No More Learning

One must go back to the uni- verse of Bruno, Shakespeare, and Bacon to find the keys to largely
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unknown treasuries of incipient modernity. Like hardly a thinker before him, Bruno immersed himself into the cosmo-dynamic of memories. With his insights into the nature and function of memoria, Giordano Bruno can become the contemporary of those who today huddle around the brain as if it were the locus of the riddle of the universe. Because he emphasized the ars-character of remembrance and memory, Bruno is the first “art” philosopher of the modern era.
It is high time to blow off the dust from Bruno’s manuscripts to reveal what alone honors a thinker who was a master of Italian and Latin prose: the luminous literalness of his real thoughts.
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Descartes
Few periods in the history of thought have become as alien to contemporaries as the seventeenth century, which is usu- ally presented by the history books as the founding era of mod-
ern philosophy. It is, in fact, hardly possible for those born and thinking later to project themselves into a time when figures like Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes were still New Philosophers. Blinded by the historical import of the impulses that have come to be associated with these luminar- ies, we are barely still able to return with an unbiased eye to the epoch when what posterity liked to call the project of modernity was hardly more than a lively exchange of letters between a few dozen correspondents.
The optical illusions of history make what was initially merely a sophisticated premonition of the inner link between power and method seem like the departure into the age when technology
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seized power. The peculiarities of this seventeenth century also include the semimythical quality of its eminent authors: their attempts were credited as laying down foundations, and their programs as epochal turning points. It was not long before the conservative enemies of modernity eagerly adopted this mytho- logical mode, with the result that Descartes’s name could become a symbol for an immoderately self-confident humanity’s frivolous deviation from the divinely ordained order of things. It is not surprising that the restoration of the nineteenth century wanted to count Descartes—whose works had been on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books—among the distant pro- genitors of the French Revolution, as though it were only two or three steps from the foundation of thinking in the principle of cogito to the dissolution of all things. Descartes’s world, of course, is not that of the bourgeois revolution, but that of the wars of religion. The pathos with which he pursues the distinc- tion between certainties and probabilities in his fundamental works was also fed by the object-lesson that the religious civil war provided to contemporaries. For what else was the Thirty Years’ War between the confessional parties (which overlapped with virtually all of Descartes’s adult life) than the battle between mere probabilities that had leapt from the theological seminaries onto the battlefield?
Descartes countered this bearing of arms by the fanatics of probability with his avowal of absolute evidence and the secure and peaceful process of his method. Where method and evidence had won the upper hand, the philosopher suggested, armed reli- gious fanaticism and the presumptuous assertion of positions would have to make way, and what was left after the end of the war of inexactitudes could—ideally—be nothing other than the peaceful advance of all truth-loving minds along the secure paths of regulated and connecting reason. Descartes’s grand idea was to move thinking into a realm devoid of strife.
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In the history of thought there is probably no other author in whom the word method was charged with so many promises as in the case with Descartes. We clearly hear pacifist resonances in the overtones of the new idea of precision: this idea stands for self-confidence and solidarity, generosity and entrepreneurial spirit all in one. In his conception of method, Descartes publicly announced his renunciation of the dogmatic ballast of the Aris- totelian universities. In an elegant and antiauthoritarian man- ner, Cartesian reflection rebuffed the claims of tradition and its professors: he who has the power to begin anew need no longer engage in dialogues with the dead; he who turns a new page is for now exempt from the dialogue with history. With this mindset, the new philosopher no longer took a fancy to the argumenta- tive contests of a powerless and self-referential Sorbonne culture, which had long since lost the connection to the arts, the work- shops, and the counting houses. With the word method, Descartes threw open the windows on the present, and it turned out that this was a time when an invigorated human ability demanded to be placed on a new logical and moral foundation. It was as though Descartes, in so doing, had created, alongside the old nobility of blood and sword and the younger noblesse de robe, a separate nobil- ity of method, which recruited its members from all strata, pro- vided they were willing to swear an oath to clarity and lucidity. From the outset there was no doubt about the antifeudal char- acter of this group of individuals with new skills. Even if the philosophizing nobleman Descartes never gave reason to doubt his dual awareness of nobility, the inherited and the self-created, subsequent generations of bourgeois intelligentsia did recog- nize in him their natural ally. The Cartesian nobility of compe- tence gave rise to the class of minds who thought for themselves and without bias, a class that has formed the critical ferment of the European intelligentsia from the early modern period on. Still today, and not entirely without reason, the myth of the
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rationalistic national character of the French invokes the Carte- sian privileges of lucidity.
Within the history of theory, the phenomenon of Descartes describes a radical currency reform of reason. In an era of a gal- loping discourse inflation—triggered by unrestrained allegori- cal mechanisms and excrescences of theological word games— Descartes created a new criterion for what constituted meaning- ful speech, built upon the gold standard of evidence. The neces- sary conciseness of this criterion arises from the stipulation that from true propositions must always follow, on the one hand, good dispositions and, on the other, useful machines. As the author of the Discours de la méthode would declare: “Being of no use to anybody means the same as being worthless. ”
If Descartes’s name remained controversial through the ages, it was largely because he symbolized, more so than almost anyone else, the victory of the engineers over the theologians. He paved the way for a thinking that opened itself unconditionally to the task of the epoch: the building of machines. As a result, the non- machine-building forms of intelligence rightly feel devalued or repudiated by the Cartesian impulse. As the creator of the analyti- cal mythos, Descartes simultaneously created the “metaphysics”— as it were—of machine-building, in that he began to break down all of existence into the simple, smallest parts, and sought to make known the rules that govern their composition. By committing thought entirely to the back and forth of analysis and synthesis, he made reason itself conform to engineering and stripped it of its ancient, contemplative muse. Thoughts now become internalized forms of work, and the life of the mind itself is put on the path toward the production of useful things. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to believe that Descartes’s fundamental mechanistic con- viction had to lead invariably to a break with theological tradi- tion. Precisely in the methodologically new beginning of scientific thought, providing a foundation proves to be the real metaphysical
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activity. But since in the great philosophical rationalism only God can furnish the foundation of foundations, modern philosophy of the Cartesian type remains characteristically suspended between theology and machine theory. There is good reason why the great systems-architects of German Idealism celebrated Descartes as their precursor. For them, as for the great Frenchman, laying the foundation was the piety of thought. But the fact that conscious- ness had now been brought into the function of laying the foun- dation constituted the modernity of the transcendental approach. Only the dissolution of the foundation in the philosophy of con- sciousness in the twentieth century turned the Cartesian universe completely into a historical artifact. Descartes’s work remains rel- evant as a testimony to the very interlacing of science and con- templation that today, more so than ever before, imparts to philo- sophical thought its precarious dignity.
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Pascal
To anyone who was trained through authors like Goethe and Nietzsche to think in terms of elective affinities and elective enmities across epochs, the Pascalian renaissance of the
twentieth century presents itself as one of the most appropri- ate receptions in modern intellectual history. It is but a single step from the obvious to the necessary, and it was inevitable that the thinkers of Christian and non-Christian existentialism dur- ing the first half of the twentieth century sensed a kindred soul in Pascal. Did his own discomforts not anticipate those of our time? Was his melancholy not already that of a later modernity weary of Enlightenment? Was his discourse about humans not already congenial with the self-experience of a civilization that, in the twentieth century, struck fear and terror into the heart of humanity like never before: fear of itself and of the degeneration of its lofty projects?
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When Pascal, in a memorable turn of phrase, called the human being a “thinking reed,” who would not have understood this as an emblem for our newly experienced fragility? And when he spoke of humanity as a deposed king, who would not have thought about the large sociopolitical projects of our age, and of the end to the demiurgic excesses? The character masks of our time include the dethroned history-maker and the unmasked phyturgos (creator of nature)—two figures who seem to have stepped right out of Pas- cal’s anthropological Pensées. However, one cannot attribute Pas- cal’s remarkable accessibility—at least in some portions of his work—to the fact that his protoexistentialist tones facilitated the projective appropriations by those who later saw themselves as kindred spirits.
Pascal attracts the attention also of radical revisionist interests, whose intent is to deconstructively rethink the entire context of the Platonic-Christian history of ideas on the basis of fundamen- tal positions that are vitalistic or subject-critical. Nietzsche dem- onstrated how this relationship of elective enmity does not spare the luminaries of the ancient world: with a power of instantia- tion bordering on violence, the arch-deconstructionist Nietzsche challenged the founders of the moralized metaphysical view of the world—Socrates, Paul, and Augustine—to a duel on a battle- field that transcends the epochs. In this clash of the titans, Pascal is called upon as a fellow combatant, because Nietzsche perceives him as the highest reembodiment of the Augustinian genius on modern soil. Like his great predecessor, Pascal embodies a type of intelligence that is proud enough to be open to humiliations. It is only from a certain height of aspirations that the mind becomes vulnerable to the experience of failing itself. Inspired by Augustinian insights into human brokenness, Pascal began with a remapping of the scope of human greatness and human wretch- edness. In the process, not only did he uncover—in an original revelation—the correlation of knowledge and interest, which has
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remained alive down to contemporary discursive constellations, but he also exposed in classic fashion the dialectic between the rise in capabilities and the escalating experience of powerless- ness. In this regard he has become, deeper and more discrete than Descartes, the ancestor of modernity. But while Descartes tends to address his readers in a matutinal temper and in program- matic departures, Pascal is an author for nocturnal reading and an accomplice of our intimately fractured afterthoughts.
Nietzsche’s protracted aversion to the melancholy Christian mathematician is a testament—as eloquent as it is fair-minded (within limits)—to the author’s strengths. In Pascal, Nietzsche discovered what is to be most valued in an intellectual person: the sense of intellectual honesty that is also capable of turning against one’s own interest: fiat veritas, pereat mundus. Yet he simultaneously notices in him what he recognizes as the biggest danger: the pen- chant for miserabilism and for letting oneself sink into an affir- mative infirmity. If the non-Christian were to be instructed by the paradoxical Christian, it is chiefly where the latter pronounces his final verdict on the human condition: did Pascal not in fact anticipate Nietzsche’s theorem of the will to power with his talk of the désir de dominer in his Provincial Letter No. 14?
But when it comes to recapturing for the humanity of the future the possibility of a metaphysically unpoisoned self-love, Pascal is no ally, but an instructive and estimable opponent. He remains an indispensable ally for all those who wish to have self-understand- ing precede self-love. Pascal embodies the fundamental conflict of the modern world with an almost archaic intensity: the con- tradiction between the operative and the meditative mind. Were the modern scientific system capable of having something like a conscience, Pascal would have to be its guilty conscience, for his work attests to how the incisive and the profound mind could be conjoined. Together with Thomas Hobbes, Jean Baptiste Racine, and John Milton, Pascal stands as a dark, doubt-riven portal figure
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at the entryway to the modern world. The shadows of his pen- siveness had time to fall upon future generations. His paradoxes have imprinted their marks upon French literature down to the present: when Sartre still insisted on disliking himself in order to tear himself away from his own lethargic existence, or when Michel Leiris embraced the happiness of pronouncing his unhap- piness, these statements and attitudes move within a sphere that Pascal’s generous dialectic helped to create. If the intellectual his- tory of the last centuries were an account of the conjunctures of the absurd, Pascal’s place within it would be forever secure. He is the first among the philosophical secretaries of modern despair.
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leiBniz
Since the early nineteenth century, the public perception of philosophy in Germany has been shaped above all by two functional roles or character masks: that of the university teacher
and that of the freelance writer. With German Idealism, a clus- ter of professors had occupied the heavens of grand theory; now, civil-servant idealists in the late-feudal state enshrined the precarious unity of throne and philosophy. In figures with the stature of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel, the type of the profes- sor of philosophy attained the preeminent position within the res publica of the learned; Schelling’s gnosticizing princedom of theory provided a model for later prophesying from the lectern. In sharp contrast to this, in terms of both typology and the ecol- ogy of ideas, philosophical writers, especially during the post- 1848/1849 period and the era of Wilhelm II, created new strate- gies for literary and political communication with their public
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via contemporary marketplaces of ideas. As freelance writers, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Marx, and Nietzsche played the essen- tial part in surpassing the professors through the philosophy of the writers.
If one looks back at the phenomenon of Leibniz through the lens of this typology, his figure appears strangely remote and dis- torted. Seen against the backdrop of the philosophical imagines and investigative images of the twentieth century, the genius of Leibniz falls into a typological gap in which he becomes all but invisible—and if contemporary thought has not known how to reestablish a convincingly fruitful relationship with the work of the philosopher and scientist, the main reason is that it no longer understands the kind of type Leibniz was.
To understand the oeuvre and theoretical temperament of this great scholar and comprehend them on his own terms, it is imper- ative to reconstruct the typological locus or the field in which Leibniz pushed himself up to such monumental and polymor- phous height. The Leibnizean field of theory sees the merger of two shaping forces that cannot be adequately grasped from either the professorial or the literary form of philosophical thought. The first matrix of the Leibnizean Wissenskunst (knowledge-art) is the magical universal science of the Renaissance along with its sub- sequent developments during the Baroque. Leibnizean univer- salism, which a romanticizing history of philosophy erroneously turned into a matter of genius, represented in truth the outflow of an epistemological-magical ideal that had asserted itself from the fifteenth century on in numerous potent incarnations. The phenomenon of Leibniz stands in typological succession to the Renaissance magus and the Baroque universal scholar. Among his predecessors, who molded the polyvalent scientific enthusiasm of the early modern period, are such luminous names as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Girolamo Cardano, Giordano Bruno, and Athanasius Kircher; Leonardo da Vinci also belongs to this
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kinship system of individuals who did everything, attempted everything, endeavored everything.
It was the task of the early modern development of science and knowledge to guide these “Faustian” impulses—whose wild forms ended up, typical of the modern age, in charlatanism—onto institutional pathways. It is no coincidence that one of the prin- cipal concerns of Leibniz as an organizer of science was to direct the progress of knowledge onto suprapersonal tracks by setting up academies. Where there had been magic, there were now to be polytechnics. Although the civilizing of universalism by plac- ing it on an academic footing eventually necessitated a division into subjects and specialization, in Leibniz himself the power of the older, magical encyclopedism continued to operate, discretely but unbroken. It speaks to his success in providing impulses for the modern organization of science that soon after his death, posterity was barely able to comprehend him as a temperament and a type. As the last, most brilliant, and most cool-minded of the Faustian doctors, he paved the way for the triumph of a non- Faustian science.
But the typological riddle that is Leibniz goes beyond the men- tion of his eminent place within the expiring history of philo- sophical-scientific encyclopedism; it does more than point to the state of philosophical thinking before the sciences became dif- ferentiated into separate entities. Leibniz is difficult to grasp with modern concepts of philosophy also because the better part of his intellectual activities unfolded within premodern or half-modern contexts. Not without ulterior motive, the portraits of Leibniz in the official histories of philosophy show the thinker wearing an elaborate courtly wig. This detail of his physical habits illustrates quite reliably his place within the theoretical scene of his day. Leibniz is, indeed, the court-intellectual par excellence—and this not only in an occasional and opportunistic function, as was the case, for example, with Descartes, who made himself available for
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several months as a conversation partner to Queen Christine of Sweden, or Voltaire, who corresponded with Frederick of Prussia and Catherine the Great. What became concentrated in Leibniz was a now largely forgotten phase in the intellectual history of Europe. His intellectual role was entirely that of the argumenta- tive diplomat, the courtier-theorist, the cameralist and princely advisor, the respondent and correspondent. It would be difficult to make sense of what were for Leibniz characteristic intellectual exercises if one fails to recall the courtly alliances—however prob- lematic—of power and intellect that formed the basis of his prag- matic work. Leibniz is the prince of the consultants to princes, the supreme exemplar of a forgotten secretarial art, which spun peculiar, theory-saturated relationships between the rulers of territorial states and their learned doctors. It is only within this context that one can understand the traits in the profile of Leib- niz’s activities that will not fit into any later cliché about philoso- phers: Leibniz the project-designer and discreet idea-prompter to small-state diplomacy, the litigant and traveler on behalf of princely business, the author of memoranda and appeals in tan- gled legal-political affairs, the legitimist and historiographer of matters relating to the House of Hanover.
Only the convergence of the courtly intellectual and multi- tasker with the Baroque universal scholar could bring about the specific Leibniz effect—that marvel of intellectual polyathleti- cism in which the happily restless, proficiency-addicted, multi- focused intellect of the thinker radiated in all directions. Like a Sun King of thought, Leibniz exhausted himself in countless departments of reason. If the concept of courtly philosophy ever made sense, it did so in his case. There is good reason why the notion of perspective played a sustaining role in the work of this philosopher-diplomat. Leibniz’s cheerfulness represents a world in which the Cabinet Wars of reason could still be constrained by an unshakeable confidence in harmony. In their disciplined
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optimism, his metaphysical treatises betray an author who sees himself as charged with the diplomatic representation of Being. In his theodicy, Leibniz not only defends the perfection of God’s world against objections raised about it by human discontent; with the brilliant formalism of his arguments, he also attests to the excellence of a state of affairs in which God can have the best of all possible lawyers defend the perfection of his world. Com- petent activity all around: according to Leibniz, that is the surest way—within human limitations—to imitate God, the one who interconnects all in everyday life.
By defining human subjectivity as competent and informed activity that is endlessly perfectible, he made his contribution to the formation of the modern subject as the entrepreneur of Being in its totality. The brightness and dispassionate friendli- ness of the Leibnizian world is grounded in the circumstance that its subject is allowed to move, still without any scruples, as the agent of a rational deity within a universe rich in perspectives and full of mysteries worthy of investigation. In post-Leibnizian worlds, the relationship of loyalty between Subject and Being seems destroyed, and with the rise of existentialisms, life philoso- phies, and systems theories, the optimistic fit between subjective and objective reason was lost. Ever since, the subjects have found themselves entangled in total wars of various types of reason; as agents, they are at the behest of uncomprehended majesties. For the future history of humankind it will be important to regenerate a principle of optimism (or at least a principle of nonpessimism) with post-Leibnizian means. If that were to happen, who would rule out the possibility that future generations will find their most important inspiration in Leibniz?
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kant
Immanuel Kant’s critical work launches the parallel action between the French Revolution and German philosophy that contemporaries already had taken note of as an epochal con-
stellation. Indeed, in both movements—as in their shared pre- conditions, namely the industrial and monetary revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—there took place the breakthrough to the bourgeois age, which ever since has deserved to be called the modern world. The philosophy of Kant is bourgeois in several respects: it is civil, because it lays claim to the emancipation of philosophical thought from the tutelage of theology and of positive and revealed religion. Kant clung to this position with existential consistency: when the faculty and student body at the University of Königsberg walked, festively arrayed, from the assembly hall to the church on the dies academicus in order to profess, on this occasion, the unity of the academic
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and the religious community, Kant would pointedly step out of the line and set out for his home by circumventing the church. In this instance, a bourgeois identity meant taking the civil side in the alternative between monastic and civil philosophy posited by Vico. How seriously Kant took this matter is evident, not least, from the fact that he struggled, turning his back on traditional forms of monastic and ecstatic transcendences, to come up with a bourgeois transcendence. He believed he had found its core in that free moral action by the individual which, motivated neither by success nor hope, does the right thing simply out of respect for the moral law—and out of respect for oneself as the subject distinguished from everything else that exists as the subject of that freedom.
Kant’s thinking is bourgeois for another reason: it articulates itself at the boundary between the academic community and the general public, and it appeals even in its technically most diffi- cult parts (at least potentially) to the critically won consensus that is supposed to emerge out of the discourse on public matters by those who understand. When Kant steps forward as a writer, he does so in the sincerely naive expectation that the archetypal assembly of bourgeois society around the profane book will repeat itself also in the reception of his writings. Here, the bourgeois way of being takes on the meaning of learned republicanism. Kant’s historical moment is thus not only the birth of bourgeois soci- ety in the political sense; his work simultaneously falls within the golden age of the Gutenberg era: it shares in its genius by docu- menting how the self-reading of the Reformation evolved into the self-thinking of idealistic classicism.
There is a third way, still, in which Kant’s thought is shaped by a fundamental bourgeoisness: Kant conceives of the place of the human being in the world neither as cosmopolitanism in the sense of the ancient wisdom teachings, nor as creatureliness under God in the sense of medieval theology: the Kantian person is
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fundamentally a fellow member of the species and in this respect a citizen of the world. Of course, the Kantian world-polis, unlike the ancient polis, is not the result of a transfer of the urban idea of order to the universe; rather, it springs from the application of the notion of freedom and self-assertion to the totality of beings capable of reason, that is, the human race in the kind of universal or global scope that Europeans were compelled to conceptualize after the age of discovery and colonization. That is why Kant’s world citizenry is transmuted into the continuation of Chris- tian holiness by means of civil and international law. It demands from each individual not only that he become a useful member of his national community, but also—and above all—that he prove himself as a functionary of the species with the capacity for rea- son; finding the future form of the political life of this species is something that those willing to embrace reason conceive of as an infinite task. The Kantian world citizens are saints in frock coats, and like their predecessors in the Roman arenas, they, too, are to commit their lives to realizing the empire of reason in the circus of the modern state. It is no coincidence that logical socialists and logical theocrats were also found among the Neo-Kantians—the “would-be saints” of the modern world. They are athletes of the reasonable coexistence with all other members of the species. The pax Kantiana encompasses the world community of the rea- sonable as in some kind of minimalist church. It is the church of the autonomous subjects, who recite their critical theories like creeds. In Kant, the embers of a fundamentalism of reason smol- der below the skeptical-humanist ashes. In his civil religion, saints are to become lawyers and heroes parliamentarians.
Finally, one must speak of Kant’s bourgeoisness in a fourth respect: Kant is the cofounder of a new philosophical genre, anthropology, whose task is to speak—from the bourgeois heights—about the pre- and extrabourgeois foundations of being human: it deals with humanity in the way it is determined as a
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species and constituted by nature. Ever since Kant, being an anthropologist means interpreting humanity no longer directly through the nonhuman (the animal) and the suprahuman (God). Anthropology in the modern style is possible only after it has become clear that the human being is the hyperbolic domestic animal which, to the extent that it becomes rational, must look to its own breeding. It can no longer be defined by God’s supposed breeding or the presumed diktat of an immediate nature—it is, to put it anachronistically, condemned to educate itself. This is all the more true since one also finds in the emancipated person— and especially in the emancipated person—the proclivity for radi- cal evil. For Kant, the paternalism of God is as unbearable as the obtrusiveness of his own natural urges, and in his eyes it is only the daily self-liberation in both directions that places the human being in the bourgeois center as the locus of freedom: nowhere else can the individual successfully pursue his destiny of sponta- neous self-formation.
Kant’s zeal is to return the passions to bourgeois propor- tions and to dissolve everything overwhelming into tireless self- assertion. In this, he is the essential thinker of modernity, to the extent that this was the age that wanted to learn how to make a home for itself in civilized finiteness. There is good reason why one of the foundational words of Kant’s thinking is: boundary. According to Kant, the thinking that calls itself postmetaphysical is one that has ways not to delete metaphysics, but to replace it. And in truth, the modern world inaugurates the age of substitutability—or in modern parlance: of functional equivalents. Kant’s own replace- ment for metaphysics has traits of a shrewd transaction: instead of participating as an uncertain vassal of the absolute in illusory trea- sures, the master of Königsberg decided to administer a wealth of clarifications as the master of the house in his own right. At times this was misunderstood as a resignation before higher claims; yet elements of resignation played no role at the core of what
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motivated Kant. His compass pointed unerringly at sovereignty, and like a wise businessman who restructures his assets in a crisis, Kant withdrew his deposits from the enterprise of metaphysics, which was no longer creditworthy, in order to invest them in more solid businesses of greater clarity. In a world replete with dangers of expropriation, use one’s own reason like an inalienable wealth: with this motto, Kant professed his zeal in embracing the adven- ture of clarity against all temptations of impoverished thinking and depression.
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fichte
Philosophy remains a fruitless enterprise without an awak- ening of the whole individual to it: among philosophers of the modern age, there is no one—with the exception of Martin
Heidegger—who taught this insight with as much vehemence and profundity of principle as Johann Gottlieb Fichte. After him, no one could reach the focal point of essential thinking who had not torn himself away, in an existentially transformative turnaround, from his prior belief in the superiority of the things in front of him and outside of him. You must change your life: that is the cantus firmus of all thinking under the banner of the modern idea of freedom. But changing oneself means above all: to forgo explain- ing oneself through the circumstances. Fichte demonstrated what it means to be teacher of idealism in the age of the bourgeoi- sie. In his speeches and writings there unfolds—with thunder- ous eloquence, powerful discernment, and fanatical loyalty to an
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arduous fundamental idea—the new doctrine of the all- transforming dignity of subjectivity. In the power of its presen- tation, Fichte’s doctrine illustrates the coincidence of analysis and appeal, of argument and initiation. As a logician, Fichte was always also a psychagogue, as a theoretician always also an agitator and master of spiritual exercises. The creator of the scientific doc- trine left posterity with the irritating impulse of an argumenta- tive prophetism; with that, he painted the glaring antithesis to the lethargic or athletic calculation involving the stock of problems that has been, since the nineteenth century, inseparable from the spiritless operation of the higher schools.
Referring to Fichte’s appellatory genius is thus more than recalling the national-pedagogical masterpiece “Speeches to the German Nation,” which the philosopher delivered in Berlin, putting his very life at risk, under the eyes of the French occupy- ing power. In these speeches he came out with the epochal self- confidence of a man who seems to know that only a world spirit at the lectern would be able to provide a remedy to the world spirit on horseback. If Bonaparte appeared on the world stage as the founder of a bourgeois empire, Fichte countered with the founda- tion of his empire of the spirit on the stage of ideas. Many clichés about the struggle between French Materialists and German Ide- alists that reverberate to this day have their substantive origins in this antithesis. Fichte’s function as the voice in the wilderness, which he simultaneously discovered and justified, was rooted in the principle of his philosophy itself, according to which seizing freedom means no less than a resurrection from the dead—the very dead that we have always been in Fichte’s mind, as long as we, dazed by the appearance of the objectively independent Being before us, vegetate in the idol worship of external reality. In the eyes of the furious teacher of freedom, the bourgeois world as a whole is a realm of the dead: for over the thoughts, motives, and works of the overwhelming majority is spread the veil of dogmatic
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and ontological delusion. Whoever lives under the spell of this death-bringing ignorance of the self could, as Fichte put it, be led more likely to think of himself as a piece of lava from the moon than as an I.
Fichte’s implacable intervention lays bare a consequential dilemma in the critical moral communication in modern societ- ies: How is the communication between the living and the liv- ing dead to be accomplished? How can the nonalienated turn toward the alienated in the first place? Indeed, must the living not always despair of the unconvertible dead? From the days of early philosophy every society in Europe had to deal with the provocations from an elite of those who are truly alive and who truly understand. The civil war between the philosophical spirit and the common mind is a constant in the intellectual history of old Europe. But where the ancient wise wrapped themselves in silence before the unchangeably stupid mass, the modern wise, as teachers of enlightenment, must go on the pedagogical offensive. The fundamentalism of conscious living reached a principled acu- ity in Fichte.
And in fact, under the enlightened, vicious glance of the phi- losophers, the entire sphere of society presents itself for the first time as an alienated world, populated by beings whose roots of the ability to be free have been cut off by their erroneous belief in the autonomous, a priori existence of things: the alienated human spends his days as a slave of his subjection to a prearranged mas- sif of facts. For him, the autonomous thing is master; where the thing rules, death is in power. But the scientific doctrine—along with its moral supplement: the instructions for a blessed life—is the logical trumpet that sounds the resurrection from the grave of objectivism. Anyone who hears and understands it can raise himself up to be a partisan of freedom. The resurrected subject will feel the urge to volunteer for the campaign of moral moder- nity by which the ancien régime of internal and external obstacles to
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humanity shall be overthrown once and for all; its place shall and must be taken by a realm of reason-guided freedom, which has never before been realized on earth. The future as projected by the idealist will be moral and reasoned, or there will not be one. For Fichte there was simply no doubt that the logical-moral res- urrection of the subjects and the political revolution of the polity converged. It was his conviction that it had to be possible to bring to an end the age of perfected sinfulness and the wanton persis- tence of all bearers of error in their positions, just as the obsolete feudal constitution of society had witnessed its deserved downfall in the French Revolution.
As the discoverer of alienated subjectivity, Fichte stands at the beginning of an era of mighty projects of philosophical emanci- pation, by which the great politics of Eigentlichkeit (authenticity) was called onto the stage: where there was alienation, there was to be Eigentlichkeit—be it the authenticity of the political commune, which self-examines and governs itself, or be it the authenticity of God, who shines through in overflowing teachers and moral entrepreneurs. Use yourself to bring forth a better world: that is the categorical imperative of the idealist. In fact, wherever the hope was kept alive that modern societies could, their systematic entelechies notwithstanding, in the end form something like a reasonable identity, Fichte was always present as an explicit and implicit ally.
Looking back over the age of great moral politics, we recog- nize, of course, how such lofty hopes have dragged humanity into a potentially violent cycle of enthusiasms and disillusionment. It would appear that after all of this, we are not condemned to free- dom, but to a clarification of our illusions from the purview of our dreams of freedom. If our age, rightly or wrongly, describes itself so frequently as an epoch of postmetaphysical thinking, it does so not least because, mindful of the two-hundred-year-long pro- cess of heroic philosophies of freedom, it has come to mistrust the
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prophetic moral competence of master thinkers willing to employ violence. To be sure: it would go too far to place the blame for the disasters of modernity on the shoulders of the great philoso- phers. And yet, one should investigate what is true in the suspi- cion against all big thinking, which posits the thesis that whoever sows illusions in the technological age will reap world wars. The epoch of ideologies or secular religions did in fact turn for us into a school of disenchantment: the manic privilege of the great phi- losophy of history, namely, to measure the movement of the world solely by the compass of reason and freedom, has been dashed by the power of circumstances. That is why a renewed analytical or deconstructivist caution, regardless of whether it is pursuing psychological or sign-critical paths, must draw its consequences from the failure of those ideologies that have become embroiled in modernity’s calamitous history as enthusiasms that assumed global power.
By all rights, this dearly bought skepticism—one could call it postillusionistic—may also encompass Fichte’s work and reputa- tion, for he is the true progenitor of the lofty delusion that the life of the human species proceeds in accordance with a fixed plan, which will surely be attained because it must be and is supposed to be attained. Fichte’s continuing importance—he himself would surely not have shied away from the term immortality—is thus not found in the area of prophetic history. The necessary unity of rea- son, morality, and the course of the world postulated by Fichte no longer impresses anyone today. We have also moved far away from the idealistic victim-habit of wasting a person as the medium of a transpersonal reason. Fichte’s greatness will reveal itself above all to those who muster the patience to immerse themselves in his analysis—unsurpassed in its lucidity—of the structures of sub- jectivity. Only after Fichte could the question of what it actually means to be an “I” become a provocation to Western thinking. Fichte therefore remains an involuntary ally of all those who, even
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under the impression of the advancing technological remaking of all concepts of the world and life, wish to take their orienta- tion from the non-indifference of the fact that I can experience myself as “I. ” It is precisely when the excesses of the doctrines of autonomous subjectivity have been overcome that the mystery of the possibility of I-ness truly shines quite clearly within the scat- tered totality of the world. The radiance of this mystery will for- ever retain some of the light of Fichte’s intelligence. Fichte’s “I” is an action that liberates a moral teaching: where the I experiences itself, it means the impossibility of being pitiful. Even if one posits that God is a meaningless concept, an existential impulse of incal- culable consequence flows from the I-ness described with Fichte’s means. I am to take the fact of my existence as myself as lightly and as seriously as though my I-ness were God’s last chance.
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hegel
One must be at the end of one’s rope to be able to speak the truth—this conviction is woven into all of Hegel’s work like a tear-resistant thread. With it, Hegel elevated the fundamen-
tal motif of Plato’s epistemology to monumental heights: realiz- ing means remembering; comprehending means reconstructing. The thinker whose system has been described—not without good reason—as the consummation of occidental or Christian-Pla- tonic metaphysics was by his very nature the metaphysician of perfection. After Hegel, thinking philosophically means bringing home the harvest of existence; but the only thing that makes it home is what can make itself at home in everything: the spirit. In Hegel, this spirit takes its time; it has and makes history: by way of skulls and step-by-step it enters into the final domesticity, its own self; the wine of truth is extracted from a late harvest. Hegel’s typical times are therefore fall and evening; his preferred figure
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of thought is the deduction; his innermost color is gray, so closely associated with the night. Under his gaze, all scenery becomes an evening landscape, every view must become a final tableau. Ter- minal knowledge appears at the advanced hour, when the concept disconnects itself from the experience in order to arrange itself in balance sheets for all eternity. Having lived means everything. A life lived to the end will have been a good one if the completed life is tantamount to the permeation of the spirit completing pos- session of itself. Such a striving for entry into fullness shows that Hegel’s spirit, too, for all the newly won openness to Becoming, is aimed at a time after the end of time.
If Becoming is a school, it must eventually lead to a gradua- tion; if it is a process, it cannot lack the moment of judgment. In this sense, Hegel is the thinker of maturity; his phenomenology as well as his encyclopedia offer programs for a reason that must pass through a specific curriculum. Only in the name of matu- rity can the historical and the metaphysical meaning be reduced to a common denominator. If the spirit accedes to its diffusion through time, it does so only in order to mature through it for the end of time and the time beyond time. Our attachment to what is temporary shall pass, until everything has transmuted into ash and knowledge. In Hegel the secret of ancient philoso- phy is revealed: that thinking metaphysically has always meant thinking in consummations. Hegel had the courage to answer the question about the “when” of consummation with reference to himself; his response was: now. Through dialectic, grandiosity assumes method. Thanks to his system, Hegel believed that he had thought his way into the timeless heart of Time. The spirit that speaks through his work has found reason for the thesis: my time is ripe; the world process as a whole has gone on the record; today what I began back in the day when I rose in the East must be perfected. What was passion has become archive. All ear- lier thinking, contemplated from Hegel’s late Now, appears as
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preparatory and forward-leading to qualifying the spirit in itself as the Absolute. If the moment of the consummation of knowl- edge has arrived, it divides time into a “prior” and a “here-and- now. ” The capacity for the “here-and-now” is a function of “being at one’s end. ” But where, through Hegel, metaphysics expresses itself in such elevated richness, it also becomes ripe for queries by spirits of contradiction: Can mere humans, can finite intellects be at the end in any meaningful way? Can they claim of them- selves—with reasons that are more than overblown pretensions— that they themselves signal and embody the end?
Accounting for the magic and the terror of metaphysics of the Hegelian type is that it still found the strength to answer these questions with a resolute Yes. This Yes divides the mass of mortals into participants and nonparticipants in the consummation; this division of humanity can be largely equated with that of individu- als who understand Hegel and those who are unable to. Hegel and his followers are thus the ones who share in the consummation of knowledge. They become finite pillars of the infinite that has penetrated to itself, safely sheltered within the unending end of history. Though most mortals cling to the provisional and live out their lives miserably in obfuscations and self-will, for the philoso- phers of consummation it is beyond doubt that the circle of the spirit’s self-realization has been able to close in elevated individ- uals. From Hegel’s perspective, such exceptions to the norm of human smallness are rightly called world-historical individuals, provided they are functionaries and subjects of the consumma- tion of the world and of knowledge. Under the aspect of perfec- tion and consummation, the great thinker is intimately bound up with the great doer. In a dream sequence of his Wintermärchen (A Winter’s Tale), Heinrich Heine describes a hooded figure who fol- lows closely behind the poet with an ax in its hand: “I am the deed to your thoughts. ” Hegel could have, in dream and in real life, confronted the conqueror and legislator Napoleon with the
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pronouncement: I am the thought to your deed. That means no less than that the political history of the world would have arrived at its end “chiefly” through the establishment of the postrevo- lutionary bourgeois state under the rule of law. In this state the working-through of the spirit for the freedom of all would have developed to the consummate fact; the recognition of all through all would have been formally carried out through the entry of all into the status of citizenship. Hegel was evidently willing—to the degree to which this accomplishment was to be attested with personal names—to link the name of the violent Corsican with his own; in fact, above the names of both there stands—in spite of weighty differences between the French Empire and Hegelian Prussia—a common sign: the breakthrough to the accomplished constitutional state. From the perception of world history, Code Civil and Philosophy of Law are in tune. The way in which the proper names of Hegel or Napoleon appear in the finale of the lofty tale of the good end of history makes evident how, in Hegel’s logic, the individual is reconciled with the general: by wearing themselves out in what appear to be their own missions, the great individuals play their role in the heroic epic of the universal events of freedom and truth; by exerting their powers to the utmost in the arena of contemporary doing and thinking, the individu- als transform themselves into crystals of the Absolute; their life becomes bright under a sky of supreme significances. In this con- text, being significant means having captured a place in the Whole as something incidental. The eminent human being is always a worker in the vineyard of consummations. Hegel’s doctrine of the Great Man encapsulates the essence of his theology of specialness; it replaces the nobility of the sword of the feudal age with the nobility of meaning for philosophical-bourgeois historiography. Just as in the tradition of Saint John the word became flesh so as to mediate God to the world, in Hegel’s doctrine of specialness, the world spirit becomes an individual and dwells among us—and
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why not, then, in the shape of generals, classicists, and professors? So much the better for contemporaries if they are capable of per- ceiving their glory on horseback or at the lectern—not to forget the book fairs, where everything also revolves around their appear- ance. The great individual is entirely illuminated by significance; he burns up without a remnant in his historical task, so as to be no more than a figure in its constellation. If the small individual remains unmentionable, because—once one subtracts his desires for prestige devoid of any accomplishments—there is nothing of significance to say, the great individual transforms himself into pure pronouncement. He becomes entirely deed, a realized figure, a pure cross between strength and moment. He sublates himself in the transfiguration-body of his deeds and creations.
One may call the effects of Hegel’s thinking prodigious in the full sense of the word. It spawned a school and a counterschool; it provoked the instincts of preservation as much as those of revolt. His undecidable hovering between dissolving and fixating all things allowed both revolutionaries and sclerotics to invoke Hegel convincingly. If one discovered in Lenin’s brain ideas of revolution and calcifications, both stemmed from the master’s legacy. Already in Hegel himself, especially in his Berlin honors, it was never quite clear whether everything was in flux or everything had settled down. Alongside the order-thinkers who wanted to inherit Hegel’s realm like some constitutional monarchy, agitated choruses of learned malcontents stepped onto the stage who rebelled against the prospect of spending the rest of their days as pensioners of consummated idealism.
Ever since Hegel, it can be denied that history is essentially over. Much remains to be done in the world—this becomes the battle cry of post-Hegelian rational politics; there are still things unsaid in the house of the self—this becomes the guiding idea of the creations of post-Hegelian discourse. New dancing stars still wish to be born, stars about whom no retrospective knows
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anything. A forward-driving interest in the unfinished awakens; the unredeemed, unliberated announces its claims to cultural and philosophical consideration. Reconciliation now wants to be con- ceived of much more broadly than any idealist ever contemplated. All thinking that dates itself in Hegelian manner after Hegel pro- fesses an interest in postponing the consummation until justice has been done also to entities still unreconciled—be they the proletariat, women, the body, the earth, the mad, the child, the animal. Every one of these themes has become the subject of a specific millenarianism. The play of consummation denial and reconciliation postponement in the name of an unredeemed group shapes the struggles of ideas in the nineteenth and twenti- eth centuries, on the Marxist as well as the existentialist wings— to mention only the two mightiest post-Hegelianisms. In all of these endeavors, the hour of consummation was suspended until a later time—history itself became a fighting game for additional demands. All young Hegelians are ontological irridentists. Too much illness and too much alienation are fracturing the world for the also-grieved and also-alienated intelligentsia to be allowed to indulge in the enlightened after-work hours. Eventually, the party that attacked the claim of consummation had to be driven to the point at which the motif of consummation itself was shattered. The modern world conceives of itself as the essentially never- consummated, and its theory must bring itself to reflect this fact. Thus, no moment in time is suitable any longer to be the Now of the consummated present. The postponement steals the march on the present; Being needs to be understood as time. The inter- est in identity is overtaken by that in difference; dissemination gains the upper hand over collection; postponement is playing its game already in the very heart of presence. There commences an age to which projects and credits mean more than retrospectives and sums; in it, the theoretical need can longer satisfy itself in vespertine surveys of what has been achieved.
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In fact, postmetaphysical reason is condemned to an orien- tation toward the future. The future is what mere thought can- not cope with. Whether the future will bring salvation remains uncertain for those alive today. Is it not more likely that in the future, too, one will have to save oneself from saviors? After all the Hegelianizing experiments with the real, we know that an ail- ing world cannot be helped with crude, effusive remedies. Not a few disappointed metaphysicians are now confessing their resent- ment against an ungrateful and incurable reality. Like resigned clinicians, they tend to send this world, this incorrigible world, home to die. Yet the rage of these helpless helpers matters little. One may ask whether philosophers, after everything that has hap- pened, can continue to think of themselves as the physicians of culture, at all. Should they come to terms with the fact that they seem more unmasked than those who also cannot help? Have not other helpers, other healers long since supplanted them with the public—and for reasons that can hardly be refuted for the time being? What can thinkers still fascinated by the magic of consum- mation accomplish in the future other than warning their clients of themselves? Is not the point now to mature into immaturity? The remembrance of Hegel and the resplendent wretchedness of his successes may be useful for understanding why, in the method- ological quarrel of the world physicians, individual philosophers— post-Hegelian as well as non-Hegelian—will continue to have their say, even if much more modestly.
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Schelling
The image of the philosopher Schelling is shaped above all by the shimmering myth of his youth. With a demonic-seeming self-assurance, the twenty year old assumed the leadership of
German philosophy around 1800, which at that time, as the spiri- tual supplement to the French Revolution, as it were, represented the avant-garde of world thought. Writing in radiant prose, the young Schelling drafted a series of systemic sketches that per- formed, before the eyes of an amazed public, a celestial journey of speculative reason. He seemed to have discovered a process of speaking from the vantage point of the Absolute as though from a secure position. No matter what objects the young man touched, everything transformed itself under his vigorous diction into a flight of fancy and speculative thunderstorm. It was as though the goal was to prove that finally a confidant of God was once again among us. Schelling drove the tone of finality to the extreme and
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elevated the oscillation between extreme viewpoints into the rank of a process. When he carried out the leap from Fichtean phi- losophy of consciousness to natural philosophy, the reputation of frivolity—indeed, inconsistency—attached itself to him, though it would escape most of his critics that there was a plausible meth- odology in this about-face. And so it was no surprise that from an early point in his career, he already encountered not only admir- ing sympathy, but also skepticism and hostile suspicion. It is not true that Schelling—as Hegel spitefully remarked—underwent his education in front of the audience; but it is true that the young author, overwhelmed by his own élan, also produced himself before a public in which there were many who stared at his bril- liant feats with the lizard gaze of unmoved mediocrity. Yet this hardly mattered, as long as Schelling was able to hold his ground as the idol of the early generation of Romantics. His evangelical fanfare about nature creatively at work within us sounded irre- sistible. His youthful work, especially from the time of Schelling’s felicitous association with the well-disposed Goethe, reflects a pleromatic world-moment—it attests to a singular omnipotence of intelligence in the fullness of its epoch. It may be that this Schellingian moment has lapsed irretrievable into the past; nev- ertheless, out of it there arose a problem in which contemporary thinking can also recognize itself. For in his abrupt turn to natural philosophy, Schelling discovered the motif of the enabling past of consciousness without which there would not exist the categories of the subconscious and of cognitive evolution, which are crucial to modern thought. It is only in their Mesmerian-magical atti- tude that Schelling’s breakthroughs to logical modernity remain bound to the Romantic horizon; substantively, Schelling pursued a natural history of freedom as the early developmental stage of reason. In fact, the young philosopher listened carefully—like an eager midwife—at the womb of nature pregnant with spirit, so as to discern deep within it the heartbeat of a self-consciousness as
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yet unborn. From his assistance in the birth of consciousness from the still unconscious, Schelling derived the insight that would make him the primus among the great theoreticians of art in the modern age.
There is a second myth about Schelling, this one concerning the darkening of the mind of the aging genius. Some believed they could detect in the later Schelling the sadness of the fallen angel, and have tried to interpret the trajectory of his life as the unavoid- able decline after a beginning at an unsurpassable height—as though we were dealing with a Rimbaud of speculative reason. Some writers went so far as to ponder what kind of image of Schelling would have been passed down if the hero of the mighty intellect had died—like Novalis—as a young man. It is indeed true that the later Schelling made it difficult for all those who were interested only in idealistic hero-worship. The second half of his life stood undeniably in the shadow of a growing complication. This did not have the character of a decline, however, but attests to a magnificent process of growing seriousness and compelling advancement in the awareness of difficulties. In hidden decades, Schelling succeeded in breaking the illustrious vise of his appar- ent perfection at an early age, and shifted the foundations of his thinking into layers of problems to which no idealistic thinker before him had penetrated. Now the terror at the heart of the world became visible to him, and he recognized melancholy as the deepest stratum of nature. In incomparably dense and dark stud- ies, he contemplated Evil as an attractive world power; he probed the eerie power of the Base to set itself up as the Lofty as the sin- ister driving force behind the course of the world; he brooded on the unfathomable abyss of God with a tenacity that seemed less suited to Munich in the early nineteenth century than to Alexan- dria in the third century ce.
If one wanted to give a label to the thrust of Schelling’s later works, one would have to speak of the conquest of brokenness.
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Schelling’s late oeuvre offers the first great monument to a post- narcissistic exertion of reason. His contemplation immerses itself in the finiteness and historicity of reason; it gives room to the inkling that philosophy’s reach for the One and the Whole of the nature of reality and the openness of becoming has always missed the mark. In many respects, but above all where Schelling brings out the precedence of the future within the fabric of time, this thinking anticipates the new beginning of philosophical ques- tioning in Heidegger. Schelling’s late oeuvre was erected in pro- tracted, virtually subterranean processes far removed from the everyday journalistic excitations of the Vormärz era, and entirely in the shadow of Hegel’s triumphalist seductions. The result was the unfair appearance that the older Schelling represented merely a classical relic who had remained bound to positions that had been overtaken by the Zeitgeist.
That impression was reinforced by the debacle of Schelling’s Berlin lectures on the philosophy of revelation, when the sixty- five-year-old philosopher failed before an initially fascinated but then bored audience with his theosophical and historiosophical elusions. Schelling contributed in no small measure to the mis- judgment of himself, above all because he was barely able to mus- ter the strength to finish a treatise and hid from completing major works he was planning in endless procrastination—as though he were belatedly frightened by his early heroic accomplishments. Added to this was that his later style became clouded and con- voluted and rarely again found its way back to the “resonant cer- tainty of victory” of his early pronouncements. In Schelling’s late style, with its wondrous complexity and melancholy chiaroscuro, there manifests itself the difficult farewell to the epoch’s dream of the omnipotence of reason. Schelling’s late prose shows the pain- ful mask of an idealism that must rally its best forces to bring itself back within the boundaries of mortal reflection. At the same time, idealism’s self-restraint was for Schelling the necessary condition
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for opening thinking up to the future. It is here that the philoso- phy of the Not-Yet takes its beginning.
In Schelling’s magnificent turning away from the unseemly grandiosities of reason, the signature of contemporary think- ing reveals itself authentically for the first time. Schelling’s most prominent student, King Maximilian of Bavaria, was ahead of the received opinion of his day when he had these words carved into the memorial to the philosopher who died in 1854: “To the first thinker of Germany. ” Neither Neo-Kantianism, nor Neo- Hegelianism, nor the phenomenological movement inaugu- rated by Husserl was able to entirely disavow the royal verdict. Through the variety of his work and the exertions of his pathways of thought, Schelling conveyed to posterity an idea of the price of maturity.
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Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer was the first eminent thinker who left the Western Church of Reason. Alongside Marx and the Young Hegelians, it was he who carried out the revolutionary break in
nineteenth-century thought in the most principled way. With him there begins the long agony of the good foundation; he bids a concise farewell to the Greek and Judeo-Christian theologies. For him, what was most absolutely real had ceased to be a godlike, reasonable, and just spiritual being. With his doctrine of the Will, the theory of the foundation of the world leaps from the kind of pious rationalism that had prevailed since the days of Plato to a recognition—characterized by horror and amazement—of the arational. Schopenhauer was the first who identified Being’s energetic and instinctive nature which is free of reason. In that, he is one of the fathers of the century of psychoanalysis; in the future he could yet turn out to be a distant patron of and kin to
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an age of chaos theory and systemics. And over the long term his most important contribution to intellectual history could be that he opened the European doors to the Asian wisdom traditions, especially Buddhism, with the utmost respect.
It may be that his doctrine of the resignation of the Will must sound even stranger to the hunger for life among the inhabitants of the First World today than it would have to Schopenhauer’s contemporaries, the progressive positivists and the world revolu- tionaries with their faith in humanity; yet today, as well, it reminds us that the unbounded hunger for life will not be able to solve the problems created by its free exercise by intensifying itself even more. Schopenhauer could have authored this statement: only despair can still save us; of course, he spoke not of despair, but of renunciation. For modern people, renunciation is the most difficult word in the world. Schopenhauer called it out against the roaring surf. After him, questions regarding the ethical are more radically open than ever before.
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KierKegaard
Historism and evolutionism—the two legacies of the nineteenth century to the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—have seared into the conviction of the later-born the
insipid tenet that every thought is the product of its time. Who- ever accepts this seems at first to have struck a good bargain, for historism frees the individual from the monstrous weight of the philosophia perennis and offers the possibility of traveling through time with lighter baggage. It suffices to place oneself at the lead- ing edge of the development as a way of dealing with the draw- back of relativism, that of one’s own obsolescence. Historical thinking seeks to replace the absolute but illusory sovereignty that metaphysics granted with the relative sovereignty of think- ing that is allowed to regard itself as advanced. Kierkegaard can teach us, however, that historism is a trick for attaining the van- tage point of postmetaphysics at half the price. For Kierkegaard,
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radical thinking is not the progeny of its time; it is the acknowl- edgment of its facticity.
The most important qualifier by which more recent thinkers have sought to mark out their place within the line of fundamen- tal epochal positions and philosophical systems is without a doubt a date: after Hegel. The latter has been associated with a dual sug- gestion. For one, the formula “after Hegel” stands for the notion that Hegel’s work completed what had been begun in ancient Greece. Henceforth, the history of philosophy can be systemati- cally presented as the epic of the concept that penetrates itself. But if the history of the mind is simultaneously the substance of world history, the consummation of the one implies also the con- summation of the other.
When following the great migration of the mind from Ionia to Jena, there begins an endless period of leisure, when the fruits of the historical battles can be contemplatively and playfully enjoyed. In this framework, dating oneself “post-Hegel” means making a place for oneself as a gratefully enlightened epigone in a world that is in principle finished.
But of course the date “after Hegel” also describes the protest against the idyll of the philosophy of history. For it corresponds to the spontaneous life experience of most people that in their case the reasonable is not yet the real and the real is not yet the reason- able. This objection leads to the position of the Young Hegelians in the broader sense. Their chief complaint against Hegel is only that he was premature. If they have a critical appreciation of the master’s work, it is not as the final but the penultimate chapter of history. They insist on the distinction that the consummation of the theory by no means implies already its practical realiza- tion; rather, from now until further notice one must continually “move” from theory to praxis. This group of post-Hegelians post- pones the moment of consummation to a later date, until at long last justice will have been done also to the claims of those entities
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skipped over by Hegel’s mind: the proletariat, women, the mar- ginalized, colonized peoples, the mentally and emotionally ill, discriminated minorities, and, finally, all of enslaved nature. All of these entities are possible subjects and drivers of ongoing his- tory to the degree that they put forth demands by virtue of their informed discontent, demands that must be met through his- torical labors and struggles before the Now of the jaded posthis- tory can dawn. That is why the root slogan of unsatisfied post- Hegelianism is: the struggle continues. The final work remains to be done. The theory that is still engaged in the struggle presents itself as the critical one: it carries the torch of truth through a world not yet real; it totalizes the perspective of the dissatisfied part onto the sanctimonious whole. Its date is the period of the transition from theoretical anticipation to practical consumma- tion: after Hegel—before the empire of reason.
If one follows merely chronology, one might expect from Kierkegaard nothing other than a variation of post-Hegelian thinking. In actuality, Kierkegaard broke with the metaphysi- cal scheme of consummation as a whole and located himself in a time that no longer had anything in common with the extended final games of the Enlightenment and the end of history. With that, he imparted a completely different meaning to the position “post-Hegel,” one that means neither the contented awareness of accomplished absolute reflection, nor the critical postponement of consummation. For a thinking in the time of existence, the issue is not to assume some position left open by Hegel. Rather, the name “Hegel” stands for the massif of metaphysics as a whole from which existential thinking seeks to break away by no longer leaning on what is objective, but by keeping open the unfathom- ableness of its subjectivity. Anyone who intends to break with Hegel in full awareness of doing so must simultaneously reject along with him the Platonic legacy and the better part of Chris- tian theology.
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Kierkegaard’s existential reflection uncovers for itself and his contemporaries the necessity of deeper dates: if subjectivity is the truth (and the untruth), the imperative is to date oneself in a destructive sense after Plato and in an absurd sense after and yet contemporaneous with Christ. Plato had established philoso- phy as metaphysics when he implanted in it the masterful claim of transcending the imperfect to the perfect, the finite to the infinite. These philosophical transcendencies had the quality of sublime regressions in which the existing intellect groped its way to preexistential intuitions. The fundamental metaphysical act— transcendence—means precisely this: withdrawing from time to regain the origin in the Absolute.
Kierkegaard radically questioned this tendency of philoso- phy; for him it was impossible to rise into the Timeless on the light thread of concepts. The human mind’s journey home to God, undertaken time and again since the days of Plato and the Church Fathers, strikes him as a treacherous career into which the individual in the metaphysical world age allowed himself to be enticed—not least under the banner of ruling Christianity. But it is the truth of subjectivity to return, after all upswings, to its dis- cord and its doubt. For Kierkegaard this manifested itself espe- cially in the act of faith, by which the human being after Christ defied the abyss of the unbelievableness of Christian doctrines. Only a Christianity that was metaphysized and inflated into sacral folklore of power could imagine that the tradition of the mar- tyrs, the saints, and the fathers of theology adds up to evidence upon which the individual believer can look back just as calmly as the philosopher can upon his inner archetypes. For Kierkeg- aard, however, the individual stands before the Christian legend utterly dumbfounded. Should he decide to take up the mantle of discipleship, then it certainly should not be because so many power mongers, hysterics, and conformists have preceded him along this path. Faith is valid only because of a decision of trust for
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which external supporting reasons cannot be adduced in the final analysis. To Kierkegaard, believing does not mean giving in to a comfortable urge of imitation in the ecclesiastical and imperial framework, but making a choice in the face of the unbelievable. In this choice “as for the first time” Kierkegaard discovers the heart- beat of existential time that is open to the future.