The Puzzle of Power

Let us be frank and admit that there is no such thing as power – just as there is no such thing as “the elephant” or “the rhinoceros.” It pays to be nominalist in all these cases and avoid a metaphysics of power just as much as a metaphysics of biological kinds. A noun makes us look for a corresponding object and an abstract noun for an abstract entity. Wittgenstein has shown how that misleads us. So, no power, but no harm will be done with the term, if we take it in the right way. Let us say, then, that there exists a field of relations of something affecting (bearing on, controlling, shaping, transforming, destroying, etc.) something in some way or other. Like Foucault, we can call this the field of relations of mobile inequality. It is from this field that we usually pick a subset we call relations of power. But the choice is wide open. Thus, we end up with disputes about the nature of power, disagreements about how power is to be defined. These arise only from an ill-conceived essentialism and should be relegated to the metaphysical dustbin.

There is no single thing called “power.” There is no single subset of relations of mobile inequalities that properly constitute relations of power. We can speak, for instance, of the power of nature, or of the power of individual agents, or that of institutions, or speak of power only when the relations in question are considered to be legitimated, or when groups of agents work in unison. In each case we are carving out a different domain from the field of relations of mobile inequality. There is no disputing about which is the right one.

This being so, it may be best to think first about the totality of mobile relations of inequality. Foucault has proposed that we call them all power relations. His notion of power is, thus, a bare, minimal one; but we can proceed from it, if the need arises, to richer and more restrictive notions. We can talk, for instance, of social and political relations of power, which are, in fact, the ones that interest Foucault. There is much to recommend this method of starting from a bare concept and then to advance through a process of conceptual enrichment. But we need, perhaps, first to make more explicit what is meant by mobile inequality. Instead of calling the relations in question “mobile” we might also speak of them as “active” or “dynamic.” We are, in other words, not considering conceptual, logical, or mathematical relations of inequality. To say that proposition Q derives from proposition P does not mean that P exercises power over Q. We also don’t mean comparative relations of inequality. “A is taller than B” does not imply a power relation. We are concerned rather with mobile, active or interactive, relationships that generate a dependence and thus an inequality of one relatum to the other. “Going for a walk together” is a dynamic relation in which the partners interact with each other; but, as a symmetrical one, it is not a power relation. “Persuading someone to come along for a walk” is, on the other hand, an example of a power relation in the intended sense.

This broad notion of power proves its usefulness when we start thinking about social and political matters. It allows us to specify different mechanisms and functions of power in society and politics. We can distinguish, for instance, between prohibitive and productive relations of power. While judges exercise power mostly in a prohibitive manner, teachers are meant to exercise power productively. Society and culture exemplify both prohibitive and productive power. Power relations are, in fact, ubiquitous in society – though, of course, not universal. There are symmetrical social relations in addition to the asymmetrical ones. Sometimes the symmetrical relations arise from and are, in fact, constituted by (asymmetrical) relations of power. Social equality is often a fragile achievement teetering on a multitude of relations of inequality.

Our minimal notion of power helps us, further, with characterizing the relation between the social and the political. Power operates both in society and politics. We need to ask then: what is specific about political power? Here again we must say: there is no unique and prescribed way of doing so. We can carve out political relations from the totality of relations of mobile inequality in more than one way. Politics, like power, is not a natural kind. We can define politics, political power, and relations of power in more than one way and it is not the case that one of these definitions is the right one. And because politics is not a natural kind, it does not make sense to assert, like the Aristotelians, that we are political by nature. The only thing we can possibly say is that power relations are endemic to human life and in this sense “natural.” The identification of a particular subset of power relations as political is always a pragmatic choice. The reasonable thing is to look for a concept of political power that is diagnostically useful. But our choice will always be contestable. Hence the disputes over what is political and what is not. Is the enforcement of morals a political matter? Is religion a political concern?

In order to clarify the issue, we must revert to the previous strategy and begin with a minimal characterization of political power. This, too, is Foucault’s way of proceeding. We can follow him in saying that political relations of power are relations that exercise power on relations of power. Political relations are, thus, of second- or higher-order. The law giver, for instance, acts politically in passing laws that regulate the social interactions of citizens: these laws forbid, regulate, or nurture certain exercises of power. They forbid child abuse, regulate business, and nurture a political consciousness. Any political exercise of power can, in turn, be subject to an exercise of political power. The legislature’s exercise of power may be reviewed by a court. In a modern state there are characteristically multiple levels of the exercise of power on political relations of power. Political power thus operates in a multi-level fashion.

Foucault’s minimal concept of political power has its uses but it can also mislead us. The exercise of power on power relations is ubiquitous in society – even in those parts we normally consider to lie outside politics. Parents exercise power on relations of power when they encourage, control, or intervene in their children’s play. Given our minimal concept of political power we will have to say that the parent is then acting politically. A large class of social relations involves, in fact, the exercise of power on relations of power. We are forced to conclude that social life is suffused with politics. Some of Foucault’s readers have come to believe that he has made the stupendous discovery that politics is everywhere. But that “discovery” is due only to his choice of a minimal concept of political power. By using it we draw attention to analogies between private, family, and social life, on the one hand, and what we are used to call more narrowly politics, on the other. The danger of Foucault’s way of speaking is that we come to think of these domains as more similar than they actually are. We may thus be misled into thinking that family life is really (against all possible evidence) just as cold, calculating, and self-serving as large-scale politics can be or, alternatively, that large-scale politics is just as personal and petty as family life often is.

Such concerns justify the introduction of a narrower concept of political power. Given the obvious difference between the informality of family and social life as against the formalized exercise of power in the state, it makes sense to isolate the concept of an institutional exercise of power as a distinct notion. Doing so has, however, significant implications. Frans de Waal has argued that we can identify political power relations in the life of primates. Could this not be helpful for understanding the evolution of human politics? If we insist that politics presupposes an institutional order, we may lose hold of this insight. But talking about “chimpanzee politics” may also lead us to overlook the distinctive character of the human variety. We can try and navigate around this difficulty by distinguishing between a “proto-political” exercise of power in animal life and the properly political exercise of power in an institutional order. It may even be useful to distinguish a whole variety of uses of the term “political.” But our language is not helpful in giving expression to that possibility. A solution may be to use the term with numerical subscripts.

To speak of political power in the more specific, institutional sense forces us to be clear about the nature of institutions. Institutions we may say, for short, are, in fact, complexes of power relations or, more typically, multi-level, staggered, and hierarchical complexes of power relations. But this is still not enough. We need to add that such complexes are commonly built on a material base, require material means, and have material effects: they have a location, they occupy buildings, they process documents, they manage machineries and armaments. If we speak of institutions as systems of rules or practices, we will overlook this material aspect. The material base of institutions changes, of course, over time and with it the political relations of power. Political power is thus not a fixed quantity, but something that has a history.

The history of human power has, in fact, a dual character. There are the actual relations of power and there is their interpretation. Power is most effective, Foucault has argued, when it is invisible and thus remains uninterpreted. But what we think and say about power can both enhance and deplete it. When we believe that someone has power, his exercise of power may become more effective. When we say that someone is legitimated to exercise power, we will be more ready to submit to it. Saying that someone “has power” means that he is capable of exercising it or that he is legitimated to exercise it. It is possible to have power in one sense but not in the other. Both the exercise of power and its interpretation change over time.

This history displays what Carl Schmitt has called a dialectic of power. The more centralized and complex power relations become, the less they will be controllable by individual agents. The concentration of power and its dispersion go hand in hand. The rulers of modern states have enormous power, but their exercise of power is dependent on those who supply them with information, on the one hand, and those who execute their decisions, on the other. Donald Trump has all the power of an American president at his disposal but his decisions are determined by what he has just seen on television. So, who is the one who actually exercises power in this situation? And when the president issues one of his intemperate commands, a judge or a bureaucrat or a general may well obstruct its execution. So, who exercises power over whom at that moment? It may make sense to speak of a sovereign holder of power in simple settings, but in the complex institutional arrangements of modern life sovereignty becomes an illusion. There is no one to whom the people could hand over all power and there is no power which could be handed over entirely to the people. Forms of government constructed on the principle of sovereignty exist – but only in the imagination. And it must be admitted that this imaginary sovereignty can redirect the actual flow of relations of power.

The cycle of birth and death leads, in any case, to a constant transfer of power. At every moment someone gains and someone loses power. The transfer of power may go on gradually and unnoticed; it can also be visible and programmed or even sudden and violent, chaotic and unforeseen. Systems of political power (monarchy, dictatorship, democracy, etc.) differ not only in the way power is exercised within them but also – and perhaps more importantly – in how it is transferred. Many factors determine the nature and speed of that transfer: biological, economic, cultural, and ecological. Technological development contributes greatly to the instability in the distribution of power in human hands. As a consequence, human history results in a constant accumulation and concentration of power in some places and its dispersion in others. The balance of power is always in flux. If those in power were actually able to control this process, relations of power would already have settled in a stable pattern a long time ago. But there are instabilities, revolutions, the acquisition and deprivation of power. There is, however, no natural law that this cycle will go on forever. Who can say what the ultimate outcome will be: a complete absorption of power into a single centre, a black hole that attracts and annihilates all power around it, or a dissipation of power into an anarchic cloud of galactic dust?

The process is not entirely in our hands. The human exercise of power depends on what the material substratum will allow or what it requires. In institutional contexts those constraints will be particularly stringent since the functioning of the institution is so dependent on its material base. Our increasingly technologized world may eventually come to circumscribe the possibilities and thus the power of human agency. In the end, the power of nature is bound to overwhelm that of human action.

How to become a philosopher

Let me say right away that I don’t know how one becomes a philosopher. I can only speak about this in personal terms. Having studied philosophy for a lifetime, I suppose I can call myself a philosopher in the way others call themselves physicists or plumbers. Even then I hesitate to use the word. I generally avoid it when I am asked what I do for a living. Experience has taught me that there will be two possible responses. The first is: “Let me tell you my philosophy.” And the second: “So, what is your philosophy?” I find that I can only stammer in reply. After all these years I don’t know what “my philosophy” is. I certainly don’t want to pin some label on myself, saying that I am a realist, a materialist, a historicist, or whatever. And I certainly also don’t want to hear a catalogue of someone else’s dearest convictions.

Philosophy, if it is anything, is not a set of beliefs for me; not a doctrine and not a theory. It is an activity, an effort at being thoughtful, a determination not to rush into some popular belief, a readiness to look ironically at my own views as well as those of others, a form of detachment. It connects me with a long line of figures from the past who seem to have thought along similar lines back to the ancient Greeks and then outward to India, China, and other places. Philosophy is not an occupation for us, but a preoccupation we all share.
So, I want to write about how that preoccupation came about for me, what went into it, and what it now looks like. But I would probably not be writing this, if it were not for our current plague, that poisonous virus that is disrupting our lives. Being mostly confined to my house, my cell, and faced every day so directly with my own mortality, I have begun to ask myself what I have been up to all these years, what has brought me to this place and this moment.

How I became a child archaeologist

I was born in Bonn, the historical city on the left bank of the Rhine. We thought of ourselves as Rhinelanders rather than Germans. Ethnically, we said, we were Franks and our cousins lived toward the West in France. Like them we had once been citizens of the Roman empire, unlike those people on the other side of the river. For some incomprehensible reason, we called those living on the Eastern bank of the river “cross-eyed” and looked down upon those further east. Almost two thousand years later we were still proud of our Roman past. The patron saints of the city were Cassius, Florentius, and Malusius – three Roman soldiers who had died for their Christian faith – whose graves could still be seen in a crypt deep underneath our Romanesque cathedral, It was common to find Roman relics when digging into the ground.
One day, when I was ten, I discovered a manhole cover in the basement of my grandfather’s building. When I lifted it up, I could see earth below the cement floor. I started to dig and soon came up with a piece of ceramic. It was my prize possession from my first archaeological excavation and I showed it to no one. Was it of Roman origin? Who knows, since it is long lost. But I can’t rule it out. During the war bombs had laid open a Roman graveyard just a couple of streets away. Did my shard come from a similar site?

By the time I made my discovery I was attending our local Gymnasium and had begun to learn Latin. I still remember the very first sentences: “Agricola arat. Puella cenam parat” – The farmer is plowing. The girl is preparing a meal. A standard example for learning the Latin grammar. Later on we read Caesar’s De Bello Gallico and tried to find references in it to our own region. We marveled at Roman artifacts in our local museums and visited the Imperial city of Trier.

At the age of ten I had discovered my first vocation. There was no doubt that I would be an archaeologist. These were, of course, childish fantasies – to be soon forgotten or only recalled as a source of later amusement. One wants to be an astronaut, a rock star, or a fireman at the age of ten and ends up as a corporate lawyer, a caretaker, a professor.

Having just taught a course on Michel Foucault, I am however reminded that philosophy itself might be thought of as a kind of archaeology. Foucault spoke of it that way for a time – as a search for buried substructures and foundations on which our knowledge, our morals, our politics are built. The metaphor is intriguing because it highlights the fact that philosophy is also so much a concern with the past and we might even say with relics and ruins. Have I, perhaps, not strayed that far from my ambition at the age of ten? But now handling concepts instead of a piece of broken ceramics.

My short career as an artist

At the age of 12 or 13, my father gave me my first easel and canvas and set me to work. I copied the head of an El Greco Madonna and painted Jesus walking on water. I don’t know how I had got to El Greco and have no idea now of what drew me to the image of Jesus in a glistening pool of gold and blue waves. I also don’t know anymore what else I painted in those days and what happened to those pictures and when I gave up on painting. I think it may have been soon after. My budding career in art came surely to a quick end.

My father had always wanted to be a painter but had never had the chance to undergo formal training. He was self-taught but dedicated to the arts to the end f his life. Our house always smelled of linseed oil from some drying canvas. Stylistically, his work hovered somewhere between impressionism and expressionism, with occasional cubist touches. At one point my father built a loom and began to design and weave carpets. The frame was enormous and cluttered up an entire room. When I first went to school he made a leather satchel for me but got no thanks for his trouble. I really wanted a store-bought one like those all the other boys had.

I am not a hobbyist and have never gone back to my oil paints. But I still feel an attraction to the visual arts and affinity with them. I became intrigued with the work of August Macke who had been associated with Franz Marc and Wassily Kandinsky, He had lived and worked in Bonn and our art museum had a collection of his paintings. For my graduation at the Gymnasium I wrote an essay on one of them. Even today I feel I can understand something better when I have it visually before me. I don’t even like that much to listen to lectures. Spoken words go by so fast but the image is magically there: patient, silent, waiting to reveal itself to the lingering eye.

First philosophy

I liked going to school and I liked to read. Even before I got to school, I had taught myself to read with the help of my older sister, asking her how to say this or that written word. One day I could read simple sentences to the surprise of my parents. I became an unbearable child. Instead of wanting to play with other children, I preferred to stay at home with my books.

One of my uncles suggested I should go to the Gymnasium. My parents, who had ony attended primary school, agreed and so, from the age of ten, I walked every morning past the house in which Beethoven was born, across the old market square to my school named after the composer. From the age of ten I learned Latin and soon later Greek together with German and mathematics, arts and science, and a smattering of English.

Our teachers were well-educated men and we liked them even when we laughed at them behind their backs. Dr. Richter was the master of our class; he taught us Greek and Latin and read the Hölderlin’s poems to us which we could hardly understand. We were convinced that he secretly worshiped the ancient gods.

It was in his class that I first heard the word “philosophy.” We read some of the Pre-Socratics in Greek and a smattering of Plato and Cicero and Seneca in Latin. We also had an optional philosophy class taught by the principal of the school, Dr. Grenzmann, who was also a professor of German literature at our University. Grenzmann was a dedicated phenomenologist in philosophical outlook and so my first readings in modern philosophy became the essays of Max Scheler.

When we graduated, our teachers wrote confidential reports on us which we got to see only fifty years later. My report said that I was becoming the intellectual in my class. I had no idea that my teachers saw me like this and I certainly didn’t think of myself in those terms. But it is true that I had become fascinated by philosophical ideas.

The time I became almost a monk

My new interest in philosophy intertwined with intensely religious feelings. I had been a religiously dedicatd boy and remained so throughout those years. Rhineland Catholicism was of a liberal kind. As students we read Urs von Balthasar, Karl Rahner, and Henri de Lubac, progressive and philosophically motivated theologians. I went to hear the lectures of Heinrich Schlier at the University, a Protestant theologian who had converted to Catholicism and expounded theology in Heideggerian language. I read Catholic writers from Chesterton to Georges Bernanos. Above all I admired the work of Paul Claudel and wrote him a letter.

The Catholic religion was natural to us. My parents were Catholics by habit. But there were others in my family.to whom religion was their life. One of them was an unmarried aunt, my mother’s sister, who resided with us but lived only for the church. She went every morning to mass and took me once on to Remagen, up the Rhine, where the skull of St, Apollinaris of Ravenna was preserved in a reliquary of gold. I shrank away from being blessed with that skull. She was also deadly afraid of thunderstorms – not at all of the lightening but of the thunder and would light a blessed candle to turn the thunder away. Though I loved her, I could not do much with such superstitions

My grandfather Johann Fuß, after whom I was named, was also a pious man but his belief was more practical and appealed to me more. He was good-humored, generous, and believed in the motto: Live and let live. After he had acquired his house with its four flats he rented two of them to Jewish families, one religious and one secular, and sent his daughter, my mother, upstairs every Sabbath to light the religious family’s stove and turn on their lights. Later on when the Nazis were coming to power, some hooligans tried to break in to terrorize our Jewish neighbors. My grandfather who was over sixty by then and peaceful by nature stood in the doorway with an axe and threatened to kill anyone daring to come close. It was all part of the faith he practiced.

As a young girl my mother fell in love with a Jewish boy living close by. My grandfather did not object to her marrying him and she might have done so, if my father had not suddenly turned up. After the war her former boyfriend came once to visit, now dressed in an American uniform. From my mother’s account I have concluded that it was a melancholy encounter. The memory of so many dead and so many losses stood like a shadow between them.

There was real religious devotion also on my father’s side of the family. One of his brothers had become a priest but when he preached against Hitler from his pulpit, he was forced to flee overnight across the border to Belgium – dressed up as a Carmelite nun. He ended his days in coldest Saskatchewan where the coffins of the deceased were stacked up to wait for their burial in spring. Having been an inspiring preacher in Germany, he turned into a radio preacher in Canada. One of his sisters, my aunt, became, in turn, a nun and spent her days with the sick and dying in Egypt.

So, religion was in my blood and loved the magical rituals and the mysterious doctrines of the faith. My decisive religious experience came when I read Thomas Merton’s book The Seven Storey Mountain. I decided, I wanted to become a monk like him. I went for a retreat at the ancient Benedictine monastery of Maria Laach. It was there that I realized that I was perhaps not made for a monkish life, that I liked books more than I liked to pray, and that I preferred philosophical writings to theological ones. And this was the end of that dream. Today, as I am writing this, we find ourselves more or less confined at home due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. As soon as it gets light I go for a vigorous walk through deserted streets, my head full of thoughts about the day ahead and the condition we are in. I come home, have breakfast, and turn on my computer to dedicate myself to my task. And so I find myself, it occurs to me, living some form of monastic life after all these years.

A budding politician?

Bonn was still a deeply Catholic city when I grew up though it was also at the time the capital of the West German Federal Republic. In the 1930s, as Hitler’s movement was growing, the city had steadfastly supported the Catholic Center party with Konrad Adenauer, the mayor of neighboring Cologne, as its leader. In the new republic Adenauer was now the Chancellor, a local, a Rhinelander, one of us. The world, so t seemed to us, had returned to normal.

My parents voted faithfully for Adenauer’s party but never talked about politics. When I asked my father once how he had survived the war, he said, by being invisible – sticking out neither in good nor in bad ways. He was certainly not made to be a soldier. He assured me that he had never shot at anyone and to avoid this he had got himself transferred to the army’s catering service. At the end of the war he had been on the Eastern Front when his Captain told his group to go AWOL and so they went by car till the gasoline ran out and then singly on foot as far as they could. My father finally surrendered to British troops outside Hamburg. He liked to talk about that time; it had been his greatest adventure; but he never spoke of its political side.

Things were different in my Gymnasium. My fellow students were mostly the sons of government officials. I was one of the few local boys but making friends with those others I became increasingly politicized. Seeing that our teachers were reluctant to speak about the recent past, we formed our own study group to find out what had happened – to the dismay of some instructors.

This was also the time when European unification was on the agenda. I became an ardent supporter of it and joined an organization called “European Youth.” Many things fused in my enthusiasm for the unity of Europa. The hope that it would overcome the nationalistic strife of the past. Recalling the unity of Christendom. The memory of Charlemagne, a Frank like us, who had once ruled over the Western world. My picture has become more sober, but I have remained faithful to this day to the ideal of European unity and think of myself more as a European than a German.

For a while my political fervor was so great that I seriously thought of becoming a politician. In the end, though, it was philosophy that won out. But much of that philosophy has always had for me a political undercurrent and over the years I have occupied increasingly with political philosophy.

A toe in the water

When I left the Gymnasium it was clear that I would go on to the University. My school had secured a fellowship for me from the prestigious National Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung) which could support me for the entire course of my studies. But I was still uncertain of what I want to do and who I want to be. Was it realistic to think of myself as a professional politician? Did I, perhaps, still have a religious vocation? I was confused but not unhappy because I had a fallback position. I could always become a Gymnasium teacher. I had liked my school and my teachers and could easily envisage a lifetime in such a career.

I began my studies at the University of Bonn which allowed me to go on living at home. I could easily walk from my parents’ house to the former palace of the archbishop and prince elector of Cologne which was now the University’s main building. I decided to take a broad range of courses in philosophy (of course), German literature, art history, even theology., and I also entertained the possibility of mathematics Surprisingly, I had no inclination to continue with the Classics. I was intimidated by the subject.

As soon as I got to the University I am faced with a problem. My fellowship was only conditional for a year and I had to obtain a letter of support from one of my professors to make it permanent. I knocked on doors in the philosophy department until someone opened. Dr Perpeet listened thoughtfully and then told me that he wass planning a seminar on German Idealism; the class would be reading Joseph Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism later on in the semester. He would hand me the responsibility for two long sessions and, if I did well, he would write me the necessary letter. Did he know what he was doing? I was a freshman student. I knew nothing about German Idealism. I had never heard the name of Schelling and I had certainly never read his book. But I agreed to take it on, since I didn’t seem to have another option. When I got the book I fond it impenetrable. Schelling derived a series of strange propositions from the principle that the I is identical with itself. There were, according to him three fundamental forces in nature, three dimensions in space, and three epochs in history and all this could be derived from the principle of identity. I didn’t understand any of the “derivations.” What would I do? I finally discovered a summary at the end of the book and decided to limit my exposition to those pages. I must have done an adequate job. Perpeet wrote me the letter I needed; it allowed me to go first to Munich and then to Oxford; it was the key that opened for me the world.

But first I continued in Bonn and studied Leibniz and Kant with Gottfried Gabriel; I heard Benno von Wiese lecture on the poet Friedrich Schiller; I attended Heinrich Lützeler’s class on Romanesque art and architecture. Von Wiese had played a dubious role in the Nazi period, to the dismay of his friend Hanna Arendt, but he had been cleared after the war and now played the classical role of the German professor. He was imposing in stature and personality and demanding as a professor. He wrote his books with the help of his assistants who got little credit for their effort. And he lectured, of course, in the auditorium maximum, the largest lecture hall in the University, to a crowd of hundreds of students sitting and standing in the isles. When half-way through the semester everybody finally found a seat, von Wiese complained (half-jokingly) that soon there would be no reason for him to continue his lectures. But his course made me read Schiller’s poems and plays, as well as his historical and philosophical writings. Even so, Schiller would never become someone I would feel naturally drawn to. His idealism did not really appeal to me. As for his interpreter, he left me cold.

Lützeler also lectured in the auditorium maximum to a comparable number of students. He was, however, in all other respects the exact opposite of von Wiese. Small in stature he had to stand on a box to look out over his podium. Lützeler was a local like me, born in Bonn. He had been an ardent opponent of the Nazis. Dismissed by them from his academic position, he had regained it immediately after the war. Besides being an engaging lecturer on art history, he was also the successful author of a book on Rhineland humor.

The most impressive figure at the University became for me the philosopher Oskar Becker. I had acquired an infatuation in mathematics at the Gymnasium. Our mathematics teacher had approached the subject in a philosophical manner that deeply appealed to me. I had also discovered a little book by I. M. Bochenski in one of the University books stores with an introduction to mathematical logic. Professor Becker was teaching a course on that topic in my first semester. He turned out to be elderly, eccentric, and an expert on the history of mathematics. That same semester Becker also taught a seminar with the title “The Principle of Reason.” I assumed that it would also be about logic and enrolled in it but it turned out that the course was about Martin Heidegger, with whom Becker was closely aligned, and on a late course of lectures in which Heidegger spoke in the darkest language about Leibniz’s principle of sufficient reason. Thus, began a dual fascination for me with both logic and Heidegger.

One semester, Wolfgang Stegmūller came as a visiting professor. He was one of the few analytic philosophers in Germany at the time. He lectured on the philosophy of science and spoke of Carnap, the Vienna Circle, and the verification principle. When he left for Munich, I decided to follow him.

Gottlob Frege in Bavaria

Munich showed still some of the scars of the war but it was still a beautiful city. It was also much larger than Bonn had been. For all that it retained some of the atmosphere of a small city and was sometimes referred to as a one million people village. It was difficult to find housing and so I lived at the southern edge of Munich, far away from the University. But on clear days one could see the snow-covered peaks of the Alps in the distance.

Stegmüller quickly disappointed me. He was a respectable scholar but lacked all imagination. One semester he gave a seminar on Willard van Orman Quine. We were each supposed to discuss one of his essays. When my turn came I reported that Quine claimed this and that but that there were problems with some of his his claims which could, however, be resolved in such and such a way. Stegmüller was dissatisfied with my report. He said: “Our task is to understand Quine, not to criticize him.” I flew into a rage, grabbed my papers and walked out of the door with the words: “If that is philosophy, I don’t want to know about it.” That was the moment when I decided to leave Munich.

I was sorry to leave my friends behind; they were all fellow students in philosophy. Only a few of us were Bavarians, some were American. The locals looked at us sometimes with suspicion when we sat in one of the beer hall talking for many hours about philosophy. Occasionally, we were still up at five o’clock in the morning and might find our way to the “Donisl,” a place next to the old city hall, which opened at that hour. One could drink beer there and eat their freshly grilled Bavarian sausages in the company of nightcrawlers and night workers, prostitutes and policemen. The Bavarians were still suspicious of outsiders and particularly liked those they considered “Prussian.” One day, I was sitting at one of those long beer hall tables with an American friend. We were once again deeply into our philosophy. At the other end of the table an elderly man, dressed in his Bavarian outfit, was glowering at us over his beer. Finally, he began to mutter: “Damned pig Prussians,” he called us. My American protested: “But I am an American.” The man contemplated for a moment and then said triumphantly: “In that case, you must be an American pig Prussian.” And with that he turned contentedly back to the beer mug in front of him.

One of the centers of our philosophical life was the seminar conducted by Wilhelm Britzelmayr, who had previously been a banker and an artillery officer, and wa now a professor of philosophy. His knowledge of ballistics had turned his mind to mathematics and from there to logic and he had become an ardent student of the work of Gottlob Frege. Frege’s writings came to me as a revelation. He seemed to be able to speak about the most abstract and difficult problems of logic and mathematics in a language of crystalline purity. Having been ignored in his life-time he had finally come to be recognized as the founder of modern mathematical and symbolic logic. I didn’t know as I sat in Britzelmayr’s seminar in Munich that I would spend many years studying Frege’s work.

Finding a new world in an old college

I was reluctant to leave Britzelmayr and his group but decided to go to Oxford where I knew there were philosophers with an interest in Frege’s work. I applied to my fellowship to allow me to go there for a year. In my application I mentioned a number of Oxford philosophers whom Stegmüller had spoken of in his course on analytic philosophy. One of them was the moral philosopher R. M. Hare.

As I was waiting for an acceptance letter from Oxford , I received a personal note from Hare. Could I come to Balliol College? I would have to stay, though, for a couple of years and work toward a Bachelor of Philosophy degree. My ever generous fellowship agreed to finance this extended stay and I took up the offer with great enthusiasm.

Oxford came as a revelation to me. I find it difficult now to remember what emotions I felt as I crossed the channel on the steamer from Ostende to Dover, took the boat train to London, crossed London from Victoria to Paddington Station, and finally saw the Oxford spires. It had never traveled like this in a foreign country. My English was halting and I was unsure what the English would think of a German in their midst. The Second World War was still very much in people’s in memory and I think I was one of the first students with a Studienstiftung felowship at Oxford. The administrators of the fellowship had told me that they didn’t quite know how much things would cost In England but that I should make sure to immerse myself fully in Oxford life.

At the college I was made to feel at home as soon as I arrived. All my worries about being German were dispelled. Balliol scholars were to international in background. I made friends, as was to be expected, with some of the English students, but also with others from the US, from Australia, India, and Pakistan. Living together in college we spent days and nights together talking about everything under the sun. It was as if I had entered a new reality. Post-war Germany had been a narrow and conservative place, focused very much on itself. Now I was being rushed into the contemporary world. My simple religious convictions faded away. I began to read the English novelists. I went to the theater to hear Shakespeare’s English spoken. After some years, first in Oxford and then in London, I realized that I had become an ardent Anglophile. I still feel that England is part of who I am. No wonder that I felt deeply hurt when the British decided to split from the European Union.

Life at Oxford was simple yet privileged. I took both for granted. Food in the college dining hall often led to protests: peas swimming in bright green liquid, grey, unappealing slices of boiled beef, mashed potatoes. Dressed in our academic gowns, we ate our food at long wooden tables surrounded by the illuminated pictures of viceroys and prime-ministers. On Sundays the fellows of the College would eat at their high table which was decorated with silver bowls and elaborate candlesticks. As they marched in, we would take out table spoons and drum till they sat down. No one knew the origin of that customs, but over time it had flattened out our ancient spoons.

At dinner we were served by the college servants who were also in charge of cleaning up our rooms. My “scout” would come in every morning to wake me up. Leaning over my bed, he would utter the same sentence every day: “Good morning sir. It’s a quarter to eight and it’s fine weather outside.” It did not matter what time of day it was or what the weather was like. Each servant was in charge of one staircase with six or so rooms. While I was living in college, the authorities decided to give the servants one day a week off from work. The arrangement was that the scout from the neighboring staircase would take over that day. These were local men who had worked in the college for many years. But they had their own peculiar pride. My servant complained: “Sir, I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all. A stranger coming into my staircase!” He was talking about someone he had probably known for a lifetime. For me it was an unexpected lesson in English class society.

We were certainly privileged as students in college. As freshmen, we had been given a talk by the Dean of the College who was also its Anglican chaplain. He told us: “Gentlemen, the sign of the Balliol man is effortless superiority.” The Reverend Francis Leader McCarthy Willis Bund was an Oxford eccentric. He was said to be an authority in Trinitarian theology who would begin his sermons on the topic with the words: “Dearly beloved, if we were Christians, we would say…”

Many of us students came from privileged backgrounds. In our common room I learned to play “Shove ha’p’ny,” a popular board game, with the crown prince and later king of Norway. One of my English friends was Adam Ridley, the great-grandson of the English prime minister H. H. Asquith. He took me to meet his grandmother, Lady Violet Bonham -Carter, a leading figure in English liberal politics, as well as Jo Grimond and his family. Grimond , the leader of the Liberal Party, had married Lady Violet’s daughter. I leaned that English politics was still very much a family affair.

The college had a number of clubs one could join or be elected into. One of them was the Cerberus society, a serious debating club dedicated to the threefold subject of philosophy, politics, and economics. Distinguished speakers would be invited for talks. “PPE” was one of the major undergraduate programs at Oxford. It had been invented by Benjamin Jowett, Balliol’s most distinguished Master, who had translated Plato and with the PPE had sought to resurrect a Platonic program of study. I joined the Cerberus Society but was also elected to the Arnold-Brackenbury Society, a dining and wining society in which we dressed up in tuxedos and competed in making witty speeches on topics like “This house would rather not.” That, too, was part, of Oxford’s method to train its elite for public life.

In my third year at Oxford, I was elected President of the Junior Common Room. I was to represent the students in college. I felt certainly moved by the recognition I was given. It was not a demanding job but it gave me a chance to meet with the Master of the College and welcome College guests. The most memorable occasion came when I had to chair a meeting that was called to discuss a painting by David Hockney. Our Junior Common Room had a picture fund to which we all contributed to buy pictures for display in the Common Room and that we could also borrow for decorating our own rooms. The daring student in charge of the fund that year had acquired a painting by a not yet so famous Hockney. The work, painted in Hockney’s early, primitive style was called “The most beautiful boy in the world.” It showed a naked male in a see-through nighty obviously masturbating. Some of the religious students were outraged. Hockney himself came to the meeting to defend his work. Nonetheless, a majority of the votes were cast to sell it off. Today, the work would probably be worth millions.

Oxford philosophy

Richard Hare became my college tutor at Balliol. He turned out to be a slim, bespectacled man, not unfriendly but austere, with an uncertain, lopsided smile. Hare rarely looked at one as he spoke, focusing instead on the rug in front of him. Later on, he once told me of the tortures he had suffered in Burma during the Second World War. I was soon writing weekly essays for him on his own work on The Language of Morals. But I remember that he also made me Sartre’s Existentialism is a Humanism, a work with which he felt an affinity. After I had worked with him for a year, he asked me one day about my first University degree. I had to explain to him that there was no such thing as a baccalaureate in the German University system. This created a dilemma since the B. Phil. degree presupposed the possession of a B.A. Being a moralist and having made the promise that I could take a B. Phil. at Oxford, Hare felt obliged to make this possible. When he consulted the official Oxford University book of rules and regulations, he discovered that each said such and such were indeed the requirements but that the rules always added “unless Convocation decides otherwise” – Convocation consisting of all the graduates of the University. This required a petition written in Latin. In the end, “Convocation” did decide otherwise in my case and allowed me to proceed to the B. Phil.

I learned to write weekly tutorial essays which helped me with philosophy but even more so with my English which was still somewhat imperfect. In my first weeks at Oxford I had attended a lecture by A. J. Ayer which had left me despondent. I had hardly been able to follow it. But then I leaned that Ayer was famous for his rapid, machine-gun delivery. His one hour lecture, when published, had forty pages.

I went to tutorials not only with Hare but also with my official supervisor, Gilbert Ryle. Where Hare was diffident, Ryle was assertive. I thought of him always as an exemplary British colonel, smart, affable, and utterly kind. With Ryle I worked on Russell and Wittgenstein. My third teacher became Michael Dummett. I was keen to work with him on Frege and faithfully attended Dummett’s seminars on the philosophy of mathematics. There I heard for the first time of Dutch intuitionism and of Hilbert’s formalism. Dummett was different from my other instructors. He was pale with a soft, somewhat puffy face; a heavy smoker; disorganized and eccentric; a Catholic convert with a social conscience; lively in philosophical conversation but at times also irascible. Once, when the American philosopher Saul Kripke was in town, he asked him to give a talk in his class. Dummett was late that day and so Kripke, afraid of being unable to complete his presentation, began without waiting for Dummett’s arrival. When Dummett showed up, his mood quickly turned to anger. He accused Kripke of trying to steal his class from him. After Kripke had left town, Dummett said to me: “I like him much better, now he is 3,000 miles away.”

Apart from Hare, Ryle, and Dummett, I attended Isaiah Berlin’s lectures on political philosophy. as well as seminars by Paul Grice, Bernard Williams, J. O. Urmson, and David Wiggins. Berlin was by far the best lecturer at Oxford and his lecture classes were crowded with eager listeners. Berlin was responsible for keeping my interest in politics alive. I joined all the political clubs and went to talks they sponsored by visiting speakers. Grice, Williams, Urmson, and the others opened my eyes to aspects of philosophy I had never known before. Oxford philosophy was still in its heydays. It was exhilarating, open minded, experimental. Most of all I now began to get serious with my study of Wittgenstein. I came to know the Wittgensteinians: Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Michael Dummett, Tony Kenny, David Pears. Being still very much in love with logic, it was the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus who appealed to me most. It took me time to get into Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. And to this day I have retained a love for Wittgenstein’s first book. It’s scope, its ambition, and its ultimate failure have kept me fascinated. I had come to Oxford imbued with the spirit of Frege, I left it steeped in Wittgenstein’s thinking.

At the end of my second year I took the B. Phil. examination. It involved tests in three areas of philosophy. My favorite concerned “The Original Authorities for the Rise of Mathematical Logic” and included questions about Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, and Dutch Intuitionism. I was well-prepared for this through my work with Dummett. We were also required a short thesis. With Hare’s guidance mine was on the logic of value-terms.

Having got the degree, I was given permission to stay on for a year of “research.” My German fellowship, always generous, agreed to pay for the extension. I had no more requirement to fulfill and could do what I wanted. That was the year when I became president of the Balliol Junior Common Room. I also immersed myself in all kinds of politics. In between, I was working on various kinds of “modal” logic: the logic of possibility and necessity, tense logic, epistemic logic, and deontic logic. But my heart was not deeply in that work because I was coming under the corrosive influence of Wittgenstein’s skepticism. Traditional philosophy, I agreed with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus, was the result of a misunderstanding of the logic of language. I also agreed with the later Wittgenstein’s resistance to the supposed sublimity of logic. Instead, he declared, we should look at the working of everyday language. From Frege and Russell I had learned that arithmetic (or, perhaps, even mathematics as a whole) was just part of logic. Wittgenstein showed me how that view was mistaken and how one should look, rather, at how mathematical reasoning is actually conducted.

One day, during this period, I received a visitor in my college room who introduced himself as Professor Richard Wollheim. He was the head of the philosophy department at University College London and waned to know whether I was possibly interested in a job as a Junior Lecturer. I had been unsure about where to go next. A return to Munich was one possibility but I also had thought about going to the United States for a doctorate in philosophy. Berkeley was one of the places I had in mind. But the idea of living in London appealed to me even more. After some conversation about the position, Wollheim left with the promise to call within a week. After two days, he rang to let me know that the job was mine. I still don’t know how he had heard of me. I assume it must have been through the mouth of Gilbert Ryle who often functioned as such an intermediary.

Hare was not entirely happy with my decision to go to London. He thought it my duty to go back to Germany “to teach ethics to the Germans.” He meant, of course, that I should teach them Hare’s ethics. I could not bring myself to tell him that I had become somewhat disillusioned with his formalistic approach. This was not uncharacteristic of the way the Oxford philosophers were thinking. Their discussions stayed far away from the pressing moral issues of the time. They had nothing to say about the horrors of the recent past or the social problems that were plaguing their own country. Hare’s example of a moral dilemma always concerned the returning of a book to the library. My worries about this kind of ethics were perhaps stimulated belatedly by my early reading of Max Scheler. I had read and absorbed his critique of the formalist approach to ethics in his treatise Der Formalismus in der Ethik und die materiale Wertethik. I was also beginning to question the idea that universality was a mark of ethics. Hare shared this, of course, with Kant and other philosophical traditions. At the time I did not know how to think about an alternative. It was many years later, when I read Nietzsche and Foucault, that I began to see what such an alternative might look like. Meanwhile, I gave up thinking about ethics and began to work more on logic since that was the subject I was expected to teach at University College London.

The metropolis

It was exhilarating to live in London. The city had recovered from the effects of the war and was thriving. But I was dirt poor on my junior salary and thus limited in where I could go. Still, I came to explore an entirely new world. I met another German, Hans Eckhart, who was there supposedly studying. For a while we were inseparable and known as “the two Hanses” exploring the town. Hans Ullrich was particularly keen on the ballet and so we went to see Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn in their most stellar performances at the Covent Garden Opera House. Later on I came to know Tony Warren who was only slightly older than me but already famous as the creator of “Coronation Street,” Britain’s most popular television program. Through him I became acquainted with a colorful array of English actors, directors, and impresarios.

The Courtauld Gallery with its incredible collection of impressionist and post-impressionist was at that time located just around the corner from University College. The British Museum was in walking distance and the National Gallery only a short bus ride away. All of these places were free and so I would often go in between work, look at two or three paintings, and be back in College for the rest of the day. Wollheim was intimately familiar with the arts and drew my attention to the galleries with their shows of Rauschenberg, Twombly, and the London School painters. He was also deeply into psychoanalysis.
One evening he lectured at the London Psychoanalytic Society in Harley Street. During the cramped reception that followed I accidentally spilled my wine over the bosom of a distinguished lady analyst. In the sudden silence that fell I realized, to my utter embarrassment, that I had clearly become a subject of analysis. I could never quite share Wollheim’s enthusiasm for psychoanalysis. Later on, Stuart Hampshire once said to me: “Let’s face it, Richard’s book on Freud is a scandal.” I tried to object that it seems to me to give a good account of Freud and particularly of his early views. Hampshire responded: “But there is not a word of criticism in it. When it comes to Freud, Richard is just a believer.”

The Philosophy Department was located at the back of University College on Gordon Square right in the center of Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf had lived at some point in one of the houses across the large green enclosure. When I got to UCL, I discovered that Wollheim had also made a number of other appointments. One of them was G. A. Cohen, the Marxist philosopher, who like me was fresh from Oxford,. There was also Myles Burnyeat, who would become a distinguished classicist, and Hidé Ishiguro, originally from Japan, who wrote on Sartre, Frege, Wittgenstein, and Leibniz. The door of 19 Gordon Square was always open and many visitors came through it. Wollheim’s predecessors, A. J. Ayer and Stuart Hampshire, were regulars. Iris Murdoch came to lecture for a term or two; Paul Feyerabend arrived from Berkeley to give a course on his work in the philosophy of science.

And besides UCL there were other colleges in the London University System with a lively philosophical presence. Bernard Williams, whom I had know from Oxford, became a professor at Bedford College. Peter Winch, with his interest in Wittgenstein, was at King’s College, and Karl Popper at the London School of Economics. All three became important to me in one way or other.

Soon after I got to London, I began to attend Popper’s regular seminar and met his colleagues John Watkins and Imre Lakatos. My contact with them renewed my interest in the philosophy of science which I had acquired originally from Stegmūller in Munich but then neglected at Oxford where it was not a central concern except for Rom Harré whose lectured I had attended but who seemed to be largely ignored by the other Oxford philosophers. Popper was instructive and colorful. He reminded me of the typical German professor with his authoritarianism. For one thing, he did not allow his students to attend classes in other London colleges in fear that they would become contaminated and he did not cherish deviations from his own falsificationist conception of scientific theorizing. Popper liked to invite visiting dignitaries to his seminar but always confronted them with his own views. One day, Noam Chomsky was in town and so Popper asked him to come and talk. For introduction, he spoke for twenty minutes or more on a two-line footnote in which Chomsky had mentioned Popper’s name. When Chomsky tried to intervene in this flood of words, Popper pounded the table. “Perrhapps, you will let me finish ONE sentence,” he thundered in heavy German. I was surprised that Chomsky did not walk out at that moment. Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend appealed to me more with their historically informed views on scientific theorizing. I was fascinated later on by Lakatos’ Proofs and Refutations and by Feyerabend’s iconoclastic Against Method. They confirmed me in thinking about human knowledge in historical terms, something that was in my blood ever since I had read Heidegger, and that attitude was re-enforced in me with the appearance of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

I liked Peter Winch and his approach to Wittgenstein. Winch understood the social dimension of Wittgenstein’s thought more than many other interpreters who treated it simply as a contribution to metaphysics, or logic, to the philosophy of language or the philosophy of mind. I admired Winch’s book on The Idea of a Social Science. I can’t remember to what extent I identified with his arguments but I certainly was fully in tune with his conclusion that the social sciences were not and could not be sciences in any strict sense. One term, Winch organized a seminar on Wittgenstein in which I participated. I gave a talk about Wittgenstein’s distinction between functions and operations in the Tractatus. I didn’t know that Rush Rhees was in the audience. Rhees had been one of Wittgenstein’s students and a colleague and mentor of Winch. The following week Rhees attacked my presentation, not only for being incorrect (which it may well have been) but as morally corrupt. I could not see what my discussion of Wittgenstein’s logic had to do with morality. But Wittgenstein’s students (and perhaps even Wittgenstein himself) used to think in those terms. I was sure, though, that I never wanted to be a follower of Wittgenstein like Rhees. I was determined, rather, to follow my own nose and not be the adherent of any one philosopher or philosophy.

I knew Bernard Williams from a class he had given at Oxford. He had intimidated me at the time with his devastating comments on what his students were saying. He seemed to me the archetype of the smart analytic philosopher always ready with an argument or a counterargument. In London I began to see a different side of him. He was quick in thinking, imaginative in discussion, and always to the point in debates. I also began to appreciate his singular wit. Having said something utterly provocative, he would often bend over in laughter at his own daring words. He was, in fact, at his best in these situations. His lectures tended to be more staid and his writings often abstractly argued. At the time, he was still thinking along the lines of mainstream analytic philosophy. Later on, he discovered Nietzsche who had been an anathema to him at Oxford. It was to Nietzsche, the genealogist, he then turned. The encounter opened up his philosophical horizons and led to his best work.

London was a congenial place for Williams. His wife, Shirley, a Labour Party politician, served at the time as minister of education. Bernard himself served on a number of royal commissions and government committees. In addition, he was a trustee of the Covent Gard Opera House. I was happy to see glimpses of this life. I began to understand doesn’t have to be simply a cloistered intellectual.

Uncertain steps

Work at University College was hard. I taught three lecture courses at a time, each only one hour per week, but demanding because I had never done any teaching before. The English believed in appointing their University lecturers at an early age. Almost no one had a doctorate. We were supposed to learn on the job. From the start, I taught classes in elementary and advanced logic as well as in metaphysics and epistemology. More than I could really handle. I always felt like being only a few steps ahead of my students.

The most demanding part of the teaching were, however, our tutorials. UCL was teaching in the style of the classical tutorial system designed by Jowett. We would see students individually every week. They would come and read out the essays they had written on topics assigned to them the week before. The rest of the hour was spent on discussing the paper and the material. I had found my own tutorials at Oxford a tremendously effective way of learning. But now I discovered how depleting the teaching of tutorials could be. Every week I would teach a dozen or more of them. At the end of the week I would sometimes feel emptied out.

The teaching load made it difficult to do much writing. I began to understand why so many fellows of the Oxford colleges never published anything. What was worse, I was still unclear about what I wanted to write on. Sometimes, I would write poetry rather than philosophy. I have recently come across a notebook from those days that contained a whole collection of poems written in German. They were avantgardish in style, but I was struck above all by the persistent note of sadness in them.

In philosophy I turned back to Gottlob Frege and what I had learned about him from Britzelmayr and Dummett in Munich and Oxford. He appealed to me because he was both a logician and a philosopher, or, rather, because he was a philosophically minded logician. I had no interest in doing purely technical work in logic, but I could see why logic could give rise to the most profound philosophical questions. At first, I tried to write a purely formal analysis of Frege’s thought, but then, later on, turned to a historically motivated account of his work. Paul Grice would eventually joke that I had written two books on Frege: the one I published and the other I had not.

I don’t know exactly what motivated the historical in turn in my thinking. I have to speak here of three influences which may have worked together. The first was my early exposure to Heidegger and his historical take on philosophy, particularly in his later writings. Somewhat provocatively I chose a motto from Heidegger for my Frege book. It said that to ask historically was to set a happening in motion. The second source was no doubt Wittgenstein to whom I referred at the end of the book as having taught me that logic can be understood only in terms of the concrete uses of language and that it requires, thus, “the examination of actual historical discourse.” The third was Dummett’s intuitionistically inspired theory of meaning. If the meaning of a proposition unfolds in time in the process of its verification, I began to wonder, should we not think of that process not just abstractly but as historical?

I remained thus in debt to my teacher. But the result was that I came to disagree more and more with his reading of Frege. For Dummett, Frege was a realist who had stood up to a dominant Hegelianism in German philosophy. I began to have increasingly doubts that this was correct. I began to think that there was much of Kant and Kant’s philosophy in Frege. Frege’s great opponent had been John Stuart Mill and Mill’s radical empiricism, as Frege made clear in his marvelous book on The Foundations of Arithmetic. Frege had argued that empirical knowledge presupposes mathematics and logic and that these had to be considered a priori in Kant’s sense. Frege had distanced himself from Kant, of course, by arguing that arithmetical propositions are analytic and, in fact, derivable, from pure logic; but he had agreed with Kant in asserting that geometrical truths are synthetic a priori in that they are based on an intuition of space. I also began to realize how Frege had been influenced by Herman Lotze at Gottingen, how his logicism and his doctrine of the objectivity of the content of propositions – of “thoughts” as both Lotze and Frege called them – had their origin in Lotze’s writings. Further reading drew my attention to Frege’s affinity to the Neo-Kantians – particular Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. I discovered that he had derived his distinction of the sense and the reference of words from them as well as the idea that propositions refer to truth-values – “the True” and “the False.”

My conclusions thus led to a sharp disagreement with Dummett. We both spoke in harsh words. Others chimed in and there existed, for a time something called “The Sluga-Dummett controversy.” I found myself fighting against one of the most respected figures in analytic philosophy. But eventually some students of Frege came around to thinking that there was something to my claims. At the time I thought that the controversy was not good for my career but, in the end, it may have promoted it.

One day Alfred Tarski, the famous logician, came into town. He was scheduled to give a series of lectures at University College and since I was the one teaching logic in the department, I was assigned to take care of our guest. At the end of his stay Tarski was to return to the University of California at Berkeley where he had been a professor of mathematics for many years. Shortly before he left, he asked me: “Would you like to come to Berkeley.?” I told him that I was interested, but that I was a philosopher and no mathematician. Tarski waived this aside. Speaking of the philosophy department, he replied in the heavy Polish accent he had never lost: “If I tell zem to take you, zey vill take you.” I was far from sure about that but it turned out that he had, indeed, a great deal of influence with the Berkeley philosophers. The day came when I received a letter of invitation. My time in London and in England was coming to an end.

 

What hope is there?

Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis is a tightly argued  new book by Ci Jiwei that sets itself the dual task of analyzing China’s democracy deficit while doing so in a genuinely philosophical manner. Such an exercise in a “diagnostic” style of political philosophy is greatly more challenging than the usual abstract and normative theorizing of our political philosophers. It faces the twofold challenge of having to give a plausible account of the political reality that serves as its material and to produce substantive new philosophical insights on that basis. Ci manages both tasks with great assurance. His book is bound to become essential reading for anyone concerned with China’s political prospects but it will also prove to be of interest to  anyone who wants to think realistically about politics and political philosophy.

Ci’s major thesis is that China must undergo a process of democratization in the next few decades or face potentially disastrous instability. Ci seeks to make his case for Chinese democracy in “prudential” rather than purely “normative” terms – a “case for democracy without falling under its spell,” as he puts it, aligning himself with John Dunn’s “realistic” view of democracy.  (p. 17)  In agreement once again with Dunn, Ci holds, furthermore, that political philosophy must proceed in a diagnostic and prognostic manner rather than in abstractly theorizing terms. He quotes Dunn as saying: “History, if anything, can tell us how we have come hither; moral philosophy, perhaps, what to make of the fact that this is where we now are. But political theory has no choice but to tell us how to act, given that this is indeed where we now are.” (p. 385)

Ci, one of the leading Chinese philosophers today and a professor of philosophy at the University of Hong Kong, is the author also of  Dialectic of the Chinese Revolution (1994) and  Moral China in the Age of Reform (2014).  I have for long been an admirer of these volumes and particularly of the first with its penetrating analysis of China’s drift from Maoist utopianism to an always already implicit hedonism and its original take on philosophical ideas from Confucianism to Nietzsche.

Conjoined to these two earlier works, Democracy in China can be seen to make up the concluding volume of a trilogy that aims at  a sweeping, philosophically imbued picture of China and Chinese politics from 1949 through the coming decades. The entire work situates itself at the intersection of philosophy, history, and politics – not an easy place to occupy as we can see from the few philosophers who have done so successfully. Hegel, Nietzsche, and Foucault come, first and foremost, to mind. Ci’s book is a remarkable new contribution to this genre.

While Democracy in China may be read as a continuation of the two earlier volumes, it also treads critically different ground. With their focus on China’s recent past and immediate present, the two earlier books could draw on confirmable historical circumstances. In seeking to ground philosophical reflection on historical realities, they could thus adopt a strictly diagnostic tone of voice. The new book, with its view to the future, is inevitably forced to follow another, prognostic procedure – one that is inevitably haunted by greater uncertainty than the diagnostic one. But in what other way can a historically oriented form of political philosophy become practical and prescriptive? Neither the past nor the future are completely knowable, but we can still acquire at least a skeleton knowledge of it. With respect to the future, hesitant conjecture is, however, the closest we can come to real knowledge. Thus, we know who the successors of Mao were and more or less what they did, but we cannot know who Xi Jinping’s successor will be or what he will stand for.  Ci is fully aware of this asymmetry and acknowledges it again and again in the course of his book, but it certainly makes for a more tentative agenda than his earlier writings. History has ways of diverting its course in unexpected directions and we cannot ignore that possibility when it comes to the future of China. So, what grounds do we have for assuming that Ci’s carefully reasoned scenario will actually play out?

There is another striking uncertainty in this book and that concerns its intentions. Who are meant to be its readers? One might think that its most important readers, the ones who will have most to learn from the book and the only ones who can make practical use of its lessons, will be members of the upper echelons of the Chinese Communist Party. But what likelihood is there that they will come across a book written in English by a Hong Kong philosopher and published by Harvard University Press in America? And if they were to become familiar with the book, would they be ready for its lessons?

These considerations are not meant to disparage Ci’s work, but they make me think that the book’s significance should not be measured by whether it will contribute to the rise of democracy in China, that Ci’s is after all a work of philosophical reflection and that its importance will lie in how it contributes to a deepened understanding of our political and historical reality. I am inclined at this point to invoke Machiavelli’s Prince. That book, too, was intended as a guide for political rulers; but it lives on now as an account of the working of political rule.

We can say, in any case, that Ci’s book has two dimensions: one political and the other philosophical. The political dimension concerns the future of China – a matter surely of the greatest significance. Whatever China’s future may be will have an impact on the global political order. If China should eventually become a full-fledged democracy, it will be the largest democracy the world has ever seen. To manage a democratic system of that size will, no doubt, be extremely challenging. The ancient Greeks believed that democracy could truly function only in small city states. We now have mass democracies but at the price of deviating radically from the model of the original. A Chinese democracy will have to be a political system of an entirely new and as yet unforeseeable form of democracy. But whatever form it will have, a Chinese democracy will also give a boost and a new direction to democracy around the world. If China should, on the other hand become unstable, that too will have global repercussions. Ci’s reflections on the future of China  certainly make clear what is at stake.

But the significance of his work is not exhausted by this. The other dimension of his book is the philosophical one. From his thoughts about China, Ci extracts many new philosophical insights concerning, not least, our very understanding of democracy. His work serves thus also as an exemplary exposition of the diagnostic mode of political philosophy.

Ci Jiwei, Democracy in China. The Coming Crisis, Harvard University Press 2019

 

 

The Darkness of this Time: Wittgenstein’s pessimism

Schopenhauer as educator

Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher, and Adolf Hitler, the dictator, were born just six days apart in the Spring of 1889 – Wittgenstein into golden luxury in the capital of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hitler into a modest family and a provincial town at the Empire’s border to Germany. Different as those backgrounds were, Wittgenstein’s and Hitler’s life-paths came to parallel each other at certain points and occasionally even to intersect. I am concerned in this essay with Wittgenstein’s pessimism about his time but have found it useful to look also at Adolf Hitler as an antithetical figure propelled by another kind of pessimism. The contrast between the two men may help to illuminate questions about their and our age, about technology and technological thinking, and, possibly, about pessimism itself.

The first thing Wittgenstein and Hitler shared was, of course, that both were born into an increasingly unstable multi-national empire. This was, perhaps, less of a problem for Hitler who always thought of himself as German and who grew up hostile to the Empire with its Jewish and Slavic populations. But many others – such as the Wittgensteins with their place in Viennese society and their Jewish ancestry – felt seriously threatened by the unravelling of their social and political order. Pessimism was in the air in Vienna. We hear that Arthur Schopenhauer, the early 19th century pessimist, was avidly read by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Sigmund Freud, Ludwig Boltzmann, the physicist, Karl Kraus, the literary critic, and Gustav Klimt, the painter, among many others. Ludwig Wittgenstein was no exception. Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation was the first work of philosophy he read, long before he took up the subject at Cambridge in 1911 and it made a lasting impression on him. Even Hitler came under the spell of Schopenhauer and later recounted that “during the whole of World War I carried the five volumes of Schopenhauer’s work in my pack. I have learned much from him.”

In 1904, Wittgenstein’s and Hitler’s paths almost crossed when they both attended the Technical High School at Linz. But they probably never knew each other, because Wittgenstein was one year ahead and Hitler one year behind. Eleven years later both became soldiers in the First World War with Wittgenstein volunteering to join the Austrian forces, while Hitler enlisted, instead, characteristically in the German army. Both came out of the war burned and traumatized. After that their lives began to move in sharply different directions. Wittgenstein saw himself confirmed in his Schopenhauerian pessimism. Hitler, meanwhile, turned from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche whom he misread as an advocate of nationalism and anti-Semitism and the prophet of men like himself – “artist-tyrants” – who would destroy the existing moribund culture and create a new global order “made to endure for millennia.” If he had been a more perceptive reader, he would have realized that Nietzsche’s assertiveness had its own pessimistic underside in the belief in the inevitable coming of nihilism.

We don’t know why two people with more or less similar experiences can nevertheless draw diametrically different conclusions. Are there psychological reasons that make the one withdraw from the world and the other to seek active engagement? Or are the reasons social in that each one of them has been conditioned by background and upbringing to react in a distinctive way – one becoming wary of technological progress and the other a self-declared technophile? Or is it that historical circumstances are configurations – puzzle pictures, in other words, – that can be perceived in utterly different ways and make the one a philosopher and the other into a dictator? But to see Wittgenstein and Hitler simply as antagonistic figures may still be too simple. Could we not also understand them as representing two complementary kinds of pessimism – one of skeptical withdrawal, the other of ideological engagement? One a nihilist in his denial of the will, the other a nihilist in its affirmation?

The First World War had been a war like no other before it. It was a new technological war fought with an array of never before seen weapons: gigantic navies, submarines, planes, bombs, tanks, long-distance cannons, machine guns, and poison gas. Technology displayed itself thus with a heretofore unknown power, foreshadowing yet further advances in armaments in the later parts of the twentieth century and the first decades of our own. The experience of this newly dehumanized warfare, the military defeat of the axis powers on whose side both Wittgenstein and Hitler had fought, and the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in particular, convinced both of them that Europe and, indeed, the West as a whole had entered a moment of historical crisis.

We know what brutal conclusions Hitler drew from that conviction. In 1941 he said: “I went to war out of pure idealism; but then one saw thousands maimed and killed and one became conscious of the fact that life is a continuous cruel struggle which ultimately serves the preservation of the race. Some must perish so that others can live.” By then, Hitler had become convinced that the most advanced modern technology was needed for victory in this struggle. One official who saw him in action in that period, describes Hitler as “altogether the type of the totally technologically minded man, the homo faber of modern civilization.” The official had no doubts about Hitler’s “extraordinary interest and uncontestably strong talent in the area of modern technology.” But he also felt that Hitler displayed all the flaws of this type: such as an “atrophy of all powers of the soul” and an entire lack of human feeling. In 1942, Hitler commented on his own preoccupation with technology: “In technological warfare the winner is the one who has a superior weapon at the right moment… One must possess technical superiority at the decisive point. I am, I admit it freely, obsessed with technology (ein Narr der Technik).” Hitler’s obsession with technology extended in all directions. In the military field, he took personal charge of the development of new weapons and during the war “set the monthly target, direction, and size of every production of weapons and ammunition in every detail.” Elsewhere he was obsessed with techniques for propaganda, with the control of large populations, the capturing, transporting, and interning of those he deemed hostile, technical means of mass sterilizing and exterminating . He displayed the same technological drive in the civil arena. Symptomatic for this was the “people’s motorization” campaign he began as soon as he came to power. On September 23, 1933, Hitler addressed workers on the first German “Autobahn” concerning his gigantic project. “Today we stand at the threshold of a tremendous task. .. In future decades transportation will be coupled with these great new roads which we now plan to build throughout Germany.” The engineer Ferdinand Porsche was given the task of creating an affordable “people’s car” (i.e. “Volkswagen”). Hitler himself came lay the foundation stone of the new factory and returned for the rolling out of the first car. The new car technology was to be propagated by car races at the Nürburgring in the Eifel and at the AVUS track in Berlin, events that were transmitted by radio all over Germany.

“I am completely powerless.”

If this was Hitler’s response to the experience of the First World War, how did Wittgenstein react to it? Strangely enough, Wittgenstein, like Hitler, saw the war initially also as a racial struggle. In his diary he wrote on October 25, 1914: “I feel today more than ever the terrible situation of the German race. For it seems to me as much as certain that we cannot prevail against England. The English – the best race in the world – cannot lose. But we can lose and will lose, if not this year then the next. The thought that our race should be beaten depresses me terribly, for I am totally and completely German.” But the lesson he drew from this was very different from Hitler’s for he concluded that one must not let oneself depend on chance, “neither the lucky nor the unlucky one.” In an almost Buddhist spirit (inspired, no doubt, by Schopenhauer), he sought to foster in himself an attitude of acceptance of whatever happens and to free himself thus from the demands of the will.

We can see from Wittgenstein’s war-time diary how he came to this view-point, what it meant for his philosophical thinking, and how it eventually came to shape his Tractatus. He had begun work on that book as soon as he had enrolled in the army. During the course of the war he maintained a series of philosophical notebooks from which he eventually extracted his book. The Tractatus is thus, in the most literal sense, a war book reflecting the course of his thinking in the years from 1914 to 1918.

When he had shown up in Cambridge in 1911, Wittgenstein had initially aligned himself with Russell’s way of seeing and doing philosophy. Russell was imagining at the time “the possibility and importance of applying to philosophical problems certain broad principles of method which have been found successful in the study of scientific questions.” This, he wrote, would make philosophy ultimately “indistinguishable from logic.” As such, it would investigate the logical forms of propositions and the various types of facts and their constituents. Russell concluded programmatically: “A scientific philosophy such as I wish to recommend will be piecemeal and tentative like other sciences; … This possibility of successive approximations to the truth is more than anything else, the source of the triumphs of science, and to transfer this possibility to philosophy is to ensure a progress in method whose importance it would be almost impossible to exaggerate.” Logic, science, and progress were thus the leading ideas in Russell’s philosophical thinking and there is no doubt that Wittgenstein for a while adopted the same objectives. In his “Notes on Logic” from 1913, he declared in the spirit of his philosophical mentor: “Philosophy consists of logic and metaphysics… Philosophy is the doctrine of the logical form of scientific propositions.” During this period, Russell came to think of Wittgenstein as, in fact, dangerously one-sided in his preoccupation with logic. To his mistress, Lady Ottoline Morell, he wrote of Wittgenstein: “He has not a sufficient wide curiosity or a sufficient wish for a broad survey of the world. It won’t spoil his work in logic, but it will make him always a very narrow specialist.” Russell did evidently not realize that other and older philosophical concerns were also already swirling in Wittgenstein’s mind.

But it needed Wittgenstein’s war experience to bring them back to the surface. The early entries in Wittgenstein’s war-time notebook show how he was still caught in the spirit of Russell’s philosophizing. But this was to change as the war dragged on. In June 1916, Wittgenstein was pulled into the so-called “Brusilov Offensive,” a Russian military campaign in which Wittgenstein’s unit lost 12,500 men out of a total of 16,000. Wittgenstein himself was unsure that he would survive. And he realized at this moment that there was nothing he could do to change that situation. It was then that his philosophical notebook turned from deliberations on logic to thoughts about the world at large and its meaning. “What do I know about God and the purpose of life?” he wrote. “I know that this world exists… That something about it is problematic, which we call its meaning. That this meaning does not lie in it but outside it… I cannot bend the happenings of the world to my will: I am completely powerless.”

It was In this situation that his attention returned to authors he knew from his early life in Vienna: Schopenhauer and his treatise The World as Will and Representation; Otto Weininger and his book Sex and Character with its reflections on the nature of the human self; and Fritz Mauthner and his monumental Contributions to a Critique of Language whose preoccupation with ordinary language he still rejected in the Tractatus but whose skepticism about the powers of philosophy he came to share. In addition he was reading others like Tolstoy, Emerson, and Nietzsche. And all these influences converged with the philosophical inspiration he had drawn from the logical writings of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell and flowed into his book. His ultimate goal, he declared at the end of the book, was to see the world aright; but in order to do so one had first to work oneself through the propositions of philosophy but only to overcome them finally and set them aside. “The right method in philosophy,” he concluded was this: “To say nothing except what can be said, i.e. … something that has nothing to do with philosophy.”

These conclusions were certainly no longer inspired by Russell’s way of thinking. In the introduction to the Tractatus which Russell wrote for its original bilingual edition, he praised the work as an achievement in “logical theory” and as such “a work of extraordinary difficulty and importance” but he only skirted the broader concerns of the book. Of Wittgenstein’s new doubts about the possibility of saying anything philosophical Russell wrote sarcastically: “What causes hesitation is the fact that, after all, Mr. Wittgenstein manages to say a good deal about what cannot be said.” No wonder that Wittgenstein was incensed by Russell’s words. He accused him of having failed to understand the book and threatened to withdraw it from publication, if it could appear only with Russell’s introduction. He wrote to Russell: ”Now I’m afraid you haven’t really got hold of my main contention, to which the whole business of logical propositions is only a corollary. The main point is the theory of what can be expressed by propositions … and what cannot be expressed by propositions.” To another correspondent he wrote: “The point of the book is ethical … my work consists of two parts: of the one which is here, and of everything which I have not written. And precisely this second part is the important one. For the Ethical is delimited from within as it were, by my book … All of that which many are babbling of today, I have defined in my book by remaining silent about it.

Russell had clearly touched a raw nerve in the author of the Tractatus. He had identified an apparent paradox in the book in that much of it, despite its call for philosophical silence, remained preoccupied with thoughts about logical structure and form. Was Wittgenstein then not, after all, continuing on the track of Russell’s philosophizing? Russell did evidently not see that such a preoccupation could be split off from his own faith in science and progress. He failed to be aware of the modernist conviction that whatever is “higher” (the aesthetic, the ethical, the spiritual) could no longer be represented concretely and in traditional terms but could be made manifest only in its absence by means of abstractions. It was this conviction that drove Adolf Loos, with whom Wittgenstein was at that time closely connected, to conceive of an architectural aesthetics of pure form, stripped of all historical references and ornamentation. The impact of this view on Wittgenstein is apparent in the house that he built in Vienna in the late 1920’s together with his friend, the architect Ludwig Engelmann who had, in turn, be a student of Loos. It was this same modernist awareness that expressed itself in the same period also in the work of Mondrian, Malevich, and Kandinsky.

“May the spirit live,” Wittgenstein had written in his war-time diary. “It alone is the safe harbor, protected, far away from the desolate, infinite, gray sea of happening.” The sentence expresses both the positive and the negative side of the conclusions he was to draw in his Tractatus. On the positive side there was a turn to a new “spirituality”, vividly present in his “Lecture on Ethics” of 1929, on the negative one a turning away from Russell’s faith in science and progress, a turning away from all philosophical theorizing, and distrust of the culture in which it flourished.

“Spengler could be better understood in this way.”

It was more than a decade later that Wittgenstein returned to the philosophical matters he had raised in the Tractatus. That moment proved to be of profound philosophical and personal significance to him; it affected how he would go on to think about philosophy and it certainly changed how he thought about himself and his time.

The turn to the 1930’s was first of all the moment when Wittgenstein began to question the assumptions about logic and language that he had laid out in the Tractatus. He now discovered that he could no longer subscribe to Russell’s conception of logical analysis and his conviction that language could be understood on the model of the logical calculus. He found himself, instead, drawn Mauthner’s view on language which he had explicitly rejected in the Tractatus. “All philosophy is ‘critique of language’,” he had written there, “(but not in Mauthner’s sense).” This despite the sympathy he felt even then for Mauthner’s skepticism about philosophy. Adopting a metaphor borrowed from Mauthner’s book – who had taken it, in turn, from Sextus Empiricus, the ancient Pyrrhonian skeptic – Wittgenstein had concluded the Tractatus by saying that one had to abandon his philosophical propositions to see the world aright. “My propositions are elucidatory in this way,” he had written: “He who understands me finally recognizes them as senseless, when he has climbed out through them, on them over them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder, after he has climbed up on it.)” The Tractatus had, in effect, used Russell’s conception of logic, language, and meaning to motivate Mauthner’s skepticism. By 1930, Wittgenstein, however, began to discard these remnants of Russell’s view of philosophy.

The turn to the 1930’s was also of profound personal significance for Wittgenstein. It was the moment at which in reaction to the rising wave of antisemitism, stirred up by Hitler and his followers, he became for the first fully conscious of his own Jewish family background. And thus he could no longer retain the thought that he was “totally and completely German” and that recent history had to be understood as the struggle between his own, the German race, and the English one. When Hitler marched into Austria in 1938, he found himself reluctantly having to make a choice between a German and an English passport. He weighed the possibility of Irish citizenship, but in the end, for practical reasons and without deeper convictions, agreed to become a British subject. Some of his family members stayed behind in Vienna. In the end, after handing over their foreign stocks, they managed to obtain a certificate from Berlin declaring Hermann Christian Wittgenstein, the grandfather of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and all his descendants to be purely Aryan even though Hermann Christian’s father had been Moses Mayer who had changed his name and had his son baptized. It has been said that Hitler personally approved this certificate.

The political turmoil of the late 1920’s and early 30’s affected Wittgenstein’s entire outlook on the world. This turn comes first into focus in a projected preface from 1930 for a book he never completed. He wrote then that the spirit of his work was not “the spirit of the great stream of European and American civilization.“ The words make clear that Germany and England were for him now part of one single civilization and as such equally problematic. He also wrote: “The spirit of this civilization makes itself manifest in the industry, architecture and music of our time. In its fascism and socialism, and it is alien and uncongenial to the author.” Modern civilization, he added, was obsessed with the idea of progress. “Typically it constructs. It is occupied with building an ever more complicated structure.” In reading these words, we are reminded that Wittgenstein’s father had been a dedicated engineer and wealthy industrialist who had long insisted that his son should follow him in that career. Wittgenstein had veered away from this trajectory already before the war when he abandoned his engineering studies and had begun to work on logic with Bertrand Russell in Cambridge. But by 1930, Wittgenstein felt just as alienated from Russell’s scientific conception of philosophy as he had earlier from his father’s preoccupation with engineering and industry. So, in his 1930 note he added that the spirit of the typical western scientist was also alien to him. “He will in any case not understand the spirit in which I write… I am not interested in building a structure … I am not aiming at the same target as the scientists.”

Such thoughts sharpened his view of what he himself was seeking to do in his philosophy. In his Blue Book he spoke of a mistaken “craving for generality” that spoiled philosophy. One of the reasons for that craving was the modern obsession with science. “Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness.” In this modern age, Wittgenstein told his students at the same time, “the nimbus of philosophy has been lost.” We have now philosophers skillfully operating their formal methods. “But once a method has been found the opportunities for the expression of personality are correspondingly restricted. The tendency of our age is to restrict such opportunities; this is the character of an age of declining culture or without culture.”

Wittgenstein’s skepticism about the age in which he was living was re-enforced by his belated reading of Oswald Spengler’s book Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West). The book had been an instant bestseller when it appeared in 1918, at the end of the First World War. The title suggested an account of the military disaster that had befallen the central European powers. But Spengler’s book had, in fact, been conceived before 1914 and was meant to provide a much more ambitious “sketch of a morphology of world history,” as its subtitle said. Wittgenstein, reading the book ten years after its appearance, the end of the war, and the completion of his Tractatus, understood immediately what the book was really about.
Spengler had been motivated by two great ideas: the first was cultural pluralism and the second historical determinism. He had rejected the conception of world history as a single, linear, and cumulative process. Instead he had described it as constituted by a series of separate, self-contained cultures that each had their own unifying idea – a ground-plan that determined every element of the culture from its art and religion to its science and mathematics. Spengler admitted therefore “no sort of privileged position to the Classical or the Western Culture as against the Cultures of India, China, Egypt, the Arabs, Mexico · separate worlds of dynamic being which in point of mass count for just as much in the general picture of history as the Classical, while frequently surpassing it in point of spiritual greatness and soaring power.” Every culture had for Spengler “its own possibilities of self-expression.” “I see world-history,” he wrote, “as a picture of endless formations and transformations, of the marvelous waxing and waning of organic forms.” The development of each culture and its formative idea followed, moreover, – so Spengler sought to show – the same fixed course which led organically from an initial larval state through an age of unfolding maturity to a terminal phase, which Spengler called “civilization.’’ “Every Culture,” Spengler insisted, “has its own civilization … Civilization is the inevitable destiny of a Culture. … Civilizations are the most external and artificial states of which a species of developed humanity is capable. They are a conclusion, the thing-become succeeding the thing-becoming, death following life, rigidity following expansion, intellectual age and the stone-built, petrifying world-city following mother-earth and the spiritual childhood of Doric and Gothic. They are an end, irrevocable, yet by inward necessity reached again and again.”

Spengler concluded that his comparative analysis of world-cultures could reveal also the current state and future of the West. It would show that Western culture had entered now into the age of civilization. And with the assumption of historical determinism in hand, Spengler went on to argue that such a comparison of the West with cultures that had already completed their course (such as that of ancient Hellenism) one could foresee the inevitable end of Western culture. The first phase of that process, he thought, had already begun around 1800 and was to conclude around the year 2000. It was characterized by “the domination of money, “democracy,” and of economic powers permeating the political forms and authorities.” The second phase, from 2000 to 2200 would bring about “Caesarism, the victory of power-politics over economics, increasing primitiveness of political forms, the decline of nations into a formless populations, and an imperium of gradually increasing crudity and despotism.” The final phase after the year 2200 would lead to “a world of spoils,” to “Egypticism, Mandarinism, Byzantium,” and finally to “primitive human conditions slowly thrust up into the highly civilized mode of living.”

Theodor Adorno, who was well aware of weaknesses of Spengler’s thought would later write that “the course of world history vindicated his immediate prognoses to an extent that would astonish if they were still remembered.” In criticizing Spengler, he added, “German philosophy and science could bring to bear only pedantic punctiliousness in concrete matters, the rhetoric of conformist optimism in its ideas, and often enough an involuntary admission of weakness in the form of the assurance that things aren’t really all that bad.” Spengler saw himself, in fact, as a realist rather than a pessimist. But it is easy to see why he attracted readers, like Adorno and Wittgenstein who saw the world in a dark light. Almost twenty years after first reading Spengler’s book, Wittgenstein was still sufficiently in thrall with it to write: “My own thinking about art and values is far more disillusioned than would have been possible for someone 100 years ago… I have cases of decline (Untergang) before my mind which were not in the forefront of people’s minds at that time.” He remained convinced that he was living in an age of civilization in Spengler’s sense, a time in which no real culture was possible anymore and, hence, a time also which limited the power and productivity of intellectual labor – his own included. In such an age, Wittgenstein noted, “forces become fragmented and the power of an individual man is used up in overcoming opposing forces and frictional resistances.” He was thus prepared for the possibility “that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity; that the idea of great progress is a delusion along with the idea that the truth will ultimately be known.”

The traces of Wittgenstein’s encounter with Spengler can be found everywhere in his later work. For one thing, Wittgenstein came to see the world in temporal and historical terms – something that had been sorely missing in the Tractatus. In that work he had treated language as an essentially timeless structure mapping on to the equally timeless structure of the world. The Tractatus had barely acknowledged the temporality of things and it had not even mentioned that the world had a history. “What has history to do with me?” he had written in his war-time notebook. “Mine is the first and only world.” The Tractatus foreshadowed thus the coming of a philosophical movement that would eschew history in the name of formal analysis. But Wittgenstein’s own thinking after 1930 was to diverge from this new trend. Not that he ever became a systematic philosopher of time and history. But he began to think about language under the sign of its temporality. What mattered to him now was the use of language, rather than its supposedly determinate, a-temporal structure. And this use, he recognized, takes place in time and changes over time. Wittgenstein’s late reflections in On Certainty about the existence of different world-views with their own distinct internal logic was evidently in debt to Spengler. Like Spengler, he came to think that world-history divides into different cultures that cannot be ordered along a single axis of progress. There are, Wittgenstein concluded, different world-views which have their internal coherence and which allow thought to move within them. Each of these views is committed to assumptions that it takes for granted. But these assumptions may still change over time. The riverbed of thought may move and so one world-view may emerge out of another one; one culture may change into another.

For all that, Wittgenstein was not an uncritical reader of Spengler’s book. From the start, he never accepted the claim that each culture is characterized by one single formative idea that determines all its significant contents. And he also never subscribed to Spengler’s historical determinism. He argued, instead, that we can compare cultures with human families: “Within a family there is family resemblance, though you will also find a resemblance between members of different families.” It was in this encounter with Spengler that Wittgenstein first came to the notion of family resemblance that was to play such a crucial role in his subsequent reflections on language, meaning, mathematics, and the mind. In critiquing Spengler, he meant to say that individual cultures, far from being hermetically sealed off from each other by their formative ideas, should be thought of as diverse and multi-featured just like any biological family. While Spengler had written of a pluralism of cultures, Wittgenstein thus sought, in addition, to emphasize pluralism within cultures. He also refused to agree with Spengler’s view that human cultures are so different from each other that there cannot be any understanding across the lines of cultural division. On Spengler’s view, we have to assume that they are, in effect, incommensurable whereas Wittgenstein stressed the resemblances between cultures that allow for the possibility of mutual understanding and interaction.

“Perhaps, one day this civilization will produce a culture.”

It would be wrong to think of Wittgenstein as denying the insights of science or of wanting to destroy the works of technology. What concerned him, rather, was the fact that science and technology have become the template on which the entire culture, including its philosophy, were shaping themselves. This, he felt in agreement with Spengler, would lead to the death of living culture and thus to the petrified state of civilization. His thinking met at this point with that of Martin Heidegger. Heidegger, like Wittgenstein and Hitler, had been born in 1889. He, too, had been a soldier in the First World War, and while his experience had been less traumatizing than that of these two others, the war and his aftermath had still convinced him that he was living at a moment of world-historical crisis. Like Wittgenstein he read and was influenced by Spengler’s, Decline of the West. In 1920, two years after the publication of that work and early on in his own career, he delivered a lecture on the book. Its text is unfortunately lost and we have no report on its contents, but Spengler’s book certainly retained Heidegger’s attention. In his subsequent writings Spengler’s name occurs frequently. While those references are often critical in tone, it is clear that without Spengler’s influence Heidegger might never have conceived of his own time in the way he did: as an age of the complete forgetting of the question of being and one in which everything is reduced to being a mere resource. Heidegger, like Wittgenstein, was no technophobe or enemy of science; both of them rather sought to remind us of the need to resist a merely technological form of thinking.

Against the tendencies of the culture, Wittgenstein sought to define a new way of doing philosophy whose aim was neither scientific nor technological. Where he saw science as motivated by the search for general, explanatory laws, he wanted philosophy to attend to the particular. “Where others pass by, I stand still,” he wrote. His new philosophy was to be alert in particular to what differentiates things, to their multiplicity and diversity. For this reason he had contemplated giving his Philosophical Investigations the motto: “I will teach you differences,” a phrase chosen from Shakespeare’s King Lear. Instead, he eventually adopted an equally apt sentence from the Austrian poet Nestroy which said that progress “looks always greater than it really is.” Wittgenstein was convinced that the most pressing and deepest philosophical puzzles came from not paying attention to what is close and at hand. The solution of these puzzles, he was certain, would not be found in ever more elaborate theorizing. The true goal of philosophy was, rather, to free the mind from the illusionary tendencies to which it is prone. “What is your aim in philosophy?” he asks in his Philosophical Investigations and he replies: “To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.” The aim of philosophy was, in other words, to liberate the mind from its entrapments by letting it retrace the particular steps by which it had got into its dilemma. Wittgenstein recognized at this point an affinity to Freud’s psychoanalysis. While he rejected Freud’s elaborate and reductive theorizing, he identified with his psycho-analytic practice which he considered a model for the proper conduct of philosophy, “The philosopher treats a question as one treats a disease.” And like the work of the psychoanalyst, that work “consists in resembling reminders”

Time has passed. The protagonists of my story are long gone. Spengler died in 1936 at odds with the regime that Hitler had brought to power but also convinced that he had correctly predicted the appearance of a new “Caesarist” form of rule. Hitler killed himself in 1945 in the rubble of the empire he had meant to last for a thousand years. Wittgenstein died peacefully in 1951. In one of his last notes he wrote: “It is so difficult to find the beginning.” But knowing that he would soon be dead, he added: “Here is still a big gap in my thinking. And I doubt whether it will be filled now.” For all his anxiety about the times through which he had lived, his final message to his friends was: “Tell them that I have lived a happy life.” Heidegger died in 1976, still looking somberly at his age. He concluded an interview with the magazine Spiegel that he wanted to be published after his death, with a word from his favorite poet, Friedrich Hölderlin: “Only a God can save us.”

The West is still powerful today and, perhaps, even flourishing. Science and technology have made further strides. The scars of the First and Second World War are hardly visible any longer. There is still creative life, or so it seems. Can we then still speak of a decline of the West? The answer is “yes” if we mean the term in the way Spengler, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger understood it. Their concern was not with science and technology as such but with the fact that they have become increasingly the templates on which everything else in society is understood, judged, and adjudicated. They saw this as an end-stage in the development of a culture, as a becoming cold and rigid of something that had once been alive and vital. Wittgenstein, in particular, worried over how we have reduced philosophy to the model of scientific theorizing and how this has distorted and impoverished what philosophy can be and once was.

We certainly need to modify and expand Spengler’s, Wittgenstein’s, and Heidegger’s perspective. They saw science and technology as part of Western culture and understood the threat they pose as specific to the West. We have come to understand since then that science and technology are cross-cultural forces. They bear on every culture in the world, from the smallest to the biggest, from the indigenous cultures of the Amazonian Indians to a grand one like China. Science and technology and the modes of thinking they bring along affect every human form of life, transform it, and press it into a particular pattern. If this is so, and this represents a threat to living culture, we must speak no longer only of a decline of the West but of the possibility of a global decline – one that manifests itself here in China, in India, in every continent on earth and not only in the Western world. In China we see today a country that has made great and necessary progress in science and technology, but we also see a place in which the danger of losing the vitality of its ancient culture is most evident.

The decline we face has a peculiar character. It may go together with gigantic systems of economic and political power. It may even see those systems persist and grow ever more complex. The decline may be all around us, confining and distorting, while we imagine that we are flourishing. The paradox is that the power, order, stability, and efficient organization of 21st century states may turn out to be exactly signals of this decline. Spengler could still be hopeful in his view, despite his forebodings over the state of Western civilization, since he thought of the decline as confined to the West and thus leaving open the possibility of the emergence of a new vital culture in some other place on earth. But if the condition he diagnosed is truly global, this hope is no longer available to us. It seems to me possible that Wittgenstein came eventually close to that view. It may have been in consequence of it that he began to think that, if there was the hope for a new culture, it would have to arise in the middle of the old and not elsewhere.

In the years after 1930, he began to think intensively about a kind of philosophizing that was needed free ones from the confining modes of science and technology – a liberating sort of philosophy that could deliver us, the West and the rest, from the bewitchments of the mind amongst which was for him our obsession with scientific and technological progress and with scientific and technological forms of thinking. This thought had been with him in some form or other ever since the Tractatus. There he had conceived of a philosophical attitude that would set aside theorizing in the scientific style in favor of a genuine seeing of the world. We can call this a visionary attitude, if we want to. With the 1930’s and Spengler’s influence on him, he began to realize that there were different ways of viewing the world, different world-views and that the task of philosophy was not to persist in any one of them, certainly not in our modern scientific and technological view of things, but perhaps also not in that view-point of complete powerlessness he had adopted in the Tractatus. But after his encounter with Spengler, he came to look for a more active way of opposing the slide into the dead end of civilization. At this time he undertook a critique of the British anthropologist Frazer who had argued that mythological thinking was just a step towards scientific theorizing. Wittgenstein concluded that the mythological form of thought has its own grammar and justification different from that of the logic of scientific reasoning. Mythological thought, he maintained, was not after reductive and causal explanation of phenomena and their subsumption under general laws; it aimed rather at interpreting and giving meaning to the concrete phenomena of human life. There was, of course, no way of returning to mythological thinking. The question was now whether philosophy could develop its own distinctive way of looking at things. This might involve thinking in terms of a visionary form of philosophy, or of descriptive and phenomenological one, or even a therapeutic forms but none of these would be engaged in formulating general theories, striving to attain the status of a progressive science..

Wittgenstein understood how difficult this project would be and how difficult it would be to move an entire culture from the track on which it was traveling. In the preface of his Philosophical Investigations he spoke of “the darkness of this time” that would make it unlikely that his thought would be understood and he expressed fear the work, “in its poverty,” might not succeed in doing what it intended to do. He wrote in another place in the same spirit: “The sickness of a time is cured by an alteration in the mode of life of human beings, and it is only possible for the sickness of philosophical problems to get cured through a changed mode of thought and life, not through a medicine invented by an individual. Think of the use of the motor-car producing or encouraging certain sicknesses, and the human species being plagued by such sicknesses until, from some cause or other, as the result of some development or other, it abandons the habit of driving.”

Was Wittgenstein thinking here of Hitler’s “people’s motorization” campaign? We should not dismiss that possibility. But more important is his conclusion that philosophical thinking alone cannot bring the technological Behemoth under control. What is needed is more than a changed mode of thought; life itself must change. What when was he doing in the face of this realization? What did he assume his philosophizing to amount to? Did he see it as a mere place holder? Keeping a form of thinking alive, perhaps for only a few, until a new culture would emerge? Or was it meant to be a first, tentative step towards such a culture? Was Wittgenstein returning here to his earlier sense of being completely powerless? Martin Heidegger leaves us with similar questions. What did he think he was doing by recalling the question of being? Did he mean simply to remind us in an age of forgetfulness that there was more than one way to conceive of being – not only as a resource as our technological made of life continuously suggests? In the end, Heidegger could only say that we would have to wait for a new clearing, to ready ourselves for a new understanding of being that might come to us some day, perhaps unasked for. What more could the philosopher do?

It is so difficult to find the beginning

My graduate seminar this semester was dedicated to reading Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations once again. My motto were three sentences from On Certainty which say: “It is so difficult to find the beginning.  Or better it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not to try to go further back.” (471) I found this relevant to the question how to begin another reading of the Investigations; but the remarks also puzzled me. One would expect Wittgenstein to say that in philosophy we never go back far enough.  What could he mean by telling us not to go too far back?

My own challenge in the seminar was to read the Investigations, as if I was looking at them for the first time. I was trying to set aside all the interpretations that have accreted around the text and read it, so to say, naively. I was resisting the pressure to go back from the words of the Investigations to those of the interpreters.  But that was not all.

The beginning is always difficult in philosophy. There is always the question what one can assume and what one must argue for. One often finds that one starts somewhere and then discovers that something else needs to be said first and then something else again. Instead of adding more at the end of one’s writing, one adds more and more at the beginning. But how far is one to carry this process? Is there an absolute beginning?

I have tried to think about the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations in comparison to the beginnings of the Tractatus and the Blue Book.  The former begins with a dogmatic philosophical statement, one about the world as a whole. The second begins with a question, one about meaning in general. The Philosophical Investigations begin, by contras more modestly with a quotation.  But why this quotation? Why this passage about language from Augustine’s Confessions? If the issue is one of language and meaning and whether the meaning of a word is the object referred to, Wittgenstein might as well have quoted a passage from Russell or from himself, or even from Frege. So, why Augustine?

My guess is that Wittgenstein assumes that Augustine has something to offer which the others do not. And this is certainly so, even though Wittgenstein does not actually mention it. What distinguishes Augustine is that he speaks of the learning of language, of how a child acquires language, of how language is a means of communication, of expressing desires, for instance, and not just a medium of representation or for saying what is true.  We might as well say that for the Wittgenstein of the Philosophical Investigations the right beginning for thinking about language is the question of how a child learns language. And this learning, we are told right away is not brought about through a process of rational explanation; it is, to begin with, the result of drill (Abrichten).

I now think that the remarks from On Certainty that were my motto this semester refers directly back to the Philosophical Investigations.  The remark continues, in fact, to speak directly of “when a child learns language” (472) and it goes on to say that “language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination.” (475) Wittgenstein seems to be reformulating here what he had previously said at the beginning of the Investigations.

A short trip to China

A month ago I attended the fourth International Wittgenstein Symposium in Xi’an. I gave a lecture on the beginning of the Philosophical Investigations and a talk at Northwest University on “Wittgenstein and the Decline of the West.”

Almost everyone in Berkeley said: “Xi’an. Where is that?” It tells you how ignorant we are about the country. It is a city of some 7 million people (and perhaps unofficially even of 10 million). The first capital of China lone before Beijing and as such full of antiquities. It was also the end of the Silk Road, the place where Buddhism entered China and it has, till today, a thriving Muslim quarter. A modern city but one with a history.

The Wild Goose Pagoda where the Buddhist scriptures were kept after they had first been brought to China
The Famen Temple outside Xi’an where one of the Buddha’s finger bones is preserved
The thriving Muslin beighborhood

The philosopher as a toad

I have been reading all summer – right across the field, whatever has come into my hands. My seminar last semester on Foucault’s  “The Order of Things” stimulated my interest in French literature and because of Foucault’s well-known hostility to Sartre I decided to have another look at that philosopher. So I took up Sartre’s autobiographical work “Les Mots” which had been on my bookshelf for quite a while.

Certainly an intriguing and disturbing book. Intriguing as a description how Sartre leaned to read and began to write. But disturbing also because Sartre speaks about himself in the starkest terms.  We read, for instance: “My long hair got on my grandfather’s nerve. ‘He’s a boy,’ he would say. ‘You’re going to make a girl of him. I don’t want my grandson to be a sissy!’ One day – I was seven years old – my grandfather could no longer stand it. He took me by the hand, saying that we were gong for a walk. But no sooner had we got around the corner than he rushed me into a barber shop, saying: ‘We’re going to give your mother a surprise.’ I returned home shorn and glorious. There were shrieks, but no hugging and kissing, and my mother locked herself in her room to cry. Her little girl had been exchanged for a little boy. But that wasn’t the worst of it. As long as my ringlets fluttered about my ears, they made it possible to deny my obvious ugliness. Yet my right eye was already entering the twilight. She had to admit the truth to herself. My grandfather himself seemed nonplussed. He had been entrusted with her little wonder and had brought back a toad.”

And Sartre writes in similar words not only about his own small, dwarfish stature and his bad, disfiguring eye but also about his inner flaws, his hypocrisy and self-deception. Spell-binding as the book was, I must admit that after 250 pages, I felt I had heard enough about the inner life of a precocious ten-year old.

I ended up, however, with one fascinating realization. “Les Mots” came out in 1964 just two years before Foucault published his “Les Mots and les Choses.” Its manuscript had been full of invective against Sartre which had been eliminated only at the last moment. So we must assume that Sartre’s title was presumably on Foucault’s mind. What is more, Sartre criticizes himself at the end of his book for what he considers to have been his early idealism and writes: “”As a mystic, I attempted to reveal the silence of being by a thwarted rustling of words and, what was most important, I confused things with their names.” And there you have the two words that make up Foucault’s title, “les mots” and “les choses,” in one sentence. So, what are we to make of Foucault’s title? Does he mean to say that where Sartre has been stuck in his words, in his subjectivism and humanism, while he, Foucault, is concerned also with things and how words bear on them. But if that is what he means, then Sartre has already anticipated him and has diagnosed the shortcoming in his own earlier self.

One thing is clear, of course, Foucault would never have been able to write a book like “Le Mots.” He would never have been able to lay himself bare in the way that Sartre did.

Local struggles in a global city

A few weeks ago, I met up with a number of local activists in Hong Kong. I wanted to know how much support they still had from the general public and what their chances were for asserting any political influence, given that their leaders were under attack and their elected representatives had been disbarred. At the time, the HK administration was barreling ahead with its controversial extradition bill and nothing seemed to be able to stop it. But now, in the last two weeks, we have seen the answer to my question. A million people protested and they had come together not as members of an organized opposition but through a spontaneous grassroots movement making use of the power of the social media. Popular democracy, so it seems, has triumphed and the administration has now suspended – for the time being – the process of pushing the extradition bill through the otherwise pliable legislature. An important battle seems to have been won.

But the war is not over. The bill may be resurrected at any time later and the fears of the Hong Kong protestors are hardly assuaged, as I have found out. The year 2047 is still looming, when Hong Kong is scheduled to become an integral part of China with the end of the “one country, two systems” arrangement. That arrangement has already been under increasing pressure for some time and the proposed extradition bill was only to be one more nail in its coffin. When I asked my localist friends a few weeks ago how they pictured Hong Kong in 2047, unsurprisingly they had no clear answer for me. Will Hong Kong simply melt away into the cauldron of greater China and become just another Chinese city?

I tried to convince my localist friends that this was unlikely, that because of its history Hong Kong would retain its distinctive character whatever happened to it politically. The struggle of the localist advocates is certainly more than a political one. They want to maintain also their distinctive history and their Cantonese language. The use of Cantonese extends, moreover, beyond Hong Kong and the cause of he localists is thus also one over the cultural identity of Southern China as against the Mandarin speaking North. Hong Kong has, strictly speaking, been never a Chinese city. It was a British creation, grew up as a colonial stronghold, became a refuge for people dislodged from Communist China, and it has in recent years, since the British left, part of that web of megacities that now span the globe. No wonder that many Hong Kongers do not consider themselves Chinese. This cultural consciousness will not disappear for the foreseeable future, whatever happens to Hong Kong. It is thus plausible to think that Hong Kong will remain a thorn in the flesh of China – just as Taiwan is, though for somewhat different reasons. Whether the distinctive identity of Hong Kong will persist, depends, of course, also on the vitality and creativity of its people. A cultural distinctness cannot be defined only in terms of Hong Kong as a global financial center.

Hong Kong in turmoil

When I arrived in Hong Kong a month ago it was already clear that a political crisis was brewing. The HK administration had tabled a new extradition law and opposition to it was growing by the day. Now the issue has come to a boil. On Sunday, a million Hong Kongers braved sweltering heat to demonstrate against the law. The next day, Carrie Lam, the chief executive announced that she was going ahead with it any way and that he legislature would vote on the law this Wednesday. More confrontations are inevitable.

The British left Hong Kong with an incomplete democracy when they handed the territory back to China under the “one country, two systems” agreement. Till today only part of the legislature is elected by the public and the choice of the chief executive is controlled by Beijing. No wonder that the relation of the Hong Kongers to the administration is fraught with tension. Few people mourn the departure of the last chief executive, C. Y. Leung who seemed to be set only on pleasing Beijing. His successor, Carrie Lam, came into office promising to do better but now she has changed course (or been forced to do so).  Her new motto is: The public be damned. There is no doubt that her hardline tactics on the extradition bill has lost her the good will of a large part of the Hong Kong population. She is not likely to get that back. Her next few years in office promise to be rough.

The extradition bill is a further blow to the already shaky democracy of Hong Kong. It will allow the extradition of HK residents to the mainland, if they are accused there of serious crime. The expectation is that Beijing will use the law to stifle political opposition. The existence of the law will, in fact, be enough to make critics of Beijing speak more circumspectly. And the way the law is being funneled through the legislature is another insult to democracy. Normal legislative procedures have been abandoned to push it through. The result will be a much hated law pushed by an unpopular and unrepresentative administration on an unwilling population.  No wonder that people in Hong Kong are speaking of the end of democracy.

And here are two headlines from today’s South China Morning Post:

Tensions in Hong Kong on rise as city’s leader Carrie Lam gets death           threats and more protests loom over extradition bill

Strikes, class boycotts and ‘picnics’: how ordinary people across Hong Kong are mobilising to take action against extradition bill

 

Living in the twilight

“Fully 99.5 per cent of human existence was spent in the Palaeolithic era, which began about 3 million years ago when humans began using primitive tools. That era ended about 12.000 years ago with the last ice age. During this long twilight period, people noticed almost no cultural change at all, ‘The human world that individuals entered at birth was the same as the one they left at death’.” (Jamie Susskind, Future Politics, p. 4)

But was it really a twilight period? Or was it, perhaps, not a time in which the human species truly flourished and in which it could hence live contentedly for some millions of years? We hardly ever think of the price of civilization. You have to turn to someone like Nietzsche to raise that question. Susskind is writing of the coming of a new, digital world. And while he discerns problems along the way, he is still imbued with the spirit of technological optimism. He describes with admiration how our computers can now play chess and Go better than any human player. The technological capacities are remarkable, but the value of our games has been diminished and we ourselves have become thereby diminished. Who are those engineers who work so eagerly at the diminution of our species? What spirit of resentment drives them? What drove us out of the paradise of our primitive, pre-historic existence? Were we already stained by the will to power whose effect we see before us every day now in its terrifying beauty?

Nietzsche, for all his clear-sightedness, was also still blinded by the idea of progress when he projected the coming of the Übermensch. Who says that whatever or whoever comes after us will be beyond and above us? Is it not possible that we are living right now in the twilight period of our species?

The End of Eternity

A week ago, I saw Bi Gan’s movie The End of Eternity (《地球最后的夜晚》)– called In English Long Day’s Journey into the Night — on a Cathay Pacific flight. I came away thinking that this must be one of the great movies of all times. The next day I discovered that it was also playing at a neighboring movie house and so went to see it again. I couldn’t sleep after that as the images, words, and sounds of the movie were hauntingly coming back to me again and again in the middle of the night. Dark, mysterious, and melancholy, Bi Gan’s work is, in fact, a piece of the most sublime Chinese poetry and utterly captivating as this poetry can be.

Its story may be simple and even banal: a man looking for a woman he had known many years before. But it is developed captivatingly in a series of magical scenes that move back and forth in time and place in an unexplained fashion. Its logic is that of a dream, of free poetic associations in which images, words, and sounds repeat themselves in a disorienting fashion. The effect is heightened by the way the movie is constructed in two separate halves, the first shot in standard format, the second in 3D. While the first half is replete with images of water, the second is preoccupied with images of stone. The movie begins with the protagonist washing his face under a faucet; then he stands in a basement where water is pouring through the ceiling and accumulating on the floor. Later he arises suddenly out of a deep pond apparently in the same place, but when his companion steps into it that same water it appears to be only ankle-deep. In the second half, the hero finds himself suddenly in an abandoned mine; he drifts on a small gondola into a town in which everything is made of stone; he follows a torch-bearing woman up mysterious stone staircase but then, returning to the market-place, walks up once more on those same rocky stairs.

While the movie’s present-day story is set in the year 2000, it shows us nothing of the world of modern China. There are no high rises here, no motorways, no shopping malls, no huge teeming masses, and certainly no signs of China’s economic and military might. We are in a forgotten, claustrophobic corner of China. The signs of an outside world are few and far between. In the first few, passing shots we see some construction machinery and an old metal girder being cut down; we are told of the hero’s friend, a young small-scale crook, whose body is one day found in a mineshaft; there is the image of a cobra suddenly striking the wall of its cage; a disturbing upside-down scene of the hero aiming his gun at another man sitting in front of him in a movie theater; a house burned down by a jealous woman. But these moments of violence are never allowed to dominate the movie; they are embedded in it, rather, like sudden, fearful intrusions into a more languorous dream.

The movie begins with the hero’s return to his hometown after his father’s death. The father, he hears, has spent his final days looking at a dead clock on the wall. When our protagonist opens the clock he finds in its back a photograph of the woman he has once known. At the end of the movie our hero gives a watch to a woman he has just met and who may or may not be the one he has been looking for all the time. She notes that the watch is not working and tells him that a watch is a symbol of eternity. He, in turn, draws her attention to a pair of sparklers she has lit on her make-up table and tells her that they are symbols of the transitory. We are left to contemplate their kiss with these words in mind.

The European elections – A shift in political paradigm

The European elections on May 23 mark a point of transition in European politics. More than 50 % of Europeans eligible to vote made use of the opportunity. In some countries, the numbers were even higher. In Belgium 88.5% went to vote, in Denmark 66%, in Spain 64%, and in Germany 61%. These are remarkable figures. They show that for the first time in its history, the parliament has come to be recognized by a large number of Europeans as an important component of the political structure of the EU.  Not only the parliament but also the EU as a whole has thereby undoubtedly gained in democratic legitimacy.

But something even more important has happened in this election. Dire predictions about the inevitable rise of the radical right have not been borne out. Yes, right-wing parties did gain ground in some countries (Italy, UK), but they declined in some others (Germany, Spain). At the same time Left-Green won surprising new ground. Some commentators have bewailed that this  development will undermine the political center and thus threaten the political stability of the EU. We may, in reality,  be seeing the emergence of a new political order.

The established conservative and social-democratic parties of Europe have so far failed to pursue an effective course against the rise of the new right. It does not help to characterize this new right as populist, since that term can signify a multiplicity of different political positions. These “populists” are better described as localists. They hark back to the nation and the idea of national sovereignty; they try to construct walls against the outside world; they want to keep immigrants at bay; they seek to uphold traditional local values; and above all they oppose “globalization.” It is against this localism that Left-Green defines its agenda. Climate change cannot be combatted locally; it is a global affair; it demands international co-operation; our natural environment is the globe; all of humanity is bound together in the need to preserve the environment.

Environmental politics has, moreover, science on its side whereas the new right only has its little, shopworn, pitiful prejudices. But let’s not be too summary in that judgment. There is certainly value in tradition and in local cultures. Environmentalists need to learn that in addition to preserving natural habitats, we must also preserve cultural habitats. This insight is needed, if we are to drain the waters of the new right.