Wolfgang Schirmacher. The End of Metaphysics.

Wolfgang Schirmacher. “The End of Metaphysics.” in: EGS Lecture. 2011.

So, let’s go to The End of Metaphysics.  Metaphysics is from Heidegger, you know that, is the name, actually, of a book of Aristotle…means nothing.  It is the book that comes after Physics.  Physics was the book about nature, and the book that comes after was on all the stuff you cannot observe, stuff you have to make up, so to speak, and not ethics.  Ethics was a third.  But this metaphysics, they kind of lead it back to before Aristotle, Plato.  And you remember Plato, Socrates, the dialogues and so on and so on, but they made up a kind of thing of Plato’s system of – what’s it called? – ideas.  That means the real Plato is not the table, the idea of the table because there are many, many outcomes of what a table could be obviously.  And so for Plato, he never wanted to make a doctrine out of it, but his followers needed some guidance – how I hate this word “guidance,” I need some guidance out of life – but they made a doctrine out of it.  They made everything, the real important things, the ideas because that’s what is real life, and Plato never said this.  And if you read the dialogues like The Sophist, one of the dialogues I really had to read in a scholarly manner with one of my professors who just died, and word for word, not really my style of thinking, but you always find that there is never an answer in these Platonic dialogues.  There are always questions.  There is always an aporia  - there is maybe this, but maybe not.  And Socrates strength is to go after people who think they know something, “Oh, I hear you know something, so tell me…”  And then, the famous sentence you all know, “I know that I don’t know,” but most of you don’t know what the next, the following words are: “Therefore,  I know more than anybody who claims knowledge.”  So knowing nothing is the highest form of knowledge. Spinoza called this intuition.  Intuition is inside that comes with the feeling of certainty.  You live most of the time in unknowing conditions.  You don’t think about it, but you are sure of it.  Are there forms of intuition?  Yes, there are, but being able to criticize your body and mind is certainly one of the reasons why life is not boring.  So it is not a problem that you have intuition…because you have the intuition that this is a classroom, you know.  Descartes would tell you that you are in a bad dream, that you are having a nightmare, you are…Critchley is still here so you have a nightmare, and there is no way you can prove it’s not the case.  There’s absolutely no way.  All that what happens here, screaming guy, you know, his wolf English – as Manuel Delanda explained last time what it means and encourage me to speak wolf English! – so, anyway…

Oh yeah, Plato and the opening is not a doctrine, and if you look closely any great philosopher, really, any great philosopher, even the father’s of the church, Aquinas, Paul, other things like that, they never give you doctrines.  Doctrines are kind of the reduced form for dummies…those American versions where you get your short version, your two-minute versions, that is enough to get through the hour in class if they ever ask you.  No, there is the, as Heidegger said, questioning.  That is the style, you get the even more emphatic way of answering.  And certainly not problem solving.  That is what computers do and is not what we are questioning.  But the thing about questioning is, of course you all know, the big question about life, why do I live?  Is it worth that I live?  You never get an answer, but the questioning as such is full.  There is a lot of things you encounter.  I’m not saying you learned, but you encountered.  You go inspired by it.  And this idea of inspiring and learning by role model is at the core of my position on this.  When I am beyond my grave I will make sure that this will happen that the next president of EGS is my old friend, Martin Hielscher who’s already vice-president.  He came in my seminar in Hamburg as a young man.  The next dean is my friend Michael Schmidt who did interviews with me since 35 years.  I make sure…I am having, like, five jobs I have to split between this and that person, and I grew this ghost person.  Martin Hielscher has an email from me what happens if evil-spirited Thailand kills me - and there are all these evil spirits when I go on my motor scooter because there are no rules! The only rule is smile when you die, please, and don’t be surprised. – no, I have made sure, and that is what we promised to you and the government, everybody enrolling in EGS is guaranteed to finish.  We have designed the money to do that.  We have designed the people who will do it and do it in the spirit of the founder, if the founder is with Alzheimer’s, but that is something you won’t find out for a while. That’s the good thing when your are a philosopher: “Oh. What an interesting guy, what did he say? He forgot everything.  Good!”  That’s exactly the…forgetting!  That is what you have to learn, forgetting! Okay, metaphysics was this kind of guidance, what people stole out of philosophers and believed, and religion certainly had a lot because the deviation - what’s it called? - they had God as the guiding principle.  The Christian God was the guiding principle and one of the most blood thirsty gods we ever had.  Allah is nothing against the Christian God, you just forgot about it because it is a few hundred years back…the Inquistion, you remember.  Fortunately we have movies that show how it was at this time.  So we have nothing, really, to accuse the Arab world with their stupidity in bloodletting in some ways.  They just need a few hundred years.  That’s all.  It’s a question of time.  I said in my class today, the last sentence of Being and Time is that timing will reveal itself as the horizon of being, timing, Zeitigung in German, not time, time which comes out of your own experience, your timing, the right time for you.  The chairos in Greek, the chairotic thinking.  There is a time, and nobody can tell you, but you must be there when it comes.  So be prepared for your own timing…whether that timing is an idea, whatever, you meet the right person, you start a work, a collaboration together like you students should do.  You should be each other’s support group.  Our famous people will not be your support group.  They are not educators.  They have their own creative life. They will inspire you, but they don’t want to be bothered by you.  But your fellow students are in the same situation that you are, need something give something.  That’s what you should do, and you will get from us, when I am finished here with you, you get, then, what I have here pictures and also a list, which I have a line saying who you are and what you are doing in your life, very short, but it will allow you to speak with people from other groups etc.  We have done quite a few feature films as collaboration stuff and documentaries and so on.  And I found, nicht, anonymous founded years ago, Atropos press, which publishes, like, thirty books every year now, and we also have a film part with documentaries of filmmakers and philosophers that we have here.  And it is connected, thanks to Hendrick, to the EGS website.  So you get their ranking.  When you ask for Zizek you get The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema on page one.  Even though somebody else produced it, we are not so narrow-minded that we would not allow it to be offered also on our website.

So, metaphysics was a name of the leading doctrine, and always had, as Heidegger in the years when he should have paid attention to what is happening politically but did not and went to his hut in the black forest, a little hut, and was reading all texts in original Greek, from all other languages, Latin etc., from the entire history of philosophy from the presocratics to his time, and was reading it in a way finding patterns, finding new ways of connecting, finding actually what was going on finding what he called the forgetting of being, of being with the big “B.”  Of course he found the big Being, the Being the the big “B.”  And he found that for the Greeks, for example, it was cosmos.  Cosmos was the highest principle.  It was a hierarchical thinking starting with the highest principles.  It then goes down and gives more rules, etc., etc.  And the people were kind of looking to this hierarchy and acting accordingly.  Cosmos was a pre-established order of nature and mind, and the worst you could do was violate it, the law of cosmos – for Oedipus by fucking his mother, violating the law of cosmos, so there was nothing he could do about it because it was tragic.  Tragic was greatness in failure, just as the heroes in Greek were great in failure, or they were the comic relief stuff.

Then after the cosmos – what came after the cosmos? The cosmos was a long time because the Romans came politically.  Under the Romans, their ideology was mostly a translation, and all their teachers were slaves Greek slaves.  That’s one of the things I think of – even if they are so much smarter than the students they are slaves!  So I try not to be yours! So many others came, but it was still a cosmic order, and the Stoics, one of the most important Roman philosophers near to my heart because they had Gelassenheit, being calm in bad times and in good times.  Or when Nero is calling you, go to your bathroom, open your pulse and kill yourself before he is doing something bad to you.  So take it easy.  Be calm.  Gelassenheit.  But this is not my Gelassenheit because Schopenhauer rightfully pointed out that these guys are also puppets because they also believed in the cosmos.  The calmness was because everything that was happening was already set up.

Yeah.  And then came Renaissance – man, human being as the highest principle, and we are very still much in it even if it is no longer working because, as you noticed, the value of human life, depending on the region you live in, can be ten dollars or five thousand something, but that is all not having the human as the highest principle.  It is making money, what Heidegger called instrumental, the fixed, where everything is the same.  There’s only how much you can buy.  There is no highest being anymore.  There is only small beings everywhere.  In the hospital you are not a human being.  You are the broken arm. That’s why I never went to the hospital.  I healed myself – Homo generator!  And that is what Heidegger showed, that this humanism, with their Renaissance, modernism, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hobbes and all these thinkers, was no longer existing.  Everything became the same, could be bought, could be sold.  Nothing was sacred, and even the sacred was up for buying.  I am grateful to the new pope because now my English is better understood in America than before because he has the same pronunciation, the same mistakes I make.  But what is he?  He’s a…if you believe in him and as Lyotard said, fine.  If not, nobody can make you.  It’s all just a game.

So the time of the big “B” is lost.  And there were some Heideggerians in America who tried to make historicity the new Being with a big “B” – “Okay, okay, there is no God over man, but history is joy itself.”  Everything is to be handled in the historical context, and even progress, the big ideas of enlightenment etc., that was no longer really binding anybody anymore, but that we are like that, that we have historicity, Geschichtigkeit, that was something we still could believe in, to believe in your own going on and dying.  But Heidegger had never said this.  Heidegger’s entire work until the black forest was to overcome our need for being with a big “B,” our need for guidance, our trust in metaphysics, and a doctrine, and a teacher, and a theory.  Heidegger did what Schirmacher would call getting a life before you get a theory, or eat dessert first, the American version.

So Heidegger understood…his point was…but in Marx you will remember he said he thought he had ended metaphysics, the Ideas – because big “B” Being was never a certain human being but the Idea of humanity – had destroyed that by turning Hegel from his feet to his head, or the other way around, I don’t care, from Idea to material, materialism.  The material world is the real world.  History is what we do under certain circumstances, our action under certain circumstances.  But it does not help.  You have still, if you just exchange the highest principle with another one, it does not matter.  You are still in the hierarchic form.  Still you can be exploited by states and organized order.  So it was not the end of metaphysics.  It was just another interpretation of the big “B,” material.

So that was the short version.  So what is it for Heidegger?  What happens after metaphysics.  There, the first thing that happens, but again, we are not believing in theory anymore, but we also cannot live with just day to day fact, totally arbitrary in the world.  We must have something in between.  Agamben made once a very good lecture about the paradigm.  Here are the facts, there is theory, in the middle is the paradigm. The paradigm, which kind of organizes the fact, but does not strive to be a theory.  So it can be much more easily challenged, changed etc.  You will not die for your paradigm.  For theories many people have died, and facts…yeah, death is just a fact, not something you strive for.  It happens.  Shit happens.

So paradigms…but this is kind of the Italian version, to be sober.  Heidegger’s word for it is Ereignis.  And the official translation, the English translation of Ereignis is “enowning” and “appropriation,” and, as Avital Ronell, was de-appropriation.  It is a happening, and this happening is something profound.  So this Ereignis, brings you in your own.  That is Ereignis. It is, and I learned this word very strongly from Critchley, courage.  It is the courage of Ereignis, of staying in the process of Ereignis, staying in the striving for truth without ever claiming it.  This affords a lot of courage and so believing you have the truth and to know what’s right, to know who you are.  But if you look closer, if you are honest enough to get some glimpses, the best you could do is to enjoy it, believing it.  So the appropriation, when the word becomes your word, needs also the de-appropriation in order to believe it again and actually have left it at any moment you have expressed it.  There’s nothing wrong about it because that is how life happens.  It lives in Ereignis.  How in the technological age?  That is where Schirmacher became the next philosopher after Heidegger – the Ereignis technique, the Event of technology.  Heidegger only has one sentence in a book about it, the seminar he did after the war in which he says that the Ereignis is the negative of the Gestell.  Gestell, the instrumental technology, ruling our world, for which Heidegger always said – your translation? – for enframing. Heidegger said this is wrong, but it works perfectly so it will be out there for hundreds of years, and some people know that but they cannot do anything about it.  That is one thing.  The other one, only one sentence, in which he acknowledged the connection between Gestell and Ereignis, he called it the negative, and out of the context, he shows, he speaks in terms of photography.  So it is the same.  It’s not even two parts in some way.  They need each other, so to speak, or, in Schirmacher’s world, that which can kill us can also keep us alive.

And I came at the time the ecological crisis just happened.  Only in der Spiegel, a journal I wrote for, and in one of the books, nobody took it seriously in philosophical terms, but I did.  It’s not a question of better administration.  It is an answer of nature to out instrumental technology.  Here it’s not true, Heidegger, that we can live forever in this technological world as an instrumental world in which everything can be bought and sold.  So, nature and the ecological crisis shows us the other side, forces us to acknowledge the Ereignis possible with technology and not looking for the utopian technology going back to nature as the early Greens did in Germany.  There is no other good nature waiting outside we can go to and eat the beans or whatever.  No, this is the same technology in which we have as our inventiveness to turn it around into a living, livable technology, your Ereignis of technology.  And fortunately Heidegger was still alive, and we got a letter from a professor who knew about my work, and it was important because at that time, and it was late 1969, I became a PhD candidate, I was the only one in Germany who still wrote a doctorate thesis on Heidegger.  It was considered suicide in academic terms because it was the time of the Frankfurt School.  That’s what you were supposed to write about, the history of philosopher but not Heidegger.  So Heidegger listened carefully that there was a young philosopher telling him that luckily he was wrong with his expertise that it can go on for thousands of years.  It will not go on for thousands of years.  It will also not go away over night because we have now a cover up.  There are fish in the Rhine again, very tough ones.  It’s not totally caput, but it’s half caput.  It does not stink everywhere, and we are trying with these ecological footprints and measurements and nobel prizes winners instead of being president can show documentaries, and that’s all good.  I’m not saying anything about that.  But don’t fool yourself.  The ecological crisis is not over.  It’s even more dangerous than before because the obvious side has been taken care of.  It’s like the mafia, which even though you cannnot see it right away…

So, no, why I outlawed the word “tool” in this schools, so don’t ever say a technique is a tool, and don’t ever smoke in my presence, because tool is the idea of a master collecting, selecting tools to get a goal.  It’s such a misunderstanding of what we are actually doing, such an instrumental understanding of our life techniques.  The life technique, that is Lebens technique, that is what I show in Ereignis.  Life techniques don’t need a theory.  So they need an understanding, yes, but the understanding is in the activity of living, and it is also somehow in the memory of it, even in the expectation, I don’t mind this too, but it has this very strong distrust for theory.  Theory will tell us, order us, promising us with empty promises what a good life we will have if we just follow what theory tells us.  Look what kind of life we actually got for our believing in theories.  No.  Have a life first then come up with some ideas.  So in some way, as a philosopher in the technological age I am also a philosopher of the good life, gelingen Leben.  I still give out not a million dollars but whatever when someone can translate “gelingen.”  The “fulfilled life” is kind of a near translation; It is much more than that, and if you know me a little better or Google me enough you will know that I live what I preach as much as I can.  I live a good life.  I always wanted to just work for half a year and have half a year free.  Now I work only for two months and have the rest free, but free means living my life technique called the computer internet.  So I’m never free, but I don’t mind because I don’t understand my freedom from my life techniques.  It exists as how I live.  If I go offline for a few days a lot of trouble goes on at EGS, but I could have stopped in the beginning three days ago, very easy.  Now I have already become a big issue etc. because I made a kind of anthropocentric statement saying, “I’m not going into anymore…I don’t want to read my emails.”  On the other hand I must admit the wonderful thing of not answering emails for a while.  So still it is a wonderful thing of the old times, a metaphysical thing – life will take care because a big “B” is still in place.  No.  By Ereignis I have to generate myself.  As Homo generator my responsibility is this, and my ways of doing it, not tools, not emails, is also embodied in the machine side of me. Student:  Life activities do not use tools, would you say they use methods or agencies and is the infinite one of these modes or agencies? Agency…the only agency I know is the CIA… Student: But when you say it’s not a tool… No, no.  In German we have other words, “lifestyle,” “order,” ways.”  “Ways” is a very open word for that.  It’s just my way of doing that.  When a great violinist plays how would you call that?  He’s acting as a tool? No.  He lives in music, and he does not even know that anymore.  He has no “I.”  He has no instrument.  He has nothing.  It’s just that he lives in music, but it was a long way to come there.  I’m not saying it’s easy.  It’s only easy for the babies.  Then after two and a half years your parents civilize you, and the schools do a good job to screw you up more until you come to me here, and I try to unscrew you a little bit or encourage suicide.  Both are fine with me as long as you don’t stay civilized anymore.  But that is…I’m not saying…let’s put it this way, as Heidegger says, we still speak in the language of metaphysics.  And Hélene Cixous - who is not here because she has to take care of her 100 year old mother and cannot leave Paris, so I always wait for the death of the mother, the bad person that I am – she tried, for example, to have a language of her own, the feminist language whatever.  She tried a new kind of language in order to avoid what comes with so many meanings she does not want.  And all philosophers in our program are very near to artists of thinking.  They are not scholars although they were trained as scholars, but they left hat training behind to become artists again.  So we don’t have a language yet, but again, my point is to say it is a long process, and we will…all of you will die before someone finds a word for “gelingen” in English, and for “tool,” and to find not just a word, but an ensemble of words.  For example, that’s why I’m so fond of Deleuze.  He tried very much as a concept maker, the philosopher as concept maker, that is philosophy, to find words like “multitude,” words like…giving the word “and,” you know, the “and, and, and…” a totally new emphasis.  That is how the nomadic life goes.  Se he tried to change the words.  Guattari, his friend, certainly also tried to change the word “subjectivity.”  I tried to change the word “artificial.”  I tried to change the word “technique,” “technology,” which is something totally different and against the word “technology” – there is no logic, logic is a theory.  It’s a techne, something you know about something you could do but don’t have to.

So, yeah, it is, you are right, part of the vision of EGS.  Why have I invited the film makers and the artists?  Because I believe that their way not to be philosophers, but they could not help themselves, but expressing many of these problems and giving us answers.  Greenaway came saying we don’t have cinema yet.  That was his strong thesis.  Now he is going back and re-animating the paintings of the past.  And I was an actor, but I told the assistant of Greenaway, “I am not an actor, I am actually the boss of your director for three days.”  Then he was shooting me in an old, rundown movie theater in Leipzing, in the town where I was raised, my childhood movie theater, but now totally not working anymore, and this he did as a three part movie, two parts maybe, and expected me to pretend that I’m an expert on [name?], and I am in a conference and give a paper.  He had written down a text for me, but there is no conference…where is the conference?  I am standing here inbetween these rows of a movie theater, and I have these half-wits running around with their camera, people I would not even greet on the street, and what are these technical people?  So for the first time I got respect for the inhumane work of an actor, but you should not ask anybody to pretend in such a way.  How can you do that?  And the only thing he said to me, but firstly I refused to take more than two takes, I said “sorry.”  First I refused to learn my text.  I said no respected academics will read such a paper.  Secondly I wanted to change his texts because every third sentence was the word “perhaps,” a word which is very hard for me to pronounce –no academic will ever say “perhaps!”  There is no “perhaps” in academics; It is right or wrong! Not “perhaps, perhaps, perhaps…” bullshit.  But I did not learn it.  I read it.  And he brought like a table of stuff, and it was made of wood and said to just imagine it was in a conference room, and the only thing he said to me ever was “Be more Wolfgang!”  So be more like Saas-Fee, but how can I?  How can I?!  It’s impossible.  So he shot me for six hours, and only the last two hours he took what he needed.  He came one day two years later and took scenes from his movies about me and showed it as one documentary to my students.  Wolfgang’s an actor.  My mother always said if you cannot be come anything, become an actor.  But thank you very much, I said absolutely not…but the last two hours I had really a stomach ache, and I was so fed up.  That was what he needed.  But then he even took away my language and let somebody else speak my lines.  That was the funniest thing in there because I was not supposed be Spanish or something, and so it absolutely totally screwed up the…and then when you think that most actors live with rejection after rejection, the worst thing that can happen to a person, comes in believing they can do it, and they say “no thank you, we will call you,” things like that, you know.  Every actor should kill the director! And himself!

So it is a totally inhumane job.  And when I think now of the other three, the love story, all these kinds of things, [name?] was the first one, romance really, when the two actors fuck in the real, that was the first.  Yeah, okay…she, “everybody out except the camera man and me,” you know, so it was not a spectacle in some way, but it was still inhuman.  Later when she took Rocco, you know Rocco, that was his shop so it was fine.  He was fine, he was totally in his element.  The lady, probably not so much.  But the cinema of this kind is the anthropocentric, inhumane enterprise. Student: Is it a moral issue or an ethical issue? It’s an ethical issue…but there is no difference between moral and ethical.  It’s just how you define it.  Usually you use ethical.  The ethical is the wider range of the moral as rules and so on.  No, no, if you are exploiting somebody, and you send this person to do an impossible task, and that’s why nobody trusts an actress or an actor.  I will never trust you because I will never know, because you don’t know, if that is what you really feel or if that is what you are playing.  You will not know this, and it’s not in any way an accusation.  There’s no way you can help it. Student: [audio unclear] No, I have great admiration for firemen, these kinds of things.  It’s impossible to think we are…when you see a crime story, you know, most of the time I would just leave. How could I be so stupid to run into a house where a man with a gun is, you know?  I wouldn’t do that.  It doesn’t matter who they are going to shoot because that’s accident.  Let them shoot my mother or whatever, fine with me, but I’m not running into this house.  And I think that is humane.  It’s inhumane to be the hero and hope for a day of sex that never comes anyway. [audio unclear] I don’t let other people tell me how to live.  I only say that actors are kind of empty vessels, you know, do whatever the director or script says. I never really had an admiration for the difficult job they have because they ask from you something they should not ask from you.  So I hope one day it will be the robbers fighting in the movies and doing that and loving and leaving, whatever,  and you are just the audience enjoying it and never get rejected at all. Student: I never liked being in the audience.  That was never very exciting. Yeah.  It depends.  It depends on the empathy you have.  You have your sense of empathy.  This needs some improvement. Student: [audio unclear] But people always say this is not art when they cannot empathize with one of the people inside, you know?  No, they are not interesting…you are an actor too?  Is that right? [gestures towards different student that the one previously asking the question] Student: Yeah. So I address both of you, and you must know it even better.  No, no.  Really I had a new understanding of that kind of inhumanity in the art…but it might be something art does.  It pushes the limits of humanity, and you have to have some brave or stupid people doing it, and we kind of enjoying her being kicked out the window whatever [laughs].

Okay, let’s go back to metaphysics.  I have here really only the four points in the end, okay?  That is what I think can still learn from it.  So let me get another voice here, please. [Gestures to student] You are English speaker, no? Yes.  Would you please read the four points. Student [in monotone voice]: The modern period is not an autonomous epoch, but is simply the last phase of Western metaphysics, which is… Would the director not kick you out?! Give it some emphasis please!  These are my sentences – I love every one of them! Student: “The modern period is not an autonomous epoch, but is simply the last phase of Western metaphysics, which is today dominant throughout the world in its final form, scientific and technical rationality” (Schirmacher, The End of Metaphysics). Any comments? No, keep going.  We covered this. Student: “Where it does not simply denote an intellectual fashion, post-modernism expresses the expected break with metaphysics, which has reached a definitive end” (Schirmacher, The End of Metaphysics). Okay, here underline that metaphysics has ended, but it does not mean it has failed.  In German, erfüllen, it also fulfilled itself.  It’s a task, so to speak.  That’s why I’m not sitting in judgment about the human past.  At least we survived as a species.  So I call metaphysics a war technique.  It was where truth did not play any role, it was a role played to know the chain of command, to know what kind of weapon you had.  You killed ten friends, but you never left one enemy alive – so all these things you have to do in order to survive, and we survived.  That we should not be critical about.  But to fight a war after the war ended, this is my accusation of the time.  We are still anthropocentric.  We still think our survival is threatened etc., and the only enemy we actually face is ourselves.  In the ecological crisis we do not face nature.  We face what we do with nature.  That is what we face, and that is the good news because it means the turning does not come from outside.  It comes from our own lifestyle. Yeah, okay.  Next please. Student: “The end of metaphysics means that a life-long project of the human species has become in its historical development a suicidal enterprise. If we proceed along the way of metaphysics only artifacts will survive, not human beings and objects” (Schirmacher, The End of Metaphysics). Yeah, that was the famous bomb, you know, the H-bomb – what was it called? – whatever, so…Virginia loved it…the neutron bomb.  It means every human being is dead, but the trees and the houses and buildings are still there.  That is justice! (laughs)  But that is still anthropocentric. We are too stupid to kill ourselves, and we are unable to kill the earth at all.  Maybe we will not survive in millions of years, but the earth has a much longer way to go.  We really underestimated out destructive power…overestimate, overestimated this power.  We are not so important for life and death as we think, just for our own life and death.  That is why it is important to know, because it might not threaten us as young men, “change your way or you die!” that was great to say to an audience, but now I understand the old people, “yeah, yeah we have heard this before, but we are still here, we will still die but not because of the ecological crisis.”  But my point is it will make our life more miserable.  Nowadays you say, “okay, okay you can survive, but your life will be much less good than it could be,” but what is the point of that because ethics is the good life, not knowing which one but making opportunities, trying things, you know, and see what fits, what helps you.

So in this way there is still a reason to make people aware that they have a chance to live a better life, not that they die because of it.  They just read to me…I was not happy about that, I stopped smoking how many years ago, 1974, stopped drinking and smoking the same day.  I was a very heavy smoker, sixteen a day, and I was a very heavy drinker, I got drunk everyday.  So I had both at the same time, unfortunately just before I went to Moscow, and the Russians hated me because they wanted to give me vodka, vodka, vodka, and I said “no, no, no,” and they thought this was very disrespectful.  I was happy to get out of Moscow alive as a non-drinker.  Or in Spain, I came first to Spain and the Cognac was cheaper than Coca-Cola, and I thought there is something really bad in this decision.  And then I read a few weeks ago in the newspaper that smoking just shortens my life by four weeks.  You must be kidding, four weeks that’s all?  And I have not smoked for fifty years?!  And all the other stuff too, all the stuff they give us that’s unhealthy, if you look into it what they do for our lifespan, our lifespan is only shortened by very few weeks.  We can easily take that.  Who wants to live a full life age longer?  My mother always asked me to kill her every time I see her.  She’s a physician herself, you know.  The last time she fell down it was four o’clock in the morning, she was screaming so loud that the physician who lived two houses away could here her at four o’clock in the morning and came over to give her morphine so she stopped hurting.  That is not a life I want more of, and for that I have given up all the things?!  Sin City here I come back.  I was drinking a glass of wine today…Victor Vitanza was drinking wine, and since I am the king I took away and drank his glass.  What could he do?  Accuse me?  But then I said, “Okay, you gave an alcoholic a glass of wine?”  So I took his bottle and threatened to take it away.  Then he got worried because it was probably a franc-priced wine, like forty-five francs, things like that.  They have nothing cheaper here.  No, no, no, I was just kidding with the guy.  But Victor got really concerned that I took his bottle and was about to leave.  I left only two things in my life, one of them is drinking, and I think I might have made a mistake.  I might think about adding a few more.  Okay, number four. Student: “The change required for the human species to survive is probably so radical that or current debates merely scratch the surface…” (Schirmacher, The End of Metaphysics). Yeah, yeah…no, no, go ahead.  I just talk to myself.  This is a typical scare technique to scare the youngsters…no, now we tell you, you will lose just four weeks as an eighty year old…what?! Okay. Student: “If we want to prevent the destruction of the world of human beings, we must learn a ‘bodily’ language which precedes the division into subject and object, and we must admit the individual to a successful enterprise which needs no planning” (Schirmacher, The End of Metaphysics). Yeah, okay, the last sentence certainly is still my philosophy, but without threat.  That is the invitation to a good life, let’s put it this way.  That is Wolfgang after he was brainwashed in America because in America I was never elected chair anywhere.  I was a loving philosopher.  So they brainwashed me!  They made me…in the beginning I had a cultural shock.  I couldn’t believe this America, this hypocrisy, this greed in there.  I was so angry, and my students asked me, “Why do you hate us so much?”  And I told them, firstly, I am Dresden’s revenge.  You remember Slaughterhouse 5 when the Anglo-American bombers went to Dresden where no military things were there and bombed them.  Two hundred thousand people died, and fortunately they did not get me because I took, without knowing it as a three-month-old baby, the last train out of Dresden at the time.  Nobody knew it was the last train because if the knew it they would do it.  Now I live in Dresden very near to the Grey Garden, which was totally burned down, but as you know fire is good for plants in the end, nicer plants after twenty-five years.  So I’m Dresden’s revenge.  Interesting was that most of them knew about it.  It must be something you learn in American schools.  My second answer was: I hate everybody. Okay, okay, that was fine.  “If you hate everybody hate us too.” But that was the first half year in America.  Then watching all the movies in English and tv and all that, brainwashed more and more, and I was offering classes like “Innovations in Communication” (laughs).  In the beginning was my “Introduction to Media Philosophy,” but then “Innovations in Communication,” and my most advanced class was “Media Ethics.”  With “Media Ethics” I always went out of the school to Thompkins Square Park, and then we are sitting there on the grass, you know, like four or five people, and we are thinking how could we live a good life professionally, not simply personally, but professionally.  That is what ethics is about.  Use your imagination.  What in professional terms would you like to do?  How can you do that?  And it was a great class.  I got many people encouraged to do things and another part or division of EGS. It’s not about how you earn things.  The real lesson is our professors.  That’s why for years I tried to get David Lynch here knowing that the guy is not talking about his movies, but I said I don’t care; I want his presence, that’s all.  And he will talk anyway, somehow.  I will try again now because he has a daughter who is a filmmaker and a son who is a scrip writer, and I will try to invite all three together.  I used to call it “Lynch world.”  Now I call it “Lynch family world,” and I have a feeling I could because in the meantime he would have come if I would have allowed him to speak about his transcendental mediation bullshit, you know…yeah, yeah, I have met [name?] in Hamburg, phony as they are, still he is dead now, but how he got to Lynch is kind of a Lynch film in itself.

But this is all I actually want to show you guys.  I want to show you people, outrageous people who made it, the successful outsides.  Avital Ronell, for example, said one of the few people who ever failed a doctorate defense is usually never possible.  At Princeton they kicked her out at her defense.  She had to do it again a year later, you know, things like that.  But she did not care.  She was a performance artist and the dark lady of deconstruction, you know, and I’ve seen her before eight hundred of the tough from the New York art world, and Avital gave a lecture and went over time, which is a big sin in such things, but then she said, “Oh, treat me like a tv set.  Walk around, talk, do everything,” and it was absolutely…you know, and she talked for another fifteen minutes.  That was Avital, totally in white and very much made up with makeup because Hitler, you might remember, did not want ladies to have makeup.  So that is one of Avital’s, she escaped with her family from Hitler, answer to the Nazi ideology: “I show you my makeup! I’m still here, and you are dead!”   That is Nietzsche’s happiness about the death of God.   That’s why, in research studies, on the bathroom wall of guy’s bathrooms, there are very often inscriptions, “ ‘God is dead,’ Nietzsche. ‘Nietzsche is dead,’ God.”  And they are both dead in the end!  But I am alive and urinate now…happy, happy!  Goodnight.