No More Learning

philosophical temperaments
INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE
InsurrectIons: crItIcal studIes In relIgIon, PolItIcs, and culture
Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors
The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrec- tions: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion.
After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeffrey W. Robbins
The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara
Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo
Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Rubenstein
Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation,
Arvind Mandair
Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou
Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney
Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Peter Sloterdijk
Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett
Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeffrey W. Robbins
Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic,
edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Udi Aloni
A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Stanislas Breton, edited by Ward Blanton, translated by Joseph N. Ballan
Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event, Clayton Crockett
Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience,
Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou
The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts / L’Incident d’Antioche: Tragédie en trois actes, Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer
peter sloterdijk
translated by thomas dunlap / foreword by creston davis
philosophical temperaments
FROM PLATO TO FOUCAULT
columbia university press new york
columbia university press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex cup. columbia. edu
The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
English translation copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press Philosophische Temperamente. Von Platon bis Foucault by Peter Sloterdijk © 2009 by Diedrichs Verlag, a division of Verlagsgruppe Random House GmbH, München, Germany All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sloterdijk, Peter, 1947–
[Philosophische Temperamente, English]
Philosophical temperaments : from Plato to Foucault / Peter Sloterdijk ; translated by Thomas Dunlap ; foreword by Creston Davis.
p. cm. — (Insurrections)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-231-15372-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
—ISBN 978-0-231-15373-7 (pbk. : alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-231-52740-8 (e-book) 1. Philosophers—Biography. 2. Philosophy—Introductions. I. Title.
190—dc23
2012037921
B104. S57 2013
Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content.
Printed in the United States of America
c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
p 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
cover design: chang jae lee
cover image: gallerystock © akira sakamoto
contents
Foreword to the English Translation by Creston Davis vii Preface xvii
plato 1 aristotle 14 augustine 18 bruno 24 descartes 27 pascal 32 leibnitz 36 kant 41 fichte 46 hegel 52 schelling 59 schopenhauer 64 kierkegaard 66 marx 71 nietzsche 77 husserl 82 wittgenstein 87 sartre 91 foucault 95
Notes 101 Index 105
v
foreword to the english translation “analyzing philosophy’s temperamental symptom” creston davis
Sloterdijk’s Work and Impact
Peter Sloterdijk has the most provocative and daring temperament of theorists writing in the world today. With his ever expansive subject matter, Sloterdijk’s unblinking bravado and dazzling prose keep pushing thinking beyond the pale of static assumptions and into the creation of new worlds. And that is precisely what makes him dangerous: Sloterdijk believes in creating worlds, atmospheres, and ecologies beyond our assumed “world. ”
Perhaps the thread that unites Sloterdijk’s works over the past quarter of a century is his unique genealogy that transcends binaries and oppositions inherited from both Enlightenment secularism and Christian theology. In this way, he is a thinker par excellence of Diogenesian, dyadic, elemental, pluralized thinking that refuses vulgar reductions down into a singular Leibnizian
vii
“monad. ” This is why Sloterdijk’s thinking is as refreshing as it is controversial: where bankers, philosophers, and others see a singular world, Sloterdijk sees worlds (plural). It was, of course, Heidegger that reminded us of a singular world philosophy teth- ered to the question of Being (existence), a question that West- ern philosophy forgot. However, Sloterdijk puts a crucial twist on Heidegger’s reminder. According to Heidegger we find ourselves “in-die-Welt-Geworfen-Sein” (being-thrown-in-the-world), but for Sloterdijk we are rather “in-den-Weltraum-Geworfen-Sein” (being- thrown-in-the-cosmos). So as Heidegger reminds us to remember the basic question of Being, Sloterdijk reads this watch-sign as a way to rethink the very foundations of philosophy itself by call- ing into question a singular a priori “world. ” In the place of a sin- gular “world” Sloterdijk gives us a genealogy of pluralized worlds or spheres. It is in this precise sense that Sloterdijk’s thinking is posed in opposition to Francis Bacon’s dictum: “Knowledge is power. ” Power, for Sloterdijk, is the potential for new creations of new knowledge through connector systems of yet unimaginable and unbounded infinite possibilities. Read in this way we could put a twist on Shakespeare and Charles Dickens: When in Shake- speare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff says to Pistol, “I will not lend thee a penny,” Pistol replies, “Why then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open. ”1 And with Dickens, “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! . . . secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. ”2 The world for Sloterdijk is not a self-contained, solitary, mysterious “oys- ter”; but rather, worlds pluralize and are uncontainable like a sponge with infinite connectors and thresholds.
What makes Sloterdijk’s work so controversial is that for him we have all become like Scrooge, assuming that the material and theoretical world is the only horizon from which existence takes its meaning. But what if there were worlds instead? If there are worlds, as Sloterdijk suggests, then there are different existential
viii foreword
possibilities, that is to say, difference itself becomes the unity into which life draws its breath. This is revolutionary and radi- cally breaks with the history of philosophy (with and against Heidegger) precisely through Sloterdijk’s return to the marginal- ized schools of ancient Greek thought. By decentering a singular world (as the ontological given), Sloterdijk’s philosophy becomes nothing short of a Copernican Revolution for the twenty-first- century theory.
Sloterdijk—a Brief Biography
Born just after World War II in Karlsruhe, Germany, Sloter- dijk is widely considered to be the foremost public intellectual in Europe. As an undergraduate, he studied philosophy, litera- ture, and history at the University of Munich, and received his doctorate in German literature from the University of Ham- burg in 1975. After completing his doctorate he went to India to study under an internationally renowned mystic and spiritual guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho). Much of Sloterdijk’s work remains indebted to Osho’s teachings, which are them- selves largely indebted to many religious and theoretical influ- ences, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and psy- choanalysis. One of Osho’s central pedagogical techniques was the employment of paradox and contradiction as a means by which to help individuals transcend and transform their men- tal and spiritual capacities. Entering into paradox was a way to move beyond the safe distance to intellectual “critique” and into the fullness of living itself reminiscent of two figures that bookend the Western philosophical tradition: Heraclitus and Nietzsche. Sloterdijk’s journey to India gave him the creative power to live with the ambiguity of existence’s synthetic, dif- ferential unfolding.
foreword ix
Being familiar with the ambivalence and radical contingency of life’s flux from Osho and from his own fully independent studies, Sloterdijk began to map out a writing career that changed the very coordinates of philosophical theory. From the germs embedded in his first thesis and best-selling work, Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk can be fairly called the first postsecular thinker in the West—a thinker of a life after God and its twin, nihilism.
Sloterdijk’s philosophical work can best be identified in three stages: the early period starting in the mid-1980s (with Critique of Cynical Reason); the middle period from the late 1990s through 2004 (with the Spheres trilogy, Bubbles, Globes, and Foam); and the period from 2005 to the present (which is highlighted by the books God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms; Derrida, an Egyp- tian; Rage and Time; and this volume, Philosophical Temperaments, as well as by Sloterdijk’s work as a moderator of the Second German Television program “Philosophical Quartet”).
According to Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Critique of Cynical Reason became a work in philosophy that sold more copies in Germany than any other book since 1945. 3 And there is a good reason for this: Sloterdijk’s thesis is as brilliant as it is controversial. To vul- garly reduce his thesis, he basically defines the term cynicism in two ways: there is the Kynismus and there is the contemporary meaning of “cynicism. ” The former term is derived from the ancient Greek philosophical tradition founded by Diogenes and represents a countervailing mode of life in both philosophy and action as it sought a unity with nature and disrupted the social and ethical mores. By contrast there is the contemporary cynicism expressed in sarcastic beliefs in the power of reason, which thus never fully takes life seriously. The latter is thus a symptom of the general conditions of a society devoid of meaning (or even the hope of meaning). Thus Sloterdijk critiques contemporary cynicism while drawing on the “kynicos” tradition (the followers of Diogenes) as a way of reuniting philosophy with everyday life.
x foreword
If Critique of Cynical Reason put Sloterdijk on the map, the trilogy Spheres secured a permanent place in the philosophical pantheon. The three volumes that compose Spheres are vol. 1, Blasen (Bubbles); vol. 2, Globen (Globes); and vol. 3, Schäume (Foam) and were pub- lished by the Suhrkamp publishing house in 1998, 1999, and 2004, respectively. Sloterdijk’s achievement in the Spheres trilogy is truly unparalleled in philosophy today. Again to brutally sum- marize his work, Spheres is a tour de force that advances his thesis in Critique of Cynical Reason by exposing alternative realities or spheres that are irreducible to a singular, unifying principle. Sloterdijk’s poetic prose (form) befits Heraclitus’s “Logos fire” (content) in which the world (nay, worlds) alight with elemental and radi- cally contingent primeval forces. So to settle for a postideological, apolitical stance assumes a false move that began with Plato in which this singular world is held in being by a transcendent dema- terialized eternal and unchanging ideal. Christianity, according to Sloterdijk, followed suit in Neo-Platonism, creating the con- ditions of an impoverished life devoted to a masochistic drive obsessed with the afterlife at the cost of never fully living in this life.
Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault (a Bold Philosophical Hypothesis)
Sloterdijk’s book is deceptive because it follows a strict, linear unfolding of seminal philosophical and theological figures from Plato to Foucault through Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and other seminal theorists. In this fashion, this work appears to simply reproduce yet another history of philosophy. But the truth is that nothing is further from the truth. As Sloterdijk himself states, he wishes “to pro- vide a broader readership access to original philosophical think- ing. ” That is why Philosophical Temperaments is by far the best book
foreword xi
for accessing Sloterdijk’s complex and mature philosophical sys- tem (or, better, systems). Yet this book comes with a warning sign: one should not read this book if one is looking to tame and master philosophy and theology (like viewing a captured lion in a zoo from a safe distance). This is because philosophy is not safe. Thus it is not so much that you read and “master” these pages as much as these pages read you; that is, in his words: “the disci- pline of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking, and then as a way of life. ” So the challenge is for you to prepare to be challenged where your tacit assumptions are interrogated; you must wrestle with the text, with yourself, and with your life. For Sloterdijk believes that philosophy is indistinguishable from every part of your life. This is why he is a thinker allied with Pierre Hadot’s style, where the mind, the body, and the spirit are unified. If Sloterdijk is a holistic thinker, his methodology is developed through the psychoanalytic traditions from Freud to Lacan.
In this book, Sloterdijk takes his cue from the “father,” Freud. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud develops the thesis through a his- torical analogy to the psychological development of human beings. The stages that Freud identifies unfold first through early trauma (the rupture between parent and child) and defense, then latency, followed by the outbreak of neurosis, and finally the partial return of the repressed. For Freud, Jewish “monotheism” not only was inherited by a marginal Egyptian monotheism, but also was the result of feelings of guilt for killing off the father (Moses); so a God had to be invented to relieve us from this guilt. What Freud saw in religious inventions of monotheism, Sloter- dijk sees in the philosophical tradition. Like a child, philosophy is born out of shamanism, from which humans acquire a newly found consciousness, but Platonic and Greek “orthodox” philoso- phy becomes always already indebted to the “symbolic order” of larger, more powerful worlds and nascent empires. This forces a tension between the “real” shamanism and the “symbolic” and
xii foreword
philosophical new global reach. Ancient Greek philosophy thus became caught between the two spheres of ancient tribal cults and emerging new empires as it attempted to come to terms with finding peace in a chaotic world using argument and logic as its beacon of truth.
But there is a catch: this “peace” is defined, in the first place, through the emergence of an expanding empire and its concomi- tant cosmopolitan consciousness. In other words, philosophy becomes something like a “fast-food” pill that one takes in order to be able to accept a newly formed version of “peace” articulated through an externalization of violence as constituted in the Hel- lenistic empire. This is borne out in how Alexander the Great expanded the Greek Empire with Aristotle at the intellectual helm. Thus, the brilliance of Sloterdijk’s book reveals how sha- manistic beliefs were raw and underdeveloped, taking on the characteristics of Lacan’s articulation of the “Real” (that which resists symbolization and what Freud called “early trauma”). But it is not as if Sloterdijk interprets Platonism and Greek philosophy as the measure against which the “Symbolic order” takes its mean- ing vis-à-vis the “Real” (shamanism). Rather, it is the “Symbolic order” that erects the threshold through which the mysteries of adult life are accessed and practiced, whereas ancient philoso- phy severs its relationship to tradition and the tribe in order to reformulate a new, distinctly urban outlook. The upshot of the argument here allows one to fully come to terms with Sloterdijk’s radical reading: philosophy becomes the handmaiden to a cosmo- politan consciousness founded on recollecting the archetypes of eternal essences beyond our material existence. But what he is suggesting is that shamanism too has its own “sphere” of meaning that is much more holistic and possesses its own horizons of what it means to live well.
Following the psychoanalytical reading, we can see that the knife of philosophical (Platonic) rupture necessarily creates a
foreword xiii
dark world into which reason illuminates the way via a denuded version of truth predicated on argumentation and logic. But, as Sloterdijk adroitly points out, Platonic (and Christian) philoso- phy sets itself up for its own failure, creating a neurotic impulse to get to the bottom of reality via reason, but the very telos itself is always already unobtainable. Consequently philosophy is forever stained with its own ineptitude, caught by the necessity for ana- lytic clarity but unable to fully eradicate existential contingency. One can easily recognize this seductive “promise” which was orig- inally given by Prometheus’s theft in the paradoxical form of fire’s illumination. This “philosophical symptom” is encapsulated as the original theft that gives life—the felix culpa in Christian terms.
Philosophy, as Sloterdijk understands, is a process of coming to terms with its original “theft”—knowledge is stolen from the gods, and yet it illuminates, queerly. The quest, therefore, that Sloter- dijk’s entire work follows takes place in the “hole-gap” located between necessity and contingency—between the “Real” and the “Symbolic” orders—between the unknown that we already know (but are too afraid to know that we know) and the unknown that we will never obtain but forever desire. In her novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras identifies this “hole-gap” that appears in the worlds of desire, which is articulated by the narrator via the main character, Lol Stein:
What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. . . . She has not the faintest notion of the unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she had to do. . . . [And by entering into the gap of the unknown it would give to Lol] “both their greatest pain and their great- est joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe—since I love her [the narrator says]—that if Lol is silent in her daily
xiv foreword
life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hold-word, whose cen- ter would have been hollowed out into a hold, the kind of hold in which all other words would have been buried. 4
And here we have a great example of the absent void of the Real (i. e. , the “hole-gap”) that haunts, betrays, and at the same time rein- forces the Symbolic Order. Sloterdijk reads the history of philoso- phy (and even its very nature) through the reality of this void and thereby redefines the very terms of philosophy itself. Philosophy is not about finding out the “facts” of our fundamental reality (i. e. , science), but rather is a process that, deploying a “Nietzschean” reversal, reveals “facts” which become less and less significant. At the end of the day, philosophy for Sloterdijk becomes an inter- pretation opened up for rivaling interpretations not determined by a singular “transcendent” cause (a theology, a sovereignty, or Platonism), but rather about new possible worlds and creative “truths” and their constitutive values invented and reinvented by us. Welcome to philosophy’s temperamental behavior.
foreword xv
preface
In the mid-1990s, the Diederichs publishing house and I con- ceived a plan that seemed audacious at the time: an alterna- tive history of philosophy spanning the great periods of ancient
and recent European thought in the form of readers on impor- tant thinkers. At the time, this idea was surely driven in part by the desire to offer an anticyclical, intellectual signal in opposi- tion to the rampant mindlessness so characteristic of the German fin-de-siècle.
The project’s novelty was the decision to let these ground- breaking thinkers speak in their own words. Our desire, as editors and conduits of philosophical primary texts, was to undermine the hegemony of secondary literature, which has long been responsi- ble for the fact that the original ideas are everywhere disappearing behind impenetrable veils of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries. By turning to the texts themselves, we wished
xvii
to provide a broader readership access to original philosophical thinking, and, not least, to put into the hands of students of the academic discipline of “Philosophy” an alternative to the “Intro- ductions” that dominate the field. I was convinced—and still am— that there can be no introduction in philosophy. Rather, from the very first, the discipline of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking, and then as a way of life.
Thanks to the good collaboration between the publisher and the editor, the project quickly took on concrete shape and was able to persuade a number of excellent scholars to take on the task of selecting and introducing the primary texts. The result, within a few short years, was a series that constitutes nothing less than a philosophical library in nuce. These books soon found a way to readers and reached a broad audience, especially through paperback reprints. Only two of the planned volumes (not least ones that were especially dear to my heart), those on Heidegger and Adorno, were not completed because of legal difficulties. It was a troubling experience to witness the owners of the estates of Heidegger and Adorno using their monopolies to prevent publication of selections from their oeuvre under the aegis of leading experts.
Combining the editor’s prefaces from the various volumes into the present book created an effect that was originally not intended and yet creates a certain plausibility now: to my own surprise, I noted that the vignettes of thinkers assembled here add up to something like a meaningful whole—not a history of philosophy, but still a gallery of character studies and intellectual portraits that show just how right Nietzsche was when he noted that all philosophical systems have always been, unbeknown to their authors, also memoirs and confessions. That the selection of authors entailed an unavoidable element of unfairness cannot be denied. By avoiding randomness, it hewed to a middle path between necessity and arbitrary personal taste.
xviii preface
The title of the present book is an unmistakable allusion to Fichte’s well-known dictum that the philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is. What he intended to say is this: submissive souls opt for a naturalistic system that justifies their servility, while individuals with a proud disposition reach for a system of freedom. This observation is as true today as it has always been. My hope is that the brief studies that follow show that the range of philosophical temperaments goes far beyond the two contrasting types of timid and proud individuals. It is as expansive as the soul illuminated by the logos, of which Heraclitus said: “You would not find the boundaries of soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a measure does it have. ”1
preface xix
philosophical temperaments
Plato
In the famous 344th Aphorism of his Gay Science, entitled “In what way we, too, are still pious,” the anti-Platonist Fried- rich Nietzsche erected a monument—as honorific as it is
problematic—to the founder of the Athenian academy: “But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. . . . But what if this were to become more and more difficult to believe? ”1 One might imagine the history of European philosophy as a relay race in which a torch lit by Plato—and a few of his predecessors, chiefly Parmenides and Heraclitus—was passed down from one generation to the next.
1
The image of an intellectual torch relay across the millennia is open to sharply contrasting views of what it means: whether one wants to see this race simply as the history of truth, as nothing more than the history of a problem, or even, as Nietzsche sug- gests, the history of our longest error. 2 Marsilio Ficino, the key figure in fifteenth-century Florentine Neo-Platonism, had good reason to refer to Plato as the “philosophorum pater” in the introduc- tion to his commentary on the Symposion (De amore). 3
In its major current of idealism, European philosophy was in fact the outgrowth of what one might call a Platonic patristics; it unfolded as a complex of tenets and authoritative pronounce- ments that seemed to flow ultimately from a single generative source. The Platonic masterworks have functioned as a kind of seed bank of ideas from which countless later minds could be fer- tilized, often across great temporal and cultural distances. That is true not only of the Athenian Academy itself, which, as an arche- type of the European “school,” was able to maintain its teaching for nearly a millennium in uninterrupted succession (387 bce to 529 ce); Plato’s writings also proved a marvel of translatability and radiated into foreign languages and cultures in an almost evangelical way—the most significant examples of which are the reception by Rome and the Arab world,4 and later also by the German-speaking lands. These are surpassed in importance only by the fusion of Platonism into the Christian doctrine of God (theology). What Adolf von Harnack once called the Helleni- zation or secularization of Christian theology, in both its acute Gnostic as well as gradual catholic manifestation, occurred largely under the banner of the divine Plato. 5 Moreover, some of the speculative theosophies of Islam have transmitted a wealth of Pla- tonizing motives down to the present day.
The Corpus Platonicum is thus more than just a collection of clas- sical writings: it is the foundational document of the entire genre of European idealistic philosophy as a way of writing, a doctrine,
2 plato
and a way of life. It represents a new alliance between intellectuals and the inhabitants of the city and the realm; it launches the Good News that this dismal world can be penetrated by logic. As the gospel positing that all things are grounded in something good, Platonism anchors the striving for truth in a pious rationalism— and it took nothing less than the civilizational revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to tear out this anchor. Stages in that uprooting were Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the blind world-will, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and fictionalism, the materialist evolutionism of the natural and social sciences, and most recently chaos theory. In its classic pedagogical form, Plato’s teaching sought to convey instructions for a blessed life in theory; it was in the truest sense of the word a religion of thinking, which believed in its capacity to unite investigation and edification under one roof. Some historians of religion maintain that Plato’s teachings represent in many respects a kind of modernization of shamanistic traditions. Since time immemorial, those traditions have known of the soul’s journey to the heavens and the salutary intercourse with the spirits of the next world. From this perspec- tive, Plato’s realm above the heavens in which pure ideas floated among themselves would be merely a heaven rendered logical, and the ascent of thinking to the level of the ideas merely a mod- ernized journey of the soul traveling in the vehicle of the concept. 6
With its noble optimism about the knowability of the world and its ethic of the conscious life, Platonism was in a sense the superego of European rationalism which was becoming a world- moving force. Even if Plato’s high-minded search for the good life in a good polity seemed from the outset to suffer from the defect that it was merely a utopia, it did set the measure and direction for the highest aspirations of the philosophical desire: friendship with the truth saw itself as being concerned about peace for the polis and the world, and committed to its continuous re-creation from the spirit of self-understanding. In its intention, Nietzsche’s
plato 3
saying about the philosopher as the physician of culture is cer- tainly true already of Plato. It was inevitable that these preten- sions were dismissed as overzealous—indeed, some have wanted to detect in them the foreshadowing of what would come to be called the totalitarian temptation in the twentieth century.
For all that, Plato’s discovery of a connection—however problematic—between personal wisdom and public order remains valid. And even if philosophy sank back into a profound depoliticization in late antiquity (essentially already from the time of Alexander the Great), it retained—like a kind of first psychotherapy—an undeniable jurisdiction over questions of inner peace; inner peace might seem like the preliminary step toward outer peace—a superior, quiet beacon in a tumultuous world. The Platonic tradition was in agreement with the Stoic and later the Epicurean teachings in defining the philosopher as the expert for investigating the peace of the soul.
If we have reason to this day to remember the beginnings of philosophy among the Greeks, it is chiefly because it was phi- losophy through which the indirect world power of the “school,” which still rules us and leads us astray, began to impose itself on the emerging urban societies. What steps onto the stage with the philosopher is a demanding kind of educator, who desires that the urban youth no longer grow up within the confines of conven- tions, but seeks to shape them in accordance with superior and artificial criteria that are universal in their form.
The tandem of Socrates and Plato marks the breakthrough of the new educational idea: they speak out against the conven- tionalism and opportunism of the teachers of rhetoric and the sophists with a plea for a comprehensive reshaping of the human being. Paideia, or education as the forming of the human being for a latent or manifest imperial “big world,” not only is a founda- tional word of ancient philosophizing, but also identifies the pro- gram of philosophy as a political practice. It reveals that the birth
4 plato
of philosophy was conditioned by the emergence of a new, risky, and power-charged world system—today we call it that of urban cultures and empires. This system compelled a retraining of the human being in the direction of being fit for the city and the empire. To that extent one may claim that classical philosophy was a logical and ethical rite of initiation for an elite of young men—in rare cases also for women. Under the guidance of an advanced master, they were to reach the point of transcending their prior, merely familial and tribal conditioning in favor of a far-seeing and broad-minded urban and imperial humanity. Thus, philosophy is at its very outset invariably an initiation into the big, the bigger, the biggest; it presents itself as a school of the universal synthesis; it teaches how to think of the multifarious and the prodigious as a single, good unity; it introduces the individual to a life under rising intellectual and moral demands; it bets on the possibility of responding to the growing complexity of the world and the heightened majesty of God with a continuous effort at expand- ing the soul;7 it invites us to move into the mightiest new edifice: the house of Being; it wants to turn its students into residents of a logical acropolis; and it awakens in them the urge to be at home everywhere.
One can easily recognize this seductive “promise” which was orig- inally given by Prometheus’s theft in the paradoxical form of fire’s illumination. This “philosophical symptom” is encapsulated as the original theft that gives life—the felix culpa in Christian terms.
Philosophy, as Sloterdijk understands, is a process of coming to terms with its original “theft”—knowledge is stolen from the gods, and yet it illuminates, queerly. The quest, therefore, that Sloter- dijk’s entire work follows takes place in the “hole-gap” located between necessity and contingency—between the “Real” and the “Symbolic” orders—between the unknown that we already know (but are too afraid to know that we know) and the unknown that we will never obtain but forever desire. In her novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras identifies this “hole-gap” that appears in the worlds of desire, which is articulated by the narrator via the main character, Lol Stein:
What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. . . . She has not the faintest notion of the unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she had to do. . . . [And by entering into the gap of the unknown it would give to Lol] “both their greatest pain and their great- est joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe—since I love her [the narrator says]—that if Lol is silent in her daily
xiv foreword
life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hold-word, whose cen- ter would have been hollowed out into a hold, the kind of hold in which all other words would have been buried. 4
And here we have a great example of the absent void of the Real (i. e. , the “hole-gap”) that haunts, betrays, and at the same time rein- forces the Symbolic Order. Sloterdijk reads the history of philoso- phy (and even its very nature) through the reality of this void and thereby redefines the very terms of philosophy itself. Philosophy is not about finding out the “facts” of our fundamental reality (i. e. , science), but rather is a process that, deploying a “Nietzschean” reversal, reveals “facts” which become less and less significant. At the end of the day, philosophy for Sloterdijk becomes an inter- pretation opened up for rivaling interpretations not determined by a singular “transcendent” cause (a theology, a sovereignty, or Platonism), but rather about new possible worlds and creative “truths” and their constitutive values invented and reinvented by us. Welcome to philosophy’s temperamental behavior.
foreword xv
preface
In the mid-1990s, the Diederichs publishing house and I con- ceived a plan that seemed audacious at the time: an alterna- tive history of philosophy spanning the great periods of ancient
and recent European thought in the form of readers on impor- tant thinkers. At the time, this idea was surely driven in part by the desire to offer an anticyclical, intellectual signal in opposi- tion to the rampant mindlessness so characteristic of the German fin-de-siècle.
The project’s novelty was the decision to let these ground- breaking thinkers speak in their own words. Our desire, as editors and conduits of philosophical primary texts, was to undermine the hegemony of secondary literature, which has long been responsi- ble for the fact that the original ideas are everywhere disappearing behind impenetrable veils of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries. By turning to the texts themselves, we wished
xvii
to provide a broader readership access to original philosophical thinking, and, not least, to put into the hands of students of the academic discipline of “Philosophy” an alternative to the “Intro- ductions” that dominate the field. I was convinced—and still am— that there can be no introduction in philosophy. Rather, from the very first, the discipline of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking, and then as a way of life.
Thanks to the good collaboration between the publisher and the editor, the project quickly took on concrete shape and was able to persuade a number of excellent scholars to take on the task of selecting and introducing the primary texts. The result, within a few short years, was a series that constitutes nothing less than a philosophical library in nuce. These books soon found a way to readers and reached a broad audience, especially through paperback reprints. Only two of the planned volumes (not least ones that were especially dear to my heart), those on Heidegger and Adorno, were not completed because of legal difficulties. It was a troubling experience to witness the owners of the estates of Heidegger and Adorno using their monopolies to prevent publication of selections from their oeuvre under the aegis of leading experts.
Combining the editor’s prefaces from the various volumes into the present book created an effect that was originally not intended and yet creates a certain plausibility now: to my own surprise, I noted that the vignettes of thinkers assembled here add up to something like a meaningful whole—not a history of philosophy, but still a gallery of character studies and intellectual portraits that show just how right Nietzsche was when he noted that all philosophical systems have always been, unbeknown to their authors, also memoirs and confessions. That the selection of authors entailed an unavoidable element of unfairness cannot be denied. By avoiding randomness, it hewed to a middle path between necessity and arbitrary personal taste.
xviii preface
The title of the present book is an unmistakable allusion to Fichte’s well-known dictum that the philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is. What he intended to say is this: submissive souls opt for a naturalistic system that justifies their servility, while individuals with a proud disposition reach for a system of freedom. This observation is as true today as it has always been. My hope is that the brief studies that follow show that the range of philosophical temperaments goes far beyond the two contrasting types of timid and proud individuals. It is as expansive as the soul illuminated by the logos, of which Heraclitus said: “You would not find the boundaries of soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a measure does it have. ”1
preface xix
philosophical temperaments
Plato
In the famous 344th Aphorism of his Gay Science, entitled “In what way we, too, are still pious,” the anti-Platonist Fried- rich Nietzsche erected a monument—as honorific as it is
problematic—to the founder of the Athenian academy: “But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. . . . But what if this were to become more and more difficult to believe? ”1 One might imagine the history of European philosophy as a relay race in which a torch lit by Plato—and a few of his predecessors, chiefly Parmenides and Heraclitus—was passed down from one generation to the next.
1
The image of an intellectual torch relay across the millennia is open to sharply contrasting views of what it means: whether one wants to see this race simply as the history of truth, as nothing more than the history of a problem, or even, as Nietzsche sug- gests, the history of our longest error. 2 Marsilio Ficino, the key figure in fifteenth-century Florentine Neo-Platonism, had good reason to refer to Plato as the “philosophorum pater” in the introduc- tion to his commentary on the Symposion (De amore). 3
In its major current of idealism, European philosophy was in fact the outgrowth of what one might call a Platonic patristics; it unfolded as a complex of tenets and authoritative pronounce- ments that seemed to flow ultimately from a single generative source. The Platonic masterworks have functioned as a kind of seed bank of ideas from which countless later minds could be fer- tilized, often across great temporal and cultural distances. That is true not only of the Athenian Academy itself, which, as an arche- type of the European “school,” was able to maintain its teaching for nearly a millennium in uninterrupted succession (387 bce to 529 ce); Plato’s writings also proved a marvel of translatability and radiated into foreign languages and cultures in an almost evangelical way—the most significant examples of which are the reception by Rome and the Arab world,4 and later also by the German-speaking lands. These are surpassed in importance only by the fusion of Platonism into the Christian doctrine of God (theology). What Adolf von Harnack once called the Helleni- zation or secularization of Christian theology, in both its acute Gnostic as well as gradual catholic manifestation, occurred largely under the banner of the divine Plato. 5 Moreover, some of the speculative theosophies of Islam have transmitted a wealth of Pla- tonizing motives down to the present day.
The Corpus Platonicum is thus more than just a collection of clas- sical writings: it is the foundational document of the entire genre of European idealistic philosophy as a way of writing, a doctrine,
2 plato
and a way of life. It represents a new alliance between intellectuals and the inhabitants of the city and the realm; it launches the Good News that this dismal world can be penetrated by logic. As the gospel positing that all things are grounded in something good, Platonism anchors the striving for truth in a pious rationalism— and it took nothing less than the civilizational revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to tear out this anchor. Stages in that uprooting were Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the blind world-will, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and fictionalism, the materialist evolutionism of the natural and social sciences, and most recently chaos theory. In its classic pedagogical form, Plato’s teaching sought to convey instructions for a blessed life in theory; it was in the truest sense of the word a religion of thinking, which believed in its capacity to unite investigation and edification under one roof. Some historians of religion maintain that Plato’s teachings represent in many respects a kind of modernization of shamanistic traditions. Since time immemorial, those traditions have known of the soul’s journey to the heavens and the salutary intercourse with the spirits of the next world. From this perspec- tive, Plato’s realm above the heavens in which pure ideas floated among themselves would be merely a heaven rendered logical, and the ascent of thinking to the level of the ideas merely a mod- ernized journey of the soul traveling in the vehicle of the concept. 6
With its noble optimism about the knowability of the world and its ethic of the conscious life, Platonism was in a sense the superego of European rationalism which was becoming a world- moving force. Even if Plato’s high-minded search for the good life in a good polity seemed from the outset to suffer from the defect that it was merely a utopia, it did set the measure and direction for the highest aspirations of the philosophical desire: friendship with the truth saw itself as being concerned about peace for the polis and the world, and committed to its continuous re-creation from the spirit of self-understanding. In its intention, Nietzsche’s
plato 3
saying about the philosopher as the physician of culture is cer- tainly true already of Plato. It was inevitable that these preten- sions were dismissed as overzealous—indeed, some have wanted to detect in them the foreshadowing of what would come to be called the totalitarian temptation in the twentieth century.
For all that, Plato’s discovery of a connection—however problematic—between personal wisdom and public order remains valid. And even if philosophy sank back into a profound depoliticization in late antiquity (essentially already from the time of Alexander the Great), it retained—like a kind of first psychotherapy—an undeniable jurisdiction over questions of inner peace; inner peace might seem like the preliminary step toward outer peace—a superior, quiet beacon in a tumultuous world. The Platonic tradition was in agreement with the Stoic and later the Epicurean teachings in defining the philosopher as the expert for investigating the peace of the soul.
If we have reason to this day to remember the beginnings of philosophy among the Greeks, it is chiefly because it was phi- losophy through which the indirect world power of the “school,” which still rules us and leads us astray, began to impose itself on the emerging urban societies. What steps onto the stage with the philosopher is a demanding kind of educator, who desires that the urban youth no longer grow up within the confines of conven- tions, but seeks to shape them in accordance with superior and artificial criteria that are universal in their form.
The tandem of Socrates and Plato marks the breakthrough of the new educational idea: they speak out against the conven- tionalism and opportunism of the teachers of rhetoric and the sophists with a plea for a comprehensive reshaping of the human being. Paideia, or education as the forming of the human being for a latent or manifest imperial “big world,” not only is a founda- tional word of ancient philosophizing, but also identifies the pro- gram of philosophy as a political practice. It reveals that the birth
4 plato
of philosophy was conditioned by the emergence of a new, risky, and power-charged world system—today we call it that of urban cultures and empires. This system compelled a retraining of the human being in the direction of being fit for the city and the empire. To that extent one may claim that classical philosophy was a logical and ethical rite of initiation for an elite of young men—in rare cases also for women. Under the guidance of an advanced master, they were to reach the point of transcending their prior, merely familial and tribal conditioning in favor of a far-seeing and broad-minded urban and imperial humanity. Thus, philosophy is at its very outset invariably an initiation into the big, the bigger, the biggest; it presents itself as a school of the universal synthesis; it teaches how to think of the multifarious and the prodigious as a single, good unity; it introduces the individual to a life under rising intellectual and moral demands; it bets on the possibility of responding to the growing complexity of the world and the heightened majesty of God with a continuous effort at expand- ing the soul;7 it invites us to move into the mightiest new edifice: the house of Being; it wants to turn its students into residents of a logical acropolis; and it awakens in them the urge to be at home everywhere. As the goal of this exercise, Greek tradition offers us the term sophrosyne (prudence, self-control), Latin tradition the term humanitas. To the extent that the philosophical school of antiquity is thus paideia, an introduction into adult prudence that constitutes humanity, it carries out a kind of rite of transition to cultivate the “large-spirited” human who is suitable for the city and the empire. 8 It would be unconsidered to see in the values of paideia and humanitas merely nonpolitical ideals of personal charac- ter. That the wise man recognizes all humans as kin—is this doc- trine really only a humanitarian naiveté, born of an exaggerated expansion of the ethic of the family? 9 If one recalls the pinnacle of Europe’s culture of higher secondary schools between 1789 and 1945, it becomes clear that all European nation-states pursued a
plato 5
humanistic education system to prepare their youth to take on tasks within the framework of their national-imperial programs. As much as philosophy and education were already in antiquity oriented toward the individual, the emphasis in all the “work on oneself ” was initially and mostly on preparing the individual to be a “human being within a state. ” Only when the split between power and spirit had become very deep, as during the Roman Empire, did philosophy fall under the sway of the model of the autonomous wise man who has turned his back on the powers of this world.
Classical philosophy held out to its disciples the prospect that they could achieve serenity in a chaotic cosmos; the wise man is he who recognizes chaos as the mask of the cosmos. He whose gaze penetrates into the deeper structures gains the freedom of over- all mobility; no locus within Being is entirely foreign to him any longer; that is why the love of wisdom is the high school of exile. By designating—in a way as witty as it was programmatic—the wise man as a kosmopolités, as a citizen of the world, philosophy promised superiority over a universe that was, already in its very form, a vicious marketplace of gods, customs, and opinions—and simultaneously a battlefield on which multiple polities fought for hegemony. Too little attention has probably been paid to the fact that Plato’s youth—he was likely born in 427 bce—coincided entirely with the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce). The philos- opher’s ominous distance from empirical reality and the idealis- tic tendency—often faulted—to withdraw from the merely given are easier to understand if one bears in mind that in his younger years, Plato rarely experienced a world that was not distorted by the passions of war.
In modern parlance one would therefore describe classical philosophy as a discipline of orientation. If it wanted to promote itself, it could do so above all with the promise to transcend the confusion of existing conditions through an orderly return to secure foundations—in modern terminology one would speak of
6 plato
a reduction of complexity. The philosopher as the eliminator of malicious multiplicity bore traits of the leader of a mystery, who guided students into the realm of the first principles, from where one could acquire gratifying, sweeping overviews. But every ascent into higher stations demands its price. 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
plato 7
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
8 plato
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
plato 9
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
10 plato
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
plato 11
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
12 plato
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.
plato 13
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—
14
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
aristotle 15
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.