“When I grew up I gave up childish things like wanting to grow up,” C. S. Lewis once said. Well, to paraphrase Lewis: When I grew up I gave up childish things, like German intellectuals.
When I was an undergraduate, I wrote a thesis on Martin Heidegger's Being and Time and Ludwig Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. It was the culmination of a college career obsessed with the entire gamut of supposed German geniusâ??—â??from the too saintly Kant, to Hannah Arendt, the femme fatale of German intellectual bros, to Freud and Jung, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Hegel and Marx, Husserl and Heidegger, Adorno and Benjaminâ??—â??pairs of names that make any 19-year-old American intellectual wish to be part of even the least remarkable German intellectual rivalry. One laments: Do those even exist in America?!
Each of these Germans were for some brief period of my youth the most beautiful mind (or for those who have had too much German idealismâ??—â??they were geist itself). They had each found the question of questions, the concept of conceptsâ??—â??wrestled not merely with metaphysics but with the very possibility of metaphysics, not history but the essence of history, and of course, not any particular being, but being itself.
And yet when I would walk home every nightâ??—â??after poring over Heidegger and Wittgenstein and supporting Germans like Schleiermacher and Gadamerâ??—â??whose immense erudition was for me so intimidating that I never wanted to write a sentence again, but for the German seemed a matter of courseâ??—â??I would desperately smoke three or four or five cigarettes and whisper to myself the lament of Goethe's Faust: Surely, I must be smarter than all the dimwits, but I don't understand anything!
It is surely surely something far more, or at least different, than intellectual content that sustains this adulation. An obscurantism, a lack of clarity, a theoretical pretentiousness that would never be tolerated from an undergraduate is taken, if it comes from an Adorno or a Heidegger, as the virtual fountain of truth. Suddenly everything that was regarded as wrong with the 18 year old is taken as part and parcel of the German's profundity. It is similar to the perceptual experiments one can do with modern art: ask a group of students to look at a canvas with paint splattered everywhere, and get them to give their honest reaction. Then reveal to them that it is a Jackson Pollock. Among so many young intellectuals it is not only in modern art where one cannot tell the real from the fakeâ??—â??it is in German philosophy too.
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