In May, a celebrity contestant appeared on the German version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. In a sharply cut dark blue jacket and a black open-necked shirt, with designer stubble and flowing locks, philosopher Richard David Precht had no trouble answering question after question until the host asked: “Which of the following was a headline in a British newspaper in February? Was it A) Darwin Becomes Foreign Secretary, B) Dickens Takes Over the BBC,C) Shakespeare Trains Champions, or D) Tolkien Wins a BRIT Award?”
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Precht, understandably, decided to quit while he was ahead rather than risk losing the 64,000 euros he’d already amassed. The correct answer was C (Craig Shakespeare is the manager of the football club Leicester City, which won the English Premier League title in 2016).
Though he raised a significant sum for charity, for some, Precht’s appearance on the show was just another signal that something has gone quite wrong with German philosophy. Other German philosophers have certainly been sniffy about Precht’s media-friendliness. Markus Gabriel calls Precht a “philosophy performer,” while Peter Sloterdijk calls Precht a “popularizer by profession.”
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But Precht is unrepentant. As one of the most prominent — and sought after — figures in a new wave of German philosophy, he has argued that in order for the discipline to remain relevant, it must come down from the ivory tower and commune with the masses. As a student in Cologne in the early 1990s, Precht envisioned a world in which philosophers would be seen as fascinating people living exhilarating and uncompromising lives. His generation of idealized contemporaries would forge their own path, and their ideas would bear little similarity to the “ineffectual academic philosophy” of his professors, who were “boring middle-aged gentlemen in pedestrian brown or navy suits.”
There’s no doubt that Precht has made good on this dream, cultivating a much wider audience for his field. Dubbed the “Mick Jagger of the non-fiction book,” a reference presumably intended as a compliment, Precht has sold more than 1 million copies worldwide of his most popular book — Who Am I?: And If So, How Many? — in 32 languages. His TV show, called simply Precht, boasts a viewership of nearly 1 million.
German philosophy today is not so much the kind of intellectual discipline that Martin Heidegger would practice, hermitlike, in his Black Forest hut but rather a successful service industry competing for customers. Take, for instance, Philosophie Magazin, a bimonthly glossy publication distributed around Germany that hit the newsstands in 2011. The editor in chief, Wolfram Eilenberger, outlined its mission in an editorial: “It’s a magazine that takes its questions to the marketplace, letting the public help feel them out.”
Philosophie Magazin now has a circulation of 100,000, proof that Eilenberger’s approach paid off. Indeed it would appear there is a new demand for ideas in Germany, one ripe for the plumbing. In 2017, philosophy in Germany is booming. Student enrollment in philosophy courses has increased by one-third over the past three years. Its leading practitioners are giving TED Talks and producing best-selling books, top-ranking TV shows, and festivals such as phil.cologne, which attracts more than 10,000 visitors to the German city each June.
Such has German philosophy changed: Words like “delightful,” “beguiling,” and “easily consumable” would never have been used when speaking of Immanuel Kant or Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. At its best, the trend indicates German philosophy is engaging a mass audience as never before. At its worst, this means philosophy is becoming an item of conspicuous consumption designed to flatter users’ intellectual self-images.
More than 70 years ago, two of Germany’s most renowned philosophers, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, leaders of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, described what they called “the culture industry.” For them, the industry — rife with a stupefying parade of celebrities and brain-rotting TV shows — was effectively a means of mass deception and subjugation. In Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer posited that products of this culture industry would only stunt the consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity and was “so designed that quickness, powers of observation, and experience are undeniably needed to apprehend them at all; yet sustained thought is out of the question.” In 2017, you would be forgiven for supposing, this new wave of German philosophers has become part of what their predecessors had warned against.
The pivotal question then is: Can German philosophy be consumed at a common, everyday level without being dumbed down or having its ideas stripped of their complexity? Moreover, German philosophy was supposed to critique everyday life rather than provide the intellectual tools to sustain it. The greatest German philosophers, including Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Karl Marx, and the Frankfurt School, gave us eviscerating analyses of the forces underpinning everyday life. In their struggle to keep German philosophy relevant, have its current champions forgotten what German philosophy once excelled at doing?
And if that’s the case, this new consumerist version of philosophy is not a signal of its modern importance but is actually just masking the field’s decline. And if it is indeed declining, German philosophy has made the kind of Faustian pact German literary giant Johann Wolfgang von Goethe would have appreciated — exchanging profundity for popularity.
On April 22, 1969, Theodor Adorno was just about to begin his lecture series, “An Introduction to Dialectical Thinking,” at Goethe University Frankfurt when he was interrupted by student protesters. One wrote on the blackboard: “If Adorno is left in peace, capitalism will never cease.” Then three female protesters surrounded him, bared their breasts, and scattered rose and tulip petals over him.
Adorno grabbed his hat and coat, ran from the hall, and later canceled the lecture series. He plunged into a depression and a few months later, during an Alpine holiday, died at the age of 66.
This so-called Busenaktion (“breast action”) was later described by Peter Sloterdijk in his 1983 tome, Critique of Cynical Reason: “Here, on the one side, stood naked flesh, exercising ‘critique’; there, on the other side, stood the bitterly disappointed man without whom scarcely any of those present would have known what critique meant.… It was not naked force that reduced the philosopher to muteness, but the force of the naked.”
In another culture, it would not have mattered quite as much that student protesters had thwarted a philosopher’s lecture. But German philosophy is different. The grand German tradition of philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Heidegger has been a source of national pride. But the Busenaktion was a devastating attack on the otherwise constant deference to German philosophers.
This unchallenged culture of respect had come about in part because German philosophy and German national identity have been yoked together ever since Hegel, who, writing in the shadow of the defeat of Napoleonic France and filled with the nationalism inspired by Prussia’s late military victory, dreamed of a united Germany. Hegel imagined that such world peace entailed the emergence of a vanguard state that would overcome others as human history progressed to its fulfillment. And as far as Hegel was concerned, Prussia (and then, fingers crossed, the united Germany) was uniquely positioned to satisfy that historic role. No other country’s philosophers have quite so assiduously built the concept of national identity into their intellectual systems; no other philosophers have burdened their homelands with such a destiny.
Of course, Adorno, who came to prominence more than a century later, was writing in the shadow not of Prussian military victory like Hegel but of Auschwitz, a singular obscenity that eternally put an end to, among other things, philosophical justifications for German nationalism. Adorno, furthermore, was a Jew who loathed Hegel’s Protestant notion of progress. And after Adolf Hitler and the Holocaust, German philosophy could no longer posture as marching toward some grand denouement at the end of human history.
Adorno was certainly no nationalist, but, despite everything, he was profoundly connected to the German language and the culture in which he was raised. On his return from Californian exile he posited that the German language has a particular affinity for philosophy. “Historically speaking,” Adorno wrote, “the German language, as part of a process that still requires proper analysis, has become capable of expressing something about phenomena that goes beyond their mere essence, positivity and givenness.” In other words, Adorno seems to say: If you wanted to do philosophy properly, forget English, French, Arabic, and Greek. To get to the heart of philosophy, you need to do it in German. After the Holocaust, moreover, Adorno became something like the conscience of a nation (at least the West German nation; the ideologues of the new East German state detested his and the Frankfurt School’s heretical neo-Marxism). It was Adorno who, in Negative Dialectics, wrote: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.” Here was the German philosopher speaking to Germans about their moral duties and expecting to be listened to.
For some Germans, merely listening seemed beside the point. In 1969, those student protesters targeted Adorno because he was, ostensibly, a Marxist but one who disdained their call to action. In their view, he had retreated into theory when the revolutionary need was for action. As Karl Marx wrote in 1845, “The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.” In this light, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School, and Adorno in particular, dramatized how German philosophy had failed at its moment of reckoning.
If philosophy were to mean anything in Germany after Adorno’s death, it would have to become something different from that.
