On April, 20th, 2008, the textbook Angst – Vom Nutzen eines gefürchteten Gefühls (Fear – About the Usefulness of a Much-Feared Emotion) was first edited by Aufbau-Verlag of Berlin. Since they are therein identified as suffering from a “compulsive neurosis”, professors of philosophy, unfortunately, wish it had never been written.
If you suffer from a compulsive neurosis, you exorcize fear. How do you do this? By permanently repeating the same activities. Activities that in normal life have an important function but will have no effect whatsoever on your environment if you are suffering from a compulsive neurosis. Just look at Lady Macbeth in the wonderful Shakespearean drama. She is permanently making the movements of washing her hands. But firstly there is no water implied and secondly she does not stop doing it even after the hands are perfectly clean. This common neurosis is called ablutomania.
Her husband makes it clear why she keeps washing her hands. He assures her that all the water in the ocean would not be enough for cleaning her hands, because the blood she has on her hands is imaginary. It is the king’s blood, which the king’s assassin cannot get rid of. The ablutomania she suffers from is a consequence of this blood she has spilt, so now she wants to clear her conscience. However, the attempt is useless. She will not succeed. Nevertheless, she is obsessed with the need to wash her hands.
If someone is suffering from a compulsive neurosis, they are obsessed with having to do the same thing over and over again, even though what they do has no effect whatsoever on the outside world. The sole purpose for the patient is that his deeply rooted anxiety be banished. As soon as you try to prevent him from executing his neurotic activity with painstaking accuracy, he will panic.
Barely a hundred years ago, the psycho-analyst and student of Sigmund Freud, Oskar Pfister, discovered that the academic discipline of philosophy is a compulsive neurosis in the true meaning of the word. First and foremost, there is the solipsistic mental attitude through which this species of academics distances itself from the rest of the world. The corresponding logical and metaphysical musings come naturally and create the contemplative “mood” that is so characteristic of the ivory tower where nobody is allowed to disturb the peace. While they constitute a belief in their own value, their belief in actual reality dwindles and the emotional escape from the world around them establishes itself. As soon as the outside world is cut off, a paranoid megalomania subconsciously starts growing. The loss of outside love is compensated by making oneself the beginning and end of all ones thoughts.
The assistants at the philosophical chairs of Frankfurt/Main most adapted to the system keep telling me that there is no philosophical question – for instance of the sort neurologists might ask – that cannot be solved exclusively by philosophers. Naturally, they want to be left alone by the natural scientists and naturalists – in other words: by those whose work is based on empirical studies.
However, as Pfister already noted, this “self-deisation” is not the only way out for philosophers who are entirely cut off from the outside world. There is another tendency that has been establishing itself especially in the field of analytical philosophy since Habermas in Germany, namely formalism. “You indulge in abstractions formulated as unrealistic as possible, making an issue seem so artificial and improbable and getting lost in hair-splitting that has no practical use in life whatsoever that all real people who like using their brains for thinking are either revolted or amused.” Recently, the neurologist Axel Meyer pointed out that our knowledge culture actually suffers greatly from this habit. “Let us, for instance” he writes in his ironical comment Quantensprung. Crash der Wissenschaftkulturen in the Handelsblatt of Feb, 26th, 2009, “take Jürgen Habermas and his … absurd ideas on the brain in particular and the evolution in general”. Why did the philosopher Jürgen Habermas not refrain from commenting when neurologists publicly declared their doubts about his theory of communicative behaviour? The answer is: because he wanted to make it clear that philosophers alone are qualified to falsify theories developed by professors of philosophy. They, however are scared of Habermas.
Thus, philosophizing more and more degenerates into becoming a compulsive neurosis, meaningless for real life.
Suffering from a compulsive neurosis always means that you deliver something that is per se totally worthless – for example washing your hands like Lady Macbeth for a quarter of an hour or saying an incomprehensible word or sentence – yet associate it with profound emotions, because you have no access to reality. (Just imagine what power is in the word “justice”, yet nobody knows exactly what it means). Academical philosophy gives you the impression of being profound, but this has only ritual meaning and only for those who have been introduced. It is formalism of thinking and precision of articulation with which the suppression of psychic drives are represented.
This flight from the real world is most evident in an ethics that propagates its ideals of a pure attitude, a renunciation of usefulness and the subjugation of free will under a freedom that allegedly has no origin. There is no doubt that the defence of free will amongst professors of philosophy since Immanuel Kant does not spring from empirical experience of the world, but from nothing other than an extremely strong and ever increasing suppression. After all, having a free will means being like God in that you can create something from nothing. There is no way to express the fear of the unpredictable element in empirical facts in stronger terms than Kant did in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft. The author himself was aware of the fact that “pure reason” actually does not exist. However, this is not what matters when we are talking “pure” attitude in ethics, because it is a necessary concept.
The further our contemplations digress from the empirical sphere, the stronger the domination of introversion gets. All influence rooted in reality is suppressed. Trying to justify subconsciously motivated intuition is called rationalizing. Taking into consideration that we have now come to a state of affairs where none of the everyday problems motivate a single professor of philosophy to comment on them, it turns out that Pfistesr’s assumption is true: the neurotic formalism as found in philosophy does not solve any of the world’s problems. All it does is giving the philosophers a way out of their deep inner misery.
This is why the malapropism of the lust principle among philosophers as given to us by the poet Robert Gernhardt – who unfortunately died much too soon – contains so much humour.
KJG
(Translated by EG)
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