Category: The philosophers

Matteo Ricci’s treatise on friendship, the Jiaoyou lun of 1595, signifies the moment at which Chinese thought and European philosophy first made contact.[1]  In the years immediately preceding that treatise, Ricci had translated the four books of Confucianism into Latin and ten years later he was to produce a Chinese adaptation of the Enchiridion of the Greco-Roman Stoic Epictetus, thus establishing an exchange of ideas in both directions. But it was the Jiaoyou lun with its attempt to mediate between Western and Chinese understandings of friendship that most notably tied the knot between the two traditions.

How fruitful is it to relate Foucault to Heidegger and Nietzsche? What can be learned about the genesis of Foucault’s thought from such a comparison? How does it illuminate the nature and content of his thought? How does it expand our understanding of the phenomena that Foucault explores? Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow have shown us how much one can gain from reading Foucault and Heidegger together.[1] Their book inspired Foucault to say to an interviewer:

Oskar Becker und Martin Heidegger – beide 1889 geboren – standen sich lebenslang persönlich und philosophisch nahe. In frühen Jahren waren sie zu gleicher Zeit Schüler Edmund Husserls in Freiburg und dienten zusammen als seine Assistenten. Husserl betrachtete die zwei gelegentlich sogar als seine beiden designierten Nachfolger.

Heideggers Nationalsozialismus: Das ungelöste Rätsel Hans Sluga   (Unveröffentlichter Vortrag, Humboldt Universität, Berlin, Mai 1998)   1.   Der 28. Mai 1933 war ein Unglückstag für Martin Heidegger, aber das sollte ihm erst viel später offenbar werden, und selbst dann hat er das, öffentlich jedenfalls, nur unwillig und verklausuliert zugegeben….

Anyone who sets out to determine Foucault’s debt to Nietzsche will have to take his last interview into account in which he characterized himself as “simply a Nietzschean.”[1] The claim deserves notice because Foucault never expressed himself in an equally forceful manner about anyone else. But it provokes also an immediate question. How could he have been “simply a Nietzschean” given the remarkable fluidity of Nietzsche’s thought and his own unwillingness to be pinned down once and for all?

Human thought possesses for Stanley Cavell both a tragic and a comic dimension. It does so, moreover, inherently and indispensably because thinking is “not required of beings exempt from tragedy and comedy,” as we read in Cavell’s book Pursuits of Happiness. (p. 259) The remark provokes and is meant to do so. There exists indeed an acknowledged link between tragedy and philosophy but the connection between philosophy and comedy seems (to common perception, at least) obscure. Our whole philosophical tradition begins according to Plato with a tragic conflict between the philosopher and the polis. According to Cavell, we need to think also about the comic dimension of our social existence.

“The time for petty politics is over,” Nietzsche proclaimed in Beyond Good and Evil, his “prelude to a philosophy of the future”[ The year was 1886. At roughly the same moment his notebook records: “The time is coming when one will have to relearn about politics” because of a compulsion to great politics.”

When Duccio Trombadori interviewed him in 1978, Foucault described how the Second World War had initially alerted him to the need for a radically different society and how subsequently, under the influence of Nietzsche, he had come to hope for “a world and a society that were not only different but would be an alternative version of ourselves.” Having joined the Communist Party in the 1950’s as a “Nietzschean communist” (!) and having left the Party again a short time later because of its Stalinist tendencies he had ended up, as he put it, with “a degree of speculative skepticism” towards all politics. But his reluctance to concern himself with political matters had dissolved towards the late 1960’s as a result of two and half years of teaching at the University of Tunisia where he came face-to-face with the political activism of his students and was moved by their readiness to expose themselves to the most fearful risks. “It was a real political experience for me,” Foucault told Trombadori.

Carl Schmit, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault on the concept of the political.

Carl Schmitt is known to us as an acute though controversial political thinker but his biographer tells us an unnerving story that might seem to undermine his claim to our attention. The case raises broader questions, I want to suggest, about the relation of political thought to experience. This proves, however, an elusive topic and something needs to be said about it before I can turn directly to Schmitt and the story about him I have in mind.