It is my intention to say a few words about the so-called general test in philosophy, which is part of the examination that qualifies candidates for academic posts in secondary schools in the Land of Hessen.1 What I have observed over the last eleven years has made me more and more concerned that the meaning of the test is misunderstood and that the test fails its purpose. Moreover, I have had cause to think about the mentality of those being tested. I believe I sense their own discontent with the test. From the beginning many feel alienated and not really equal to it; some harbor doubts about its significance. I believe I must speak about this matter because the very results of the test often depend on factors I have encountered and that are often not fully recognized by the candidates. An examiner would have the wrong attitude altogether if he did not fundamentally try to help those people whom he is professionally obliged to judge, even when such help has a sting to it. I alone answer for my words here, though my colleagues might share my opinion in many respects. In particular, I know that Horkheimer reached the same conclusions. Obviously there are many candidates for whom my fears are unfounded. They are mainly those who personally have a specific interest in philosophy; as participants in our seminars they have often developed a genuine relationship to philosophy. Beyond this group, there is no lack of students with wide horizons and intellectual sensibilities. Truly cultured individuals, they already bring with them at the outset what the test, fragmentarily and insufficiently enough, is supposed to detect the presence or absence of. But my critique is in no way directed only at those who have not passed the exam: often they are only more careless but certainly no less qualified than the majority who are passed in accordance with formal criteria. Rather it is the sign of the fatal condition—really a condition regardless of any particular faults of those who fail—whose marks are borne even by the students who sail through the exam or who, as an expression that itself is already fundamentally offensive puts it, “receive a solid average.” Often one has the feeling that this or that candidate should be passed because he answered most of the concrete and verifiable questions more or less correctly; but this decision, no matter how welcome to the person in question, does not exactly lighten the examiner’s heart. If the test were conducted strictly according to the spirit and not the letter of the exam regulations, such students would have to receive a negative evaluation, above all in consideration of the youth who will be entrusted to them once they become teachers and with whom I do not yet feel too old to identify myself. The mere need for teachers should not profit those who by their nature presumably will have the opposite effect of what that need requires. The entire situation is suspect precisely in those aspects for the sake of which the general test was first introduced. I think it better to say this openly and to stimulate discussion than to carry on silently with a practice that inevitably must lead the examiners to routine and resignation and the candidates to disdain for what is expected of them, a disdain that often only thinly veils their disdain for themselves. It is kinder to be unkind than to disregard with an all-too-convenient, friendly indulgence what in the consciousness of the examinees affronts their own better aptitudes, which I am sure every candidate possesses. It goes without saying that humanitarianism embraces goodwill and consideration, and among those in our department of philosophy at the university who must administer examinations none are lacking these qualities. But we wish to be humane not only toward the candidates, whose anxiety we can well understand, but also toward those who will one day sit before them, whom we do not see, and who are threatened with greater injustice at the hands of an immature and uneducated intellect than anyone who might be threatened by our intellectual demands. One does not need what Nietzsche called the “love of strangers” for this: a little imagination is quite sufficient.2
When I said that those who are equal to the test are often the ones who participated actively in the philosophy seminars, I did not mean to exercise any institutional pressure. I take the idea of academic freedom extremely seriously and am completely indifferent as to how a student educates himself, whether as a participant in seminars and lectures or merely through private reading. I had absolutely no intention of equating the significance of this examination with professional training in the specific discipline of philosophy. I only meant to say that those who push themselves beyond the activities of a single academic specialty to that consciousness of spirit that is philosophy usually fit the conception of the examination. It would be childish to expect that everyone could or would want to become a professional philosopher. I fundamentally mistrust precisely that category. We do not want to expect from our students that déformation professionelle of those who automatically think that their particular field is the center of the world. Philosophy fulfills itself only where it is more than a specialty. The general test, according to paragraph 19 of the exam regulations, to which so many cling scrupulously, “should determine whether the applicant has understood the educational significance and strengths of the disciplines he has studied and understands how to consider them from the vantage point of the vital philosophical, pedagogical, and political questions of the present” (p. 46). There is then added expressly: “yet the philosophically accentuated test should not lose itself in specialized questions, but rather must orient itself according to such questions as are essential for the living culture of today, whereby the particular disciplines of the applicant constitute the point of departure.” In other words, the general test intends, to the extent that any test can do it, to give an idea of whether the candidates, in reflecting upon their specialized discipline—that is, in reflecting upon what they are fulfilling—and in reflecting upon themselves transcend the bounds of what they have actually learned. Quite simply one could say: whether they are intellectual, spiritual people if that phrase did not have a distinct tone of arrogance, did not evoke exactly those desires for elitist domination that prevent the academic from self-reflection. The phrase “spiritual person” may be abominable, but its actual significance is brought out only by something more abominable—an encounter with someone who lacks any trace of the spiritual. This test therefore should permit us to see whether those candidates, who as teachers in secondary schools are burdened with a heavy responsibility for the spiritual and material development of Germany, are intellectuals or, as Ibsen said more than eighty years ago, merely specialized technicians.3 The fact that the term “intellectual” [“Intellektuelle”] came into disrepute at the hands of the National Socialists seems to me just one more reason to use it in a positive sense: the first step toward self-reflection would be to stop cultivating vagueness as a higher ethos and stop slandering enlightenment, and instead resist the baiting of intellectuals, no matter what disguise it might take. However, whether someone is an intellectual or not is manifested above all in his relationship to his own work and to the societal totality of which it is a part. This relationship, not the work in specialized domains like epistemology, ethics, or even the history of philosophy, is what constitutes the essence of philosophy in the first place. It was formulated in this way by a philosopher whose qualifications in the particularized philosophical disciplines would be difficult to dispute. In the Deduced Plan for an Institute of Higher Learning to be Established in Berlin, that is, the university, Fichte says: “Now that which scientifically comprehends the entire spiritual activity, including all particular and further determinate expressions of it, is philosophy: thanks to the formation given them by the art of philosophy, the specific sciences should receive that which constitutes their proper art; that part of them which up to the present has simply been their natural gift dependent on the mercy of chance should be elevated to the rank of reflected ability and activity; the spirit of philosophy would be that which understood first itself and thereby all other spirits within it; the artist in a particular science must above all else become a philosophical artist, and his particular art would merely be a further determination and a single application of his universal philosophical art.” Or, perhaps even more strikingly: “Thus with this developed philosophical spirit, that of the pure form of knowledge, the entire scientific or scholarly material would then need to be comprehended and penetrated in its organic unity, at the institution of higher learning.”4 These propositions are no less valid today than they were one hundred and fifty years ago. The emphatic concept of philosophy intended by the movement of German Idealism in the epoch when it was in accord with the spirit of the age did not add philosophy as a subject to the sciences, but rather sought philosophy in the vital self-reflection of the scientific and scholarly spirit. However, if the process of specialization, which denigrated this idea of philosophy into a platitude to be intoned by officiating orators, were viewed actually as an expression of the reification spirit itself underwent in step with an increasingly reified exchange society, then philosophy would be precisely the force of resistance inherent in each individual’s own thought, a force that opposes the narrow-minded acquisition of factual knowledge, even in the so-called philosophical specialties.
Please do not misunderstand me. I am not ignoring the necessity of philosophy’s becoming autonomous vis-à-vis the individual scientific and scholarly disciplines. Without that separation the natural sciences at least could hardly have experienced such rapid development. Perhaps even philosophy itself was not able to attain its most profound insights until, like Hegel, it had voluntarily or involuntarily taken its leave from the activities of the individual disciplines. It is futile to hope for a magical reunification of what has been separated; even the philosophicum, the philosophy examination, must beware of this illusion. Several highly developed disciplines in the humanities, for instance classical philology, have taken on such a specific gravity and have such a refined methodology and material at their disposal that philosophical self-reflection almost inevitably appears dilettantish in comparison. There is hardly a direct path leading from the practices of those disciplines to philosophical reflection. Conversely, the development of philosophy into a specialized discipline cannot simply be ignored. In the absence of familiarity with the products of specialized philosophy, philosophical self-reflection on the part of individual disciplines easily takes on a chimerical quality. Consciousness that would behave as though in its material it were at once also philosophical not only could all too easily sidestep the density of the material and veer into arbitrariness but would moreover be condemned to regress to stages of philosophical amateurism long ago superseded. I am neither overlooking nor intentionally ignoring this objective difficulty of the exam. But I think that one should not stop with that and, above all, that one should not get carried away. If in fact there is no direct path available between the work of the individual disciplines and that of philosophy, then this does not mean that the pursuits have nothing to do with one another. An expert in German philology would quite rightfully be indignant were he required to toss out historico-philosophical interpretations of the linguistic laws governing sound shifts. But, for instance, a problem such as how the mythical legacy of folk religions in the Nibelungenlied, though archaic from a Christian point of view, nonetheless takes on postmedieval Protestant traits in the figure of Hagen, assuming that the episode on the Danube signifies something like this5—such a problem would be legitimate in the eyes of the philologists and at the same time would be productive for philosophy. Or: if the great lyric poetry of the Middle Ages in large measure lacks what in the form of nature lyric then became so deeply rooted in the concept of the lyrical since the end of the eighteenth century, then the absence of this element that for such a long period of time is virtually taken for granted as part of later lyrical consciousness would be a theme just as much of interest to philosophers as to philologists. There are countless connections of this kind and the candidates could surely choose themes from their own areas of research. To understand Schiller it is essential to know his relation to Kant, by which I mean not the biographical and intellectual-historical contexts but rather the influence of Kant upon the very contours of Schiller’s dramas and poems; and likewise in order to understand Hebbel one must know the historical-philosophical conception that infuses his dramaturgy. I am almost never presented with proposals for themes of the sort I’ve just improvised here. Of course, I do not mean by this that specifically philosophical themes should be excluded or that they should be considered exceptional. Yet for the moment it is enough to indicate the difference between the usual proposals and those involving some self-reflection, if not upon particular problems within the individual disciplines then at least upon the more extensive questions and areas of research. For my own part I would be content with themes that reveal at least some inclination toward what I have envisioned here.
The complaint is often heard that philosophy burdens future teachers with a supplementary discipline and, moreover, with one many people lack any connection with. I must return the reproach: very often it is the candidates, and not we, who transform the general test into a specialized one. When a candidate is, in the parlance, “allotted” to me, then I try to discuss with him the area he has chosen and try to distill a working theme from which something like the intellectual self-conception of his work can be inferred. However, by no means does this arouse pure joy and enthusiasm. On the contrary. If it were up to the desires of the students, then the written part of the test would always set topics purely about specialized disciplines, the history of philosophy, or summaries of philosophy. Quickly enough one discovers a predilection for certain philosophers and certain writings that enjoy a reputation for being particularly easy; thus the Meditations of Descartes, the English empiricists, Shaftesbury, Kant’s Grounding of the Metaphysics of Morals, an ensemble so limited thematically that by now it has come to arouse all kinds of doubts in us. I am not easily persuaded that a Germanist or historian finds special significance or indeed any particular interest in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding of Locke, whom Kant called excellent and who is not exactly light reading for me either; and I am no less convinced when, as occurs more often of late, the candidate quickly produces pat reasons to justify his study of this extremely digressive founding text of common sense*. By the way, the distinction between easy and difficult philosophers, which I suspect is paralleled by a distinction between easy and difficult examiners, is completely spurious. The abysses Locke smoothly glides over gape wide in his texts and at times make even a coherent presentation of his thought prohibitively difficult, while such an ill-reputed thinker as Hegel reaches a much higher level of rigor precisely because in his work the problems are not obscured by comfortable opinions but are addressed openly and without reservation. The intellectual or reflective person should feel free to entertain such considerations. If, however, heeding the watchword safety first*, one wants to pass the exam by taking as few risks as possible, then this behavior does not exactly reinforce the intellectual powers and ultimately endangers an already tentative sense of security. For all that, I hope that the examiners will not now be engulfed by a wave of questions on Hegel.
If in fact one insists that the topic chosen be more than superficially connected to the candidate’s particular area of interest, then one encounters the most peculiar difficulties. I once had the hardest time simply bringing one person to state his area of interest; everything interested him, he replied, and thereby awakened my suspicion that nothing interested him. Finally he indicated a specific period, and I thought of a work that offers a historico-philosophical interpretation of that era. I proposed that he work on this topic and ended up only terrifying him. He asked me whether the author in question actually was a renowned philosopher important for the disciplines he was studying, as the examination regulations stipulated; the verbatim text of the regulations often becomes the means of escaping their intention. Where the regulations provide points of orientation by which the examiner and the candidate can conduct the exam, some candidates hold fast and cling to them as though they were inviolable norms. One student declared that he was interested in Leibniz and his critique of Locke. When in preparing to take the test for the second time he proposed the same topic and the examiner explained that he thought it inappropriate to discuss the same things again, the student’s first reaction was to ask whether he again had to study two philosophers. His behavior echoes a proposition from Hofmannsthal, which indeed he puts in the mouth of Clytemnestra, consumed by fear: “There must be proper rites for everything.”6 The candidates here in question search everywhere for cover, prescriptions, tracks that have already been laid down, both in order to find their way via well-worn paths and also to normalize the procedure of the examination so that precisely those questions for which the entire examination was first instituted are not posed. One encounters, in a word, reified consciousness. But this, the inability to experience and to engage with a topic in a free and autonomous manner, is the flagrant contradiction of everything one can reasonably and without pathos conceive to be the “genuine cultivation of mind” that the exam regulations identify as the purpose of the secondary schools. In negotiating the choice of topics one gets the impression that the candidates have taken as their maxim Brecht’s phrase, “But I do not want to be a person at all,” even and especially when they have learned the categorical imperative in its various formulations.7 Those who become indignant at the imposition of philosophy as an academic discipline are the same people for whom philosophy means nothing more than an academic discipline.
For more than one reason we’ve learned not to overrate the written parts of the test in the overall evaluation of the candidates and to place more weight upon the oral section. However, what one hears and sees there is hardly more encouraging. If a candidate expresses his aversion to the expectation that he should be an intellectual by pointedly sighing throughout the exam, then undoubtedly that is more a matter of upbringing than of spirit, although both have more to do with one another than might occur to such a candidate. But specialized personnel has—if I may be permitted this contradictio in adjecto—its orgy in the orals.8 “The candidate,” as the exam regulations stipulate, “should demonstrate that he grasps the fundamental concepts of the philosopher he has studied and that he understands their historical evolution.” A candidate questioned about Descartes was able, as is usually the case, to give a quite accurate overview of the line of reasoning in the Meditations. The discussion came to the concept of res extensa, extended substance, its merely mathematical-spatial definition, and the lack of dynamic categories in the Cartesian conception of nature. In response to a question about the consequences of this lack for the history of philosophy, the candidate explained, to his credit quite honestly, that he did not know; he had never looked beyond Descartes, whom he had down pat, even so far as to see what insufficiencies in the Cartesian system motivated Leibniz’s critique and thereby also led to Kant. The specialized concentration upon a certified great philosopher had diverted him from what the exam regulations require, the knowledge of the historical evolution of the problem. Nevertheless he passed the exam. Another candidate presented with unpleasant loquacity the line of reasoning in the first two Meditations. I interrupted him in order to see how much he understood, and asked him whether the hypothesis of doubt and the conclusion of an indubitable ego cogitans completely satisfied him. I was entertaining the less than abstruse idea that the individual empirical consciousness underpinning Cartesian theory is itself intertwined with the spatio-temporal world from which, according to Descartes, it stands apart as an irreducible and imperishable difference. The candidate looked at me for a moment, during which he was more sizing me up than reflecting about the Cartesian deduction. The result was apparently that he took me to be a man with an understanding of higher things. In order to oblige me, he answered: no—there is indeed a genuine encounter. Let us suppose that he had really thought of something, for example, that in the recesses of his memory he had remembered something of the doctrines that accord mind an immediate and intuitive knowledge of reality. In any case if he meant something like this, he did not know how to articulate it, and philosophy is after all, as our old teacher Cornelius defined it, the art of self-expression.9 What is characteristic in the response, however, is that he tossed me a platitude taken from a run-down and, in the given context, questionable existentialist philosophy in the belief that he would thereby demonstrate his sophistication and possibly give me a name-brand pleasure. The specialist’s credence in facts, for whom every consideration of what is not the case is an annoyance and possibly a sacrilege of the scientific spirit, has its complement in the faith in grandiose expressions and magical turns of phrase from the jargon of authenticity that chokes the air in Germany nowadays.10 When reflection upon the subject matter itself, the intellectual sensibility of science and scholarship, comes to a stop, then what takes its place are platitudes steeped in worldviews, spellbound by that ill-fated German tradition according to which the noble idealists go to heaven and the base materialists go to hell. More than once I’ve encountered students who ask me whether they are also allowed to express their own views in their papers, whom all too innocently I have encouraged to go right ahead, and who then strive to demonstrate their independence by means of propositions such as this: Voltaire, who brought about the abolition of torture, lacked genuine religious sentiments. This alliance between the brutishness of terre à terre and the stereotype of an officially sanctioned worldview reveals an intellectual constitution akin to the totalitarian mind. National Socialism lives on today less in the doctrines that are still given credence—and it remains questionable whether its doctrines were ever believed—than in certain formal features of thought. These features include the eager adjustment to the reigning values of the moment; a two-tiered classification dividing the sheep from the goats; the lack of immediate, spontaneous relations to people, things, ideas; a compulsive conventionalism; and a faith in the established order no matter what the cost. Structures of thought and syndromes such as these are, strictly speaking, apolitical in their content, but their survival has political implications. This is perhaps the gravest aspect of what I am trying to say.
The patchwork of acquired—which most often means memorized—facts and worldview declamations indicates that the connection between the subject matter and its reflection in thought has been sundered. This is confirmed again and again in the examinations and must be directly due to the absence of what anyone wishing to educate and cultivate others must himself have, namely, culture. Despite warnings from her examiner a student wanted to choose Bergson for the subject of her oral exam. In order to see whether the student had any idea of what is called intellectual context, the examiner asked her about some painters contemporaneous with the philosopher and whose work might have something to do with the spirit of his philosophy. At first she maintained that it was naturalism. When queried for names she first mentioned Manet, then Gauguin, and finally, with a good deal of help from the examiner, Monet. The examiner insisted on asking for the name of this great movement in painting of the late nineteenth century, and the student answered triumphantly: expressionism. Alas, she had not indicated impressionism as her topic but only Bergson; yet living culture would consist precisely in the awareness of such relations between the Lebensphilosophie and the impressionistic style in painting. Whoever does not understand that also cannot understand Bergson himself; and indeed the candidate actually was absolutely incapable of explaining the two texts she claimed to have read: Introduction à la métaphysique and Matière et mémoire.
If we were countered with the question, for instance, of how a culture that would encourage the association of Bergson and impressionism should be acquired, then we examiners in philosophy would feel quite embarrassed. For culture is precisely that for which there are no correct rules; it is acquired only by spontaneous effort and interest and is not guaranteed by courses alone, even if they be those of the type of a studium generale, “general studies.” In truth, culture is not even about applied effort, but rather about having an open mind and the general ability to engage in intellectual matters, to take them up productively within one’s own consciousness instead of merely learning something and, as the unbearable cliché says, “confronting” it.11 If I did not fear being mistaken for a sentimentalist, then I would say that culture requires love: what is lacking is probably the ability to love. Any suggestions for how this condition might be changed are dangerous; most often it is decided in an early stage of childhood development. But anyone in want of this ability should hardly teach others. Not only do such individuals perpetuate that suffering in the classroom poets were denouncing sixty years ago and that people think, quite falsely, is now long gone, but rather the defect is passed on to the pupils and reproduces ad infinitum that intellectual condition that in my view is not an innocent naiveté but rather was partially responsible for the catastrophe of National Socialism.
This lack shows itself most palpably in the relationship to language. According to paragraph 9 of the examination regulations, particular importance should be accorded to linguistic expression; in the case of severe deficiencies in language, the work must be deemed unsatisfactory. I do not dare to imagine what would happen if the examiners adhered to this rule. I fear that even the most urgent openings for teachers could not be filled, and it would not surprise me if many candidates relied on this state of affairs. Only exceedingly few candidates have any idea of the difference between language as a means of communication and language as the precise expression of the matter under consideration; they believe that knowing how to speak is sufficient to know how to write, although it is true enough that whoever cannot write most often is also incapable of speaking. I hope I’m not one of the laudatores temporis acti, but my memories of Gymnasium evoke teachers whose linguistic sensibility, or rather whose simple correctness of expression, is distinguished from the sloppiness that reigns today, a sloppiness that probably could be justified by appealing to the overall predominant usage of language and that in fact reflects the objective spirit. Sloppiness usually gets along splendidly with schoolmasterly pedantry. Whenever I meet with a candidate to discuss his theme for the Staatsexamen,12 as soon as I have the impression that he lacks a sense of responsibility toward language—and the reflection upon language is the prototype of all philosophical reflection—I bring this paragraph of the regulations to his attention and try to describe for him in advance what I expect in these examination papers. The fact that such paræneses bear so little fruit seems to indicate that it is a matter of more than just laxness;13 the candidates have lost all relation to the language they speak. The more mediocre works teem with grammatical and syntactical errors. The basest clichés, such as “somewhat,” “the genuine concern,” and the famous “encounter,” are used without the least embarrassment, indeed with gusto, as though the employment of catchphrases meant that one is absolutely up-to-date.14 Worst of all is the articulation of propositions. Somewhere in the back of one’s mind there is probably the reminder that a philosophical text should possess logical integrity or coherence based on reasoned argument. However, this in no way bears any connection to the relations between the thoughts themselves, or rather the affirmations that so often merely pretend to be thoughts. Pseudo-logical and pseudo-causal relations are produced with the help of particles that paste together the propositions superficially at a linguistic level, but thoughtful reflection reveals them to be irrelevant; thus, for example, of two propositions one is presented as the conclusion of the other at the level of language, whereas at the level of logic neither proposition entails the other.
As for style, most of the candidates, though they may have studied linguistics, have not the slightest idea; instead they awkwardly and affectedly sift out from their customary manner of speaking what they mistakenly think is a scientific or scholarly tone. However, the language in the examination papers is outdone by what is heard in the oral part of the exam. Often it is a stammering interspersed with vague, qualifying phrases, such as “to a certain extent,” that in the same instant they are uttered try to evade responsibility for what is said. Words of foreign derivation, even names of foreigners, constitute hurdles that are seldom surmounted without some damage to either hurdle or candidate; for instance, most of the candidates who have chosen for their exam a philosopher who is apparently as easy to classify as Hobbes, speak of him as Hobbes, as though the bes belonged to the dialect in which ebbes means “etwas.”15 The very idea of dialect. One may rightly expect from culture that it accustom a regional language’s coarseness to more polished manners. This is out of the question. The conflict between High German and dialect ends in a draw, which pleases no one, not even the future teacher, whose disgruntlement clatters in every word. The speaker’s closeness to his dialect, that sense in which—in the case of a dialect still quite rustic—he is at least speaking his own language, or as the vernacular has it, “speaking off the top of his head,” has been lost.16 The objective standard language has not been achieved, but remains disfigured by the scars of the dialect; it sounds a bit the way those boys in provincial towns look who are called in to help with the Sunday dinner crowds and are rigged out in a waiter’s jacket that does not fit them at all.a Certainly I do not want to say anything against the friendly institution of German language courses for foreigners the university organizes, but courses for natives would perhaps be more important, even if they did nothing more than rid the future teacher of that intonation in which the brutality of the rustic indistinctly blends with his future pedagogical dignity. The complement of vulgarity is pomposity, the fondness for using words that lie beyond the speakers’ horizon of experience and that therefore in their mouths sound like those foreign words they presumably one day will harass their pupils with. Such expressions are almost always sedimented cultural goods of the privileged class or, in terms less academic, a worn-out gentleman’s wardrobe that enters the so-called pedagogical sector only when no one in the realm of free spirits will touch it.17 Urbanity is part of culture, and its locus is language. No one should be reproached for coming from the country, but no one should make a virtue out of it either and obstinately continue it; whoever does not succeed in emancipating himself from provincialism remains extraterritorial to culture. It would be good for those who intend to teach others if they would become explicitly conscious of their duty to deprovincialize themselves instead of helplessly imitating whatever is considered culture. The persistent divergence between city and country, the cultural amorphousness of the agrarian, whose traditions meanwhile are irrevocably on the ebb, is one of the forms in which barbarism perpetuates itself. It is not a matter of the refinements of intellectual and linguistic elegance. The individual becomes mature only when he frees himself from the immediacy of conditions that are in no way natural but, on the contrary, the vestiges of a historic development that has been surpassed—something that is dead and does not even know it.
If one happens to be cursed with an exact imagination, then one can very well imagine how the choice of career occurs: the family discussion about what the boy should do to get somewhere in life, perhaps after having doubted that he’d pull it off on his own without the protection of a career guaranteed by a diploma; local dignitaries may have lent their encouragement and put their connections to work, and together they would have concocted the most profitable course of study. Here a role is played by that ignominious scorn for the teacher’s profession that is widespread not only in Germany and that in turn motivates the candidates to make all too modest demands upon themselves. In truth, many have resigned themselves even before they begin, and consequently have no more esteem for themselves than they have for their intellectual work. In all this I sense a humiliating necessity that paralyzes in advance all resistance to such an attitude. The situation this type of high school graduate finds himself in probably really leaves him scarcely any other choice. It would be too much to presume him capable of perceiving the dubiousness of his enterprise at the moment he decides upon his future. Otherwise he would already be liberated from the constraint that is revealed later in the examination as a lack of intellectual freedom. The people I have in mind are trapped within a vicious circle; their interest compels them to make the wrong decision of which they themselves ultimately become the victims. Nothing would be more unjust than to blame them for this. But if the idea of freedom still has any meaning at all, then it should allow these ill-suited students to come to the obvious conclusion at the point in their development when they become aware of the difficulty—the rupture between their existence and their profession and everything it involves—and this awareness must inevitably develop sometime at university. Either they must in good time renounce the profession with which they are incompatible—during an economic boom the excuse hardly holds that other possibilities are blocked—or with all the energy of self-criticism they must confront the condition, some symptoms of which I have here enumerated, and must attempt to change it. Precisely this attempt, not any determinate result, would be the culture that candidates should acquire and, I would like to add, would also be what the examination requires by way of philosophy: that the future teachers gain some insight into what it is they do, instead of remaining captured within it and understanding nothing. The handicaps that, as I well know, hamper many of them, are not invariants.18 For that reason self-reflection and critical exertion have real potential. That potential would be the opposite of the blind and dogged diligence that the majority have once and for all decided upon. This diligence contradicts culture and philosophy because from the outset it is by definition the learning of what is already given and valorized, in which the subject, the person who is actually learning, his judgment, his experience, the substrate of freedom, are all absent.
For what actually alarms me about the examinations is the gulf between the philosophical work presented and the students themselves. Whereas their study of philosophy should promote the convergence of their genuine interest with the academic specialty through which they are developing themselves, instead their study merely perpetuates their own self-alienation. This self-alienation even increases to the extent that philosophy is felt to be a ballast preventing them from acquiring useful knowledge: either the candidate’s preparations in his major disciplines, and thereby hindering his progress, or his learning material necessary for his profession. The philosophy studied for the exam becomes its own contrary; instead of leading initiates to self-understanding, it serves no other function than to demonstrate to them and to us just how badly culture has failed, not only in the case of the candidates but in general. The surrogate they take in its stead is the concept of science. This concept once used to mean the requirement that nothing be accepted without first being examined and tested: the freedom and emancipation from the tutelage of heteronomous dogmas. Today one shudders at just how pervasively scientificity has become a new form of heteronomy for its disciples. They imagine that their salvation is secured if they follow scientific rules, heed the ritual of science, surround themselves with science. The approbation of science becomes the substitute for the intellectual reflection upon the facts, once the very foundation of science. The armor masks the wound. Reified consciousness installs science as an apparatus between itself and living experience. The more the suspicion grows that the best has been forgotten, the more the operation of the apparatus itself serves as consolation. Again and again I am asked by candidates whether they may, should, must use the secondary literature and what I recommend. Now a familiarity with the secondary literature is always good so that one does not lag behind the current state of research and thus perhaps discover the North Pole all over again. Those who want to acquire academic qualifications must ultimately also demonstrate that they master the ground rules of scientific and scholarly work. But often the concern with secondary literature means something entirely different. First, the expectation that the secondary literature will furnish the thoughts the candidate masochistically believes himself incapable of generating, and then the hope, perhaps not even conscious, of belonging to science’s mystical predestined elect through demonstrations of scholarly folderol, citation, extensive bibliographies, and references. The students wish at least to be one of science’s chosen few, because otherwise they are nothing. I have no inclination to existentialist philosophy, but in such moments it contains an element of truth. Science as ritual exempts them from thinking and from freedom. They are told that freedom must be saved, that it is threatened from the East, and I do not delude myself about the regimentation of consciousness on the far side of the border. But sometimes it seems to me as though freedom were already undermined among those who formally still have it, as though their spiritual habitude has already aligned itself with the regression, even in those areas where it is not expressly regulated, as though something in the people themselves waits to be relieved of the autonomy that once signified all that was to be respected and preserved in Europe. Within the inability of thought to transcend itself there already lurks the potential for integration, for submission to any kind of authority, which is already evident today in the way people compliantly cling to the status quo. Many go so far as to glorify the captivating spell even to themselves, exalting it into what the jargon of authenticity calls a “genuine bond.” But they are deceiving themselves. They have not passed beyond the isolation of autonomous spirit but rather have fallen behind individuation and therefore cannot overcome it as they would like to believe.
The idea of practical progress possesses such an unshakable supremacy for many people that for them nothing else seriously compares with it. Their attitude is one of automatic defensiveness, and for that reason I do not know whether I can reach them at all. One of the characteristics of reified consciousness is that it hunkers down within itself, stubbornly persists in its own weakness, and insists on being right no matter what the cost. I am always astounded by the acumen exhibited by even the most obtuse minds when it comes to defending their mistakes. One could reply, with little risk of being contradicted, that this is all very well known but that nothing can be done about it. In support of this assertion general reflections could be marshaled such as: where could anyone today find the faintest glimmer of a larger meaning that might illuminate his own work? Further, and here I would be the first to agree, one could invoke the fact that social conditions such as where one comes from, which are beyond anyone’s control, are responsible for the inability to satisfy the emphatic concept of culture: the majority have been cheated out of the experiences that precede all explicit instruction and that sustain culture. Furthermore, one could refer to the insufficiencies of the university and its own failure: quite often the university itself does not provide what we complain of not finding in the candidates. Finally, one could draw attention to the overload of material to be learned and the awkwardness of the examination situation itself. I will not enter into a dispute about how much of all this is accurate and how much mere pretext: there are insights that in themselves are true but that become false as soon as they are used to serve narrow interests. So much I would concede: that in a situation where the virtual dependence of everyone on the structure as a whole reduces the possibility of freedom to a minimum, the appeal to the freedom of the individual rings rather hollow. Freedom is not an ideal hovering inalienably and immutably above the heads of human beings—not without reason does the image recall the sword of Damocles—but rather its possibility varies as a function of the historical moment. In the present moment the economic pressure upon most people is still so unbearable that it destroys all self-consciousness and critical reflection: it is no longer the material needs of former times but more the feeling of overall impotence within society as a whole, a universal dependence that no longer makes individual self-determination possible.
But can one expect a man to fly? Is enthusiasm something that can be regulated? Plato, who after all knew what philosophy is, considered it to be the most important subjective condition for philosophy.19 The answer is not as simple as the dismissive gesture might suppose. For this enthusiasm is not a contingent phase simply due to the biological stage of adolescence. It has an objective content, the dissatisfaction with a pure and simple immediacy of the subject matter, the experience of it as semblance. The subject matter itself will require that its semblance be transcended as soon as the person with goodwill immerses himself in it. The transcendence I have in mind is one with the immersion. Every person senses quite well on his own what is missing: I know that I am not saying anything new here but at most what many people prefer not to admit. The most urgent recommendation would be Schelling’s Lectures on the Method of Academic Study.20 In his approach from the standpoint of identity philosophy many themes can be found that I reached coming from completely different premises; it is astounding that the situation in 1803, when the German philosophical movement had reached its height, does not differ so much in regard to the issues here under discussion from the present day when philosophy no longer exercises such authority. It is not so much a matter of future teachers pledging allegiance to something they find strange and irrelevant, but that they should follow the needs arising in their work and not let themselves be dissuaded by the supposed constraints of their formal course of study. Intellectual activity may be more questionable today than in Schelling’s age, and to preach idealism would be foolish, even if it still had its former philosophical relevance. But spirit itself, to the extent that it does not acquiesce to what is the case, carries within itself that momentum that is a subjective need. Every person who has chosen an intellectual profession has undertaken an obligation to entrust himself to its movement. That obligation should be no less honored than the expectation that the examination regulations will be followed. What I wanted to say, and perhaps have been unable to express with complete clarity, should not be brushed aside with an air of superiority that masks hard-boiled cynicism. It would be better if each person pursued the goals he has set for himself. It is not a question of drawing comfort from the thought that things just are that bad and nothing can be done about it; rather, each must reflect upon this fatality and upon its consequences for one’s own work, including one’s examination. This would be the beginning of that philosophy that closes itself only to those who blind themselves to the reasons why it remains closed to them.
