Philosophy is to learn how 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 – they had fled in his birth in 1937 from Germany to France – but anything but meekly put up with the earthly conditions.
On the contrary: It obliges us to actively create our existence in human dignity. It saved us in his view, but before 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 the idea – at the expense of people who stand in the way. In this devastating logic of utopian Glucksmann saw the root of totalitarianism as all forms ideologically motivated suppression systems.
However, 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.
Central Solzhenitsyn-reading
This consistent break with all constructions of an illusory good the philosopher had to take place by his own experience with the seductive power of world doctrines of salvation. In his youth he had always moved in the left-wing radicalism. In the legendary Paris in May 1968, he was among the leaders of the movement. The move away from extremism early 70s took place under the influence of reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. She led Glucksmann just how the lofty and noble dream of a happy harmonized, egalitarian society had produced a system of terror of the camps in the Soviet Union. 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 in the dialectics of Hegel. They appeared in the French public as a bang and made the glutäugigen deviants from the pure left teaching with his long, black hair to the star of the Parisian salons and talkshows. And they inspired a young, anti-totalitarian direction among French thinkers who were given the label “New Philosophers”.
For a key figure in the intellectual life of France was André Glucksmann, when he succeeded the late 70s, his liberal conservative academic teacher Raymond Aron and Jean-Paul Sartre, the icon of the French Left, to a joint initiative to rescue the Vietnamese “boat people” together. The action expressed what Glucksmann of post-totalitarian intellectuals expected: to leave their ideological trenches, when it comes to concrete support for the most threatened
The collapse of communism in Europe called at Glucksmann no triumph feelings out.. Shortly afterwards broke out in the Balkans a bloody ethnic massacre, Glucksmann was among the first who raised the alarm. That he soon called a Western military intervention in favor of a Serbian genocide threatened Muslim Bosnians as later the Kosovars once again earned him the accusation of being a warmonger. How right Glucksmann had turned out later – too late, however, as for the victims of Srebrenica.
Earlier than most other recognized André Glucksmann also the danger posed by Putin’s authoritarian restoration in Russia. But in the West, hardly anyone wanted to hear anything about it, many did his warnings against the “new Tsars” as obsessively from. When they were taught in the past two years a better, Glucksmann was already too ill to intervene in the debate.
No self-promoter
Had Glucksmann in his early anti-totalitarian phase even flirted with the Enlightenment 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”, “hate. The return of an elementary force “and the last not yet translated into German” contre-attaque Voltaire “he described a liberal society that” does without the pomp pompous “values.
But they found less and less attention. He was accused of scribbling and redundancy and 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, had touched to realize that he was the exact opposite.
(Tages-Anzeiger)
(Created: 10.11.2015, 19:47 clock)
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