The early insurance system was one of the harbingers of systemic modernity, provided one defines modernization as a progressive replacement of vague symbolic immune structures classifiable as final religious interpretations of human living risks with exact social and technical security services. In fundamental aspects, the assurance of the mercantile professions replaces what had previously seemed to lie in God's hands alone. This applies especially to provisions for the consequences of unforeseeable twists of fate. Prayer is good, insurance is better: this insight led to the first pragmatically implanted immune technology of modernity; it was augmented in the nineteenth century by the social security system and the hygienic-medical institutions of the welfare state. The immaterial price paid by the moderns for their insurability was high, admittedly, in fact metaphysically ruinous – they increasingly dispensed with fate, that is to say with a direct connection to the absolute as an irreducible danger. They declared themselves specimens of a statistical averageness that dressed itself up individualistically. The meaning of being shrank to an entitlement to benefits in a standard damage case.
The philosophy of the Modern Age, by contrast, initially managed no more than a reorganization of symbolic immunity. This, as we know, was done in the name of ‘certainty’. If there is such a thing as a characteristically modern philosophy – an assumption supported by the phenomenon of Descartes and its consequences – it is due not least to the fact that it succeeded in modernizing self-evidence. In addition, this revealed an inner basis of certainty which, as one says, could be taken as a point of ‘departure’ – shown by the currently and immediately clear and obvious self-observation of doubt. The cycle of civil, non-monastic philosophies in modernity probably rests on the increasing demand among the middle classes for proof of non-insanity. Their clients are no longer the clerical courts, the bishoprics, monasteries and theological faculties, but rather the project-makers in the anterooms of Western princes and the enterprising minds in the growing audience of educated private persons; this was finally accompanied also by what, with reference to the scholarly world of books, one could call the scientific public sphere. Perhaps the rationalist branch of continental philosophy that followed on from the emigrant Descartes attempted precisely that: providing a new breed of risk-citizens who take up loans, speculate on floating capital and have loan redemption dates in view with an unshakeable logical mainland on which to stand – an offer to which the seaworthy Britons proved less receptive in the long term than the other Europeans, who rarely made a secret of their hydrophobia and, furthermore, always had to reckon with a higher public spending ratio in their intellectual enterprises.1
It is of epoch-typical significance that the title copperplate of Bacon's Novum organum of 1620 depicts returning ships, with the legend Multi pertransibunt & augebitur scientia: ‘Many will pass through and knowledge will be increased.’2 Here we find a betrothal of newer experiential thought to the Atlantic fleet guided by pragmatism, just as the doge of Venice, as lord over Mediterranean seafaring, annually married the Adriatic Sea. That same Bacon, like a Pliny of rising capitalism, authored The History of the Winds, which opens with the statement that the winds gave humans wings with which they learned how to fly – if not through the air, then at least over the seas.3 The totality of these winds formed what would later be called the earth's ‘atmosphere’ – taken literally, the orb of vapour or mist. The sailors on Magellan's voyage had been the first to see for themselves the unity of the earth's surface and that of the sea enclosed by an air breathable by humans. The seaman's breath gained the first access to real atmospheric globality: it led Europeans into the true Modern Age, in which the connection between the human condition and the atmosphere established itself as the master idea of an epochal caesura that had not yet been fully thought through.
Even if the new centres of knowledge could not be located directly on the ships, they would still have to display certain port qualities in future. Experience only reaches people via importation; its further treatment via concepts would be the business of philosophers – enlightenment begins at the docks. The true terrain of experience in the Modern Age is the ship's deck, no longer that ‘earth’ of which, as late as the twentieth century, the ageing Edmund Husserl had sought to reassure himself, a desperately conservative turn of phrase, as a ‘primal ark’ [Urarche] or ‘primal home’ [Urheimat]; one can speak here of a regression to the physiocratic view, which holds that all values and validities stem from agriculture and a bond with the soil. Husserl's attempt to base all insights ultimately on a general world soil, the ‘ground of universal passive belief in being’,4 is still tied to a premodern form of terranism that cannot interrogate the reason for having a foundation excessively enough.5 This happened at a time when marinism had long provided the more pragmatically astute answers, though perhaps not the better ones in absolute terms; maritime reason knows that one should be wary of running a-ground;6 only those who navigate on the surface can operate successfully. The nautical spirit requires not foundations but terminals, foreign partners, inspiring port connections, remote destinations and a dose of civilly made criminal energy.
In its form, a philosophy that sought to follow its reputation for formulating the world-concept of the Modern Age would be destined to constitute itself as a swimming faculty, or at least as the port authority of Old Europe. It belonged to the poverty of continental philosophy, the German in particular, that it was usually bound – even in the twentieth century – to the atmospheres and morals of small provincial residences, where philosophical studies could scarcely be anything other than the continuation of the lower priesthood's training by other means. Not even the Tübingen dreams of the Aegean, which were certainly the best thing that ever touched German intelligences, could force access to the sea for idealistic thought.
Johann Gottfried Herder pinpointed the small-town spell affecting German thought into recent times in his bold early travel journal: ‘On earth, one is fixed to a dead point and locked in the narrow circle of a situation.’ He attempted to counter this claustrophobia, which touted itself as philosophy, with the leap into a different element: ‘O soul, how will it be for you when you depart from this world? The narrow, fixed, restricted midpoint has vanished, you flutter through the air or swim on a sea – the world disappears for you … how new a way of thinking.’7One could read this as suggesting that the German disposition only wanted to see its chance at globalization in death.
The maritime dimension of the Modern Age world format, however, was notoriously underestimated by most continental capitals and royal seats, whether Vienna, Berlin, Dresden or Weimar. For the most part, the continental philosophies placed themselves pre-emptively in the service of a terran counter-revolution that instinctively rejected the new world situation. In the end, one does want to continue controlling the whole from the position of a secure national territory, pushing forward a firm foundation against the impositions of nautical mobility. This applies to the territorial rulers as much as the territorial thinkers. Even Immanuel Kant, who purported to be repeating the Copernican revolution in the field of thought by elevating the subject to the location of all representations, never fully realized that the Copernican revolution was actually less decisive than the Magellanic one. Like every terran mind of the past, Kant, despite living in a seaport town, remained indebted to the fixed-location mentality. What good did it do, then, to make phenomena revolve around the intellect if said intellect had no desire to travel around the world? With his insistence on the cogito owner's duty to reside, Kant was destined to misunderstand the essential features of a world of fluctuations. The well-known quasi-lyrical passage in the Critique of Pure Reason concerning the island of pure reason, the ‘land of truth’ that breasts the ocean, ‘the true seat of illusion’ where ‘many a fog bank and rapidly melting iceberg pretend to be new lands’,8 probably reveals more about the defensive motives of the modern business of thought in its German variety than the author intended: in front of the full faculty, this passage formulates the anti-maritime oath with which the rational mind ties itself to the perspectives of deep-rooted, terran-regional self-assertion. It crosses this treacherous ocean but once, with clear disgust – or critical intent, some would say – to assure itself that there is really nothing of interest for reason to be found there. That is why, in 1788, the same author could publish a Critique of Practical Reason from which readers learned absolutely nothing about the most practical matter of his time, namely seafaring – and how could they, when the maxims for the actions of captains on the high seas were unsuitable as a guideline for any set of universal rules?
Matters were made all the worse by Heidegger's defence of provincial life, a defence whose message was this: Berlin is no good for someone who, like some location-specific grotto oracle, is the medium through which the truth of Being speaks – four hundred and fifty years after Columbus and one hundred and fifty after Kant. He too understood truth as a chthonic function – a revocable emergence from earth, mountain and cave – and granted only a temporal, not a spatial meaning to that which comes from afar. Thought concerning the whole was the last to board the ship.
And so Goethe noted in his journal from the Italian Journey, on 3 April 1787 in Palermo: ‘No one who has never seen himself surrounded on all sides by nothing but the sea can have a true conception of the world and of his own relation to it.’9 The great majority of Central European scholars, almost all cowed and sustained by territorial states and their lords, preferred to be surrounded by the walls of schools and libraries, or at the utmost by urban backdrops. Even Hegel's seemingly magnanimous acknowledgement of the sea as the natural element of industry, which joins different nations, in the famous §247 of his Philosophy of Right – ‘the greatest medium of communication’, ‘one of the chief means of culture’10 – is in fact no more than an administrative note, and does not take on any significance for the conceptual culture of the habitually enthroned, non-wandering philosopher.11 Telling the truth remains, for the time being, a sedentary activity on mainland foundations. Romanus sedendo vincit (Varro).12
Only the solitary Schopenhauer, away from the universities and regional churches, managed overdue breakthrough to a way of thinking that made a fluidified foundation its starting point: The World as Will and Representation is the first manifestation of an ocean of the philosophers. On this ocean, the subject navigates on the nutshell of the principium individuationis, kept secure by the saving illusions of space, time and I-ness. This discovery was taken up by Nietzsche and the vitalists, who declared the re-fluidification of ossified subjects the true task of a ‘philosophy of the future’. In their writings, one can witness a remoulding of subject-oriented thought suitable for the high seas.
It was not a philosopher who succeeded in formulating the true concept of the subject's ambition in the age of mobilization, however, but a novelist – Jules Verne, who found the formula for the epoch in the motto of his Captain Nemo: MOBILIS IN MOBILI. His maxim, ‘moving amid mobility’, explains with unsurpassable clarity and generality what modernized subjectivity seeks to and should do. The goal of the great flexibilization is the power to navigate amid the totality of all accessible places and objects without being oneself vulnerable to the detecting instruments of others. Realizing oneself in the liquid element as a subject: this is absolute freedom of enterprise, perfect an-archy.13 Only Schopenhauer, if anyone, had come close to this approach when he declared succinctly in his central work: ‘The subject is the seat of all cognition but is itself not cognized by anything.’14
It was Schopenhauer's contemporary Ralph Waldo Emerson who, with his first series of Essays published in 1841, initiated the ‘American evasion’ and nautical reformulation of philosophy – which is why Nietzsche discovered a kindred spirit in him already as a young reader.15 In Emerson's work, the offensive tones from the early European period of de-restriction reappear in transatlantic translation.
Centuries earlier, in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds, published in Venice in 1583, Giordano Bruno, another thinker of solitary motivations within his time, celebrated the emancipation of the human spirit from the impoverishment of a nature so ‘mean and niggard in her fruit’ and a miserly God restricted to a single small world: ‘There are no ends, boundaries, limits or walls which can defraud and deprive us of the infinite multitude of things. Therefore the earth and the ocean thereof are fecund […].’16 The Nolan described his own role as that of a Columbus of the outer spaces who had given earthlings insight into shattering the domes of illusion. Just as Columbus had returned from crossing the Atlantic with news of another shore, Bruno wanted to return from his voyage into the infinite bearing news of the absence of an upper edge. On the exterior, the world is devoid of boundaries or fortifications on all sides: this was the central space-theoretical announcement of the Brunian Modern Age, and it was not meant to sound any less evangelical than the Columbian one.17
A quarter-millennium later, the American sage Emerson replied to this in his pitilessly optimistic essay ‘Circles’ with the following words:
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning […]. There is no outside, no enclosing wall, no circumference to us. The man finishes his story – how good! how final! how it puts a new face on all things! He fills the sky. Lo! on the other side rises also a man and draws a circle around the circle we had just pronounced the outline of the sphere.18
Only from the later nineteenth century on would continental philosophy – in spite of all phenomenological, neo-idealistic and neo-Aristotelian revivals – steer towards the collapse of absolutist-territorial fortifications of evidence, a collapse that could be postponed, but not prevented. With more than a century's delay, some German professors even hinted at their willingness to consider whether the conceptual means of terran idealism were still suitable for processing the actual conditions of globalization intellectually. These too, to their own advantage, were closer in recent times to the legacy of the British common sense doctrine, which facilitates the transition from the old inconcussum standard to a globalized probability culture – particularly because theoretically approaching a universe of fluctuations seems less painful from that position. This implies, admittedly, a conversion from the ‘Catholic’ path, which connected poverty with security bonuses, to the ‘Protestant’ lifestyle of the Calvinist variety, which spurringly relates wealth and risk.19 It was Friedrich Nietzsche who, as a critic of metaphysical ressentiment, first realized that philosophical thought after Zarathustra must become something fundamentally other than a sensible waiting and circumspection in the idealized orb of being.
On the market of modern immunity techniques, the insurance system, with its concepts and procedures, has completely won out over philosophical techniques of certainty. The logic of controlled risk has proved far more economical and practicable than that of ultimate metaphysical justification. Faced with this choice, the large majority of modern societies made fairly unambiguous decisions. Insurance defeats evidence: this statement encapsulates the fate of all philosophy in the technical world.
The only modern country not to have chosen the path to the precautionary insurance state is the United States of America, with the result that religion, or more generally speaking the ‘fundamentalist disposition’, retained a significance atypical of modernity: it resisted the religion-dissolving Enlightenment as vehemently as it opposed any attempts to take away the firearms of its citizens. For the USA, immunity and security remain constructions that must come about in the imagination of each individual. (It is for similar reasons that Hollywood keeps the figure of the hero alive, despite its undeniable premodernity; heroes are still needed if statehood cannot keep the continuing moral wilderness under control.20) Wherever else insurance-oriented thought has established itself, however, one witnesses the change of mentality that characterizes postmodern boredom ‘societies’: uninsured situations become rare, and consequently the disturbance can be relished as an exception, the ‘event’ is positivized, and the demand for experiences of difference floods the markets. Only fully insured ‘societies’ have proved able to set in motion that aestheticization of insecurities and unfathomabilities which forms the criterion for postmodern life forms and their philosophies.21
In so-called risk ‘societies’, however, the spirit of the insurance system drove out the willingness to take those very actions that gave them their name: a risk ‘society’ is one in which anything truly hazardous is de facto forbidden – that is to say, it is excluded from compensation in the event of damage. One of the ironies of modern conditions is that by their standards, one would have to forbid retroactively everything that was ventured in order to realize them. It follows from this that post-history is only seemingly a historico-philosophical concept, and in reality an insurance-related one. The post-historical states are those in which historic actions (foundations of religions, crusades, revolutions, wars of liberation, class struggles and the accompanying crimes) are impermissible on account of their uninsurable risk.