No More Learning

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.
68 kierkegaard 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. With it, there opens up the possibility for something essentially new that would be valid not only by virtue of its similarity with eternal models. In this sense one can contend that the thinking of radical modernity floating in experiments begins with Kierkegaard. He was the first to enter the age of doubt, suspicion, and the creative decision.
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Marx
The history of Marx’s writings could tempt the contemporary commentator into the suggestive remark that all history is the history of battles among interpreters. In its origin, the mania
of interpretation is a furor theologicus, and it flourishes best in a climate of militant monotheisms. Nowhere is this more clearly evident than in the history of Christianity, which has for eigh- teen hundred years, with an unparalleled power-hungry will to serve and understand, cultivated a small bundle of texts known as the New Testament. Like none other, the example of Chris- tianity demonstrates the world history-making dominance of the interpreters over the text. In monumental strokes, Roman- ized Catholicism embodies the ideal type of a bureaucratically moderated, hermeneutical dictatorship; in it, the unity of episco- pal monarchy and the power of interpretation has been thought through and realized to the utmost degree. Auctoritas, non veritas facit
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legem: The interpreter, not the text, makes the law. The party that is truly always right resides in the First Rome, not the Third (i. e. , Moscow). That it is the interpreter who gives voice to the words of the master: this rule holds not only for old, evangelically radi- ating textual material that is suitable as the founding matter for churches; it can also be demonstrated in para-evangelical writings from more recent times.
Occasionally the names of the three major writers Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, each of whom—in his own way—carried the twilights of the nineteenth century into the twentieth, are mentioned in the same breath, and observers have sought to detect in them a common denominator that has been called their dysangelical mission. They are regarded, especially by represen- tatives of Christian humanism, as bearers of the three obtru- sively negative messages about the basic forces of human reality with which the citizens of modernity have had to contend ever since: the dominance of the conditions of production over ideal- istic fictions; the dominance of the vital functions—also known as the will to power—over symbolic systems; the dominance of the unconscious or instinctive nature over human self-awareness. With three voices the dysangelists seemed to be proclaiming one and the same doom: you are prisoners of structures and systems. The truth will make you unfree. In this view, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the dark messengers, are the bearers of truths that do not lift up and unite, but dissolve and weigh down.
Of course, if one takes a closer look it becomes apparent that the three authors exerted entirely different effects than those of eschatological heralds of human entanglement or decenter- ing. On the contrary, all three, each in his own way, found forms of succession that one would have to call apostolic, were that expression not already so clearly colonized by the Christian para- digm. Marx, like Nietzsche and Freud, became the originator of texts and tendencies upon which the law of the dominance of
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interpreters asserted itself with the utmost power. They all sought and found agile readers who in their writings detected the slo- gans for careers, indeed, the pretexts for coups, the establishment of societies, and radical revolutions in thinking and ways of liv- ing. In addition, their works attest the modern teaching role of nonprofessors—they reveal the extent to which the university has become alienated since the nineteenth century from the crucial creative minds. As for the interpreters of the modern masters, it is true of them as well that empires, churches, and their schools are the important employers—and where it becomes possible, as in empowered Marxism, to fuse these three entities into a single centralized power that creates meaning, functionaries who inter- pret the classics enjoy the unbridled privilege of an aristocracy melded with the clergy.
In a totalitarian system, the dominance of the secondary can sit- uate itself piously beneath the canopy of the master texts. Where sects are in power, loyalty and betrayal become indistinguishable. Until recently it was also normal among Western Marxists to fan- tasize that the master himself would have accepted certain devia- tions from his doctrines with applause. As one of the last father figures of the truth, Marx implanted in his sons the belief that dis- sent from the father also still came from the father. The Church of Marxism wanted to wander through history as a procedural unit of Father, Son, and Critique. I interpret, therefore I am some- body: exegesis in conformity with the times opens up access to positions in the sphere of power. Wherever sacred or classic writ- ings are encumbered by the unreasonable expectation of estab- lishing empires, churches, and schools, the interpreters secure for themselves exquisite places within the hierarchies. Has great his- tory not always been the realm of the soldiers of meaning? If one accepts figures such as Lenin and Stalin, Mao Zedong and Pol Pot as Marx interpreters in their own right, this would make Marx- ism, seen through the prism of its unscrupulous appropriators,
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without doubt the eminent interpretive power complex of mod- ern intellectual history. There was a good reason why Stalin, in his day the reigning pontifex maximus of Marxist doctrine, could feel superior to his rival in Rome when he posed the ominous ques- tion of how many divisions the pope had.
In the wake of the political and economic debacle of the dic- tatorships of Marxist interpreters in so many countries—who claimed that they constituted no less than a second world—the question arises of how many readers Marx had, and among those, how many good ones.
To be sure, early on there were already intelligent efforts, especially within Western Marxisms, to defend Marx against his armed devotees. Beginning in the 1920s, it was de rigeur to regard Marx as a misunderstood great man, whose true intentions could be discerned only through the path of a critical gnosis. Here the true Marx was contrasted to the Marx of real-life consequences: the analyst of systems to the utopian, the scientist of structures to the humanistic ideologue. In such niches of leftist irony, the author of Das Kapital was able to survive into the 1970s as the dis- sident of the misfortune that had written his name on its banners. After the disappearance of the ghostly ideological entity that was the Soviet Union, the question arose anew whether the Marxist writings should be given the chance to be disencumbered from the history of what they had wrought. Will they be exonerated because their true intentions can be shown to have been differ- ent? Can they invite another reading, as though the first waves of interpretation have subsided like mere projections and trans- gressions on the part of self-proclaimed false apostles? In fact, the texts exist, still and as if for the first time, like some gloomy yet liberated country from which the occupiers have withdrawn. Surely, none of the few travelers in the new textual lands still believe that they can shed a direct light on the conditions of the advanced financial and media society. A generation will probably
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pass before Marx in the text will be read the way the authors most closely related to him are already today read on occasion, specifi- cally Fichte, Hegel, Feuerbach, and Kierkegaard: as a fateful figure in the endgame of metaphysics, which seemed to have reached its “consummation” in a certain way in German Idealism, and which yet remained alive in some eerie manner in its supposedly post- metaphysical heirs. One will then realize that the layer of basic philosophical concepts in Marx’s oeuvre represents a developed aggregate state of Fichte’s idea of alienation. In this sense one can say that Marxism was a footnote to German Idealism, and that it embedded a metastasis of the Gnostic notion of alienation into the intellectual realm of the twentieth century.
The good reader of the future will become attentive in Marx’s texts to the concepts and metaphors under which the longest dreams of classical metaphysics donned a contemporary disguise—especially the all-pervading phantasm of the powerful self-generation of the historical subject and the crypto-theological motif of the recovery of the original fullness of self by the “pro- ducers” in a world freed from money. These basic elements of Marx’s philosophical fiction of a “proletarian reason” become vis- ible as soon as one immerses oneself in his work with the kind of mixture of curiosity and equanimity that became possible only with the waning of the religious war over exegesis. One can echo Günter Schulte—to whom we owe the most penetrating recent work on the Messianic critic of political economy—in asking, “Do you know Marx? ”; and one can second the author’s convic- tion that a real knowledge of Marx cannot exist as long as his new readers do not participate in the adventure of a “critique of pro- letarian reason. ”1 Thus, a renewed knowledge of Marx does not have the purpose of defiantly disseminating once again a compro- mised classic of social criticism in a time removed from critique. Rather, reconstructing the Marxian inspirations means entering into the ghostly history of concepts which—as a force that has
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become a state, a spirit that has become technique, and as all- intertwining money—are sucking at the life of individuals more than ever before. Without a doubt, Marx’s future theoretical fame will be linked to his achievements as the conjurer of dead labor. The core of his critique of political economy is necromancy: as the hero who descends to the realm of the dead to contend with the shadows of values, Marx remains uncannily relevant also for the present. The undead—which walks among humans as the value of money and which, as a laughing communicator, strips the living of time and souls—rules today almost without any pretexts over the advanced societies. Work, communication, art, and love belong here entirely to the endgame of money. These form the substance of contemporary media and experiential time. And because money requires time for its utilization, so-called great history is also con- tinuing in some eerie way; it is a game that is always played for extra time. Yet such history is no longer the conversation of the living with the dead about the goodness of the world, but the ever more thorough pervasion of the living by the economized specter. The money soul peers ever more undisguised out of the human subjectivity of our time: a society of bought buyers and of prosti- tuted prostitutes is making a place for itself in globalized market conditions. Classic liberal laissez-faire is becoming explicit as the postmodern sucking and letting oneself be sucked. Telecommuni- cation is increasingly difficult to distinguish from tele-vampirism. Tele-viewers and tele-suckers draw from a liquefied world which hardly still knows what a resistant or autonomous life might be. Is it not possible that a time is coming when those who do not wish to speak of vampirism should also be silent about philosophy? If that is the case, it would most definitely be the time of Marx’s second chance.
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nietzSche
An irritant to democrats and a folly to professors, the name Friedrich Nietzsche still makes the hearts of artists and revi- sionists beat faster. The reason behind the uneven history of how he has been received was planted by Nietzsche’s work itself—by taking from some more than they are willing to give up, and giving to others more than they can initially take. That is why the latter are fascinated and the former harbor reservations. If Nietzsche on the one hand undermined the traditional worldviews of moral earnestness, he on the other hand put into the world an aesthetic seriousness that is difficult to grasp even for those who like to invoke him to justify themselves.
Friends and enemies of Nietzsche agree on only one thing: namely, to define his work as a kind of artists’ metaphysics; they recognize it—for good and ill—as a turning point in intellectual history toward the aesthetic Weltanschauung. What is difficult for
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both parties is a cogent answer to the question of from where the aesthetic Weltanschauung—shrouded in praise and warnings— derives its evolutionary heft. No matter how often one invokes the formula about the aesthetic justification of existence, as long as it is not made clear to what extent the aesthetic could be considered as a basis for justifying the most serious of all things—human life as a whole—in the first place, one is merely engaged in a seemingly dangerous game of language. For Nietzsche, an aesthetic Weltanschau- ung does not mean the release of frivolousness, nor does it satisfy the demand for a discounted ethic for artists and others who never became adults. The usual deserters of the principle of reality will not get their money’s worth from Nietzsche. For under the code of the aesthetic, Nietzsche discovers another horizon of dire situations of which the traditional culture of war as the ultimate emergency— with all its classicistic stereotypes—knows nothing. For the male youth in ancient cities and modern nation-states, it is surely seri- ous enough when they are supposed to be ready to defend the exis- tence and claims of their fatherlands with their lives.
But Nietzsche looks far beyond the horizon of military and national seriousness; by studying his own becoming as an exam- ple, he discovers the gravity of the struggle for self-birth that the individual has to wage with himself and his fate. With the ulti- mate acuteness, Nietzsche lifts into the light a circumstance that had rarely ever been independently examined previously: namely, that the task of leading life out of its raw material likeness and making into a work sui generis can take on the quality of a life- and-death struggle. That is why Nietzsche is, in the final analysis, more a psychagogue than a psychologist, even if his psychological genius seems to have been posted at the entrance to the twentieth century—the true psychological century—as a monumental guardian statue; even Sigmund Freud, the herald of psychologiza- tion, had cause during his lifetime to deny that he had reached his territory through the gate of Nietzsche.
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As a psychagogue of modernity, Nietzsche is the leader in the lovely temptation to create great life-forms out of the material of talent and character. It would seem that Nietzsche, in so doing, brought forth into the world more than merely a rationalization of his own difficulties in life. With his pedagogical-psychagogic impulses, he reacted to the secular changes in the educational conditions of the modern world. From a sociopsychological per- spective one could define modernity as the impossibility of edu- cating individuals to completion: there are only diplomas; there is no longer maturity. That is why parents and teachers are now sys- tematically “incapable of coping with” their offspring and pupils— the reason being that the finished world itself, from which the pedagogical labor of conformity was to take its cues, has in turn crumbled as a result of dynamization. Education as a way of align- ing the world and young people is running on empty—and who- ever wanted to accept its factual results genuinely as final results would surely be one of those last people on whom Nietzsche’s inciting contempt was ignited. What appears in Nietzsche as an aesthetic Weltanschauung is in truth a potent psychagogic program for a world time of postclassical strategies for human elevation. It responds to the necessity that modern individuals find themselves under, namely, to transcend the horizon of their prior education. In this context, Nietzsche’s infamous words about the Übermensch mean nothing other than a challenge to create the autoplastically self-educating Self as a work of art out of the semifinished prod- uct that mothers and teachers send out into the world. The logi- cal consequence of this program is the transition from the prece- dence of self-understanding to that of self-realization.
Anyone who thinks that this view seems too lofty should con- sider that one hundred years after Nietzsche even unions are preaching the necessity of lifelong learning and training. If one strips the notion of the Übermensch of the element of genius and religiosity, one arrives automatically at the concept of the learning
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society. However, gone from that society would be the specifically Nietzschean goad, namely the incitement to godly individualiza- tion. Any such thing could be reactivated only through a return to radical concepts of elitism that could not be neutralized even by a deregulated Übermenschen market or art market. Nothing of the kind is evident today anywhere, provided one perceives the art tyrants and the autogenous gods of the contemporary global celebrity system for the fools that they are rather than the incar- nations they wish to be.
If we presupposed this, Nietzsche, the helpless master of the dangerous idea of cultivating humans into something higher, can be regarded as a domesticated writer; at least he himself laid claim to the title Hanswurst (buffoon) for himself at one of the most exposed places in his work. Under this premise—and only under this premise—can one discern in the theorem of the Übermensch an idea of world-moving usefulness and urgency. It points out that contemporary culture must invent a system of education and self- education that would be capable of producing individuals fit for a globalized world in sufficient numbers. Without such a revolu- tion of self-education and self-cultivation, humanity today has no chance of solving its impending problems. The important thing would be to bring the self-education emergency and the ecologi- cal emergency into convergence. As for Nietzsche, in a crucial passage he described this work as the revaluation of all values. The culturally revolutionary relevance of this formula is unex- hausted, even if its interpretations to date—including Nietzsche’s own—have remained unsatisfactory. The classical kynical motif of “reminting the coin” had been picked up by Nietzsche to set an anti-Christian turnaround in motion; it was, as we know, Nietzsche’s reformist dream to trigger a counterrevolution of health against the morbus metaphysicus that had cast its spell over the Western world since the days of Socrates and Paul with its inhibitions. Anyone who wants to “remint the coin” must rewrite
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the texts, the Platonic ones no less than those of the New Testa- ment. Nietzsche’s most important effect likely emanates from his talent of imbuing sacred texts, in serious parodies, with unexpect- edly contrary meanings. He turned old texts into new tunes, and wrote new texts for old tunes. His parodistic genius exploded all traditional genres of discoursing in elevated and lowly tones. As a buffo founder of religion, he preached the Sermon on the Mount anew and rewrote the Tablets of Sinai; as anti-Plato he laid out earthly ladders of power and vigor for the soul seeking to rise to something higher. One may question whether his rewriting of the texts and redirecting of forces should enjoy universal success. But what remains unfinished and more relevant than ever is the habit of Nietzsche’s attempts at reformulating the spirit of the moral laws in keeping with the contemporary age. Perhaps one can learn from Nietzsche’s parodistic art something for the task of writing anew the tablets on which will be inscribed the rules for the sur- vival of the industrious animal homo sapiens. It could turn out that revaluing the values and remaining loyal to the earth are tasks that amount to the same thing.
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huSSerl
To the tricky questions of how much certainty humans need to find their bearings in thinking, some among the found- ers of modern philosophizing—above all, Descartes, Fichte, and
Husserl—responded with the sonorous thesis that nothing less than absolute certainty is enough. With this claim, the project of philosophy as rigorous science—repeatedly picked up anew by the process of modernity—launched itself. It is in this very claim that the idea of philosophy as the ur-exercise of rigor has its final sup- port. As a science prior to and above the sciences, rigorous author- itative thought seeks to demonstrate that the totality of material phenomena is constructed out of achievements of consciousness.
If the question posited at the outset is tricky, it is so because it goes hand in hand with the insinuation that the striving for absolute assurance is encumbered with an element of neediness, indeed, of existential misery. Searching for absolute certainty
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would thus mean admitting to calamitous uncertainty. That the serenity of achieved certainty is rooted in groundless instability: ever since the modern metaphilosophical questionings of motives, the philosophical quest for the peace of the thinking soul has also had to learn to live with this suspicion. Here it becomes clear how, through the project of science, philosophy’s motif of show- ing intelligence the path of salvation, which has been powerfully effective since Greek antiquity, asserts its rights also on the terri- tory of the modern world. In the Western Titanomachy between disquiet and quiet, the partisans of absolute certainty take the side of sacred immobility, as though they wanted to profess along with the Church Fathers: our heart is restless until it finds rest in self-evidence. The minds of modernity part company over the question of whether this self-evidence is genuinely attainable, and whether, once attained, it is suited to healing the ontological psy- chosis of the restless animal.
Among the philosophizing world doctors of the twentieth century, the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, holds a special place. As the teacher of thinking self-perception, he removed himself and his students into a theoretical sanatorium where no other measures were on the agenda other than exercises of clarification in the purest air of detailed descriptions. On Hus- serl’s Magic Mountain, the students learned—first and last—the sacrifice-demanding art of being pure patients; in the face of what had seemed long since familiar and known, they indulged in the beautiful sufferings of phenomenological patience. Insight into the omniactivity of subjectivity is held out as a potential reward for patience. Anyone who has spent any time in that peculiar san- atorium of evidences knows something about the oppressiveness of exactitude, an oppressiveness of which the world’s children, living as they do with heedless anxiety in the practical lowlands, could not even dream. There is a demonicness of explicitness to which only those have access who devote themselves to the
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exercitationes spirituales of descriptions artfully carried out and written down.
He who enters into the time of the pure exercise of descriptions is removed, as it were, from the life time that simultaneously runs its course, and the objects of the phenomenological mediation assemble on the desk of the thinker into sublime still lifes. They are no longer naively encountered objects from the so-called real world, but figures in the absolute film of intentionality. For the duration of his exercise, the describer steps out of the torrential time of life lived heading toward death, and entrusts himself to the present of absolute consciousness. Drawing on the latter’s power of vision, the phenomenologist undertakes the task—as strange as it is seductive—of elevating what has been seen a thou- sand times and is long known once again into a topic, as though the goal is to catch it by surprise as it emerges out of the creative consciousness at the moment it is first beheld. Like hardly another thinker before him, Husserl brought the unity of thinking and writing into a gestural synthesis. To him, the desk, if we assume a true philosopher has sat down at it, is the window onto the world of essences; here, beholding and writing prove to be convergent activities. The written recording of the phenomenological obser- vation reveals as its calligraphic core the tireless exercise of the writing hand. Philosophy, practiced as an act of descriptive reason, is thus unmasked as fundamentally an “office-osophy” [Bürosophie]; it enacts itself as the activity of an intellect that has taken a holiday from the natural attitude. The chair of the philosopher, who has immersed himself in arid ecstasy in his descriptions, is the bearer of a seated observer; out of the pen of the thinker flows the ink of the original evidence: his writings capture the living intuitions on the paper like congealed light. His own desk is the place where the contemplator deigns to let the world be present in its entirety. As the preferred setting for thematizing everything that appears, the philosopher’s desk turns into a transcendental belvedere. Only at
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this desk could there take place the process of undoing the erro- neous judgments of precipitous reason, which tends to get lost in momentous self-deception both in daily life and in science. In this process, phenomenology rendered its verdict against the essential blindness of vulgar relativism and psychologism, as well as against the blindness to the subjectivity of scientistic objectivism. In the final analysis, the desk of the phenomenologist is an altar at which the thinker officiates as a pure functionary of the Absolute; here the philosopher performs his service as the vicar of a lucid God.
Yet the withdrawal of the phenomenologist to the desk of uni- versal self-reflection was not able to alter the course of the mod- ern world as a whole. As though moved by a higher power, the modern scientific-technological evolution strives—as its major tendency—toward ever more encompassing states of naturalism and relativism. The phenomenological guardians of Being, who exercised themselves as the eyes of God in a transcendental con- templation of the world, found themselves increasingly marginal- ized and passed over by a process of investigation that is leading modern civilization toward an integral technological naturalism. Already the contemporaneous psychologies of the unconscious undermined the project of an integral science of the actions of world-constituting consciousness; and what is more: out of the developments of cybernetic technology and the globalized condi- tions of capital there emerged a new world of facts that are sub- ject to a mode of Being that is not related to consciousness. More and more, the experiential realm of modernity seems pervaded by technological objects that offer consciousness only a surface: such surfaces of keys and symbols, beneath which highly complex appa- ratuses confront their users, can hardly still be grasped as phenom- ena in the specific meaning of the world, since it is characteristic of them that within them, Being turns its back on Manifestation. What is essential technologically no longer appears to conscious- ness as phenomena. In the face of the technological environment,
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phenomenology seems like the philosophical testament of the pretechnological world. Even for Husserl’s most independent student, Martin Heidegger, who would become unfaithful to his master in so many ways, technology remained a metaphysically suspect entity; he perceived in it a formation of phenomenologi- cal injustice and believed that he could recognize it as an onto- logical error. The thought of Heidegger and Husserl reveals that a philosophy of technology cannot succeed on the basis of a theory that proceeds—following “old Western” conventions—from the primacy of the correspondence between Thinking and Being. To be sure, even modern-day systems theory—which has become the basic theory, as it were, of the technological world—still attests indirectly to the epochal suggestive power of the phenomeno- logical perspective, a theory in which the transcendental subject, reformatted into the figure of the observed observer, stubbornly recurs. In fact, does the current penchant for systems-theoretical thinking not betray a continuation of Husserlian motifs in a way that is appropriate to technology? In its original gestalt, Hus- serl’s work—which ends, not by accident, with a lonely call for a heroism of reason that must be newly awakened—keeps alive the memory of the greatness and limitation of the European culture of rationality.
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WittgenStein
Barely half a century after the death of the philosopher, the name Ludwig Wittgenstein—like that of Martin Heidegger— is part of the intellectual mythos of the twentieth century. Even if
Vico’s distinction between civil and monastic philosophy seemed to have become obsolete ever since the French Revolution, one is inclined to reactivate this distinction for Wittgenstein’s sake. How else could one interpret the emergence of the phenomenon that was Wittgenstein in the midst of an age of political phi- losophies and warring illusions than as the renewed eruption of thinking in the mode of eremitic aloofness from the world? Part of the still luminescent enchantment of Wittgenstein’s work and the standoffish nimbus of his life is the unexpected return of the monastic element in the moral center of bourgeois culture. More so than virtually anyone else, he attests to the moral secession of an intellectual elite from the totality of mediocre conditions.
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The human being as something to be transcended: that convic- tion was present in the elect of the educated class in Vienna before the Great War not only in its Nietzschean guise and as a philoso- phy of life; it asserted itself also in the forms of a bourgeois cult of the saint, at the center of which stood the figure of the artistic and philosophic genius. It was the responsibility of that figure to offer salvation from ambiguities and mediocrity; it was his task to show an implacably demanding youth the path from the depths of shameful commonness to the lofty heights of transfigurative callings. Grandeur became a duty for genius, self-transcendence the minimum condition of existence. For the young Wittgenstein this meant: the human being is a rope that is strung between the animal and the logician.
The story of Wittgenstein’s life and thought is the passion of an intellect that sought to explain its place in the world and at its boundaries. What the contemporary world of the philosopher perceived as his rigid and demanding aura was the high tension of a man who required constant concentration on his ordering principles so as not to lose his mind. As one dwelling on the bor- derline of Being, the philosopher is never concerned with any- thing less than the block of the world as a whole, even when he is merely pondering the correct use of a word in a sentence. He feels as though the world along with all its order could get lost in the space between two sentences. And so, thinking becomes for him a navigating between islands of formal clarity that lie scat- tered in the vastness of unclarity. In fact, Wittgenstein is a thinker who left behind a work of individual sentences. It was his unprec- edented need for precision that would make him into a martyr of incoherence. He himself was painfully aware that he was suffering from a kind of Lord Chandos neurosis—a disorder of the ability to assert coherences of the world through words, and to believe in these claimed coherences. Throughout his life, Wittgenstein failed to meet the challenge of composing a real “text” in the sense
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of continuous speech. He felt, more keenly than any other thinker before him, the difficulties of conjunctions or clausal linkages, and no problem preoccupied him more profoundly all his life than the impossibility of moving from the description of facts to ethi- cal precepts. His notes are the monument of an overly brilliant hesitation to create the world in a cohesive text. In their radical modernity, his writings attest to the disintegration of the analogy between the round cosmos and fluid prose. But precisely because Wittgenstein was no longer capable of being a proposition-happy philosopher of systems and totality in the traditional style, he was virtually predestined to lift the patchwork of local life games and their rules into the light. There was a good reason why his theory of language games became one of the most potent arguments of modern and postmodern pluralism.
Looking back today over the waves of Wittgenstein’s reception, one can say at least this much about the historical importance of this peculiar Viennese character who ended up in the British world of scholars: he inoculated the Anglo-American world with the madness of ontological difference by exhorting the precritical empiricist to wonder, not at how the world is, but that it is. At the same time, he infected continental philosophy with a new idea of precise style, which brought forth flourishing outgrowths in the milieu of the analytical school. It would appear that both parties are by now in the process of getting over the phase of the initial immune responses. Ever since Alan Janik and Steven Toulmin’s classic study Wittgenstein’s Vienna, the stage seems set for a healthy engagement with the stimuli of the magical hermit. Who could still invoke Wittgenstein only to elect him the patron saint of odd mind games? Who could still denounce him as the positivistic destroyer of the Western culture of reflection? After the waning of the reactive distortions, what emerges is the profile of a thinker who will undoubtedly be counted among the godparents of the intelligence of the future. Even in its logical severities and human
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one-sidedness, Wittgenstein’s intensity holds gifts of incalculable import for posterity. It attests for all those who awaken to think- ing after him that ethical questions have become more difficult. Should it ever be possible to write a critique of martyrological or witness-bearing reason—and thus a valid ethics—a decisive chapter would have to be devoted to the man Wittgenstein.