Ernst Tugendhat interview
Kay
[Philosopher Ernst Tugendhat on Heidegger, the fear of death and
unfounded speculations in brain research]
The interview was supposed to last just two hours in the afternoon,
but it went until almost midnight. Ernst Tugendhat, 77, had doubts
about whether he wanted to see it printed. In the end a letter came
from Tubigen: "I find the text alright as it is now" was written in
the round characters of his old typewriter. Tugendhat doesn't like to
send emails: his thoughts still travel by post.
Die Tageszeitung: Professor Tugendhat, your most recent philosophy
deals with fear of death. When was the first time you experienced this
fear?
Ernst Tugendhat: I wrote my first lecture on death when I was 64. I
was in Chile at the time, alone, and I had the feeling that all that
awaited me was death. But perhaps I was already open to the topic,
because I'd studied with Heidegger, in whose thinking death also plays
a major role. When I think I only have a short time to live, I'm
horrified. Not because I want to go on living at all costs, but
because I feel I've frittered away my time and should have lived very
differently.
And how?
That I don't know. I just have this worry that I could have missed out
on the main thing. But in the meantime this feeling's been pushed to
the side by mysticism.
But how can mysticism help?
It helps you recognise that in any event you're not so relevant. That
has to do with amazement at what Heidegger called being, or, as
Wittgenstein said, that this world exists at all.
If you're not important yourself, then where do you get the motivation
to live? Isn't it debilitating to believe that everything is
important, except yourself?
No, I'm just as important, but no more so. In addition, I do have
philosophical ambitions, and I'm happy when I'm successful in what I
do, even if in fact I condemn such an attitude. I try to downplay my
own importance, but in point of fact I experience how important I do
consider myself.
Would that not be grounds for rethinking your theory that one should
relativise oneself?
No. Mysticism and egocentricity are not mutually exclusive. I believe
a person never gets past taking himself seriously, even as a mystic.
Because in doing mysticism, he is interested in the fact that HE is
doing mysticism. There is this gap between taking-oneself-
exaggeratedly-seriously and the serenity of relativising oneself,
putting oneself into perspective.
When one says: I'm not important, then one also says: I'm not
important for others. What becomes of love?
Of course, love involves a mutual understanding that people find each
other important. I just believe that at one point this moment becomes
independent.
Nevertheless it seems to me that overcoming the fear of death requires
no longer having any passions.
Yes.
That seems like a price to pay.
Look, those are only opposites within a framework of tension. Take the
case of vanity. It's something we would all find funny, because it's
an exaggeration of one's own importance.
Are you vain?
We're all egocentric. But some are more reflective than others. And
the vain are particularly unreflective.
May one be happy about one's successes?
Good question. I'd say yes - as long as you don't overdo it.
Which of your successes pleased you most?
When I took up my first post as professor in Heidelberg, I let out a
deep sigh of relief. In the years beforehand, all those years as an
assistant at T?bingen, I didn't believe in myself. I read job
vacancies in the papers but I never found anything I felt I could do.
I had no faith in myself as a philosopher. I had a sense of
inferiority - that's true of a lot of haughty people.
You were haughty?
Basically I'd always had a high idea of myself. Gradually I gained
self-confidence, but I still consider myself far too dependent on how
people react to my lectures. That depresses me. And my lectures in
Germany were always well-received, as opposed to in the Anglo-Saxon
countries.
Where does the difference lie?
Here there's a lot of bragging in universities. In England and the
USA, people have a different way of addressing you, particularly with
me, because my style of thinking is rather Anglo-Saxon. Many German
colleagues have it easier in America because there people think, oh,
that's some German profundity that's so profound that it can't be
understood anyway.
So nowadays good philosophy is only done in England and the USA?
No. I believe that German academics are more aware of what the big
questions are. But on the other hand they pay less attention to
methodology and very little to discipline in discussion. After a
lecture in Germany, a lot of people will stand up and go on about one
thing or other, without referring to what the speaker has just said.
German audiences tend to see themselves as panel members.
What's your relationship to J?rgen Habermas like? You've known each
other a long time.
That's too complicated a question.
May I put it differently? Habermas too is discovering religion.
But very differently. He himself has no need for religion, he says so
himself. Just what interests him in religion I don't exactly know. But
in any case it's not what interests me. I've certainly got a need for
belief. He's interested in the moral components of religious
tradition, not religion as such.
Your most recent book seems paradoxical. With its strong reference to
death it seems like a farewell - and a new beginning.
What gives you the impression of a new beginning?
Your attempt to give new answers to the question: what is philosophy?
What's your method? Is there a general question that can bundle
together the individual disciplines within philosophy?
I say in the foreword that what I've said until now on certain topics
seems to me very insufficient. I'd already said my previous book would
be my last. Then I wrote these essays, which appeared in March. Now
however, I really do think it's my last book.
Because you're content with yourself?
No, but I have the feeling that for me the time for philosophising is
over.
Your desk looks very tidy. All that's on it is an old typewriter.
I can only think when sitting at the typewriter. I've got small sheets
of paper, half the size of a normal page. The page number is on the
right, the date on the left. I order them chronologically. There's a
pile of almost two thousand manuscript pages.
How do you find your thoughts again?
That can be difficult. I tossed everything away before leaving Chile
in 1999, and sold off anything that still had a value. I don't cling
to things.
Not even your own thoughts?
When an essay's written, you can throw away the notes.
That's rather unfortunate for a potential biographer.
Everything should be thrown away shortly before your death. I don't
want people to be tempted to publish anything. Even Heidegger's
letters to his wife are now being published. I don't think he'd have
approved of that. I can't understand why people think that when
someone's dead you don't owe them any more respect, and you can turn
their private life inside out.
Nevertheless, one more clue for potential biographers: how did you
spend your free time? They say Ludwig Wittgenstein read old detective
novels.
Most of my life I did nothing but philosophy. Maybe I heard a little
music, or met people. I was a workaholic, I think.
Did you have role models for that?
My parents perhaps. My father was very calm, very strict, he exuded
authority.
For 25 years you preoccupied yourself primarily with ethics - and now
at an advanced age you turn to anthropology. How did this change in
focus come about?
I address a certain problem with Heidegger in an essay I wrote in
1999, his use of the German term "man" (generally translated into
English by "one" - ed.). I try to show that Heidegger had a false
anthropology, and can't explain his own terms. That happened rather
coincidentally, but then I kept going from there.
Could one describe your entire philosophical life as an overcoming of
Heidegger?
Yes. I read "Being and Time" when I was fifteen. At the time I often
studied philosophical texts with my mother, more out of friendliness
to her. It was terribly important for her to do things with me. I came
to Germany as soon as I could, and studied the whole time in Freiburg.
Heidegger had the reputation of being very aloof.
You know, as a person he was never very important for me. When he'd
been rehabilitated, that was in my second year or so, I took the three
courses he was offering. Then I visited him in Freiburg from time to
time, and we'd go for walks together. I was always scared stiff, I
felt totally unprepared. Then he sent me a card telling me when I
should come with the words: "No need to prepare."
And later?
We had one really good talk after I'd left Freiburg - when I began to
criticise his notion of the truth in my Habilitation dissertation.
That was the start of a short while when I think he was quite taken
with me. But our personal relationship was entirely unimportant for
me. At that time I didn't consider Heidegger's Nazism important
enough, and that was wrong. That was naive of me. Later I reproached
myself for that very much.
Because it was because of him that you returned so quickly from your
emigration to the land of the perpetrators?
That was a very questionable step. My gesture of reconciliation now
seems scandalous to me vis-?-vis the victims. Because I didn't suffer
under Nazi rule. I didn't even experience the emigration as a personal
loss. For me as an eleven-year-old, the ship voyage to Venezuela was
an adventure.
But you had to leave one of the most famous houses in the history of
modern art, Villa Tugendhat, which Bauhaus architect Mies van der Rohe
built for your father in Brno.
That house never played a role in my life, or if it did, then it was a
negative one. It's a matter of complete indifference to me where I
live. Perhaps that's a reaction to our family's glorifying the house
so much.
Why did it take so long for you to think it was wrong to return to
Germany so soon?
I grew up in a circle of Jewish emigrants who had studied with
Heidegger. They all acted as though you could separate his work from
his person. That I as a Jew came back to Germany prematurely ? that
eventually struck back at me.
But only at you? Nobody reproached you for it?
No, no reproaches or accusations. But people were surprised.
Your family?
My family for sure, at the time in any case. But I had a friend in
Berlin, and we were sitting at Cafe Einstein in the mid 80s. She was
English, and asked me why I'd had returned to Germany. It was then I
noticed that now, speaking from a distance, I can't give a good answer
to the question. That was one of the reasons why I left Germany for
South America in 1992.
Is it possible to correct a decision fifty years on?
It was irrational. It was probably an aggression against myself, which
I exteriorised. I suddenly had this hatred of Germany, I wanted to
undo it.
Then in 1999 you returned to Germany a second time. How do you feel
now? Normal?
I only came to Tubingen because of the libraries.
In 1968 you were a Dean at Heidelberg. How did you experience Germany
at the time?
The student movement led me to reconcile myself with Germany. In the
early years I always felt like a foreigner. But I fully identified
with the student protests. I was put off by the strange reaction of a
large number of my colleagues. They wanted their peace. And yet it was
quite a striking experience for me. I was treated as a normal human
being! We professors simply argued. My colleagues behaved in a way
that was neither anti-Semitic nor philo-Semitic. To this day I don't
understand that. They were all people who'd experienced the Nazi
period.
What was it like later on?
I personally didn't experience any anti-Semitism. But that's not an
objective statement, it may be a coincidence. What I do witness is
philo-Semitism, for instance when Germans tell me they aren't entitled
to voice the same criticism of Israel as I, when I describe Zionism as
nationalistic, for example. Many Germans would not have the courage to
do so.
Coming back to Heidegger, how do you see him now?
C. H. Beck publishers suggested I write a book on "Being and Time."
But that would do him too much honour. It's not only the way he
behaved in the Nazi era, but also what he said after 1945 ? awful. I
think there was something dishonest about him. In human and political
terms for sure, but also in philosophical terms.
You're always quoted as saying that the problem in Heidegger is the
absence of a concept of untruth.
He developed a concept of truth, the concept of "unconcealment", to
which the contrast of falsehood no longer essentially belonged. Things
are relatively complicated in his philosophy. He always had ways of
talking his way out. But in principle the critical dimension was lost.
Nevertheless you, too, remained fascinated throughout your life.
Not throughout my life. My turning point was when I received an
invitation to go to Ann Arbor in Michigan shortly before my
habilitation on Husserl and Heidegger. I was 35 at the time. It was
there that I realised that analytical philosophy is of greater help in
explaining things for which Husserl made inventions like "categorical
intuition." To me, that was a major methodological shift. I continued
to adhere to questions posed by Heidegger, but I was no longer
fascinated by them. Heidegger tried to apply his metaphysical concepts
to Aristotle. I on the other hand wanted to show that Aristotle had
actually headed for a philosophy based on an analysis of language all
along.
Your turn to anthropology in 1999 ? in opposition to Heidegger ?
nevertheless still shows what a great influence he had on you.
I'm aware of that. In a lecture here in T?bingen, I recently tried to
unravel which parts of Heidegger are tenable? And constantly I had to
tell people that's not the way to do things. That's why I can't write
a book on "Being and Time."
Because it would be too destructive?
Yes. To write a commentary on a book, your relation to the book has to
be primarily positive.
So you couldn't write that ultimately the only thing Heidegger has to
offer is the "om" of Indian mystics, as you did in your last book.
People sometimes accuse you of being almost polemical in your
criticism.
I find it a lot easier to criticise than to pay tribute to someone.
Jurgen Habermas once said to me: "You don't just criticise, you try to
kill."
Many of your students and assistants suffer from a "Tugendhat Trauma."
Your remark "I don't understand" whenever somebody gave a presentation
is legendary.
That was simply the case; there was no strategic intention behind.
That's precisely why it was so deadly.
I may have inherited that from my mother. She was just as naive.
You had a great many students who are now themselves professors. Do
you have the feeling of leaving a kind of school?
No. For many years, I saw my role as a German professor as one in
which I had to provide clarity in all the German profundity. And I
believe that if there's anything I have achieved, it is the
development of this methodological consciousness. But there are hardly
any people who work on the same topics.
Would you have liked to found a school?
No, that never crossed my mind.
Because you refuse certainties?
I refuse certainties?!
You call it "retractions". You're constantly criticising your old
publications in the recent articles.
Yes, that happened to me a lot in moral philosophy. I kept being
absorbed by it.
To a reader, it seems as if you first needed to publish an article
before being able to develop and reject it.
No! That's not the way to think. Only sometimes did I publish things
that I knew in advance weren't quite correct, but that doesn't matter.
Let other people sweat over them.
A kind of division of labour, then?
But nobody actually does that. I don't feel that a great many of my
ideas have been absorbed.
Do you have the impression that you may have been working on the wrong
subject?
No, I actually never have that impression. I think that some topics
are important and others, I feel I should comment on, given the way
I'm built.
How are you built?
In a sense, I am a very short-sighted person. I am not a person who
has the vast overview of social contexts. I can only continue with my
little problems. On the other hand, I have an advantage that others do
not have because I work in a very precise manner. Strictly speaking, I
cannot say anything on matters relevant to society because these are
far too complex for me. I only speak about things that are part of
individual identity. For a long time, I suffered from not being able
to work empirically. At the time, I left university, and Heidelberg,
to learn that.
What do you mean working empirically? Did you want to do sociology?
Sociology and history. But it was an absurd idea. In the end, I was
lucky that Habermas offered me a job at this institute in Starnberg.
If I had worked without a safety net for several years, I would have
suffered. But I wanted to learn to work empirically. I have now given
that up. Now I do things which I know I can do, and I simply omit
things which I know I cannot.
You nevertheless commented on the first Gulf War, for example.
Those were probably always questions that were relatively easy to
narrow down. I also gave talks about the danger of an atomic war. But
I was scared and shaking when I had to give the first of these talks.
At the time, even your opponents admitted that you may not always have
been on the right side ? but you did have the best arguments.
Nevertheless I got bogged down in the 80s. I only gave two to three
lectures in Berlin that made sense ? but not many more.
What function does philosophy have now? Is it becoming superfluous ?
because of the behavioural sciences, brain research and evolutionary
biology?
I am very careful about that. As far as the behavioural sciences are
concerned, I think that people are too rash in looking for analogies ?
for example between human morals and animal altruism. That is what
Konrad Lorenz, among others, did. As for brain research, I think it's
rather crazy what's going on today.
Why?
They can only find out what types of processes are going on in which
parts of the brain. But then those professors of brain physiology
appear and present theories about the nonexistence of human freedom.
And those theories are only based on the fact that they see themselves
as scientists and believe in determinism. They are not even aware of
the philosophical literature of the last decades, which tries to not
see determinism and free will in opposition. I consider that to be
completely untenable speculation.
But brain research is still in its infancy.
Brain research may become interesting for philosophy in a hundred
years, but it hasn't been until now. I admittedly am a naturalist; I
see human beings as part of a biological development. But what the
biological sciences do in relation to human beings hardly makes sense.
If brain research has so little to offer ? does sure philosophical
knowledge exist?
No. And we don't need it. The desire to be on sure ground is the
relict of an authoritarian frame of mind. It's a relict of those times
when people believed they would receive all that is essential through
revelation from the Gods.
*
The interview originally appeared in German in Die Tageszeitung on
July 28, 2007.
Ulrike Herrmann studied philosophy and is a political and economic
correspondent for Die Tageszeitung.Ernst Tugendhat is professor
emeritus for philosophy at the Free University of Berlin. He lives in
T?bingen and Latin America. His most recent work, "Egozentrizit?t und
Mystik. Eine anthropologische Studie," was published by C. H. Beck in
2003. Another feature by him here.
Translation: jab, Claudia Kotte
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Not for commercial use. Solely to be fairly used for the educational
purposes of research and open discussion. Contents do not necessarily
represent the opinions of the poster.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -