No More Learning

It is in this very claim that the idea of philosophy as the ur-exercise of rigor has its final sup- port. As a science prior to and above the sciences, rigorous author- itative thought seeks to demonstrate that the totality of material phenomena is constructed out of achievements of consciousness.
If the question posited at the outset is tricky, it is so because it goes hand in hand with the insinuation that the striving for absolute assurance is encumbered with an element of neediness, indeed, of existential misery. Searching for absolute certainty
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would thus mean admitting to calamitous uncertainty. That the serenity of achieved certainty is rooted in groundless instability: ever since the modern metaphilosophical questionings of motives, the philosophical quest for the peace of the thinking soul has also had to learn to live with this suspicion. Here it becomes clear how, through the project of science, philosophy’s motif of show- ing intelligence the path of salvation, which has been powerfully effective since Greek antiquity, asserts its rights also on the terri- tory of the modern world. In the Western Titanomachy between disquiet and quiet, the partisans of absolute certainty take the side of sacred immobility, as though they wanted to profess along with the Church Fathers: our heart is restless until it finds rest in self-evidence. The minds of modernity part company over the question of whether this self-evidence is genuinely attainable, and whether, once attained, it is suited to healing the ontological psy- chosis of the restless animal.
Among the philosophizing world doctors of the twentieth century, the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, holds a special place. As the teacher of thinking self-perception, he removed himself and his students into a theoretical sanatorium where no other measures were on the agenda other than exercises of clarification in the purest air of detailed descriptions. On Hus- serl’s Magic Mountain, the students learned—first and last—the sacrifice-demanding art of being pure patients; in the face of what had seemed long since familiar and known, they indulged in the beautiful sufferings of phenomenological patience. Insight into the omniactivity of subjectivity is held out as a potential reward for patience. Anyone who has spent any time in that peculiar san- atorium of evidences knows something about the oppressiveness of exactitude, an oppressiveness of which the world’s children, living as they do with heedless anxiety in the practical lowlands, could not even dream. There is a demonicness of explicitness to which only those have access who devote themselves to the
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exercitationes spirituales of descriptions artfully carried out and written down.
He who enters into the time of the pure exercise of descriptions is removed, as it were, from the life time that simultaneously runs its course, and the objects of the phenomenological mediation assemble on the desk of the thinker into sublime still lifes. They are no longer naively encountered objects from the so-called real world, but figures in the absolute film of intentionality. For the duration of his exercise, the describer steps out of the torrential time of life lived heading toward death, and entrusts himself to the present of absolute consciousness. Drawing on the latter’s power of vision, the phenomenologist undertakes the task—as strange as it is seductive—of elevating what has been seen a thou- sand times and is long known once again into a topic, as though the goal is to catch it by surprise as it emerges out of the creative consciousness at the moment it is first beheld. Like hardly another thinker before him, Husserl brought the unity of thinking and writing into a gestural synthesis. To him, the desk, if we assume a true philosopher has sat down at it, is the window onto the world of essences; here, beholding and writing prove to be convergent activities. The written recording of the phenomenological obser- vation reveals as its calligraphic core the tireless exercise of the writing hand. Philosophy, practiced as an act of descriptive reason, is thus unmasked as fundamentally an “office-osophy” [Bürosophie]; it enacts itself as the activity of an intellect that has taken a holiday from the natural attitude. The chair of the philosopher, who has immersed himself in arid ecstasy in his descriptions, is the bearer of a seated observer; out of the pen of the thinker flows the ink of the original evidence: his writings capture the living intuitions on the paper like congealed light. His own desk is the place where the contemplator deigns to let the world be present in its entirety. As the preferred setting for thematizing everything that appears, the philosopher’s desk turns into a transcendental belvedere. Only at
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this desk could there take place the process of undoing the erro- neous judgments of precipitous reason, which tends to get lost in momentous self-deception both in daily life and in science. In this process, phenomenology rendered its verdict against the essential blindness of vulgar relativism and psychologism, as well as against the blindness to the subjectivity of scientistic objectivism. In the final analysis, the desk of the phenomenologist is an altar at which the thinker officiates as a pure functionary of the Absolute; here the philosopher performs his service as the vicar of a lucid God.
Yet the withdrawal of the phenomenologist to the desk of uni- versal self-reflection was not able to alter the course of the mod- ern world as a whole. As though moved by a higher power, the modern scientific-technological evolution strives—as its major tendency—toward ever more encompassing states of naturalism and relativism. The phenomenological guardians of Being, who exercised themselves as the eyes of God in a transcendental con- templation of the world, found themselves increasingly marginal- ized and passed over by a process of investigation that is leading modern civilization toward an integral technological naturalism. Already the contemporaneous psychologies of the unconscious undermined the project of an integral science of the actions of world-constituting consciousness; and what is more: out of the developments of cybernetic technology and the globalized condi- tions of capital there emerged a new world of facts that are sub- ject to a mode of Being that is not related to consciousness. More and more, the experiential realm of modernity seems pervaded by technological objects that offer consciousness only a surface: such surfaces of keys and symbols, beneath which highly complex appa- ratuses confront their users, can hardly still be grasped as phenom- ena in the specific meaning of the world, since it is characteristic of them that within them, Being turns its back on Manifestation. What is essential technologically no longer appears to conscious- ness as phenomena. In the face of the technological environment,
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phenomenology seems like the philosophical testament of the pretechnological world. Even for Husserl’s most independent student, Martin Heidegger, who would become unfaithful to his master in so many ways, technology remained a metaphysically suspect entity; he perceived in it a formation of phenomenologi- cal injustice and believed that he could recognize it as an onto- logical error. The thought of Heidegger and Husserl reveals that a philosophy of technology cannot succeed on the basis of a theory that proceeds—following “old Western” conventions—from the primacy of the correspondence between Thinking and Being. To be sure, even modern-day systems theory—which has become the basic theory, as it were, of the technological world—still attests indirectly to the epochal suggestive power of the phenomeno- logical perspective, a theory in which the transcendental subject, reformatted into the figure of the observed observer, stubbornly recurs. In fact, does the current penchant for systems-theoretical thinking not betray a continuation of Husserlian motifs in a way that is appropriate to technology? In its original gestalt, Hus- serl’s work—which ends, not by accident, with a lonely call for a heroism of reason that must be newly awakened—keeps alive the memory of the greatness and limitation of the European culture of rationality.
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WittgenStein
Barely half a century after the death of the philosopher, the name Ludwig Wittgenstein—like that of Martin Heidegger— is part of the intellectual mythos of the twentieth century. Even if
Vico’s distinction between civil and monastic philosophy seemed to have become obsolete ever since the French Revolution, one is inclined to reactivate this distinction for Wittgenstein’s sake. How else could one interpret the emergence of the phenomenon that was Wittgenstein in the midst of an age of political phi- losophies and warring illusions than as the renewed eruption of thinking in the mode of eremitic aloofness from the world? Part of the still luminescent enchantment of Wittgenstein’s work and the standoffish nimbus of his life is the unexpected return of the monastic element in the moral center of bourgeois culture. More so than virtually anyone else, he attests to the moral secession of an intellectual elite from the totality of mediocre conditions.
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The human being as something to be transcended: that convic- tion was present in the elect of the educated class in Vienna before the Great War not only in its Nietzschean guise and as a philoso- phy of life; it asserted itself also in the forms of a bourgeois cult of the saint, at the center of which stood the figure of the artistic and philosophic genius. It was the responsibility of that figure to offer salvation from ambiguities and mediocrity; it was his task to show an implacably demanding youth the path from the depths of shameful commonness to the lofty heights of transfigurative callings. Grandeur became a duty for genius, self-transcendence the minimum condition of existence. For the young Wittgenstein this meant: the human being is a rope that is strung between the animal and the logician.
The story of Wittgenstein’s life and thought is the passion of an intellect that sought to explain its place in the world and at its boundaries. What the contemporary world of the philosopher perceived as his rigid and demanding aura was the high tension of a man who required constant concentration on his ordering principles so as not to lose his mind. As one dwelling on the bor- derline of Being, the philosopher is never concerned with any- thing less than the block of the world as a whole, even when he is merely pondering the correct use of a word in a sentence. He feels as though the world along with all its order could get lost in the space between two sentences. And so, thinking becomes for him a navigating between islands of formal clarity that lie scat- tered in the vastness of unclarity. In fact, Wittgenstein is a thinker who left behind a work of individual sentences. It was his unprec- edented need for precision that would make him into a martyr of incoherence. He himself was painfully aware that he was suffering from a kind of Lord Chandos neurosis—a disorder of the ability to assert coherences of the world through words, and to believe in these claimed coherences. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein failed to meet the challenge of composing a real “text” in the sense
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of continuous speech. He felt, more keenly than any other thinker before him, the difficulties of conjunctions or clausal linkages, and no problem preoccupied him more profoundly all his life than the impossibility of moving from the description of facts to ethi- cal precepts. His notes are the monument of an overly brilliant hesitation to create the world in a cohesive text. In their radical modernity, his writings attest to the disintegration of the analogy between the round cosmos and fluid prose. But precisely because Wittgenstein was no longer capable of being a proposition-happy philosopher of systems and totality in the traditional style, he was virtually predestined to lift the patchwork of local life games and their rules into the light. There was a good reason why his theory of language games became one of the most potent arguments of modern and postmodern pluralism.
Looking back today over the waves of Wittgenstein’s reception, one can say at least this much about the historical importance of this peculiar Viennese character who ended up in the British world of scholars: he inoculated the Anglo-American world with the madness of ontological difference by exhorting the precritical empiricist to wonder, not at how the world is, but that it is. At the same time, he infected continental philosophy with a new idea of precise style, which brought forth flourishing outgrowths in the milieu of the analytical school. It would appear that both parties are by now in the process of getting over the phase of the initial immune responses. Ever since Alan Janik and Steven Toulmin’s classic study Wittgenstein’s Vienna, the stage seems set for a healthy engagement with the stimuli of the magical hermit. Who could still invoke Wittgenstein only to elect him the patron saint of odd mind games? Who could still denounce him as the positivistic destroyer of the Western culture of reflection? After the waning of the reactive distortions, what emerges is the profile of a thinker who will undoubtedly be counted among the godparents of the intelligence of the future. Even in its logical severities and human
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one-sidedness, Wittgenstein’s intensity holds gifts of incalculable import for posterity. It attests for all those who awaken to think- ing after him that ethical questions have become more difficult. Should it ever be possible to write a critique of martyrological or witness-bearing reason—and thus a valid ethics—a decisive chapter would have to be devoted to the man Wittgenstein. He is among those flayed alive, who know more than others what decency under stress means. Among his work, what was written and what was kept quiet, one must count the admirable exertion to have endured himself and his own “wonderful” life.
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Sartre
Alittle more than three decades after his death (on April 15, 1980), Sartre already appears like a monumental figure in the history of modern literature and philosophy. He, the man of words and books, has joined his ancestors, the classics, the immortals, the established authors. Only death, so it would seem, was able to keep him from rejuvenating himself; only the status as a classic deprived him of the possibility of continuing to contra- dict himself. Like few others, he was in love with the freedom to displease himself. His life gesture—dangerous for a philosopher, exhilarating for himself and his readers—was the constant surge, the tearing oneself away from what one has become; as a writer he always penned only the new page. He became a genius of analyti- cal biography—of others and his own—because he found in every consciousness the point at which human beings are too proud to admit to a past. He ceaselessly pondered the release from the
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gravity of history; he felt, with an acuity that elevated him into a kind of world conscience, that it dishonors a human being to be tired, imprisoned, and identical with his own self. His philoso- phy is a struggle against obscenity, against comfortable bourgeois alienation; he campaigns against the human being glued into reality, against the finished human being. The issue is not to be a thing: on a raison de se révolter; he who rebels is right. Explicable only via his freedom, the human is the being without apology.
In a synoptic retrospective, Sartre appears today for now as the last hero in a series of mighty European philosophers of free- dom. Ever since the young Fichte seized the standard of subjec- tivity and carried it with manic vigor against what he believed to be his perfectly sinful age, the chain of thinkers who interpreted the nature of human beings as freedom has not been interrupted. Like his predecessors, Sartre understood the human being in the hearth of his consciousness as that restless absurd being that, against a backdrop of rising self-clarification, plunges ever more deeply into its absurdity. To him, being human meant taking on oneself as an active nothing, as a living fathomlessness. That sub- jectivity means abyssality—this frightened Sartre less than it did most of his precursors in this discovery. Even the resolute Fichte in the end sought to overcome his demonstration of abysmal sub- jectivity by placing his own spontaneity into the expressive life of a divinity that did everything; Friedrich Schlegel, the master ironist among the Romantic subjectivists, converted to Catholi- cism, which became from the early nineteenth century on a refuge for the newly groundless; the Catholic Church certainly liked to play the womb for the grown-up unborns who sought to escape the coldness of the modern outside world. The vanguard among the anonymous absurd who made up the core of modernity tried it with art applied to life; they gave themselves stability in atti- tudes and in a life lived in accordance with fashionable styles. But a great majority of those rendered sickly by groundlessness looked
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for ways to reembed themselves into the communal life of the state, society, and class. The greatest among them was no less a thinker than the philosopher Hegel, who during his life found salvation by celebrating masses for the Prussian state as an ethical organism; he was emulated by countless admirers of the repaired totalities; no small number of them lost their mal du siècle in service to the state and in service to revolution; so many holisms, so many altars; others fled to the front lines of hot and cold wars. It goes without saying that the obsession with connections must con- jure forth a wealth of fundamentalisms. For two hundred years, modernity has been a stage on which a single problem has been manifested in the most diverse plays; they could all be called: How the free groundless found their way back into stable relationships.
As for Sartre, he remained throughout his life faithful to his way of living the groundless freedom. To him, the nothingness of subjectivity was not a downward-plunging abyss, but a spring bubbling upward, an excess of the power of negation against everything that was encompassing. In contrast to many thinkers of subjectivity, Sartre felt comfortable in his abyssality; leaning on anything was for him more a compulsory exercise than free- style. What he called engagement was the continuation of dégagement by other means; he had no doubt that disconnecting took pre- cedence over new bonds. He had mastered the art of spontane- ously desiring nearly everything he had to do; in this way he pre- empted compulsion wherever possible. Glissez, mortels, n’appuyez pas! , his grandmother’s saying, repeatedly cited by him in prominent places in his work, captured his motto for life: “Glide, mortals, do not lean! ” When Sartre tried to glide with Hegel and Marx on his back, he too, the man of unconditional elegance, began to lean. All his efforts to become a Marxist were an arduous theoretical comedy to apologize for his genius and for his awareness of being incomparable. Almost to the end, Sartre—who also wanted to be his own therapist—remained incurably productive.
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In our time there exist no more profound writer’s words than his late profession: “I’ve given up the office but not the frock: I still write. What else can I do? ” He was perhaps the most dili- gent, active philosophical author of the twentieth century. He has repaid his putative debts to less favored humanity with high interest.
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Foucault
The entire history of Western philosophy is nothing but a long series of footnotes to Plato: were it necessary to refute this well-known jest of the British late-idealist Whitehead, it
would suffice to point to exceptions and contrary currents. It would be more convincing if one could invoke an alternative way of thought, one that had evaded the Platonic or—more gener- ally speaking—the old-European project of metaphysical sciences of essences in its entire habit and deportment. In fact, since the establishment of middle-class society [bürgerliche Gesellschaft] in the later eighteenth century, such a revolution in the mode of think- ing announced itself in various waves. With the turn of the Young Hegelians to a Realphilosophie [material philosophy] from the bottom up—whether as an anthropology of labor, a materialist doctrine of instincts, or existentialism—the demand for a radi- cally altered mode of philosophizing stood on the agenda of an
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intelligentsia that was determined to provide the process of modernity with appropriate tools of thought. Over the course of the twentieth century, this thinking “from below” would become radicalized into a thinking of the outside. But only after Nietzsche’s inversion of Platonism and Heidegger’s reorientation of philosophical reflection on the basis of “a different beginning” was it possible to recognize with greater certainty what a thinking whose generative pole had effectively stepped outside of the zone of metaphysical theories of essences would be all about. It would have to be a thinking that had freed itself vigorously enough from the Eleatic temptations and would know how to hand itself over to the adventure of a fully temporalized and agitated existence, without seeking support in the classical fictions of a transcendent subject or an absolute object.
The postmetaphysical challenge provoked a number of charac- teristic responses in the twentieth century, some of which not only gave rise to incisive projects, but also achieved public resonance and effects within academia. Here one should mention above all relativistic neopragmatism, the post-Marxist theory of communi- cative action, the body-philosophy of the neophenomenological school, deconstructionist textual criticism, sociological systems theory, and the neokynical aesthetic of the everyday. Only when set against the backdrop of such broadly related intellectual prac- tices does the specific difference of Foucaultean thinking stand out in its magnificent willfulness and radicality. In this thinking it now becomes fully evident what it means for the “human being” to draw the consequences from the death of God. In Foucault, so it would seem, the art of not writing footnotes to Plato has developed for the first time into an alternative classicism, and this even though he introduced into the business of philosophi- cal examinations—through his blazing intellect—a high degree of manic potential, which, at other times, would surely have become effective as the ideal dowry for the thinking of the One. In this,
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the phenomenon of Foucault resembles that of Nietzsche, in whom quasi-Platonic passions led in an analogous way to anti- Platonic spiritual exercises. Foucaultean thinking, which had so resolutely turned its back on all illusions of the secure embedded- ness of the particular within the unity of meaning, pointed with pride to the formulations by which, during its formative phase, it had been led to the conviction that it was moving at the very pinnacle of thought: it dated itself confessionally to a time when Nietzsche, Blanchot, and Bataille had already defined an epoch. These authors, these works, these sallies are for Foucault the guarantors of a contemporary sensibility that had opened itself equally to the dizziness of the dissolution of boundaries and to the acuity of analysis. They are the thinkers who inoculate their readers with madness and put them in contact with the uncanny. But it was not only the poetic dissolution of metaphysics in sur- realism that would set the tone in the initiation of the young phi- losophers; for Foucault, the future new historian, the archaeolo- gist, the transformation of the idealistic sciences of essences into structuralism would also become decisive—a process that ensured French thought for a relatively brief but highly successful period the primacy in the contemporary history of the human sciences and their philosophy.
Only in this unrepeatable constellation, which marked a crucial phase in the postmetaphysical transformation of philosophical thinking, could there occur what would later be called the Fou- cault event. Where Nietzsche had proclaimed that Dionysus had become a philosopher, Foucault asserted the thesis: Dionysus had become an archivist. In the basement files of psychiatric insti- tutions, asylums, clinics, and later also prisons, a young scholar undertook the enormous task of sifting through the material, driven by the willingness to perceive also in the gray of the admin- istrative language of ages past the lightning of the events, which the literary ontology of late Surrealism had dealt with only with
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a view to the way in which language existed in the autonomous poem. These researches of the Dionysian archeologist gave birth to the very synthesis of flamboyance and severity, of monumental learnedness and flagrant laughter, which has not ceased to irritate the academic milieu and inspire kindred intelligences. Foucault’s subversion of philosophical knowledge is betrayed not least in his turning away from the problem games of official philosophy and in his resolute embrace of “material” works; once could almost mistake the early Foucault for a psychologist and a literary critic, and the middle and late Foucault by a hair for a social historian and a sexologist.
And yet, even though Foucault buried himself in the archives of the humanities and of disciplinary practices, he remains in the most eminent sense a philosopher, and every page of his writ- ings refutes the possibility of confusion with the discourse of the individual disciplines. Still, within his oeuvre there is hardly a text that could be read—the way the guild would—as a contribution to the so-called foundational problems of philosophy, let alone as an exegesis of the classics. Nevertheless, Foucault kept the universe of orthodox metaphysical thinking in view with profes- sional cool; more so, perhaps, than anyone else, he knew what had to be avoided, overcome, replaced, if the undertaking of a think- ing beyond the rigged games of substance, subject, and object was to succeed. “The world as sphere, I as compass, God as center— that is the threefold blockage of event-thinking. ” With this calm aside, he set the new thinking, which for him articulated itself initially and especially in the minute examination of regional and datable regimes of discourse and power, worlds apart from the metaphysical classicism along with its semimodern adjustments in the phenomenological movement and in Freudian-Marxian social philosophies.
Maliciously and temperamentally he took note that certain philosophers lamented him as the lost son of transcendental
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philosophy, while some historians looked askance at his works as wild and excessively glamorous historical fictions. Represen- tatives of both disciplines found it difficult to situate a thinker who did not seem interested in accumulating a capital of lasting truths, but who stepped onto the stage as someone who intended to write a history of lightning bolts. Had Foucault entertained ontological intentions, he could have indeed claimed that all truthful Being is of the nature of lightning. The meaning of Being is not existence and the timeless preservation of essence, but event, the opening up of the horizon, and the spawning of temporary orders. But while the German adepts of Nietzsche and Heidegger mostly allow the notion of Event (Ereignis) to become indistinct within a cultic contemplation, Foucault accomplished the breakthrough to a foundational research oriented toward Event philosophy, for which he proposed the subtly ironic title archeology. Nobody understood its principle and intent better than Gilles Deleuze, who concisely captured his own, closely related intention with the felicitous formula about the “universal history of the contingent. ”
Foucault’s philosopherdom would not have been complete, however, if there had not existed alongside the epistemologist and archeologist also the politician and ethicist Foucault, who stepped up to the challenge of rethinking the core of all phi- losophy, the theory of freedom: no longer in the style of a philo- sophical theology of liberation—also known as alienation the- ory, but as a doctrine of the Event that liberates the individual and in which he moulds and risks himself. What he remarked in a eulogy for his friend, the Christian Kantian Maurice Clavel, can also be read as a clear-sighted and candid characterization of his own undertaking: “He stood at the heart of what was probably most important in our epoch. I want to say: a very comprehensive and very profound change in the consciousness that the Occident has slowly formed about history and time.
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Everything that organized this consciousness, everything that gave it continuity, everything that promised its consummation, is tearing apart. Certain people would like to patch it up again. But he told us that one must live the time differently, even today. Especially today. ”1
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notes
Foreword to the English Translation
1. William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor, act 2, scene 2, lines 2–5.
2. Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (West Valley City, UT: Editorium, 2007), 2.
3. Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, Theory and History of Lit- erature, vol. 40 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
4. Marguerite Duras, The Ravishing of Lol Stein, translated by Richard
Seaver (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 38. Preface
1. G. S. Kirk and J. E. Raven, eds. , The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical His- tory with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 205, no. 235.
101
Plato
1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, edited by Bernard Williams, translated by Josefine Nauckhoff, poems translated by Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 200.
2. Author’s Note: The suspicion that Nietzsche—following upon Kant, Marx, and Feuerbach—helped to kindle, namely, that the history of European metaphysics can be read also as the success story of a pro- found untruth or semitruth, was spelled out in the twentieth century in a spectrum of penetrating accusations. Heidegger believed that he could discern in the history of European metaphysics and technol- ogy the consummation of a thoroughly malign fate of Seinsvergessenheit (oblivion of Being); Adorno saw in it the triumph of a compulsive, latently paranoid lack of identity; Hermann Schmitz diagnosed already in the emergence of philosophy its leading role in the development of a power-oriented type of reason that was based on false abstractions, misleading dualism, and a deep misunderstanding of nature and the body, feeling, and subjectivity; the feminist critique denounced the majority of philosophers as agents of an androcentric fabrication of illusion supported by power; in Otto Rank, Peter Sloterdijk, and others, one can find approaches to a critique of classical philosophy as the medium of an oblivion of birth, which manifests itself in heroic, tech- nological, and idealistic-spontaneistic compensations. All these inter- pretations have in common that they incorporate European philoso- phy into a broad critique of destructive forms of rationalism.
3. Marsilio Ficino, Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, text and translation with an introduction by Sears Reynolds Jayne (Columbia: Univer- sity of Missouri Press, 1944), 35.
4. See Henry Corbin, History of Islamic Philosophy, translated by Liadain Sherrard with the assistance of Philip Sherrard (London: Kegan Paul International, 1993).
5. Adolf von Harnack, Dogmengeschichte (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991), 63ff. and 112ff.
102 notes
6. See Ioan P. Culianu, Out of This World: Otherworldly Journeys from Gil- gamesh to Albert Einstein, foreword by Lawrence E. Sullivan (Boston: Shambhala, 1991), chap. 10, “Interplanetary Tours: The Platonic Space Shuttle, from Plotinus to Marsilio Ficino. ”
7. On this, see Peter Sloterdijk, Im selben Boot: Versuch über die Hyperpolitik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), chap. 2, pp. 25–49, “Staats- Athletik: Vom Geist der Megalopathie. ”
8. See Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture, translated from the 2nd German edition by Gilbert Highet (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1969).
9. See Arnold Gehlen, Moral und Hypermoral: Eine pluralistische Ethik (Frank- furt am Main: Athenäum Verlag, 1973), 79ff.
10. See Paul Rabbow, Paidagogia: Die Grundlegung der abendländischen Erziehu- ngskunst in der Sokratik, edited by Ernst Pfeiffer (Göttingen: Vanden- hoeck und Ruprecht, 1960); Pierre Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life: Spiritual Exercises from Socrates to Foucault, edited with an introduction by Arnold Davidson, translated by Michael Chase (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995).
11.
Adriana Cavarero, In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philoso- phy, translated by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Áine O’Healy (New York: Routledge, 1995).
Marx
1. See Günter Schulte, Kennen Sie Marx? Kritik der proletarischen Vernunft (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992).
Foucault
1. Michel Foucault, “Vivre autrement le temps,” in Le Nouvel Observateur, no. 755 (April 30–May 5, 1979): 88, quoted from Dits et écrits, vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 790.
notes 103
absolute object, modern efforts to remove as concept, 96
abyss, internal: centrality to Sloter- dijk’s philosophical project, xiv–xv; as inescapable, 12–13; modern discovery of, 12–13; phi- losophers’ reactions to, 92–93; Sartre and, 93
Adorno, Theodor, critique of Euro- pean metaphysics in, 102n2
adult status: in modern culture, 79; redefining of in Plato, 7–10
aesthetic of the everyday, 96 aesthetic Weltanschauung of
Nietzsche, 77–78
Alexander the Great, Aristotle and,
xiii, 15–16
alienated subjectivity: bourgeois materialism and, 48; Fichte as founder of, 47, 48–49, 50–51; Marx and, 75
Anglo-American philosophy, Witt- genstein and, 89
anthropology, Kant and, 43–44 Arab world, Plato’s influence on,
2
archeology of Foucault, 99 Aristotle: and Alexander the Great,
xiii, 15–16; and bíos theoretikós (theoretical life), 15; and com- munity of scholars, 16–17; as man of the mean, 17; rejection of, in early modern thought, 15; as root of European university
index
105
Aristotle (continued)
system, 14–15; and scholarship vs. wisdom, 16
art, Schelling as theoretician of, 61 Asian wisdom traditions, Schopen-
hauer and, 65
Athenian Academy, 2 Augustine, 18–23; continuing
influence of, 23; as darker rein- terpretation of Plato, 19–20,
21; on grace, 20; on human nature, 20–22; influence on philosophers conception of human nature, 22; as most clearly visible person of antiquity, 18–19; nature of truth in, 22; original sin in, 20–21; Pascal and, 33–34; self-trial and confession of, 18–19, 22; soul’s irreparable separation from Good in, 19–
22
author as authority figure, written
culture and, 11
autonomous life, modern money
culture and, 76
Bacon, Francis: and birth of moder- nity, 25–26, 27; on knowledge as power, viii
Bataille, Georges, 97
bíos theoretikós (theoretical life), Aris-
totle and, 15
birth, symbolic, in tribal cultures, 7 Blanchot, Maurice, 97
Blasen [Bubbles] (Sloterdijk), x, xi Bonaparte, Napoleon, 47, 55–56 boundaries, in Kant, 44
bourgeois age, modernity as, 41
bourgeois cult of genius, 88 bourgeois materialism, Fichte on,
47–48
bourgeois philosophy, Kant and,
41–44
Bruno, Giordano, 24–26; and
Christian scholasticism, emer- gence from, 24; cooptation of by later philosophers, 24–25; and poetic prose in philosophy, 11; as universalist, 37
Bubbles [Blasen] (Sloterdijk), x, xi
Cardano, Girolamo, 37 certainty: groundless instability
underlying, 82–83; necessity of,
82
chaos theory: Schopenhauer and,
64–65; and uprooting of Pla-
tonism, 3
Christianity: basis in Platonic ideal-
ism, xi, 2; as catastrophe for phi- losophy, 20–21; and dominance of interpreters over text, 71–72; Kant and, 41–42, 43; theology, Hellenization of, 2, 19
Christian-Platonic philosophy: Foucault’s replacement of, 96–100; Hegel and, 52, 67; Hei- degger and, 96; Marx and, 75; modernists’ efforts to replace, 95–96; Nietzsche and, 3, 33–34, 80–81, 96, 97; reason as founda- tion of, xiii–xiv, 7–8; Schopen- hauer and, 64–65
Christian scholasticism, emergence from: Bruno and, 24; Descartes and, 27–29
106 index
classicism, Reformation self-read- ing and, 42
Clavel, Maurice, 99–100
common mind, philosophers’ alien-
ation from, 48 communicative action theory, 96 Confessiones (Augustine), 18 consciousness: as basis of mate-
rial phenomena, 82; history of,
Schelling on, 60–61 constitutional state, as end of his-
tory in Hegel, 55 contemplation and science,
interlacing of, in philosophical
thought, 31
continental philosophy, Wittgen-
stein and, 89
Critique of Cynical Reason (Sloterdijk),
x
cynicism, types of in Sloterdijk, x
da Vinci, Leonardo, 37 deconstruction, 96
Deleuze, Gilles, 99
Derrida, an Egyptian (Sloterdijk), x Derrida, Jacques, 22
Descartes, René, 27–31; and absolute certainty, necessity
of, 82; and birth of modernity, 27; and Christian scholasti- cism, emergence from, 27–29; as court intellectual, 38–39; and evidence-based reason- ing, 29–30; method of, 29; and nobility of competence, rise of, 29; theological foundation of, 30–31
Diogenes of Sinope, x, 10
Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, Augustinian conception of human nature in, 22
Duras, Marguerite, xiv–xv
ecological goals, alignment of edu- cation with, 80–81
education: alignment of with eco- logical goals, 80–81; in modern, dynamic culture, 79–80; as political training, in Plato, 3–6, 9–10
Eigentlichkeit, in Fichte, 49 Epicureans, 4
ethics, Wittgenstein’s impact on,
90
European philosophy: Plato as
foundation of, 1–3; value in rereading of, 13. See also modern philosophy
European rationalism, Platonism and, 3
evidence-based reasoning, Des- cartes and, 29–30
evolution, and uprooting of Pla- tonism, 3
existentialism: of Kierkegaard, 69; and loss of fit between subjective and objective reason, 40;
as post-Hegelian philosophy,
57
faith, in Kierkegaard, 69–70 feminism, critique of European
metaphysics in, 102n2 Feuerbach, Ludwig, critique of
European metaphysics in, 75, 102n2
index 107
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 46–51; and absolute certainty, necessity of, 82; Augustinian concep- tion of human nature in, 22; on bourgeois materialism, 47–48; and era of projects of philo- sophical emancipation, 49–50; as founder of subjectivity, 47, 48–49, 50–51; Marx and, 75;
as philosopher of freedom, 46, 92; on philosophical tempera- ments, xix; and philosophy as life-changing insight, 46; on political revolution as inevitable consequence of popular enlight- enment, 48–49, 50; as professo- rial philosopher, 36; response to abyssality, 92
Ficino, Marsilio, 2
First World, and renunciation,
necessity of, 65
Foam [Schäume] (Sloterdijk), x, xi Foucault, Michel, 95–100; and
event philosophy, 99; influences on, 97; minute examination of material realities in, 97–98; and postmetaphysical philosophy, founding of, 96–100; reception of, 98–99
freedom: in Fichte, 46, 92; Foucault on, 99; philosophers of, 92; Sartre on, 92–93
French Materialists, German Ideal- ists and, 47
French Revolution: Descartes and, 28; and German Idealists, 41, 59
Freud, Sigmund: Augustinian conception of human nature in,
22; influence on Sloterdijk, xii; Nietzsche and, 78; 20th-century influence of, 72–73
functional equivalents, modernity as age of, 44
fundamentalism: as destructive impulse, 13; as response to mod- ern loss of foundations, 12–13
Gay Science (Nietzsche), 1
genius, bourgeois cult of, 88 German Idealism: Descartes and,
31; French Materialists and, 47; and the French Revolution, 41, 59; Marx and, 75; professors and philosophical writers in, 36–37; Schelling’s retreat from, 61–62
globalization: and modern culture of money, 76; and new forms of education, 80
Globen [Globes] (Sloterdijk), x, xi God, soul’s irreparable separation
from, in Augustine, 19–22
God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Mono- theisms (Sloterdijk), x
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 60 grace, in Augustine, 20
Great Man, Hegel’s doctrine of,
54–56
Greek philosophy, and spiritual
peace through logic, xiii, 4, 6
Hadot, Pierre, xii, 9
Harnack, Adolf von, 2
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
52–58; as consummation of Christian-Platonic metaphys- ics, 52, 67, 75; on culmination of
108 index
history, 52, 53–55; doctrine of the Great Man in, 54–56; influ- ence of, 56; Kierkegaard and, 68; and post-Hegelian skepticism, 57–58; as professorial philoso- pher, 36; response to abyssality, 93; Schelling and, 60, 62; and spirit, fulfillment of, 52–53, 54; unitary reality in, viii
Heidegger, Martin: Christian- Platonic philosophy and, 96; critique of European metaphys- ics in, 102n2; and philosophy
as life-changing insight, 46; Schelling’s anticipation of, 62; technology and, 86; and 20th- century intellectual mythos, 87
Heraclitus: and foundation of European philosophy, 1; “Logos” fire of, xi; paradox in, ix
historicism: allure of, 66–67; Kierkegaard and, 66–67
history: as battle of interpret-
ers, 71–72; culmination of, in Hegel, 52, 53–55; culmination of, post-Hegelian denial of, 57–58, 67–68
Hobbes, Thomas, and birth of modernity, 27, 34–35
“hole-gap” between Real and Sym- bolic orders. See abyss, internal humanity: Augustine on self-love
in, 21–22; Freud on historical development of, xii; Pascal on weakness of, 32–34
human nature: Augustine on, 20–22; Augustine’s influence on conception of, 22; conception of
in modern philosophy, 22–23; Kant on, 42–43, 44; Leibniz on, 40; as something to be tran- scended, 88
Husserl, Edmund, 82–86; and absolute certainty, necessity of, 82; modern relevance of, 85–86; phenomenology of, 83–85
Idealism. See German Idealism imperial culture, Platonism as phi-
losophy of, xiii, 3–6
Index of Prohibited Books, Des-
cartes and, 28
intellectual asceticism of Aristotle,
15
intelligentsia, European, Descartes
and, 29
interest and knowledge, Pascal on
correlation between, 33–34
Janik, Alan, 89
Kant, Immanuel, 41–45; as bour- geois philosopher, 41–44; cri- tique of European metaphysics in, 102n2; as essential thinker of modernity, 44; fundamentalism of reason in, 43–45; and learned republicanism, 42; as professo- rial philosopher, 36
Kierkegaard, Søren, 66–70; and end of metaphysics, 75; existen- tialism of, 69; on faith, 69–70; Hegel and, 68
Kircher, Athanasius, 37
Kynismus: vs. cynicism, x; Platonism
and, 10
index 109
Lacan, Jacques, xiii
Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm,
36–40; as court intellectual, 38–39; optimistic theodicy of, 39–40; as typological riddle, 37, 38, 39; as universalist, 37–38
Leiris, Michel, 35
Lenin, Vladimir, 56, 73–74
life philosophies, and loss of fit
between subjective and objective reason, 40
machine age, Descartes’ practical reason and, 30
Mao Zedong, 73
Marx, Karl, 71–76; contemporary
relevance of, 76; development of Fichte’s alienation in, 75; as freelance philosophical writer, 37; quasi religion created by fol- lowers of, 73; reading of without bias, 75–76; on reason, limita- tions of, 64; responsibility for destructive acts of interpreters, 73–75; 20th-century influence of, 72–73
Marxism, as post-Hegelian philoso- phy, 57
Maximilian (king of Bavaria), 63 media, new, impact on philosophy,
12
memory: Bruno on, 26; in Plato, 8,
19
metaphysics: critiques of, 102n2;
end of, 75; Kant on, 44–45. See also Christian-Platonic philoso- phy; postmetaphysical thinking
Milton, John, 34–35
mind, meditative, conflict with
operative mind, in Pascal, 34 modern despair, Pascal and, 34–35 modernity: as bourgeois age, 41; and
education of individuals, new models for, 79–80; Nietzsche as psychagogue of, 78; and philoso- phy as ur-exercise of rigor, 83
modernity, birth of: Bruno and, 25–26; Kierkegaard and, 70; Schelling and, 60–61; as time obscured by subsequent events, 27–28
modern philosophy: as anti-Pla- tonic experiment, 12–13; and Christian-Platonic philoso-
phy, effort to replace, 95–96; conception of human nature in, 22–23; disinhibition and erosion of security in, 12–13; upcoming historic rupture in, 13
money culture, and relevance of Marx, 76
moral law, in Kant, 42
Moses and Monotheism (Freud), xii
nation-states, European, origin of in Platonic idealism, 5–6
natural philosophy, Schelling’s turn to, 60–61
neoconservatives, Augustinian con- ception of human nature in, 22
Neo-Kantians, 43 neophenomenology, 96 neopragmatism, 96
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 77–81; aes-
Metaphysics (Aristotle), 15
thetic Weltanschauung of, 77–78; 110 index
critique of European metaphys- ics in, 102n2; and education of individuals in modernity, 79–80; elitism in, 80; as freelance philosophical writer, 37; and human nature as something to be transcended, 88; opposition to Christian-Platonic philosophy,
3, 33–34, 80–81, 96, 97; para- dox in, ix; Pascal and, 33–34; on philosophical systems as memoirs and confessions, xviii; and post- metaphysical philosophy, 97; as psychagogue, 78–79; relevance to modern education theory, 80–81; and return of poetic prose to philosophy, 11; on science as metaphysical faith, 1; talent for parodic interpretations of sacred texts, 81; 20th-century influence of, 72–73; on Übermensch, 79–80
Novalis, and return of poetic prose to philosophy, 11
optimism, as principle: loss of after Leibniz, 40; regeneration of, as important project for future, 40
original sin, in Augustine, 20–21 Osho (Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh), ix
paideia, in Plato, 3–6
Parmenides, 1
Pascal, Blaise, 32–35; and birth of
modernity, 34–35; Nietzsche and, 33–34; 20th-century affin- ity for, 32–33
peace, inner, as goal of philosophy in Plato, xiii, 4, 6
phenomenology: goals and methods of, 83–85; relevance of in mod- ern world, 85–86
philosophical freelance writers, in German tradition, 36–37
“Philosophical Quartet” (TV pro- gram), x
philosophical schools, origin in Greek philosophy, 4
Philosophical Temperaments (Sloter- dijk): in context of Sloterdijk’s career, x; deceptive simplicity
of, xi–xii; development of as project, xvii–xviii; goals of, xvii– xviii; thesis of, xi–xv; title of, xix
philosophical temperaments, range of, xix
philosophy: Christianity as catas- trophe for, 20–21; goals of, in Plato, 3–6; origin in shamanism, xii–xiii; Sloterdijk’s concep- tion of, xii, xiv–xv, xviii; as ur-exercise of rigor, 82–83; as way of thinking, xii, xviii. See also modern philosophy
philosophy as (written) argument: in Husserl, 83–84; origin of
in Platonism, 8–9, 10–11; and Wittgenstein’s struggle to assert coherences, 88–89
philosophy of imagination, Bruno and, 25
Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, 37 Plato (Platonism), 1–13; Augustine as darker reinterpretation of,
19–20, 21; aversion to poets in, 11; as basis of Christianity, xi, 2; as basis of postideological apolitical
index 111
Plato (continued)
stance, xi; echoes of shamanism in, 11; education as political train- ing in, 3–6, 9–10; as foundation of European philosophy, 1–3; influence of, 3; isolation from reality in, 6; memory in, 8, 19; as model for upcoming rupture of philosophy, 13; modern rejec- tion of, 12–13; and philosophy
as (written) argument, 8–9, 10–11; as philosophy of impe- rial culture, xiii, 3–6; as proto- totalitarian, 3–4; radiation of into foreign cultures, 2; rede- fining of adult status in, 7–10; reduction of complexity in, 6–7; as religion of rationalism and search for truth, 3; as rupture from shamanist Real, xiii–xiv; and shamanism, suppression of, 8–11; shamanism as origin of, xii–xiii, 3, 7–8. See also Christian- Platonic philosophy
poetic prose in philosophy: Pla- tonism’s suppression of, 11; return of, 11–12; Sloterdijk and, xi
Pol Pot, 73
post-Hegelian philosophy: and con-
summation of history, denial of, 56–58, 67–68; Kierkegaard and, 68; meanings of, 67–68
postideological apolitical stance, basis in Platonic idealism, xi
postmetaphysical thinking: disinhi- bition and demise of Platonism, 12–13; efforts to develop, 95–96; Foucault and, 96–100; projects
of philosophical emancipation
and, 49–50
proletarian reason, in Marx, 75 psychoanalysis: analogies to in Plato,
8; Schopenhauer and, 64–65; Sloterdijk’s methodology and, xii
Rabbow, Paul, 9
Racine, Jean Baptiste, and birth of
modernity, 34–35
Rage and Time (Sloterdijk), x Rajneesh, Bhagwan Shree (Osho), ix Rank, Otto, critique of European
metaphysics in, 102n2
The Ravishing of Lol Stein (Duras),
xiv–xv
reality, abyss between Symbolic and,
xiv–xv. See also abyss, internal reason: Descartes’ method and, 28–30; Fichte on, 49–50; as
foundation of Christian-Pla- tonic philosophy, xiii–xiv, 7–8; fundamentalism of in Kant, 43–45; proletarian, in Marx, 75; as source of spiritual peace in Greek philosophy, xiii, 4, 6
reason, awakening to limitations of: in Augustine, 20; bifurcation of subjective and objective reason, 40; and collapse of Christian- Platonic philosophy, xiv; Husserl and, 86; in Kierkegaard, 69–70; in Schelling, 61–63; in Schopen- hauer, 64–65
Reformation, self-reading in, and classicism, 42
renunciation, necessity of, in Scho- penhauer, 65
112 index
republicanism, Kant and, 42 Roman Empire, Platonism in, 2, 6
Samsonov, Elisabeth, 25
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 91–94; campaign
against bourgeois complacency, 92; and groundless freedom, cel- ebration of, 91–93; as monumen- tal figure, 91; Pascal and, 35; pro- ductivity of, 93–94; and return of poetic prose to philosophy, 11
Schäume [Foam] (Sloterdijk), x, xi Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm
Joseph, 59–63; Augustinian conception of human nature
in, 22; Berlin lectures, 62; on consciousness, history of, 60–61; early philosophy of, 59–60; later career of, 61–62; leap to natural philosophy, 60–61; as professo- rial philosopher, 36; and reason, finiteness of, 61–63; youthful triumphs of, 59–60
Schlegel, Friedrich, response to abyssality, 92
Schmitz, Hermann, critique of European metaphysics in, 102n2
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 64–65; and Christian-Platonic rationalism, departure from, 64–65; doctrine of the will in, 64, 65; as freelance philosophical writer, 37; and renunciation, necessity of, 65; and uprooting of Platonism, 3
Schulte, Günter, 75
science: and phenomenology,
85–86; and philosophy as ur- exercise of rigor, 83
secondary literature on philosophy, veiling of original ideas in, xvii
self-control, in Plato, 5 Shakespeare, William, 25 shamanism: echoes of in Plato, 11;
holistic reality of, 11; as Laca- nian Real, xiii; ongoing allure of after Platonism, 10; Platonism as revised form of, xii–xiii, 3, 7–8; Platonism as rupture from, xiii–xiv; Platonism’s suppression of, 8–11
skepticism: origin of, 9; post- Hegelian, 57–58; projects of philosophical emancipation and, 49–50
Sloterdijk, Peter: biography of, ix–x; conception of philosophy in, xii, xiv–xv, xviii; critique of European metaphysics in, 102n2; influence of, ix; pluralized worlds in, vii–ix, xi; poetic prose of, xi; radical break from history of philosophy in, viii–ix, x; works by, x–xi
Socrates, and education as political practice, 4–6
sophrosyne, in Plato, 5
Sorgner, Stefan Lorenz, x soul/spirit: education of, in Plato,
5–6; fulfillment of, in Hegel,
52–53, 54
“Speeches to the German Nation”
(Fichte), 47
Spheres series (Sloterdijk), x, xi Stalin, Josef, 73–74
Stirner, Max, 37
Stoics, 4
structuralism, Foucault and, 97
index 113
subjectivity: bourgeois materialism and, 48; Fichte as founder of, 47, 48–49, 50–51; Marx and, 75
surrealism, Foucault and, 97 Symbolic order, abyss between
Real and, xiv–xv. See also abyss,
internal
systems theory: Husserlian foun-
dations of, 86; and loss of fit between subjective and objective reason, 40; Schopenhauer and, 64–65; sociological, 96
technology: machine age, Des- cartes’ practical reason and, 30; modern, and phenomenology, 85–86; new media impact on philosophy, 12
theodicy, Leibniz and, 40 theoretical life (bíos theoretikós), Aris-
totle and, 15
Thirty Years War, Descartes and
the, 28
Toulmin, Steven, 89 transcendence: of human nature,
88; in Kant, as bourgeois, 42; Kierkegaard on, 69–70; modern approach to, Descartes and, 31; modern efforts to remove as concept, 96; in phenomenology, 84–86; in Plato, 5, 6–7, 8
truth, Augustinian conception of, 22
Übermensch, in Nietzsche, 79–80 unconscious mind, and phenom-
enology, 85
universalism, civilizing of, under
Leibniz, 38
university system: alienation of creative minds from, 73; Aristo- tle as root of, 14–15
urban culture, Platonism as phi- losophy of, xiii, 3–6
Valéry, Paul, and return of poetic prose to philosophy, 11
Vico, Giambattista, 42, 87 vitalism, Pascal and, 33 Voltaire, 39
Whitehead, Alfred N. , 95
will, doctrine of, in Schopenhauer,
64, 65
wise man, isolated, as byproduct of
Platonic idealism, 6 Wissenskunst (knowledge-art) of
Leibniz, 37–38
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 87–90; and
human nature as something to be transcended, 88; and intelligence of the future, 89–90; isolation of, 87–88; radical modernity of, 89; reception of, 89; struggle to assert coherences of the world through words, 88–89
Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Janik and Toul- min), 89
written culture, development of, impact on philosophy, 10–11
Yates, Frances A.