When I 1997 André Glucksmann could imagine at a lecture at the Humboldt University in Berlin, the French philosopher had just turned 60 years old – an age that I, as this young firebrand famous thinkers could hardly bring in conjunction. I fall, I said, to no one as the sigh: “Children, as time goes by.” Before Glucksmann began his speech, he corrected me gently, in his charming French inked, but unerring German: “You are mistaken, my dear Not the time passes, we pass away…”
philosophize is to learn to die – this word Michel de Montaigne was one of the favorite maxims that Glucksmann has put on his thinking. To live in the awareness of our transience, meant for the thoroughly secular son of Eastern European Jewish parents who had fled to his birth in 1937 from Germany to France, however, anything but meekly put up with the earthly conditions. On the contrary, it obliges us to actively create our existence in human dignity.
There preserve us in his point of view but also from the hubris to build our ideal, founded on an illusory eternity idea building. At the end the reality will then namely too often forcibly adapted to it – under the sacrifice of people who stand in the way of its realization. In this devastating logic of utopian Glucksmann saw the root of totalitarianism as all forms ideologically motivated suppression systems.
The gap, which is not to close
By contrast, he continued what he called the “ethics of extreme emergency”. Not in dreamed Ideal conditions, but at the task of averting the threat of extreme inhumanity at any time, the moral claims should be based, from which we derive our actions. To not turn to overburden this defense elemental humanity with euphoric expectations of the good in people, he pleaded in his book “The Cartesian revolution” (1989) for a “negative formulated humanism” that is not put together “the pieces of the cosmos in a vain effort “wants, but comes to terms with the fact that the gap between and what we think of the world, not to close us.
Alluding to the search for the authentic Being as it notably emerges in German philosophy to Heidegger, Glucksmann wrote: “Humanism in negative intends neither to do with nostalgia for a good old time even with the announcement of a new world;. He guards against the illusion of in-the-world “
This consistent break with all constructions of an illusory good the philosopher had to wrest his own experience with the seductive power of world doctrines of salvation. In his early years he had been shaped by the communist ideals of the parents continues to move in the left-wing radicalism. In the legendary Paris in May 1968, he was among the leaders of the movement, to join in the result of a variety spontaneist of Maoism.
The birth of the “new philosophers”
The move away from extremism early seventies took place under the influence of reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. In his books “cook and cannibals” (1975) and “The Master Thinkers” (1977) reckoned Glucksmann not only with Marxism, but also with its roots in the German idealism and Hegelian dialectics. They appeared in the French public as a bang and made the glutäugigen renegades from the pure left teaching with his long, black hair to the star of the Paris Motor Show and TV talk shows. And they inspired a young, anti-totalitarian direction of French thinkers who were given the label “New Philosophers”.
a key figure in the intellectual life of France was Glucksmann, as it the end of the seventies, he managed his liberal conservative academic teacher Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre, the icon of the French left to bring together in a common initiative for the salvation of the Vietnamese “boat people”. The action expressed prototypically what Glucksmann of post-totalitarian intellectuals expected: to leave their ideological trenches, when it comes to concrete support for the most threatened.
In Germany, however, Gluck’s desecration of shrines of the Left met with skepticism by hostile rejection. At the bottom he was by believing in German pacifists and leftists when he “The philosophy of deterrence” published at the height of the movement against NATO retrofitting entitled to justify the nuclear arms of the West. Only this, he argued, could deter the Soviet totalitarianism of the subjugation of all Europe, having to perform without a terrible war.
“The Power of the Powerless”
The Anti-Atomfundamentalisten that an absolutely amoral act and the evocation of a “nuclear holocaust” saw the threat of nuclear strikes, provoked he with a question: Had the occupants of the Warsaw Ghetto in 1943 has a nuclear bomb, they may threaten to throw them to Berlin?
In this dispute already excelled at Glucksmann a change of perspective from. The Eastern European dissidents had found in the late seventies with the establishment of the “Committee for the Defense of Workers” in Poland and Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia a new form of concentration. The dissenters from the “real socialism” united not by a common ideal, but came together in the determination not to bow to the Potemkin villages and language rules of communism. They wanted to express how his reality actually looked.
Vaclav Havel saw in this decision, “to live in the truth”, the “power of the powerless”. Instead of arguing about the principles of a better society, the dissidents wanted at all once bring dignified conditions, could be among those debated freely about their different values and objectives. Glucksmann recognized it as his own philosophical and humanitarian views again.
In October 1989, when Vaclav Havel was imprisoned, was awarded this in the St. Paul Church of the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade. At his request Glucksmann gave the eulogy. “With Havel,” he said, “this so many times in jail accommodated modern Socrates, you enter into a story without illusions a The mirage of radiant future no longer obscured your view, you look directly at the evil -. The evil that we always be able to commit after it has been committed by me or my kind again. “
The West held Glucksmann for obsessive
The collapse of communism in Europe called for André Glucksmann accordingly produced no triumph feelings. He immediately warned against expectations of a new emphatic now dawning era unclouded democratic happiness. He vehemently argued against the thesis of the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama, the end of totalitarian systems is now also the “end of history” come. Shortly afterwards broke out in the Balkans a bloody ethnic massacre, which the West watched long time indifferent, Glucksmann was among the first who raised the alarm.
earlier than most other recognized André Glucksmann also the danger posed by Putin’s authoritarian restoration in Russia. While the West after September 11, 2001 considered the new Kremlin Lord as a good ally in the war on terror, Glucksmann made vehement and persistent attention to the murderous fury of the Russian army against the Chechen civilian population.
But in the West, hardly anyone wanted to hear anything about it. Many did Glucksmann’s warnings, the brutal conquest pursuit of “new tsar” will be directed sooner or later to Europe, from the obsessive. When they were disabused in the past two years, Glucksmann was already too ill to intervene in the debate, intended as the western part of the challenge posed by Putin’s encounter authoritarianism.
Eitler Self Actor ? On the contrary,
Had Glucksmann in his early anti-totalitarian phase flirted even with reconnaissance skeptical ideas such as those of “living philosopher” Henri Bergson, his later works focused on the critical reconstruction of the Western Enlightenment heritage. In books such as “The Eros of the West”, “The Power of Stupidity”, “Hate The return of an elementary force.” And finally the – not yet translated into German – “Voltaire contre-attaque” he described a liberal society that without the pomp pompous “values” manages. But they found less and less attention. He was accused of scribbling. They did not realize what intellectual treasures they hold.
In many cases André Glucksmann was labeled as vain self Actor for his impressive presence. Who got to know him, realized that he was the exact opposite. I have never met a more modest and kinder people than hit him. I’ll can not get used to it, that it no longer exists.
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