an epistemological-magical ideal that had asserted itself from the fifteenth century on in numerous potent incarnations. The phenomenon of Leibniz stands in typological succession to the Renaissance magus and the Baroque universal scholar. Among his predecessors, who molded the polyvalent scientific enthusiasm of the early modern period, are such luminous names as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Girolamo Cardano, Giordano Bruno, and Athanasius Kircher; Leonardo da Vinci also belongs to this
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kinship system of individuals who did everything, attempted everything, endeavored everything.
It was the task of the early modern development of science and knowledge to guide these “Faustian” impulses—whose wild forms ended up, typical of the modern age, in charlatanism—onto institutional pathways. It is no coincidence that one of the prin- cipal concerns of Leibniz as an organizer of science was to direct the progress of knowledge onto suprapersonal tracks by setting up academies. Where there had been magic, there were now to be polytechnics. Although the civilizing of universalism by plac- ing it on an academic footing eventually necessitated a division into subjects and specialization, in Leibniz himself the power of the older, magical encyclopedism continued to operate, discretely but unbroken. It speaks to his success in providing impulses for the modern organization of science that soon after his death, posterity was barely able to comprehend him as a temperament and a type. As the last, most brilliant, and most cool-minded of the Faustian doctors, he paved the way for the triumph of a non- Faustian science.
But the typological riddle that is Leibniz goes beyond the men- tion of his eminent place within the expiring history of philo- sophical-scientific encyclopedism; it does more than point to the state of philosophical thinking before the sciences became dif- ferentiated into separate entities. Leibniz is difficult to grasp with modern concepts of philosophy also because the better part of his intellectual activities unfolded within premodern or half-modern contexts. Not without ulterior motive, the portraits of Leibniz in the official histories of philosophy show the thinker wearing an elaborate courtly wig. This detail of his physical habits illustrates quite reliably his place within the theoretical scene of his day. Leibniz is, indeed, the court-intellectual par excellence—and this not only in an occasional and opportunistic function, as was the case, for example, with Descartes, who made himself available for
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several months as a conversation partner to Queen Christine of Sweden, or Voltaire, who corresponded with Frederick of Prussia and Catherine the Great. What became concentrated in Leibniz was a now largely forgotten phase in the intellectual history of Europe. His intellectual role was entirely that of the argumenta- tive diplomat, the courtier-theorist, the cameralist and princely advisor, the respondent and correspondent. It would be difficult to make sense of what were for Leibniz characteristic intellectual exercises if one fails to recall the courtly alliances—however prob- lematic—of power and intellect that formed the basis of his prag- matic work. Leibniz is the prince of the consultants to princes, the supreme exemplar of a forgotten secretarial art, which spun peculiar, theory-saturated relationships between the rulers of territorial states and their learned doctors. It is only within this context that one can understand the traits in the profile of Leib- niz’s activities that will not fit into any later cliché about philoso- phers: Leibniz the project-designer and discreet idea-prompter to small-state diplomacy, the litigant and traveler on behalf of princely business, the author of memoranda and appeals in tan- gled legal-political affairs, the legitimist and historiographer of matters relating to the House of Hanover.
Only the convergence of the courtly intellectual and multi- tasker with the Baroque universal scholar could bring about the specific Leibniz effect—that marvel of intellectual polyathleti- cism in which the happily restless, proficiency-addicted, multi- focused intellect of the thinker radiated in all directions. Like a Sun King of thought, Leibniz exhausted himself in countless departments of reason. If the concept of courtly philosophy ever made sense, it did so in his case. There is good reason why the notion of perspective played a sustaining role in the work of this philosopher-diplomat. Leibniz’s cheerfulness represents a world in which the Cabinet Wars of reason could still be constrained by an unshakeable confidence in harmony. In their disciplined
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optimism, his metaphysical treatises betray an author who sees himself as charged with the diplomatic representation of Being. In his theodicy, Leibniz not only defends the perfection of God’s world against objections raised about it by human discontent; with the brilliant formalism of his arguments, he also attests to the excellence of a state of affairs in which God can have the best of all possible lawyers defend the perfection of his world. Com- petent activity all around: according to Leibniz, that is the surest way—within human limitations—to imitate God, the one who interconnects all in everyday life.
By defining human subjectivity as competent and informed activity that is endlessly perfectible, he made his contribution to the formation of the modern subject as the entrepreneur of Being in its totality. The brightness and dispassionate friendli- ness of the Leibnizian world is grounded in the circumstance that its subject is allowed to move, still without any scruples, as the agent of a rational deity within a universe rich in perspectives and full of mysteries worthy of investigation. In post-Leibnizian worlds, the relationship of loyalty between Subject and Being seems destroyed, and with the rise of existentialisms, life philoso- phies, and systems theories, the optimistic fit between subjective and objective reason was lost. Ever since, the subjects have found themselves entangled in total wars of various types of reason; as agents, they are at the behest of uncomprehended majesties. For the future history of humankind it will be important to regenerate a principle of optimism (or at least a principle of nonpessimism) with post-Leibnizian means. If that were to happen, who would rule out the possibility that future generations will find their most important inspiration in Leibniz?
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kant
Immanuel Kant’s critical work launches the parallel action between the French Revolution and German philosophy that contemporaries already had taken note of as an epochal con-
stellation. Indeed, in both movements—as in their shared pre- conditions, namely the industrial and monetary revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—there took place the breakthrough to the bourgeois age, which ever since has deserved to be called the modern world. The philosophy of Kant is bourgeois in several respects: it is civil, because it lays claim to the emancipation of philosophical thought from the tutelage of theology and of positive and revealed religion. Kant clung to this position with existential consistency: when the faculty and student body at the University of Königsberg walked, festively arrayed, from the assembly hall to the church on the dies academicus in order to profess, on this occasion, the unity of the academic
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and the religious community, Kant would pointedly step out of the line and set out for his home by circumventing the church. In this instance, a bourgeois identity meant taking the civil side in the alternative between monastic and civil philosophy posited by Vico. How seriously Kant took this matter is evident, not least, from the fact that he struggled, turning his back on traditional forms of monastic and ecstatic transcendences, to come up with a bourgeois transcendence. He believed he had found its core in that free moral action by the individual which, motivated neither by success nor hope, does the right thing simply out of respect for the moral law—and out of respect for oneself as the subject distinguished from everything else that exists as the subject of that freedom.
Kant’s thinking is bourgeois for another reason: it articulates itself at the boundary between the academic community and the general public, and it appeals even in its technically most diffi- cult parts (at least potentially) to the critically won consensus that is supposed to emerge out of the discourse on public matters by those who understand. When Kant steps forward as a writer, he does so in the sincerely naive expectation that the archetypal assembly of bourgeois society around the profane book will repeat itself also in the reception of his writings. Here, the bourgeois way of being takes on the meaning of learned republicanism. Kant’s historical moment is thus not only the birth of bourgeois soci- ety in the political sense; his work simultaneously falls within the golden age of the Gutenberg era: it shares in its genius by docu- menting how the self-reading of the Reformation evolved into the self-thinking of idealistic classicism.
There is a third way, still, in which Kant’s thought is shaped by a fundamental bourgeoisness: Kant conceives of the place of the human being in the world neither as cosmopolitanism in the sense of the ancient wisdom teachings, nor as creatureliness under God in the sense of medieval theology: the Kantian person is
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fundamentally a fellow member of the species and in this respect a citizen of the world. Of course, the Kantian world-polis, unlike the ancient polis, is not the result of a transfer of the urban idea of order to the universe; rather, it springs from the application of the notion of freedom and self-assertion to the totality of beings capable of reason, that is, the human race in the kind of universal or global scope that Europeans were compelled to conceptualize after the age of discovery and colonization. That is why Kant’s world citizenry is transmuted into the continuation of Chris- tian holiness by means of civil and international law. It demands from each individual not only that he become a useful member of his national community, but also—and above all—that he prove himself as a functionary of the species with the capacity for rea- son; finding the future form of the political life of this species is something that those willing to embrace reason conceive of as an infinite task. The Kantian world citizens are saints in frock coats, and like their predecessors in the Roman arenas, they, too, are to commit their lives to realizing the empire of reason in the circus of the modern state. It is no coincidence that logical socialists and logical theocrats were also found among the Neo-Kantians—the “would-be saints” of the modern world. They are athletes of the reasonable coexistence with all other members of the species. The pax Kantiana encompasses the world community of the rea- sonable as in some kind of minimalist church. It is the church of the autonomous subjects, who recite their critical theories like creeds. In Kant, the embers of a fundamentalism of reason smol- der below the skeptical-humanist ashes. In his civil religion, saints are to become lawyers and heroes parliamentarians.
Finally, one must speak of Kant’s bourgeoisness in a fourth respect: Kant is the cofounder of a new philosophical genre, anthropology, whose task is to speak—from the bourgeois heights—about the pre- and extrabourgeois foundations of being human: it deals with humanity in the way it is determined as a
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species and constituted by nature. Ever since Kant, being an anthropologist means interpreting humanity no longer directly through the nonhuman (the animal) and the suprahuman (God). Anthropology in the modern style is possible only after it has become clear that the human being is the hyperbolic domestic animal which, to the extent that it becomes rational, must look to its own breeding. It can no longer be defined by God’s supposed breeding or the presumed diktat of an immediate nature—it is, to put it anachronistically, condemned to educate itself. This is all the more true since one also finds in the emancipated person— and especially in the emancipated person—the proclivity for radi- cal evil. For Kant, the paternalism of God is as unbearable as the obtrusiveness of his own natural urges, and in his eyes it is only the daily self-liberation in both directions that places the human being in the bourgeois center as the locus of freedom: nowhere else can the individual successfully pursue his destiny of sponta- neous self-formation.
Kant’s zeal is to return the passions to bourgeois propor- tions and to dissolve everything overwhelming into tireless self- assertion. In this, he is the essential thinker of modernity, to the extent that this was the age that wanted to learn how to make a home for itself in civilized finiteness. There is good reason why one of the foundational words of Kant’s thinking is: boundary. According to Kant, the thinking that calls itself postmetaphysical is one that has ways not to delete metaphysics, but to replace it. And in truth, the modern world inaugurates the age of substitutability—or in modern parlance: of functional equivalents. Kant’s own replace- ment for metaphysics has traits of a shrewd transaction: instead of participating as an uncertain vassal of the absolute in illusory trea- sures, the master of Königsberg decided to administer a wealth of clarifications as the master of the house in his own right. At times this was misunderstood as a resignation before higher claims; yet elements of resignation played no role at the core of what
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motivated Kant. His compass pointed unerringly at sovereignty, and like a wise businessman who restructures his assets in a crisis, Kant withdrew his deposits from the enterprise of metaphysics, which was no longer creditworthy, in order to invest them in more solid businesses of greater clarity. In a world replete with dangers of expropriation, use one’s own reason like an inalienable wealth: with this motto, Kant professed his zeal in embracing the adven- ture of clarity against all temptations of impoverished thinking and depression.
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fichte
Philosophy remains a fruitless enterprise without an awak- ening of the whole individual to it: among philosophers of the modern age, there is no one—with the exception of Martin
Heidegger—who taught this insight with as much vehemence and profundity of principle as Johann Gottlieb Fichte. After him, no one could reach the focal point of essential thinking who had not torn himself away, in an existentially transformative turnaround, from his prior belief in the superiority of the things in front of him and outside of him. You must change your life: that is the cantus firmus of all thinking under the banner of the modern idea of freedom. But changing oneself means above all: to forgo explain- ing oneself through the circumstances. Fichte demonstrated what it means to be teacher of idealism in the age of the bourgeoi- sie. In his speeches and writings there unfolds—with thunder- ous eloquence, powerful discernment, and fanatical loyalty to an
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arduous fundamental idea—the new doctrine of the all- transforming dignity of subjectivity. In the power of its presen- tation, Fichte’s doctrine illustrates the coincidence of analysis and appeal, of argument and initiation. As a logician, Fichte was always also a psychagogue, as a theoretician always also an agitator and master of spiritual exercises. The creator of the scientific doc- trine left posterity with the irritating impulse of an argumenta- tive prophetism; with that, he painted the glaring antithesis to the lethargic or athletic calculation involving the stock of problems that has been, since the nineteenth century, inseparable from the spiritless operation of the higher schools.
Referring to Fichte’s appellatory genius is thus more than recalling the national-pedagogical masterpiece “Speeches to the German Nation,” which the philosopher delivered in Berlin, putting his very life at risk, under the eyes of the French occupy- ing power. In these speeches he came out with the epochal self- confidence of a man who seems to know that only a world spirit at the lectern would be able to provide a remedy to the world spirit on horseback. If Bonaparte appeared on the world stage as the founder of a bourgeois empire, Fichte countered with the founda- tion of his empire of the spirit on the stage of ideas. Many clichés about the struggle between French Materialists and German Ide- alists that reverberate to this day have their substantive origins in this antithesis. Fichte’s function as the voice in the wilderness, which he simultaneously discovered and justified, was rooted in the principle of his philosophy itself, according to which seizing freedom means no less than a resurrection from the dead—the very dead that we have always been in Fichte’s mind, as long as we, dazed by the appearance of the objectively independent Being before us, vegetate in the idol worship of external reality. In the eyes of the furious teacher of freedom, the bourgeois world as a whole is a realm of the dead: for over the thoughts, motives, and works of the overwhelming majority is spread the veil of dogmatic
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and ontological delusion. Whoever lives under the spell of this death-bringing ignorance of the self could, as Fichte put it, be led more likely to think of himself as a piece of lava from the moon than as an I.
Fichte’s implacable intervention lays bare a consequential dilemma in the critical moral communication in modern societ- ies: How is the communication between the living and the liv- ing dead to be accomplished? How can the nonalienated turn toward the alienated in the first place? Indeed, must the living not always despair of the unconvertible dead? From the days of early philosophy every society in Europe had to deal with the provocations from an elite of those who are truly alive and who truly understand. The civil war between the philosophical spirit and the common mind is a constant in the intellectual history of old Europe. But where the ancient wise wrapped themselves in silence before the unchangeably stupid mass, the modern wise, as teachers of enlightenment, must go on the pedagogical offensive. The fundamentalism of conscious living reached a principled acu- ity in Fichte.
And in fact, under the enlightened, vicious glance of the phi- losophers, the entire sphere of society presents itself for the first time as an alienated world, populated by beings whose roots of the ability to be free have been cut off by their erroneous belief in the autonomous, a priori existence of things: the alienated human spends his days as a slave of his subjection to a prearranged mas- sif of facts. For him, the autonomous thing is master; where the thing rules, death is in power. But the scientific doctrine—along with its moral supplement: the instructions for a blessed life—is the logical trumpet that sounds the resurrection from the grave of objectivism. Anyone who hears and understands it can raise himself up to be a partisan of freedom. The resurrected subject will feel the urge to volunteer for the campaign of moral moder- nity by which the ancien régime of internal and external obstacles to
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humanity shall be overthrown once and for all; its place shall and must be taken by a realm of reason-guided freedom, which has never before been realized on earth. The future as projected by the idealist will be moral and reasoned, or there will not be one. For Fichte there was simply no doubt that the logical-moral res- urrection of the subjects and the political revolution of the polity converged. It was his conviction that it had to be possible to bring to an end the age of perfected sinfulness and the wanton persis- tence of all bearers of error in their positions, just as the obsolete feudal constitution of society had witnessed its deserved downfall in the French Revolution.
As the discoverer of alienated subjectivity, Fichte stands at the beginning of an era of mighty projects of philosophical emanci- pation, by which the great politics of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) was called onto the stage: where there was alienation, there was to be Eigentlichkeit—be it the authenticity of the political commune, which self-examines and governs itself, or be it the authenticity of God, who shines through in overflowing teachers and moral entrepreneurs. Use yourself to bring forth a better world: that is the categorical imperative of the idealist. In fact, wherever the hope was kept alive that modern societies could, their systematic entelechies notwithstanding, in the end form something like a reasonable identity, Fichte was always present as an explicit and implicit ally.
Looking back over the age of great moral politics, we recog- nize, of course, how such lofty hopes have dragged humanity into a potentially violent cycle of enthusiasms and disillusionment. It would appear that after all of this, we are not condemned to free- dom, but to a clarification of our illusions from the purview of our dreams of freedom. If our age, rightly or wrongly, describes itself so frequently as an epoch of postmetaphysical thinking, it does so not least because, mindful of the two-hundred-year-long pro- cess of heroic philosophies of freedom, it has come to mistrust the
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prophetic moral competence of master thinkers willing to employ violence. To be sure: it would go too far to place the blame for the disasters of modernity on the shoulders of the great philoso- phers. And yet, one should investigate what is true in the suspi- cion against all big thinking, which posits the thesis that whoever sows illusions in the technological age will reap world wars. The epoch of ideologies or secular religions did in fact turn for us into a school of disenchantment: the manic privilege of the great phi- losophy of history, namely, to measure the movement of the world solely by the compass of reason and freedom, has been dashed by the power of circumstances. That is why a renewed analytical or deconstructivist caution, regardless of whether it is pursuing psychological or sign-critical paths, must draw its consequences from the failure of those ideologies that have become embroiled in modernity’s calamitous history as enthusiasms that assumed global power.
By all rights, this dearly bought skepticism—one could call it postillusionistic—may also encompass Fichte’s work and reputa- tion, for he is the true progenitor of the lofty delusion that the life of the human species proceeds in accordance with a fixed plan, which will surely be attained because it must be and is supposed to be attained. Fichte’s continuing importance—he himself would surely not have shied away from the term immortality—is thus not found in the area of prophetic history. The necessary unity of rea- son, morality, and the course of the world postulated by Fichte no longer impresses anyone today. We have also moved far away from the idealistic victim-habit of wasting a person as the medium of a transpersonal reason. Fichte’s greatness will reveal itself above all to those who muster the patience to immerse themselves in his analysis—unsurpassed in its lucidity—of the structures of sub- jectivity. Only after Fichte could the question of what it actually means to be an “I” become a provocation to Western thinking. Fichte therefore remains an involuntary ally of all those who, even
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under the impression of the advancing technological remaking of all concepts of the world and life, wish to take their orienta- tion from the non-indifference of the fact that I can experience myself as “I. ” It is precisely when the excesses of the doctrines of autonomous subjectivity have been overcome that the mystery of the possibility of I-ness truly shines quite clearly within the scat- tered totality of the world. The radiance of this mystery will for- ever retain some of the light of Fichte’s intelligence. Fichte’s “I” is an action that liberates a moral teaching: where the I experiences itself, it means the impossibility of being pitiful. Even if one posits that God is a meaningless concept, an existential impulse of incal- culable consequence flows from the I-ness described with Fichte’s means. I am to take the fact of my existence as myself as lightly and as seriously as though my I-ness were God’s last chance.
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hegel
One must be at the end of one’s rope to be able to speak the truth—this conviction is woven into all of Hegel’s work like a tear-resistant thread. With it, Hegel elevated the fundamen-
tal motif of Plato’s epistemology to monumental heights: realiz- ing means remembering; comprehending means reconstructing. The thinker whose system has been described—not without good reason—as the consummation of occidental or Christian-Pla- tonic metaphysics was by his very nature the metaphysician of perfection. After Hegel, thinking philosophically means bringing home the harvest of existence; but the only thing that makes it home is what can make itself at home in everything: the spirit. In Hegel, this spirit takes its time; it has and makes history: by way of skulls and step-by-step it enters into the final domesticity, its own self; the wine of truth is extracted from a late harvest. Hegel’s typical times are therefore fall and evening; his preferred figure
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of thought is the deduction; his innermost color is gray, so closely associated with the night. Under his gaze, all scenery becomes an evening landscape, every view must become a final tableau. Ter- minal knowledge appears at the advanced hour, when the concept disconnects itself from the experience in order to arrange itself in balance sheets for all eternity. Having lived means everything. A life lived to the end will have been a good one if the completed life is tantamount to the permeation of the spirit completing pos- session of itself. Such a striving for entry into fullness shows that Hegel’s spirit, too, for all the newly won openness to Becoming, is aimed at a time after the end of time.
If Becoming is a school, it must eventually lead to a gradua- tion; if it is a process, it cannot lack the moment of judgment. In this sense, Hegel is the thinker of maturity; his phenomenology as well as his encyclopedia offer programs for a reason that must pass through a specific curriculum. Only in the name of matu- rity can the historical and the metaphysical meaning be reduced to a common denominator. If the spirit accedes to its diffusion through time, it does so only in order to mature through it for the end of time and the time beyond time. Our attachment to what is temporary shall pass, until everything has transmuted into ash and knowledge. In Hegel the secret of ancient philoso- phy is revealed: that thinking metaphysically has always meant thinking in consummations. Hegel had the courage to answer the question about the “when” of consummation with reference to himself; his response was: now. Through dialectic, grandiosity assumes method. Thanks to his system, Hegel believed that he had thought his way into the timeless heart of Time.