Martha Nussbaum, Non-Insider

In 1947 Martha Nussbaum was born. Her name at birth was Martha Craven. She claims to have repudiated her own "aristocratic" upbringing and to dislike elites and in-groups, whether it's the Bloombury group or Derrida. She has taught at Harvard, Brown and the University of Chicago, received more than 60 honorary degrees, and a few days ago she won the Berggruen Prize, which comes with a $1 million cash award.

In the mid-1980's, when Nussbaum was a professor in both the Classics and Philosophy Departments at Brown, she published The Fragility of Goodness, a book which added considerably to her already considerable prestige in academia. In the late 1980's, I was a Collage Scholar in the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. We College Scholars were given The Fragility of Goodness to read. Prof Nussbaum came to the University of Tennessee to speak. There was a Q&A after her lecture. I asked several questions.

I have never been particularly drawn to nor particularly repelled by Nussbaum's writing. I think I went to the trouble of coming up with questions for her because I was drawn to the aura of power around her. Double full professor in the Ivy League at around age 40, that's sumpin. Many camerapeople followed her around, including at least one video camera crew. I don't remember what my questions were. I'm quite certain they were uninteresting.

By this time, 1988 or early 1989, I had heard the name Derrida, but not with connotations which tempted me to read him.

Bill Moyers interviewed Prof Nussbaum on TV about The Fragility of Goodness. In his introduction, there are several shots of Nussbaum's visit to the University of Tennessee. In one shot, from behind the speaker's lecturn, in the upper-left corner of the screen, is a small smudge which may or may not be me.

In 2007, Peter Sloterdijk, a German philosopher whom I still liked somewhat at the time, despite numerous German-speaking friends having assured me that he was an asshole, published a book about Derrida. That was the first time I was strongly tempted to read a text either by or about Derrida. However, my competence in the German language never ceases to grow, and the more precisely I'm able to understand Sloterdijk, the less I like him. I didn't get a copy of Sloterdijk's book about Derrida, nor, at the time, did I get any books by Derrida.

Less than 2 months ago I finally began to read Derrida. I've taken an immediate and immense like to him. I'm a postmodernist! Who knew?!

Philosophy And Politics And Tania Lombrozo's Piece For NPR

In a recent piece for NPR, Tania Lombrozo called for philosophers to be more engaged in public life.

I'm very much interested in philosophy, so why do I have a negative reaction to this NPR article? Perhaps it aroused the Epicurean in me. In ancient Greece, Stoic philosophers believed that the more fortunate members of society had a duty to serve society, while Epicurean philosophers thought that the wise thing to do was to enjoy life with a circle of close fiends and ignore the rest of the world as thoroughly as possible. Perhaps I have a Stoic approach to politics, except that I want to keep my Epicurean philosophy separate from it. Oscar Wilde loved art, including theatre, and he wanted to see society become more democratic and more responsive to the needs of those who needs were greatest, and yet he was opposed to the Realist plays which were in a great vogue during his lifetime, plays which sought to address social inequities. Wilde insisted: "All art is quite useless." Perhaps he felt that plays were the last thing which were suited to enacting great social change. And perhaps my involvement with philosophy boils down to something resembling Wilde's involvement with art -- it's something I dearly love, but I wouldn't recommend it as a cure for society's ills.

If we're going to involve philosophers in public life -- what kind of philosophers? Philosophers tend to constantly and sharply disagree with one another about just about everything imaginable, and have since ancient Greece. As far as I can tell, the most influential single philosopher in the politics of the US of the past 100 years has been Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind and instructor, at the University of Chicago, of a very nasty and powerful brood of Republican neocons.

My favorite philosopher is Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was emphatically ivory-tower. He wanted no part of any political party. Epicurean all the way, he was. "Beneath him and behind him" was how, in his opinion, every true philosopher should regard politics. And given Nietzsche's views on women, perhaps it's very much for the best that he never involved himself in politics. (Saying that Nietzsche is my favorite philosopher is far from saying that I agree with him about everything. In fact, I disagree with just about every single thing Nietzsche says about women in his philosophical works. Turning directly from those works to the letters he wrote to actual individual women, it's hard to believe that the misogynistic philosopher and the downright nice letter-writer are one and the same.)

I know of only 2 philosopher-kings, both Roman Emperors, Marcus Aurelius and Julian. Neither one a bad Emperor -- Julian is admirable for his concerted although unsuccessful attempt to oppose Christianity's intolerance of all other religions -- but neither one a particularly interesting philosopher either. (I think a case can be made that both Alexander the Great and Napoleon were philosopher-kings, and quite interesting philosophers, but I mention that only as an aside in this post because the general consensus is that they were not philosophers.)

I must be honest and point out that one reason for my negative response to Lombrozo's article is that I have heard of none of the living philosophers mentioned in it. I read mostly philosophers from bygone eras. Peter Sloterdijk, and dead guys. For all I know, all the people Lombrozo mentioned are perfectly brilliant, and their participation in public life could be nothing but tremendously good, and I'm missing an incredible amount of top-notch philosophizing which puts Sloterdijk to shame. I doubt it, but it's possible.

Existentialism and University Philosophy

"the major existential philosophers wrote with a passion and urgency rather uncommon in our own time"

It's uncommon among philosophers of our time, and it was uncommon among philosophers of their own time. And it's certainly missing from this long, tedious description of existentialism. Obviously, different people take different things from existentialist philosophers. I take from existentialism that there's no reason to be as boring as Steven Crowell, who wrote this very nearly pointless description of it.

I really don't know why there should be this incompatibility between universities and philosophy. Plato founded what was more or less the first university, the Academy, and Aristotle made the second one out of the Lyceum. Both institutions thrived for centuries. But a little while before the man generally counted as the the first existentialist philosopher, Kierkegaard, published his dissertation, Schopenhauer was insisting that real philosophy only existed outside of universities, that universities killed it and that what they called philosophy was no more than a grubby, prosaic jostling for jobs as philosophy professors, which laid much more emphasis on reading and discrediting one's competitors' writings, than on studying the canon of Western philosophy.



After receiving his Doctorate, Schopenhauer made a less than half-hearted attempt to teach philosophy at the University of Berlin, and then spent the rest of his life concentrating on being an author. As for the aforementioned "major existential philosophers," Kierkegaard got his Doctorate and then made no such attempt; and if he had continued in academia it would have been as a theologian and not as a philosopher. Dostoyevsky was a novelist. Nietzsche was awarded an extraordinary Doctorate at the age of 24, and then spent several years teaching at the University of Basel -- but he was teaching Philologie -- Classics, that is. Ancient Greek literature in his case -- and not philosophy. And Sartre and Camus made their livings writing rather than teaching. Heidegger was a professor, but he rejected the label of existentialist. I don't think we need to accept that rejection, but we should note that among the major existentialists, he's the only philosophy professor.

Steven Crowell, who wrote the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on existentialism linked near the beginning of this post, has taught philosophy at the university level for over 30 years and currently chairs the Philosophy department at Rice University. Walter Kaufmann, whom Crowell cites in his article as if he were an authority on existentialism (and indeed he is thought of as such by some, although not by me), taught philosophy at Princeton for over half his life, from 1947 until 1980. Besides what they did and do for a living, what's the difference between Crowell and Kaufmann on the one hand and Kierkegaard, Dostoyesvsky, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus on the other? For one, the major existentialists were all brilliant writers. Crowell isn't. Kaufmann wasn't. Crowell and Kaufmann are prosaic. Nietzsche cannot have been thinking of people like these two when he said that one must have chaos inside oneself in order to give birth to a dancing star, although academics in other fields seem to fit the bill much better. Einstein and Heidegger come immediately to mind. (Even outside of the philosophy departments, Einstein didn't have a conventional academic career, going from clerk to honorary PhD to professor.) It's difficult, to say the least, to think of Crowell and Kaufmann embodying Nietzsche's dictum about man being a rope stretched across an abyss.

The major existentialists had huge fires in them which burned whole forests of convention to crisps. Crowell and Kaufmann and most philosophy professors are convention itself. Does it matter whether they're consciously conventional and determined to undermine the chaos of the geniuses whose texts they have their students read, or whether they're simply much too dull to understand what I or Camus is talking about? Either way the result is diametrically opposed to the major existentialists.

Heidegger is an exception, a philosophy professor and at the same time a real no foolin' existentialist philosopher. Heidegger is exceptional in several ways, and mysterious and spooky, and that's about all I have to say about him for now.

William H Gass was a professor of philosophy for a very long time, although he's rarely described as a philosopher, although why not, actually? But in his classes given under the auspices of a philosophy department his students read mostly fiction and poetry. Gass has written mostly fiction and literary criticism (although it's unlike any other literary criticism), and then there's his book On Being Blue: A Philosophical Inquiry, a book I was thinking is in a category all by itself, but then I thought of the 3-volume work on spheres by the philosopher Peter Sloterdijk -- who is the chancellor of a university of art & design. The one of them explores human life via a color, the other via a shape. And neither of them fit into any conventional career categories. Just like the major existentialists.

Just like any major artist. A true artist or philosopher or physicist cannot be fit into any categories which exist when they're working, because their work is original. No one else has imagined something like their work, and so no one has yet made a category for it.

Karl Popper? No Thank You

"Der Überlieferung zufolge soll Platon am Eingang zu seiner Akademie die Inschrift angebracht haben, es möge sich fernhalten von diesem Ort, wer nicht Geometer sei" ("It is said that Plato had an inscription made at the entrance to his academy which asked everyone who wasn't a geometer to stay away.") -- That's the first sentence of Peter Sloterdijk's preface to the 1st volume of his work Sphären (Spheres). Sloterdijk not only approves of this elitist motto, he says that the 3 volumes of Sphären to follow are best understood as an even more radical demand for such knowledge. Sloterdijk also mentions the etymologie of "geometer" and "geometry," always a good thing to keep in mind with words which have been in use continually for thousands of years. By γεωμετρία, geometry, the ancient Greeks meant "measurement of the world." Yes, Euclid certainly practiced something which we today readily understand as the branch of mathematics we call geometry, but it's good to keep in mind the origins of words like "geometry," and "tragedy" -- and "philosophy" -- and remind ourselves that they can mean very different things in different eras.

Sloterdijk is full of this sort of helpful insights into the philosophy, the philosophies, of different eras and cultures, brimming with aids to grasping more of the immense complexity of bookish human thought.



All that by way of contrast, refreshing contrast, to Karl Popper. Someone finally persuaded me to read Popper, I've read vol 1 of his offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde, and that's that. No thank you. Not for me. Popper is full of platitudes. It seems he can't let a page go by without earnestly reminding the reader that he stands for freedom. Well, goody. He reminds me of the fictional Jerry Seinfeld's characterization of his pal Elaine Benes as a "hater of evil," a line which is so funny because, who's not? Just as we all hate evil, so are we all for freedom. The difficult part, the part where we encounter the complexity which seems to escape Popper, is when we attempt to define things like evil and freedom. Evil to whom? Freedom for whom? Gather 3 people together and you can likely find some small or great disagreement about the concrete application of these generalized good things.



That's right: I'm inclined to think that you'll get more subtle and profound messages about this sweet mystery we call life by watching "Seinfeld" than by reading Popper. I'm afraid Popper just might make things more mysterious -- and not in a good way. Near the beginning of his preface to the 1992 50th anniversary edition of the offene Gesellschaft, Popper remarks, "Seine Tendenz war: gegen Nazismus und Kommunismus; gegen Hitler und Stalin." ("It [the book] was directed against Nazism and Communism, against Hitler and Stalin.") However: "Ich verabscheute die Namen beider so sehr, daß ich sie in meinem Buch nicht erwähnen wollte." ("I hated the names of both of them [Hitler and Stalin] so much that I didn't want to name them in my book.") It might also be that, living in England in 1942, he didn't have the balls to call Stalin as bad as Hitler while Soviets were in the midst of dying by the tens of millions as England's ally.

It seems that Popper meant a lot of things in the book which he didn't say in the book. The 2003 edition is over 500 pages long, and well less than half of that is the main text of the book, the rest being numerous prefaces and afterwords and footnotes in which he explains and explains what he meant and corrects various people who misunderstood what he said. That 50th anniversary edition preface describes Hitler and Stalin as the signers of the 1939 non-aggression pact. Did Popper mean that Stalin signed that pact with Germany only after he had tried to sign similar pacts with his soon-to-be allies and been turned down, but not say it? To be fair to Popper, I think it's possible in this case that he didn't mention something because he didn't know it.

Regardless of whom this volume was really directed against, it's subtitle is Der Zauber Platons (The Magic of Plato). "Magic" is meant here in a bad way. It's magic by which Plato mesmerized people and got him to follow him as the originator and head of the war against the open society...

Popper is so bad, so inept, empty and yet simultaneously so full -- yes, of crap! Just as many changes have occurred in a term originating in ancient Greek between their γεωμετρία and our geometry, so too have societies evolved and changed tremendously. There was no open society in Athens 2400 years ago of the kind Popper envisions. Plato didn't want to plunge the world into a totalitarian Hell, as Hitler most certainly tried his very best to do. Plato was merely a conservative: he lacked the imagination to radically criticize the existing totalitarian society. Before Plato, as Popper correctly observed, Heraclitus envisaged a much more open society than the one Plato championed. Heraclitus' egalitarian vision doesn't make Plato a monster, it makes him an ordinary creature of his time and place regarding certain existing political realities, as, to judge from some of those introductions and afterwords and footnotes, countless people unsuccessfully attempted to point out to Popper.

It takes a lot to get me to defend Plato. Popper pulls it off with ease.

And ironically, reading Popper, who constantly reminds us of how he's fighting for everyone's freedom, makes me feel anything but free. Sloterdijk is rarely, if ever, called an apostle of freedom or some such, and he's often (usually ridiculously) called something like the opposite, but reading him makes me feel free. My mind soars, as the saying goes, when I read Sloterdijk. When I read Popper I feel chained to the plodding footsteps of his pedestrian mind. If ever elitism is called for, I think, it's when one is choosing an author to read. I'm done with Popper. So done. For the moment I'm returning to the 2 volumes of Sloterdijk's Sphären. Sloterdijk calls Nietzsche "the master of dangerous thinking," and Sloterdijk is sometimes described in similar terms.

Maybe Nietzsche and Sloterdijk -- and for that matter, Plato -- are dangerous to many or even to most readers. I thrive on the first 2, and I dislike Plato but there's no danger of my ever being bored by him as badly as I am with Popper. And with Plato there are flashes of brilliance not even I can deny. How does anyone know what a perfect circle is? No drawing or ball made by humans is perfectly round, neither is any planet or moon in the sky. And yet we all know exactly what a perfect circle is. Plato has an explanation for that. I don't buy Plato's explanation, but there's no denying that on this point Plato leads me by 1 explanation to none. That kind of blows my mind. Popper's not on the same level.

Why "Ancient Aliens" Sucks

Because much smarter people have asked the same questions and come up with much, much better answers.

Just because something is not easily explained is no reason to jump to conclusions such as "aliens did it." If you dig deeper into the work of academic historians and sociologists, I think you'll find that they've explained many things which the "Ancient Aliens" crowd calls "unexplained mysteries." For example, there's no mystery about why the Egyptians built pyramids: they believed in an afterlife. Pyramids were palaces for the Pharaohs to live in during that afterlife. They mummified corpses so that dead people would still have their whole bodies in the afterlife instead of being disfigured. If you're interested in eerie similarities between separate cultures, read The Golden Bough by James Frazer; you'll find a lot of very eerie similarities between separate cultures which have nothing to do with aliens. And Frazer was writing between 120 and 75 years ago, around the same time as Freud, who's also really good. More recently Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk and others have attempted analyses of worldwide cultural phenomena, in addition to all of those people who are more specialized in the histories of individual cultures. The real scholars are so much more interesting than the ancient aliens bunch. I don't think it's impossible that aliens have been among us, not at all. I just think that any culture advanced enough to visit us from another planet would have no difficulty whatsoever in concealing every last trace of itself from the likes of Giorgio Tsoukalos.

A Beautiful Misunderstanding

Today I got a four-volume edition of "the philosophical-theological works," "die philosophisch-theologischen Werke" of Nicholas of Cusa, off of the shelf and began browsing around in it for the first time in a while, a bilingual edition, the original Latin on the left and a German translation on the facing page. It's a Sonderausgabe, a special edition. German publishers seem to offer great deals very often through these Sonderausgaben, high-quality editions offered at a small fraction of the usual prices. In this case the four fat volumes of my Sonderausgabe of Nicholas of Cusa contain eleven works which the same publisher originally published in eleven separate volumes, which together cost several times as much as the Sonderausgabe. It's a set-up similar to one sometimes offered in compilation volumes by the Quality Paperback Book Club in the US: the texts are copied directly from the individual works, so that the page numbers start over from from scratch with each new work within the volume, and the type is recognizably different in each work as well.

Maybe US publishers offer such bargains as often as the Germans. I wouldn't know: it's been a while since I did a lot of shopping for new books in English. In the 1980's my primary reading interest shifted from English to German, and since then it has shifted again from German to Latin.

I have complained often about bilingual editions such as my Sonderausgabe of Nicholas, saying that for one thing half of the paper and shelf space is wasted by translating everything, and that for another, instead of encouraging people to learn the untranslated language, it will actually hinder them from doing so: the temptation to read the translation and simply skip the original will be too great. (I didn't get this edition for the German translation, but simply because it was by far the least expensive way I knew of to get my hands on a large amount of Nicholas' writings in the original Latin.) I have never taken any classes in Latin and only met a few people who are fluent in the language. One of these people sharply disagreed with me about the bilingual editions and said that they were a great help to her students in learning Latin or Greek. Maybe she's right. I think of our disagreement often. I thought of her today as I decided to dust off the Latin-German edition of Nikolaus von Kusens philosophische-theologische Werken. In any case, I felt I could use some help with my Latin today. Comparing the German translation with the original encourages me that I am making progress, getting closer to fluent in Latin.

It's a subjective question, in my opinion, at what point one is a fluent in a language. Even the most fluent native speaker still has room for improvement.

It was Peter Sloterdijk, a contemporary German philosopher, who first led me to Nicholas of Cusa, a fifteenth-century Catholic cardinal and philosopher. In the second volume, Globen (Globes), of his three-volume work on spheres, Sloterdijk refers often to Nicholas.

I like Sloterdijk quite a lot. I wonder whether I understand him better or less well than the many German intellectuals who dislike him so intensely, a few of whom have tried quite hard to explain to me personally just why I am wrong to value his work so highly. It seems to me that he irritates other Germans in part by cheerfully disregarding, and occasionally even mocking, certain preconceived notions in German culture which are so ingrained in most German intellectual heads that it is much harder for them to perceive them and their arbitrary, senselessly limiting nature, than it is for an outsider such as myself.

On the other hand, perhaps those Germans have perfectly valid reasons for disliking Sloterdijk so much, reasons which are lost in translation by an outsider such as myself, even though I read Sloterdijk's books untranslated. I often notice how nuances of English are lost or changed in people for whom English is their second language, or their third or fourth or... and of course I have to wonder how much I and other native speakers of English routinely miss in other languages.

A non-native speaker of English might just occasionally get some things right in English that I miss, just as I might be right about Sloterdijk when so many German intellectuals are wrong.

Or maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I see all sorts of things in Sloterdijk, by way of imperfect fluency in German, which simply aren't there, the way that so many English-speaking people see meanings of melancholy and grim internal strife in the word "angst" which simply aren't there in the German original. In German "Angst" means "fear." That's all. All the other associations to the word which are common in English-speaking lands, English-speaking people made up all by themselves. I don't know how "angst" in English has come to mean something for which the Germans have a perfectly good word -- "Weltschmerz" -- and English didn't, but there ya go. A new word was born in English by means of misunderstanding a German word. This sort of thing seems to happen all the time when languages intermingle

Björk once described her reaction to English-language pop music as "a beautiful misunderstanding." I heard her say this, on a talk show, years before I began to relax about things like the English meaning of "angst," and Germans saying things in English which English-speaking people would never say, but which rhyme. (Germans love to rhyme almost as much as they love David Hasselhoff.) I remembered what she said, but I think that it took me years before I started to understand the implications. Language lives and grows, it will not be bound by rules, and this is particularly true when different languages interact. And it is beautiful.

Sloterdijk and His Opponents, Part II

Sloterdijk's footnotes refer to authors from ancient Greece, to medieval, renaissance and modern authors, mostly philosophers, but also psychologists, historians, theologians, natural scientists -- a vast array. Besides Plato and Nietzsche and Heidegger there are frequent references to Nicholas of Cues and to Augustine of Hippo, and to Indian and Chinese philosophers. Sloterdijk's reading list seems infinitely more interesting than Kallscheuer's half-vast repertoire. But then, Sloterdijk is interested in presenting new perspectives on the whole of human history. I can't imagine Kallscheuer ever attempting something like that. I can, however, imagine him proferring reasons why such an attempt is decadant, or passe, or otherwise outside the lines or against the rules of the club.

Of course it is possible that Sloterdijk was not involved at all in the publication of the volume with Kallscheuer's article, and has never been aware of Kallscheuer at all. Certainly, the attacks on Sloterdijk from various German academics and critics have been so numerous that no-one could give serious attention to them all, and clearly, Sloterdijk has had his mind on more interesting things. Regrettably, he has been caught up in a bitter feud with Juergen Habermas. Either Habermas or Sloterdijk is the leading philosopher in Germany today, or perhaps more accurately, Habermas leads one branch of philosophy and Sloterdijk another, and there are probably very few people who admire them both. I have not yet noticed any calls for reconciliation between the two, among the numerous articles praising one at the other's expense. I'm no exception here, I can't think of anything nice to say about Habermas.

The outward, obvious, immediate source of the feud was, depending upon which camp you're in, either Sloterdijk's lecture "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark" ("Rules For the Human Park"), first read in 1999; or a gross mis-representation of said lecture, leading to accusations against Sloterdijk of neo-fascist thought. A journalist, an intellectual lightweight, apparently, in any case he hasn't become a household name, heard Sloterdijk give his lecture, and reported that Sloterdijk was propogating right-wing extremism. Within days headlines were flying, and Habermas had weighed in. This is where I came in: I had heard Sloterdijk's name before, but "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark" was the first of his works which I read. Sloterdijk made the entire text of the essay available free of charge on the Internet -- which again was interpreted in two very different ways: Sloterdijk's opponents accused him of capitalizing on a scandal in order to further his fame; to others, such as myself, it seemed that Sloterdijk felt, quite rightly, that he was being grossly misunderstood, and slandered, and wanted the public to read the text in question and decide for themselves whether he was a fascist.

In "Regeln fuer den Menschenpark," Sloterdijk mentions that genetic technology is creating new possibilities for human life, which will create new choices, and that philosophy has yet to develop the new parameters which will be necessary to to deal intelligently with these new conditions and new choices. That's it, that's the entire bone of contention right there, the basis for accusations that Sloterdijk was calling for a return to eugenics as practiced under the Third Reich. It is apparently taboo among the philosophical mainstream in Germany, or what used to be the mainstream, embodied by Habermas and the traditional Left, to mention genetic technology without condemning the entire field out of hand. This traditional left goes back to Adorno, who in postwar Germany was the leader of the Institut fuer Sozialforschung in Frankfurt-on-the-Main, more commonly known as the Frankfurter Schule, the Frankfurt School. More than just the actual Institute in Frankfurt, the term "Frankfurt School" came to mean the entire dominant school of philosophy in Germany, and kritische Theorie, critical theory, was another name used to describe the whole movement: left-leaning, Marxist or otherwise post-Hegelian, including Adorno, Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse and others, and definitely NOT including such independent thinkers as , Wittgensteinor Canetti. Adorno and Horkheimer were especially close, and collaborated at times as authors. Juergen Habermas definitely belonged to the Frankfurt School: in the literal sense, Adorno having personally appointed Habermas to a post at the Institut fuer Sozialforschung; and in the figurative sense as well, with Habermas, the last living prominent colleague of Adornos's, embodying in the public mind the continuation of Adorno's tradition.

The problem is that Sloterdijk came from the same tradition, and studied for a time at the Institut in Frankfurt, although he has proceeded in a very different direction. Sloterdijk, as well as Habermas, has a very great reverence and admiration for Adorno. However, Sloterdijk also admires Heidegger, and Oswald Spengler, and Michel Foucault, and Nietzsche, and other philosophers, all of whom the Frankfurter Schule tended either to disparage or to ignore. To the Habermas camp, to the traditional Left, to the Frankfurt School or at least to one narrow-minded stream of that movement, Sloterdijk's preoccupation with such thinkers is at best frivolous, at worst reactionary. They seem to forget that long passages of Adorno, for example in the Negative Dialektik, are devoted to Heidegger, certainly not in a positive way, but by no means dismissive either; and that Walter Benjamin, killed by the Gestapo before there was a Frankfurt School, but none the less one of its intellectual fathers, was a very enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche; and in general they seem to be connecting the dots in an ever-narrower philosophical system, ever more self-referential, ever less relevant to anything outside of itself. Sloterdijk may have begun as one of them, but at an early age he found that he could no longer dismiss all those others: Heidegger, Foucault, Nietzsche and the other bogeymen of the Frankfurt School. All the much worse that he praised Adorno along with all those others, lumped Adorno together with the movement's betes noirs. By the time of the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft Sloterdijk was coloring way outside the lines. Kallscheuer's attack upon Sloterdijk -- again, allowing for the possibility that I have completely misinterpreted it. Some may find this hard to believe, but I hope I'm wrong about Kallscheuer. I hope that there is a brilliance there which I do not see. There is no surplus of human brilliance in the world, any more than there are philosophers who are too popular -- is the attack of a priest against a heretic, and therefore much more bitter, more PERSONAL than it would have been if the transgressor had never been a member of the flock.

I too have serious reservations about Heidegger and Spengler and Foucault and Nietzsche. I feel the closest personal identification with Walter Benjamin, who was both a Leftist and a Nietzschean, but aside from Benjamin and myself there are very, very few Leftist Nietzscheans. Throw in my great enthusiasm for Sloterdijk, and I may very well be a movement of one. I have some reservations about Sloterdijk, but these are far outweighed by my admiration for the way he broke out of the mold of the Frankfurt School. In the course of his feud with Habermas, Sloterdijk has pronounced that the Frankfurt School is dead -- an exaggeration, perhaps, but even if not dead it surely has become deadly dull. We can no longer ask Adorno to choose between Sloterdijk and Habermas. But it seems to me that a truly profound reading of Adorno must lead to an image of him as a stubbornly INDIVIDUAL thinker, who followed no pre-determined path. In this Sloterdijk resembles him, while Habermas, along with hordes, now receding, of other adepts of the Frankfurt School, betrays the example and lesson of Adorno by trying too much to imitate the inimitable, and by repeating the dictums of one who very seldom repeated himself.

Sloterdijk and His Opponents, Part I

Peter Sloterdijk, who at least in his native Germany has become a celebrity, hosting, for example, along with fellow-philosopher Ruediger Safranski, the television series "Im Glashaus: das philosophische Quartett," seems often to take a positive pleasure in the opposition he arouses. He is without a doubt the most widely-disliked intellectual in contemporary Germany. It's not entirely unreasonable for a German to be proud of such a distinction: Adornowas probably the most widely-disliked German philosopher of his time, Schopenhauerand Nietzschewere practically unknown in their own lifetimes, Heine and Marx and Wittgenstein and Canetti were exiles, Walter Benjamin emigrated to France in 1933, when the Germans invaded France in 1940 Benjamin tried to flee to Spain, was pursued all the way by the Gestapo, and killed himself in the Pyranees rather than let himself be captured... Well, one could extend the list for quite a while. Germany's intellectual life is different than ours in the US. A very large part of the animosity against Sloterdijk, it seems quite clear to me, has to do with his popularity. A philosopher, many or most German intellectuals seem to believe, cannot be simultaneously profound and popular. Sloterdijk comes along and embodies a glorious refutation of this preconception, is at once brilliant and popular, not as popular as J.K. Rowling or, to name another anomalous conflux of depth and success, Cormac McCarthy, but just popular enough to stand out from the other intellectuals, just enough to make it clear that the readership for contemporary philosophy has widened a bit. The intellectual mainstream in Germany, rather than re-examining their belief in the incompatibility of of intellectual seriousness and publishing success, reject Sloterdijk out of hand. One very striking example is Otto Kallscheuer'sarticle "Spiritus Lector. Die Zerstreuung des Zeitgeists," the first and longest piece in the volume, published in 1987, of reactions to Sloterdijk's book Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, which appeared in 1983, sold over 70,000 copies in the first year alone, to give you a more exact idea of the size of the teapot in which this particular tempest has been brewing for over a quarter-century now, and made Sloterdijk famous and extremely controversial. Kallscheuer's essay is extremely difficult. I have nothing against difficult writing. Above, I speculated that Adorno, Theodor W. Adorno, was probably the most widely-disliked German thinker of his time. The scorn which was heaped upon him probably had to do above all, even more than with the fact that he was, from the end of World War II to his death in 1969, by far the most influential philosopher in Germany, and a Jew, with his absolutely unique and extraordinarily difficult prose style. But once I could see past the noise and hysteria surrounding Adorno, I began to appreciate his thinking, and began to eagerly labor through those uniquely difficult sentences of his. Now that he's been dead for four decades, one notices that the negative remarks have largely faded away, and that Adorno has largely been accorded his rightful place in the Pantheon of philosophy, although he's probably actually read as seldom as the other immortals. I love Gaddis' JR and Joyce's Finnegans Wake, too. But difficult is not always the same as good. It is not a praiseworthy end in itself if it does not offer rewards equal to the effort it demands. It can proceed from hopeless confusion as well as from genius. After a long study of the 54 pages of text of Kallsceuer's essay, followed by 85 footnotes over 12 pages, I'm fairly sure that it consists of a deeply confused and neurotic negative reaction to Sloterdijk, based first, last and in between on the sales figures of the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft. It's just possible that I have it all wrong, and that what Kallscheuer has produced here is a persiflage, a merciless satire of those who would refuse to consider a book to be serious because too many people had bought it -- but I have gone to the trouble of reading other of Kallscheuer's writings, and I'm afraid he's just not that funny. Excuse me, I should say: not intentionally. If I must sum up my reaction to Kallscheuer and to others like him in one line, I cannot think of an improvement on Mark Vonnegut's statement to his father Kurt, quoted in one of the latter's prefaces: "You've disappeared up your own asshole and died." (I gather that the Vonneguts, father and son, eventually reconciled.) There are many others like Kallscheuer, see his footnotes. The main reason I'm singling him out is that I don't want to dig through any more attacks against Sloterdijk, I find them deadly dull and dumb, the dozen or so negative articles I've read by as many different authors in a half-dozen popular, mainstream German publications and smaller, leftist intellectual ones, will last me for a long time to come.

Yes, most of the books on the bestsellers lists are crap. All the more reason to be happy when there's an anomaly, when Cormac McCarthy sticks out like a sore thumb between Kevin Trudeau and Dan Brown. If the stench of the masses horrifies you, just tell yourself that all those other people only bought No Country for Old Men to look smart and won't actually read it -- that is, if you're actually going to read it yourself. If not, telling yourself such things might just upset you further, but then again, pain can lead to greater wisdom.

Most people cannot live freely, cannot think for themselves, it's terrifying. Instead, they conform, to religions, for example, to political parties and movements, to academic trends. They obey, they believe, they connect the dots in the same way as others before them, all to distract themselves from an all-too-clear perception of their own existence. Philosophers are no exception, they slog along their dreary academic paths and repeat their mantras: those other authors are hugely successful, but they write trash. We are the keepers of the flame, we are the enlightened ones. Then someone like Sloterdijk comes along, who is truly free and obviously brilliant, and therefore fits into neither this slot nor that. His very existence calls certain assumptions into question. The honest reaction to him would be gratitude for throwing more light onto life. But such honesty is also brave, much more brave than most people can be. Free and brave thinkers must expect more venom than gratitude.

The book about Sloterdijk's Kritik der zynischen Vernunft -- it's entitled quite simply Peter Sloterdijks "Kritik der zynischen Vernunft", and I obtained it quite by accident, wishing to purchase Sloterdijk's famous work itself rather than a book about it, shopping online from across the Atlantic, rather than in a German bookstore -- is published by Suhrkamp, who also publish Sloterdijk himself. Although they have almost a monopoly of the more ambitious German authors, as far as I can determine they have not published any volumes by Kallscheuer alone. I have to wonder, therefore, since it seems not to have been a case of Suhrkamp calling on a writer from its own stable, whether Kallsceuer's vicious, ridiculous attack appeared in the Suhrkamp volume on Sloterdijk's insistence. I would like to think that that is how it happened, that it was Sloterdijk's way of saying, Look, you calf-biters, ("Wadenbeisser" is a beautiful German term of contempt for puny, insignificant critics, who nip at one's ankles and calves like tiny toy poodles.) take a long, 54-page-plus-85-footnotes look at one of your leaders. That it was Sloterdijk's way of saying how little such nonsense bothered him. Or perhaps, as I did, so too Sloterdijk found that Kallscheuer can be very funny, unintentionally. Sloterdijk often seems verschmitzt, an untranslatable German word meaning at once sly, quietly observing, amused, calm.

I've mentioned the 54 pages and 85 footnotes twice now, I should perhaps clarify that there's nothing wrong, in my opinion, with a lot of footnotes in philosophical writing. Almost all philosophers include a lot of footnotes in their works, Sloterdijk is no exception. The only exception I can think of, in the couple of centuries in which footnotes have been commonly written, is Nietzsche, and he may have had no other reason for leaving them out than that he wanted to emphasize how different he was from other philosophers. (As if he needed to.) But Kallscheuer's footnotes are no more inspiring than his main text; they're heavy on obscure contemporary philosophers and critics who toe the same line as Kallscheuer. Obscurantists. Nerdy club members who all know the secret handshake.

PS, 6. June 2015: I've finally figured out that Kallscheuer was mocking Wadenbeisser who have attacked Sloterdijk for ridiculous reasons, not committing such an attack. I'm disappointed. Wadenbeisser don't deserve that much commentary. Like I said in 2009: Kallscheuer isn't very funny. Brevity is the soul of wit. Besides exposing Kallscheuer's lack of it, having someone go on at such length about how ridiculous the Wadenbeisser are mkaes Sloterdijk seem insecure. An actual Wadenbeisser leading off the volume would've been much funnier.