No More Learning

According to Heidegger we find ourselves “in-die-Welt-Geworfen-Sein” (being-thrown-in-the-world), but for Sloterdijk we are rather “in-den-Weltraum-Geworfen-Sein” (being- thrown-in-the-cosmos). So as Heidegger reminds us to remember the basic question of Being, Sloterdijk reads this watch-sign as a way to rethink the very foundations of philosophy itself by call- ing into question a singular a priori “world. ” In the place of a sin- gular “world” Sloterdijk gives us a genealogy of pluralized worlds or spheres. It is in this precise sense that Sloterdijk’s thinking is posed in opposition to Francis Bacon’s dictum: “Knowledge is power. ” Power, for Sloterdijk, is the potential for new creations of new knowledge through connector systems of yet unimaginable and unbounded infinite possibilities. Read in this way we could put a twist on Shakespeare and Charles Dickens: When in Shake- speare’s play The Merry Wives of Windsor Falstaff says to Pistol, “I will not lend thee a penny,” Pistol replies, “Why then the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open. ”1 And with Dickens, “Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! . . . secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. ”2 The world for Sloterdijk is not a self-contained, solitary, mysterious “oys- ter”; but rather, worlds pluralize and are uncontainable like a sponge with infinite connectors and thresholds.
What makes Sloterdijk’s work so controversial is that for him we have all become like Scrooge, assuming that the material and theoretical world is the only horizon from which existence takes its meaning. But what if there were worlds instead? If there are worlds, as Sloterdijk suggests, then there are different existential
viii foreword
possibilities, that is to say, difference itself becomes the unity into which life draws its breath. This is revolutionary and radi- cally breaks with the history of philosophy (with and against Heidegger) precisely through Sloterdijk’s return to the marginal- ized schools of ancient Greek thought. By decentering a singular world (as the ontological given), Sloterdijk’s philosophy becomes nothing short of a Copernican Revolution for the twenty-first- century theory.
Sloterdijk—a Brief Biography
Born just after World War II in Karlsruhe, Germany, Sloter- dijk is widely considered to be the foremost public intellectual in Europe. As an undergraduate, he studied philosophy, litera- ture, and history at the University of Munich, and received his doctorate in German literature from the University of Ham- burg in 1975. After completing his doctorate he went to India to study under an internationally renowned mystic and spiritual guru, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh (Osho). Much of Sloterdijk’s work remains indebted to Osho’s teachings, which are them- selves largely indebted to many religious and theoretical influ- ences, including Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and psy- choanalysis. One of Osho’s central pedagogical techniques was the employment of paradox and contradiction as a means by which to help individuals transcend and transform their men- tal and spiritual capacities. Entering into paradox was a way to move beyond the safe distance to intellectual “critique” and into the fullness of living itself reminiscent of two figures that bookend the Western philosophical tradition: Heraclitus and Nietzsche. Sloterdijk’s journey to India gave him the creative power to live with the ambiguity of existence’s synthetic, dif- ferential unfolding.
foreword ix
Being familiar with the ambivalence and radical contingency of life’s flux from Osho and from his own fully independent studies, Sloterdijk began to map out a writing career that changed the very coordinates of philosophical theory. From the germs embedded in his first thesis and best-selling work, Critique of Cynical Reason, Sloterdijk can be fairly called the first postsecular thinker in the West—a thinker of a life after God and its twin, nihilism.
Sloterdijk’s philosophical work can best be identified in three stages: the early period starting in the mid-1980s (with Critique of Cynical Reason); the middle period from the late 1990s through 2004 (with the Spheres trilogy, Bubbles, Globes, and Foam); and the period from 2005 to the present (which is highlighted by the books God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms; Derrida, an Egyp- tian; Rage and Time; and this volume, Philosophical Temperaments, as well as by Sloterdijk’s work as a moderator of the Second German Television program “Philosophical Quartet”).
According to Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Critique of Cynical Reason became a work in philosophy that sold more copies in Germany than any other book since 1945. 3 And there is a good reason for this: Sloterdijk’s thesis is as brilliant as it is controversial. To vul- garly reduce his thesis, he basically defines the term cynicism in two ways: there is the Kynismus and there is the contemporary meaning of “cynicism. ” The former term is derived from the ancient Greek philosophical tradition founded by Diogenes and represents a countervailing mode of life in both philosophy and action as it sought a unity with nature and disrupted the social and ethical mores. By contrast there is the contemporary cynicism expressed in sarcastic beliefs in the power of reason, which thus never fully takes life seriously. The latter is thus a symptom of the general conditions of a society devoid of meaning (or even the hope of meaning). Thus Sloterdijk critiques contemporary cynicism while drawing on the “kynicos” tradition (the followers of Diogenes) as a way of reuniting philosophy with everyday life.
x foreword
If Critique of Cynical Reason put Sloterdijk on the map, the trilogy Spheres secured a permanent place in the philosophical pantheon. The three volumes that compose Spheres are vol. 1, Blasen (Bubbles); vol. 2, Globen (Globes); and vol. 3, Schäume (Foam) and were pub- lished by the Suhrkamp publishing house in 1998, 1999, and 2004, respectively. Sloterdijk’s achievement in the Spheres trilogy is truly unparalleled in philosophy today. Again to brutally sum- marize his work, Spheres is a tour de force that advances his thesis in Critique of Cynical Reason by exposing alternative realities or spheres that are irreducible to a singular, unifying principle. Sloterdijk’s poetic prose (form) befits Heraclitus’s “Logos fire” (content) in which the world (nay, worlds) alight with elemental and radi- cally contingent primeval forces. So to settle for a postideological, apolitical stance assumes a false move that began with Plato in which this singular world is held in being by a transcendent dema- terialized eternal and unchanging ideal. Christianity, according to Sloterdijk, followed suit in Neo-Platonism, creating the con- ditions of an impoverished life devoted to a masochistic drive obsessed with the afterlife at the cost of never fully living in this life.
Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault (a Bold Philosophical Hypothesis)
Sloterdijk’s book is deceptive because it follows a strict, linear unfolding of seminal philosophical and theological figures from Plato to Foucault through Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and other seminal theorists. In this fashion, this work appears to simply reproduce yet another history of philosophy. But the truth is that nothing is further from the truth. As Sloterdijk himself states, he wishes “to pro- vide a broader readership access to original philosophical think- ing. ” That is why Philosophical Temperaments is by far the best book
foreword xi
for accessing Sloterdijk’s complex and mature philosophical sys- tem (or, better, systems). Yet this book comes with a warning sign: one should not read this book if one is looking to tame and master philosophy and theology (like viewing a captured lion in a zoo from a safe distance). This is because philosophy is not safe. Thus it is not so much that you read and “master” these pages as much as these pages read you; that is, in his words: “the disci- pline of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking, and then as a way of life. ” So the challenge is for you to prepare to be challenged where your tacit assumptions are interrogated; you must wrestle with the text, with yourself, and with your life. For Sloterdijk believes that philosophy is indistinguishable from every part of your life. This is why he is a thinker allied with Pierre Hadot’s style, where the mind, the body, and the spirit are unified. If Sloterdijk is a holistic thinker, his methodology is developed through the psychoanalytic traditions from Freud to Lacan.
In this book, Sloterdijk takes his cue from the “father,” Freud. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud develops the thesis through a his- torical analogy to the psychological development of human beings. The stages that Freud identifies unfold first through early trauma (the rupture between parent and child) and defense, then latency, followed by the outbreak of neurosis, and finally the partial return of the repressed. For Freud, Jewish “monotheism” not only was inherited by a marginal Egyptian monotheism, but also was the result of feelings of guilt for killing off the father (Moses); so a God had to be invented to relieve us from this guilt. What Freud saw in religious inventions of monotheism, Sloter- dijk sees in the philosophical tradition. Like a child, philosophy is born out of shamanism, from which humans acquire a newly found consciousness, but Platonic and Greek “orthodox” philoso- phy becomes always already indebted to the “symbolic order” of larger, more powerful worlds and nascent empires. This forces a tension between the “real” shamanism and the “symbolic” and
xii foreword
philosophical new global reach. Ancient Greek philosophy thus became caught between the two spheres of ancient tribal cults and emerging new empires as it attempted to come to terms with finding peace in a chaotic world using argument and logic as its beacon of truth.
But there is a catch: this “peace” is defined, in the first place, through the emergence of an expanding empire and its concomi- tant cosmopolitan consciousness. In other words, philosophy becomes something like a “fast-food” pill that one takes in order to be able to accept a newly formed version of “peace” articulated through an externalization of violence as constituted in the Hel- lenistic empire. This is borne out in how Alexander the Great expanded the Greek Empire with Aristotle at the intellectual helm. Thus, the brilliance of Sloterdijk’s book reveals how sha- manistic beliefs were raw and underdeveloped, taking on the characteristics of Lacan’s articulation of the “Real” (that which resists symbolization and what Freud called “early trauma”). But it is not as if Sloterdijk interprets Platonism and Greek philosophy as the measure against which the “Symbolic order” takes its mean- ing vis-à-vis the “Real” (shamanism). Rather, it is the “Symbolic order” that erects the threshold through which the mysteries of adult life are accessed and practiced, whereas ancient philoso- phy severs its relationship to tradition and the tribe in order to reformulate a new, distinctly urban outlook. The upshot of the argument here allows one to fully come to terms with Sloterdijk’s radical reading: philosophy becomes the handmaiden to a cosmo- politan consciousness founded on recollecting the archetypes of eternal essences beyond our material existence. But what he is suggesting is that shamanism too has its own “sphere” of meaning that is much more holistic and possesses its own horizons of what it means to live well.
Following the psychoanalytical reading, we can see that the knife of philosophical (Platonic) rupture necessarily creates a
foreword xiii
dark world into which reason illuminates the way via a denuded version of truth predicated on argumentation and logic. But, as Sloterdijk adroitly points out, Platonic (and Christian) philoso- phy sets itself up for its own failure, creating a neurotic impulse to get to the bottom of reality via reason, but the very telos itself is always already unobtainable. Consequently philosophy is forever stained with its own ineptitude, caught by the necessity for ana- lytic clarity but unable to fully eradicate existential contingency. One can easily recognize this seductive “promise” which was orig- inally given by Prometheus’s theft in the paradoxical form of fire’s illumination. This “philosophical symptom” is encapsulated as the original theft that gives life—the felix culpa in Christian terms.
Philosophy, as Sloterdijk understands, is a process of coming to terms with its original “theft”—knowledge is stolen from the gods, and yet it illuminates, queerly. The quest, therefore, that Sloter- dijk’s entire work follows takes place in the “hole-gap” located between necessity and contingency—between the “Real” and the “Symbolic” orders—between the unknown that we already know (but are too afraid to know that we know) and the unknown that we will never obtain but forever desire. In her novel The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Marguerite Duras identifies this “hole-gap” that appears in the worlds of desire, which is articulated by the narrator via the main character, Lol Stein:
What would have happened? Lol does not probe very deeply into the unknown into which this moment opens. . . . She has not the faintest notion of the unknown. But what she does believe is that she must enter it, that that was what she had to do. . . . [And by entering into the gap of the unknown it would give to Lol] “both their greatest pain and their great- est joy, so commingled as to be undefinable, a single entity but unnamable for lack of a word. I like to believe—since I love her [the narrator says]—that if Lol is silent in her daily
xiv foreword
life it is because, for a split second, she believed that this word might exist. Since it does not, she remains silent. It would have been an absence-word, a hold-word, whose cen- ter would have been hollowed out into a hold, the kind of hold in which all other words would have been buried. 4
And here we have a great example of the absent void of the Real (i. e. , the “hole-gap”) that haunts, betrays, and at the same time rein- forces the Symbolic Order. Sloterdijk reads the history of philoso- phy (and even its very nature) through the reality of this void and thereby redefines the very terms of philosophy itself. Philosophy is not about finding out the “facts” of our fundamental reality (i. e. , science), but rather is a process that, deploying a “Nietzschean” reversal, reveals “facts” which become less and less significant. At the end of the day, philosophy for Sloterdijk becomes an inter- pretation opened up for rivaling interpretations not determined by a singular “transcendent” cause (a theology, a sovereignty, or Platonism), but rather about new possible worlds and creative “truths” and their constitutive values invented and reinvented by us. Welcome to philosophy’s temperamental behavior.
foreword xv
preface
In the mid-1990s, the Diederichs publishing house and I con- ceived a plan that seemed audacious at the time: an alterna- tive history of philosophy spanning the great periods of ancient
and recent European thought in the form of readers on impor- tant thinkers. At the time, this idea was surely driven in part by the desire to offer an anticyclical, intellectual signal in opposi- tion to the rampant mindlessness so characteristic of the German fin-de-siècle.
The project’s novelty was the decision to let these ground- breaking thinkers speak in their own words. Our desire, as editors and conduits of philosophical primary texts, was to undermine the hegemony of secondary literature, which has long been responsi- ble for the fact that the original ideas are everywhere disappearing behind impenetrable veils of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries. By turning to the texts themselves, we wished
xvii
to provide a broader readership access to original philosophical thinking, and, not least, to put into the hands of students of the academic discipline of “Philosophy” an alternative to the “Intro- ductions” that dominate the field. I was convinced—and still am— that there can be no introduction in philosophy. Rather, from the very first, the discipline of philosophy must present itself, first as a way of thinking, and then as a way of life.
Thanks to the good collaboration between the publisher and the editor, the project quickly took on concrete shape and was able to persuade a number of excellent scholars to take on the task of selecting and introducing the primary texts. The result, within a few short years, was a series that constitutes nothing less than a philosophical library in nuce. These books soon found a way to readers and reached a broad audience, especially through paperback reprints. Only two of the planned volumes (not least ones that were especially dear to my heart), those on Heidegger and Adorno, were not completed because of legal difficulties. It was a troubling experience to witness the owners of the estates of Heidegger and Adorno using their monopolies to prevent publication of selections from their oeuvre under the aegis of leading experts.
Combining the editor’s prefaces from the various volumes into the present book created an effect that was originally not intended and yet creates a certain plausibility now: to my own surprise, I noted that the vignettes of thinkers assembled here add up to something like a meaningful whole—not a history of philosophy, but still a gallery of character studies and intellectual portraits that show just how right Nietzsche was when he noted that all philosophical systems have always been, unbeknown to their authors, also memoirs and confessions. That the selection of authors entailed an unavoidable element of unfairness cannot be denied. By avoiding randomness, it hewed to a middle path between necessity and arbitrary personal taste.
xviii preface
The title of the present book is an unmistakable allusion to Fichte’s well-known dictum that the philosophy one chooses depends on the kind of person one is. What he intended to say is this: submissive souls opt for a naturalistic system that justifies their servility, while individuals with a proud disposition reach for a system of freedom. This observation is as true today as it has always been. My hope is that the brief studies that follow show that the range of philosophical temperaments goes far beyond the two contrasting types of timid and proud individuals. It is as expansive as the soul illuminated by the logos, of which Heraclitus said: “You would not find the boundaries of soul, even by traveling along every path, so deep a measure does it have. ”1
preface xix
philosophical temperaments
Plato
In the famous 344th Aphorism of his Gay Science, entitled “In what way we, too, are still pious,” the anti-Platonist Fried- rich Nietzsche erected a monument—as honorific as it is
problematic—to the founder of the Athenian academy: “But you will have gathered what I am getting at, namely, that it is still a metaphysical faith upon which our faith in science rests—that even we knowers of today, we godless anti-metaphysicians, still take our fire, too, from the flame lit by the thousand-year-old faith, the Christian faith which was also Plato’s faith, that God is truth; that truth is divine. . . . But what if this were to become more and more difficult to believe? ”1 One might imagine the history of European philosophy as a relay race in which a torch lit by Plato—and a few of his predecessors, chiefly Parmenides and Heraclitus—was passed down from one generation to the next.
1
The image of an intellectual torch relay across the millennia is open to sharply contrasting views of what it means: whether one wants to see this race simply as the history of truth, as nothing more than the history of a problem, or even, as Nietzsche sug- gests, the history of our longest error. 2 Marsilio Ficino, the key figure in fifteenth-century Florentine Neo-Platonism, had good reason to refer to Plato as the “philosophorum pater” in the introduc- tion to his commentary on the Symposion (De amore). 3
In its major current of idealism, European philosophy was in fact the outgrowth of what one might call a Platonic patristics; it unfolded as a complex of tenets and authoritative pronounce- ments that seemed to flow ultimately from a single generative source. The Platonic masterworks have functioned as a kind of seed bank of ideas from which countless later minds could be fer- tilized, often across great temporal and cultural distances. That is true not only of the Athenian Academy itself, which, as an arche- type of the European “school,” was able to maintain its teaching for nearly a millennium in uninterrupted succession (387 bce to 529 ce); Plato’s writings also proved a marvel of translatability and radiated into foreign languages and cultures in an almost evangelical way—the most significant examples of which are the reception by Rome and the Arab world,4 and later also by the German-speaking lands. These are surpassed in importance only by the fusion of Platonism into the Christian doctrine of God (theology). What Adolf von Harnack once called the Helleni- zation or secularization of Christian theology, in both its acute Gnostic as well as gradual catholic manifestation, occurred largely under the banner of the divine Plato. 5 Moreover, some of the speculative theosophies of Islam have transmitted a wealth of Pla- tonizing motives down to the present day.
The Corpus Platonicum is thus more than just a collection of clas- sical writings: it is the foundational document of the entire genre of European idealistic philosophy as a way of writing, a doctrine,
2 plato
and a way of life. It represents a new alliance between intellectuals and the inhabitants of the city and the realm; it launches the Good News that this dismal world can be penetrated by logic. As the gospel positing that all things are grounded in something good, Platonism anchors the striving for truth in a pious rationalism— and it took nothing less than the civilizational revolutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries to tear out this anchor. Stages in that uprooting were Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of the blind world-will, Nietzsche’s perspectivism and fictionalism, the materialist evolutionism of the natural and social sciences, and most recently chaos theory. In its classic pedagogical form, Plato’s teaching sought to convey instructions for a blessed life in theory; it was in the truest sense of the word a religion of thinking, which believed in its capacity to unite investigation and edification under one roof. Some historians of religion maintain that Plato’s teachings represent in many respects a kind of modernization of shamanistic traditions. Since time immemorial, those traditions have known of the soul’s journey to the heavens and the salutary intercourse with the spirits of the next world. From this perspec- tive, Plato’s realm above the heavens in which pure ideas floated among themselves would be merely a heaven rendered logical, and the ascent of thinking to the level of the ideas merely a mod- ernized journey of the soul traveling in the vehicle of the concept. 6
With its noble optimism about the knowability of the world and its ethic of the conscious life, Platonism was in a sense the superego of European rationalism which was becoming a world- moving force. Even if Plato’s high-minded search for the good life in a good polity seemed from the outset to suffer from the defect that it was merely a utopia, it did set the measure and direction for the highest aspirations of the philosophical desire: friendship with the truth saw itself as being concerned about peace for the polis and the world, and committed to its continuous re-creation from the spirit of self-understanding. In its intention, Nietzsche’s
plato 3
saying about the philosopher as the physician of culture is cer- tainly true already of Plato. It was inevitable that these preten- sions were dismissed as overzealous—indeed, some have wanted to detect in them the foreshadowing of what would come to be called the totalitarian temptation in the twentieth century.
For all that, Plato’s discovery of a connection—however problematic—between personal wisdom and public order remains valid. And even if philosophy sank back into a profound depoliticization in late antiquity (essentially already from the time of Alexander the Great), it retained—like a kind of first psychotherapy—an undeniable jurisdiction over questions of inner peace; inner peace might seem like the preliminary step toward outer peace—a superior, quiet beacon in a tumultuous world. The Platonic tradition was in agreement with the Stoic and later the Epicurean teachings in defining the philosopher as the expert for investigating the peace of the soul.
If we have reason to this day to remember the beginnings of philosophy among the Greeks, it is chiefly because it was phi- losophy through which the indirect world power of the “school,” which still rules us and leads us astray, began to impose itself on the emerging urban societies. What steps onto the stage with the philosopher is a demanding kind of educator, who desires that the urban youth no longer grow up within the confines of conven- tions, but seeks to shape them in accordance with superior and artificial criteria that are universal in their form.
The tandem of Socrates and Plato marks the breakthrough of the new educational idea: they speak out against the conven- tionalism and opportunism of the teachers of rhetoric and the sophists with a plea for a comprehensive reshaping of the human being. Paideia, or education as the forming of the human being for a latent or manifest imperial “big world,” not only is a founda- tional word of ancient philosophizing, but also identifies the pro- gram of philosophy as a political practice. It reveals that the birth
4 plato
of philosophy was conditioned by the emergence of a new, risky, and power-charged world system—today we call it that of urban cultures and empires. This system compelled a retraining of the human being in the direction of being fit for the city and the empire. To that extent one may claim that classical philosophy was a logical and ethical rite of initiation for an elite of young men—in rare cases also for women. Under the guidance of an advanced master, they were to reach the point of transcending their prior, merely familial and tribal conditioning in favor of a far-seeing and broad-minded urban and imperial humanity. Thus, philosophy is at its very outset invariably an initiation into the big, the bigger, the biggest; it presents itself as a school of the universal synthesis; it teaches how to think of the multifarious and the prodigious as a single, good unity; it introduces the individual to a life under rising intellectual and moral demands; it bets on the possibility of responding to the growing complexity of the world and the heightened majesty of God with a continuous effort at expand- ing the soul;7 it invites us to move into the mightiest new edifice: the house of Being; it wants to turn its students into residents of a logical acropolis; and it awakens in them the urge to be at home everywhere. As the goal of this exercise, Greek tradition offers us the term sophrosyne (prudence, self-control), Latin tradition the term humanitas. To the extent that the philosophical school of antiquity is thus paideia, an introduction into adult prudence that constitutes humanity, it carries out a kind of rite of transition to cultivate the “large-spirited” human who is suitable for the city and the empire. 8 It would be unconsidered to see in the values of paideia and humanitas merely nonpolitical ideals of personal charac- ter. That the wise man recognizes all humans as kin—is this doc- trine really only a humanitarian naiveté, born of an exaggerated expansion of the ethic of the family? 9 If one recalls the pinnacle of Europe’s culture of higher secondary schools between 1789 and 1945, it becomes clear that all European nation-states pursued a
plato 5
humanistic education system to prepare their youth to take on tasks within the framework of their national-imperial programs. As much as philosophy and education were already in antiquity oriented toward the individual, the emphasis in all the “work on oneself ” was initially and mostly on preparing the individual to be a “human being within a state. ” Only when the split between power and spirit had become very deep, as during the Roman Empire, did philosophy fall under the sway of the model of the autonomous wise man who has turned his back on the powers of this world.
Classical philosophy held out to its disciples the prospect that they could achieve serenity in a chaotic cosmos; the wise man is he who recognizes chaos as the mask of the cosmos. He whose gaze penetrates into the deeper structures gains the freedom of over- all mobility; no locus within Being is entirely foreign to him any longer; that is why the love of wisdom is the high school of exile. By designating—in a way as witty as it was programmatic—the wise man as a kosmopolités, as a citizen of the world, philosophy promised superiority over a universe that was, already in its very form, a vicious marketplace of gods, customs, and opinions—and simultaneously a battlefield on which multiple polities fought for hegemony. Too little attention has probably been paid to the fact that Plato’s youth—he was likely born in 427 bce—coincided entirely with the Peloponnesian War (431–404 bce). The philos- opher’s ominous distance from empirical reality and the idealis- tic tendency—often faulted—to withdraw from the merely given are easier to understand if one bears in mind that in his younger years, Plato rarely experienced a world that was not distorted by the passions of war.
In modern parlance one would therefore describe classical philosophy as a discipline of orientation. If it wanted to promote itself, it could do so above all with the promise to transcend the confusion of existing conditions through an orderly return to secure foundations—in modern terminology one would speak of
6 plato
a reduction of complexity. The philosopher as the eliminator of malicious multiplicity bore traits of the leader of a mystery, who guided students into the realm of the first principles, from where one could acquire gratifying, sweeping overviews. But every ascent into higher stations demands its price. If the philosopher wished to recommend himself as the educator of the never-before-seen type of human being guided by reason, he had to arrogate to himself the right to establish new yardsticks for what it means to become an adult in the city and the empire. And in fact, the mean- ing of what it meant to become an adult changed radically in the transition from tribal societies to political and imperial structures.
Anyone who wanted to become an adult in Athens in the fifth and fourth centuries bce had to prepare himself to take on power on a scale that was historically all but unknown—or at the least make the burdens of power his own. As teachers of what it meant to become an adult, the philosophic educators thus became mid- wives at the risky birth of human beings transposed into larger, more powerful worlds. Preventing these births from resulting in monstrosities required an art that balanced the new plenitude of power with a new prudence and circumspection.
From the time of the oldest tribal cultures, symbolic births at the threshold to adulthood have been a matter for ritual initia- tions. The modern paideia invariably has followed in the footsteps of that tradition; in this area it stands as the successor to—and also the enemy of—shamanism, where the latter not only refers to an archaic healing art, but simultaneously encompasses the authority to initiate the younger generation into the mysteries of adult life. In the cosmopolitan polis, however, it had become impossible to perform initiatory tasks only with shamanic tech- niques; the democratic, combative city no longer favored the trance. After Socrates and Plato, it was not possible to regard as grown up only the person of whom the ancestors and gods of the tribe had taken possession. Urban forms of life demanded a new
plato 7
type of adult, one to whom the gods did not get too close—this means at the same time they stimulate a type of intelligence that shifts from tradition and repetition to study and “memory. ” Rev- elation and evidence are no longer created through ecstasies, but through reasoned conclusions: truth itself has learned to write; entrained sentences lead one to it. That is why the meaning of memory is radically altered in Plato’s body of teachings: according to Plato, what we should have remembered at all costs we lost as we plunged into this world; what we learn by heart here is con- fused or useless. Henceforth, “remembrance” of a prenatal, a priori, or pure knowledge is to render the mythological and rhapsodic memory culture superfluous: thus begins the revolution of knowl- edge through the a priori.
With some liberty one could compare the Platonic procedures with a psychoanalysis in which we recall, not repressed primor- dial scenes, but clouded archetypes and obscured mathematical essences. Whether such remembrances can achieve full trans- parency may remain questionable. In any case, to Plato, thinking under human conditions means no longer sharing the full lucidity of the heavens. Mortals, as long as they are present in these bod- ies, pay their dues to the difference of all differences: because they know most things only vaguely, they suffer the rupture between the transparency up there and the clouded view down here. We are condemned to having to deal with an addition of darkness in all things. Philosophy is at the least an endeavor to illuminate the twilight we inhabit.
It was logical that the philosophical discourse began to push back the traditional myths and opinions; in place of fairy tale– infatuated stupor and rhapsodic enthusiasm, it aspired to a state of “critical” soberness, which has ever since been considered the working climate of authentic philosophizing. To be sure, with its doctrine of beautiful manias and sobria ebriatas (sober drunken- ness), Platonism still entered into a compromise between criticism
8 plato
and enthusiasm, even if such concessions were foreign to the later, dry schools. To the extent that it was enlightenment, philosophy could do nothing other than disenchant the old-religious consti- tutions of the soul and the crude stories of the gods; but to the degree to which it swore its disciples to an absolute, highest good, it simultaneously set in motion a reenchantment through the liv- ing universality. Only where this higher enchantment failed—for example, under the impression that argumentation created more problems than it solved—did skepticism and the unproductive spinning of the analytical wheels arise.
When that happened, con- tinuous reflection could also become a symptom of schizoid alien- ations: for instead of illuminations from the True-Good-Beautiful, those alienations see everywhere only depressive grays. In fact, late classical philosophy already furnished the arguments for a self-weariness. In this regard, the academicism of the ancients is kin to its contemporary counterpart.
In the optimistic early years, philosophical reeducation intended no less than to change the soul and enthusiasm of indi- viduals; its goal was to turn confused children of the city into adult cosmopolitans, inner barbarians into civilized inhabitants of the empire, intoxicated opinion-holders into thoughtful lovers of knowledge, doleful slaves to the passions into cheerful indi- viduals in control of themselves. At the beginning of European pedagogy there was a time when the word school always meant school of refinement. The modern term education hardly reflects any of this ambition of philosophy’s original project; but even our contemporary notion of philosophy, where it refers to the activi- ties of sullen faculty and the endless discourse of a subculture of jealous mental athletes, barely recalls the solemn seriousness of the Platonic enterprise—to begin, on the basis of a school, with a redefinition of what it means to be human. We must give credit to intellectual historians like Paul Rabbow and Pierre Hadot for protesting against the modern intellectualistic and cognitivist
plato 9
misunderstanding of ancient philosophy, and for reminding us instead of its tenacious self-educational pathos. 10 Philosophy that would not have operated as a transformative exercise (ask- esis) would have remained suspect to its ancient acolytes also as a source of knowledge. When Diogenes of Sinope succeeded in having Alexander step aside so that he would not block the sun, the goal of the exercise was also achieved. In this sense the wise pantomimes of kynicism are the equal of loquacious Platonism. To the man from Sinope belongs half of everything that the expres- sion “unwritten teachings” can refer to.
Without question, philosophy after Socrates and Plato was in pursuit of disenchantment. With that, the new schools opposed the unreflective habits of the state of being half-awake. Deliber- ateness is still the most modern and most improbable condition, since the old collective ecstasies have not yet relinquished their ancient power. Indeed, behind the Athenian philosophers stood not only their archaic colleagues, the shamans and iatromancers, the seer-healers of ancient Greece, but also the Homeric rhap- sodes and the poet-theologians of the Dionysian cult. Breaking with them was the historical mission of philosophy. After Socrates, all philosophers were nouveaux philosophes; they had to be new to the extent that they were involved in the media revolution of writ- ten culture and urban rhetoric. As such, they act as agents of an epochal transformation in the ancient relationships of knowl- edge. They respond to the fact that henceforth every thinker had to become a writer of his knowledge. The discourses about Being, god, the soul—ontology, theology, psychology—enter into the lines of continuous prose texts and thus always present them- selves also as ontography, theography, and psychography. The lines of the philosophical text are discrete ways to the truth; they are antiquity’s data highways to absolute information. Soon, however, there would be too many lines; the “paths” become alarmingly elongated, so much so that doubts arise as to whether the lovers
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of wisdom can still attain real knowledge in their lifetime; is it not possible that these strange arguers ended up possessing only libraries and not enlightenment?
Be that as it may, because the philosopher as author led the way on this long and steep path, a new mode of authority was born: that of authorship, which rests on the psychagogic power of the written word. Plato’s infamous polemic against the poets does not attest to an amusical aversion to pretty words; rather, it expresses an unavoidable media competition between the new, soberly composed discourse about god, the soul, and the world, and the old, trance-inducing rhapsody and the intoxicating and convul- sive theater-theology. Plato presented himself as a medium—as it were—of the god of the philosophers, who was proclaiming through him the commandment: I am an image-less god, you shall no longer have any sung and versified gods beside me. Henceforth it was no longer the tone and the verse that created the true music, but the prose argument and the dialectical thought process. Thus the Platonic opus not only marks the epochal threshold between orality and literacy, but also stands at the boundary between the older, musical-rhapsodic transmission of knowledge and the now prosaic-communicative procurement of knowledge.
What accounts for the charm of the Platonic texts is that they, unlike the Aristotelian treatises and the entire academic litera- ture, still reveal the closeness to the manner of speech of the wise singers and the pious dramaturges. For more than two millennia the tone of philosophy has remained fixed to that of the thesis- formulating prose tractate—until modern times, when, after a few preludes in Renaissance philosophy (Bruno, in particular), another rapprochement between the poetic and the discursive prose takes place in authors such as Novalis, Nietzsche, Valéry, and Sartre. Viewed as a whole, the massif of classical philosophy between Plato and Husserl is one of the most stupendous conse- quences of literacy. Therein lies one of the reasons why precisely
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today—at the dawn of another media revolution—rereading our philosophical tradition promises to become a fruitful enterprise.
In terms of its self-conception, the modern world is carrying out a comprehensive anti-Platonic experiment. This appears to have become possible only because the grounding of knowledge and action in the “ancient European” idea of a supreme Good could be abandoned. The dominant technological pragmatism of the modern era was given free rein only after the metaphysical inhibitions standing in the way of unlimited moral and physi- cal experimentation had been removed, or at least enfeebled. From this perspective it becomes understandable why moder- nity is dominated by a postmetaphysical disinhibition. Within that disinhibition, liberation and destabilization are ambiva- lently interwoven. The consequences of the uncoupling from the metaphysical foundation—deconstructivists would say: from the foundation-illusion—are twofold: the empowerment to engage in unrestrained projecting is paid for by the discovery of an inter- nal abyss. The fact that a deep-seated discomfort with modernity exists today among so many contemporaries has to do undoubt- edly with the ambivalent experience of a steady increase in power and an unstoppable erosion of security. When ambivalence prevails, positive balance sheets are difficult to come by. A grow- ing number of people are doubtful—with ever more compelling justifications—that the world experiment of the modern age still amounts to a global sweepstakes: too obvious by now is the ris- ing tide of risks and losses. If one wanted to name the principle that rules the ecology of the modern mind, one would have to lay bare why modernization brings with it ineluctably progress in the awareness of being adrift. Were it possible to make this sufficiently clear to all the actors and audiences of the modern game, it would also become evident to them why this tendency cannot be reversed through a flight to the ancient foundations. The fundamentalism that arises today around the world out of
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the mistrust of modernity can never offer more than makeshift constructs for the helpless; it produces only semblances of secu- rity without deeper knowledge; in the long term, it destroys the infected societies with the drug of false certainty. A good antidote to the fundamentalist temptation is to open once again the book of European philosophical knowledge and retrace the lines and paths of ancient thinking—to the extent that the brevity of life allows us to venture upon such elaborate recapitulations.
The motto “think again” presupposes the summons to read in a new way. All fruitful rereading benefits from the refractions and shifts in perspectives that are inherent in our retrospective view of traditions, provided we are conscious contemporaries of the ongoing upheavals in the conditions of knowledge and com- munication within the emerging telematic global civilization. There are many indications that the current generations will pass through a rupture in the shape of the world which—in profundity and momentousness—is at least as important as the one that gave rise to classical philosophy twenty-five hundred years ago. A study of that ancient rupture could therefore inspire an understanding of the present one.
We will not gain better knowledge today without participat- ing in the adventures that await us in the revision of our own history. A new aggregate state of intelligence will extract new information also from the old schools of philosophical knowl- edge: this can mean that one is ready and willing, with Plato and in spite of Plato,11 to work on actualizing our intelligence.
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aristotle
In the fourth century bce, the genius of the European concep- tion of knowledge revealed itself for the first time in its monu- mental completeness. Astonishing for the wealth of his interests,
the scope of his writings, and the perspicuity of his conceptual distinctions, Aristotle stands like a portal figure of near-mythic force at the entrance to the high European schools of knowledge. Considering what he accomplished in his lifetime as a thinker and writer, the idea suggests itself that what would come to be called the university from the Middle Ages on was anticipated in the figure of a single man. The mind of Aristotle was the senate— as it were—of a university with a wealth of departments. In him, the natural sciences and humanities—if one may use such anach- ronistic language—merged in the breadth of their range, already presided over by the philosophical doctrine of the first things, also called theology. In a few disciplines—logic, for example—
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Aristotle was both pioneer and completer in one. It comes as no surprise that the history of the European university during its first, medieval half (lasting four hundred years) was simultane- ously the history of Latinized Aristotle studies. If a scholastic theologian during this time wished to invoke the authority of the great Greek, he could do so safely with the phrase ut ait philosophus: “as the philosopher states. ” Never has a thinker been honored as Aristotle was with this formula. When early modern thought broke out of the lead chamber of scholastic authoritarianism, it was once more the name “Aristotle”—this time with a negative accentuation—that marked this development. The cry: “Aristotle errs here! ” could have become the watchword for a risk-embracing independence in the reexamination of fields of knowledge that had become excessively scholastic and convoluted.
A look at Aristotle’s life work reveals that the “theoretical life”—the often-invoked bíos theoretikós—of the ancient lover of wisdom must not be misunderstood in the sense of a modern conception of leisure. What the Romans later used to call the vita contemplativa was often nothing other than the vita activa of philo- sophical investigations. The theory itself was grounded in asceti- cism, in unflagging practice, in the daily exertion of the logical and moral powers. Philosophers are athletes of conceptual categories. To be sure, intellectual asceticism is not without is own pleasures; when Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, put forth the proposition that all humans by nature strive for knowledge, he was generalizing into an anthropological thesis what was for him a permanent, personal experience: in its unceasing movement, the active intellect takes pleasure in itself. A small likeness to the divine becomes evident in this knowledge-narcissism. Even in its driest enumerations and most industrious distinctions, the Aristotelian intellectual edifice still attests an original connection between knowledge and joy.
Occasionally the question has been raised whether Aristotle is not compromised as an educator and teacher of wisdom because
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he failed to prevent Alexander, the so-called Great. What reso- nates in this question is also the conviction that philosophy attains its goal only when it has transformed every will to power and all manic ambition. That would amount to judging the scholar with the yardstick of the wise man. Wisdom in the effusive or esoteric sense was not Aristotle’s thing. For him, the word sober-mindedness described the humanly possible. From Aristotle one could cer- tainly learn how to appropriately carry out logical and empirical investigations, but not how to die in confused passions in order to be reborn in enlightened self-control. Aristotle was not able to turn his brilliant, wild pupil into the philosopher-king Plato had called for; after years of interacting with the greatest thinker of his time, there remained alive in Alexander the belief that there was something bigger than philosophy. For Aristotle, in turn, there were more important things than putting a philosophical bridle on a prince’s son hungry for greatness. Alexander’s Egyptian and Indian adventures may have kindled the straw fire of Macedonian imperialism; what was on the agenda for him, the logician and scientist, were Alexandrian campaigns of curiosity, which were to go much further than all politics great and small. Across indus- trious decades, Aristotle created an empire of knowledge, whose subsequent history—if one desired to recount it in detail—would become nothing less than the epic of European sciences right up to the threshold of the modern period.
The Aristotelian empire in books, once their author was no longer alive, had to fragment—like Alexander’s successor king- doms—into individual disciplines. More so than virtually any thinker before him, Aristotle was aware that the edifice of knowl- edge could be consolidated only as a joint undertaking by many generations, and that the investigative intelligence must prove and optimize itself over time. Later scholars could learn from him what pose they should strike in the sequence of generations of the sci- ences: one of self-conscious gratitude toward one’s predecessors,
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or one of discrete pride—if personal, new accomplishments justi- fied it—toward posterity. Thus, Aristotle is a man of the middle also with respect to the tradition of knowledge. As both a natural scientist and an ethicist he glorified the wonder of Being in what is constant and normal.
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augustine
Augustine stands before posterity as the only intellectual personality of the early Christian era who is spiritually and psychologically illuminated down to the minutest detail—in fact, he may be the most clearly visible personality of antiquity, the only individual of world history before the Renaissance of whom we have close-ups, so to speak. This precarious privilege of trans- parent visibility does not mean that Augustine, clearly still bound entirely to ancient notions of the world and humanity, antici- pated certain tendencies of modern individualism or aspects of modern portrait culture. And he is definitely not an existential- ist ante litteram. That Augustine exposed himself to his contem- poraries and posterity so radically through his work, not least by virtue of his epochal Confessiones, which made him the patriarch of a literature of self-revelation, is the result of a theological process that the bishop of Hippo waged—victoriously—against himself.
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We possess such a movingly concrete, human, and intellectually profound picture of Augustine largely because he himself gath- ered the evidence of his conduct and his sinful propensities as evidence against himself and tried to cast them into the cleansing fire of the confession. Augustine became and has remained vis- ible because he took himself seriously as the exemplar of a human being who, with God’s help, ended up taking God more seriously than himself.
“Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and yet so new, late have I loved you. ” This habit of self-revelation shows how far Augustine—although he remained committed to the Platonic parameters as a philosophizing theologian—had moved away from the Hellenistic motives of philosophizing about origins. For while philosophical Hellenism was largely characterized by the elevation of the knowing soul to the lofty objects of its contem- plation, what prevails in the Augustinian discourse of God and humankind is a continuously radicalizing ambivalence. When Augustine endows the human interior with the highest accolades as the vessel of the traces of God, he simultaneously yields to an irresistible urge to debase humankind beneath a transcendental majesty. In this regard, Augustine’s work does not merely mark the Latin phase in the gradual Hellenization of Christianity, in which scholars believe they can discern the principle of the early history of Christian doctrine. The phenomenon of Augustine has become fateful in the history of ideas and mentalities because through him, the most stirring idea of the ancient world, Plato’s construct of love as a homesickness for the preexistential Good that is intuited, was subjected to a momentous, darker reinter- pretation, indeed, a reversal. For the Platonists, the descent of the soul into the body leads to an obfuscation of memory, from which the incarnated soul recovers to the extent to which it conforms to its calling: to purify and perfect within itself the memory of the Good. The soul of the darker Augustinianism, by contrast,
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is stained by an incurable corruption. That is why its labor of remembering the ultimate Good ends in the despairing realiza- tion that, by its own effort, it will never be able to return to the unspoiled participation in the light of the Good.
This Augustinian turn—of which it is impossible to decide whether it has the character of a discovery (that is, insight) or invention (that is, projection)—leads to the Christian catastro- phe of philosophy. It inaugurates a more or less manifestly mel- ancholic millennium in which human reason will be unable to recover from the trauma of its one-sided dissociation from the Best. But it is only under the banner of what is on the human side an irreparable separation that the motif of a love unilater- ally aggregated in God can become all-powerful. Where mutual- ity is lost and the kindness of humanity has dissolved into noth- ing, that is where the realm of grace begins. Philosophy may well contemplate the gift, but the kingdom of theology establishes itself through the new guiding concept of grace. The doctrine of grace serves to provide doctrinal pastoral care for the state of human forlornness under God. Augustine opened the sluice gates through which elemental masochistic energies have been pouring into European thinking ever since; with a radicalism that virtually raised him to the rank of a higher power, he elevated incurable human nature to the primary motif of his interpretation of reality. Thereafter, not even love as such can heal, unless it is divine love, restored and granted by Christ. But even as such, it remains over- shadowed by an agonizing particularity: for now the love of God no longer has the character of an affection that is universal and allows for unconditional participation, but has that of a strongly selective, patronizing pardon.
In the end, where the human being who loves merely in a human way, that is, the egotist who must always have himself and his desires in mind, steps onto the stage, the later Augustine sees always the stigma of loss and the trace of an original guilt that
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reaches deeper than any possibility of redemption and anything humans could achieve. One might say that Augustine in this way uncouples philosophy from its classical, manic constitution and places it under the auspices of depression. For him, too, the human being as such is already a futile passion, but the reason behind this futility is not, as in modern existentialisms, the absurd structure of the conditio humana. The Augustinian person leads a lost and wasted life because the stain of original sin essentially excludes him from the feeling of security within God, and because he must bear the uncertainty of salvation in the extreme. For Augustine, what is unredeemable in humanity is forever combined with the uncertain in the impenetrability of God. To be sure, for a small handful there continues to exist the fullness of salvation and free access to the glory of the source. But the nature-given participa- tion of the human soul in the splendor of the absolute Good is no longer sufficient to offer an adequate reason for its self-rescue and its secure return to the Best. Within the Augustinian realm, even the most pious retain a reason to doubt their salvation to the very end.
The intellectual optimism of the Hellenes is bound to fail in the face of these insights into God’s selectivity. Under Augustine’s melancholy mediation, God’s self-sufficiency grows into a for- tress that is impregnable to humans, and into which only those are accepted who, by virtue of an impenetrable act of God’s will, have remained from the outset among those who are not doomed. Augustine’s masochistic fundamental operation springs from the identification with a God against whom the human soul is always in the wrong, and whom it would have to unconditionally acknowledge as being in the right even if it is among the damned.
Just as Pascal would one day wager on the existence of God in the face of the uncertainty of revelation, Augustine, in the face of the uncertainty of being a chosen one, wagered on uncondi- tional resignation. His psychological genius lies in the fact that
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he ferrets out within the person the self-asserting “I” unwilling to resign itself, in all its new guises and defensive positions. And precisely this observation that the human being never yields fully and without ulterior thoughts inspired Augustine to conduct this model trial against his youthful vanities, and also against the illusions of his middle years, with which he had tried to save his neck within Christian philosophism. As God’s prosecutor, the formidable bishop leads the prosecution against himself and all other comrades-in-fate in the all-too-human self-centeredness. He exposes himself, the defendant accused of original sin and original rebellion, in all the hiding places of his unresigned self- will. In the process he draws out into the light that it is not only truth that dwells within the human being, but also the reason for despair, narcissistic wickedness, ungodly corruption, and the trace of Satanic separatism.
What Augustine accomplished here was no less than the fundamental inquisition against human self-love, which would become a constant in the history of Western mentality: we find it still in Fichte’s verdict against the finite “I” enthralled with itself, in Schelling’s analysis of selfishly misused human freedom, in Dostoevsky’s definition of man as “a being that goes on two legs and is ungrateful,” in Sigmund Freud’s later theorems of human autoeroticism, in Jacques Derrida’s critique of the word that hears itself talking, and in the neoconservative lamentations about mass individualism—all are part of the history of the antinarcissistic inquisition launched by Augustine and the Catholic Fathers. The axiom of the trial against the separated, self-absorbed human being is that he who wishes to be pleasing to God must be dis- pleased with himself. The truth about the truth is that it should be dreadful to those affected.
Modernity has discovered that humanity can be displeased with itself even without God. Truth and depression unfold together in a correlation that is conceivable also without God’s immense
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sadism and without God’s immense grace. It is Augustine’s con- tributions to the interpretation of the human separation from the good foundation and his keen deconstruction of human self- protections that secure the Christian classic author an inexhaust- ible post-Christian readership.
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Bruno
Among the glittering series of Renaissance philosophers who began to lead early modern European thought out of the hegemony of all-powerful Christian scholasticism, the charred silhouette of Giordano Bruno stands out impressively. Ever since his death at the stake in Rome in February of 1600, his name— shrouded by rumors of pantheistic nefariousness and cosmologi- cal daring—has been a fixture in the annals of martyrdom of the modern free spirit. The vagaries of his posthumous fate have retained something of the erratic luster and misfortune of his life story. They create the impression that his followers and inter- preters spent more time poking around in his ashes than reading his writings.
In fact, intellectual history knows few authors whose afterlife has been so heavily shaped by projections and monopolizations on the part of enraptured sympathizers for their own interests.
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And so the history of the reception of Bruno is, with few excep- tions, that of a well-intentioned legasthenia; many a descendant in need of someone to lean on has put into Bruno’s mouth what he would have said had he been the person people liked to imag- ine he was. Thus, ally-seekers of every stripe have hitched him to their cause, with anticlericalists and pantheists leading the way; in recent years, even a certain Catholic pietism has tried to lay hold of him. People are eager to make it seem like they were burned at the stake by his side in order to benefit from his aura as a victim. This kind of obtrusiveness may be a typical mechanism for the history of dissident philosophers. To the extent that it is based on a lack of better understanding, it is largely due to the fact that Latin has been a dead language among Europe’s educated elite since the nineteenth century, as a result of which Bruno’s critical texts, written in Latin, were long buried as though in a tomb. Any- one who wants to expose himself to the power and greatness of Bruno’s thinking in its most impressive manifestations must first endeavor to liberate the “magician” Bruno, the memory artist, the materiosoph, the image-ontologist, and the teacher of nimble transformation from his Latin crypt so as to ponder his ideas in the light of modern languages.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Elisabeth Samsonov, who— inspired not least by the work of the grand old dame of Renais- sance scholarship Frances A. Yates—has begun to provide Ger- man readers access to some of Bruno’s long-forgotten Latin writings. His work attests to a misunderstood aspect of the myth of the modern era: it illustrates the birth of modernity out of the spirit of a philosophy of imagination. In the wake of the rediscov- ery of Bruno’s doctrine of the world-constituting achievements of “imagination,” the lazy penchant of intellectual historians to construct modern thought entirely on the basis of Descartes becomes more dubious than ever. One must go back to the uni- verse of Bruno, Shakespeare, and Bacon to find the keys to largely
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unknown treasuries of incipient modernity. Like hardly a thinker before him, Bruno immersed himself into the cosmo-dynamic of memories. With his insights into the nature and function of memoria, Giordano Bruno can become the contemporary of those who today huddle around the brain as if it were the locus of the riddle of the universe. Because he emphasized the ars-character of remembrance and memory, Bruno is the first “art” philosopher of the modern era.
It is high time to blow off the dust from Bruno’s manuscripts to reveal what alone honors a thinker who was a master of Italian and Latin prose: the luminous literalness of his real thoughts.
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Descartes
Few periods in the history of thought have become as alien to contemporaries as the seventeenth century, which is usu- ally presented by the history books as the founding era of mod-
ern philosophy. It is, in fact, hardly possible for those born and thinking later to project themselves into a time when figures like Francis Bacon, René Descartes, and Thomas Hobbes were still New Philosophers. Blinded by the historical import of the impulses that have come to be associated with these luminar- ies, we are barely still able to return with an unbiased eye to the epoch when what posterity liked to call the project of modernity was hardly more than a lively exchange of letters between a few dozen correspondents.
The optical illusions of history make what was initially merely a sophisticated premonition of the inner link between power and method seem like the departure into the age when technology
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seized power. The peculiarities of this seventeenth century also include the semimythical quality of its eminent authors: their attempts were credited as laying down foundations, and their programs as epochal turning points. It was not long before the conservative enemies of modernity eagerly adopted this mytho- logical mode, with the result that Descartes’s name could become a symbol for an immoderately self-confident humanity’s frivolous deviation from the divinely ordained order of things. It is not surprising that the restoration of the nineteenth century wanted to count Descartes—whose works had been on the Catholic Church’s Index of Prohibited Books—among the distant pro- genitors of the French Revolution, as though it were only two or three steps from the foundation of thinking in the principle of cogito to the dissolution of all things. Descartes’s world, of course, is not that of the bourgeois revolution, but that of the wars of religion. The pathos with which he pursues the distinc- tion between certainties and probabilities in his fundamental works was also fed by the object-lesson that the religious civil war provided to contemporaries. For what else was the Thirty Years’ War between the confessional parties (which overlapped with virtually all of Descartes’s adult life) than the battle between mere probabilities that had leapt from the theological seminaries onto the battlefield?
Descartes countered this bearing of arms by the fanatics of probability with his avowal of absolute evidence and the secure and peaceful process of his method. Where method and evidence had won the upper hand, the philosopher suggested, armed reli- gious fanaticism and the presumptuous assertion of positions would have to make way, and what was left after the end of the war of inexactitudes could—ideally—be nothing other than the peaceful advance of all truth-loving minds along the secure paths of regulated and connecting reason. Descartes’s grand idea was to move thinking into a realm devoid of strife.
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In the history of thought there is probably no other author in whom the word method was charged with so many promises as in the case with Descartes. We clearly hear pacifist resonances in the overtones of the new idea of precision: this idea stands for self-confidence and solidarity, generosity and entrepreneurial spirit all in one. In his conception of method, Descartes publicly announced his renunciation of the dogmatic ballast of the Aris- totelian universities. In an elegant and antiauthoritarian man- ner, Cartesian reflection rebuffed the claims of tradition and its professors: he who has the power to begin anew need no longer engage in dialogues with the dead; he who turns a new page is for now exempt from the dialogue with history. With this mindset, the new philosopher no longer took a fancy to the argumenta- tive contests of a powerless and self-referential Sorbonne culture, which had long since lost the connection to the arts, the work- shops, and the counting houses. With the word method, Descartes threw open the windows on the present, and it turned out that this was a time when an invigorated human ability demanded to be placed on a new logical and moral foundation. It was as though Descartes, in so doing, had created, alongside the old nobility of blood and sword and the younger noblesse de robe, a separate nobil- ity of method, which recruited its members from all strata, pro- vided they were willing to swear an oath to clarity and lucidity. From the outset there was no doubt about the antifeudal char- acter of this group of individuals with new skills. Even if the philosophizing nobleman Descartes never gave reason to doubt his dual awareness of nobility, the inherited and the self-created, subsequent generations of bourgeois intelligentsia did recog- nize in him their natural ally. The Cartesian nobility of compe- tence gave rise to the class of minds who thought for themselves and without bias, a class that has formed the critical ferment of the European intelligentsia from the early modern period on. Still today, and not entirely without reason, the myth of the
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rationalistic national character of the French invokes the Carte- sian privileges of lucidity.
Within the history of theory, the phenomenon of Descartes describes a radical currency reform of reason. In an era of a gal- loping discourse inflation—triggered by unrestrained allegori- cal mechanisms and excrescences of theological word games— Descartes created a new criterion for what constituted meaning- ful speech, built upon the gold standard of evidence. The neces- sary conciseness of this criterion arises from the stipulation that from true propositions must always follow, on the one hand, good dispositions and, on the other, useful machines. As the author of the Discours de la méthode would declare: “Being of no use to anybody means the same as being worthless. ”
If Descartes’s name remained controversial through the ages, it was largely because he symbolized, more so than almost anyone else, the victory of the engineers over the theologians. He paved the way for a thinking that opened itself unconditionally to the task of the epoch: the building of machines. As a result, the non- machine-building forms of intelligence rightly feel devalued or repudiated by the Cartesian impulse. As the creator of the analyti- cal mythos, Descartes simultaneously created the “metaphysics”— as it were—of machine-building, in that he began to break down all of existence into the simple, smallest parts, and sought to make known the rules that govern their composition. By committing thought entirely to the back and forth of analysis and synthesis, he made reason itself conform to engineering and stripped it of its ancient, contemplative muse. Thoughts now become internalized forms of work, and the life of the mind itself is put on the path toward the production of useful things. Nevertheless, it would be wrong to believe that Descartes’s fundamental mechanistic con- viction had to lead invariably to a break with theological tradi- tion. Precisely in the methodologically new beginning of scientific thought, providing a foundation proves to be the real metaphysical
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activity. But since in the great philosophical rationalism only God can furnish the foundation of foundations, modern philosophy of the Cartesian type remains characteristically suspended between theology and machine theory. There is good reason why the great systems-architects of German Idealism celebrated Descartes as their precursor. For them, as for the great Frenchman, laying the foundation was the piety of thought. But the fact that conscious- ness had now been brought into the function of laying the foun- dation constituted the modernity of the transcendental approach. Only the dissolution of the foundation in the philosophy of con- sciousness in the twentieth century turned the Cartesian universe completely into a historical artifact. Descartes’s work remains rel- evant as a testimony to the very interlacing of science and con- templation that today, more so than ever before, imparts to philo- sophical thought its precarious dignity.
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Pascal
To anyone who was trained through authors like Goethe and Nietzsche to think in terms of elective affinities and elective enmities across epochs, the Pascalian renaissance of the
twentieth century presents itself as one of the most appropri- ate receptions in modern intellectual history. It is but a single step from the obvious to the necessary, and it was inevitable that the thinkers of Christian and non-Christian existentialism dur- ing the first half of the twentieth century sensed a kindred soul in Pascal. Did his own discomforts not anticipate those of our time? Was his melancholy not already that of a later modernity weary of Enlightenment? Was his discourse about humans not already congenial with the self-experience of a civilization that, in the twentieth century, struck fear and terror into the heart of humanity like never before: fear of itself and of the degeneration of its lofty projects?
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When Pascal, in a memorable turn of phrase, called the human being a “thinking reed,” who would not have understood this as an emblem for our newly experienced fragility? And when he spoke of humanity as a deposed king, who would not have thought about the large sociopolitical projects of our age, and of the end to the demiurgic excesses? The character masks of our time include the dethroned history-maker and the unmasked phyturgos (creator of nature)—two figures who seem to have stepped right out of Pas- cal’s anthropological Pensées.