The antiheroic years of a crepuscular world philosophy: A global factory of secondary literature

The paraphrase in negative of the title for a well-know biography about Hegel of Horst Althaus (1992) fits perfectly in front of the ruling standardization of a certain philosophical activity at will, which produces worldwide only more a insignificant and redundant ›secondary‹ literature thanks to a zealous academic army of professional compilers, whose numerosity propagates paradoxically a undisguised thoughtlessness and the failure to call into question the philosophical tradition.

The crowning jewel of such professionals in compilation – in compliance with a triumphant ›quantity-principle‹ – is the enumeration of mass-produced publications that disappear within a few months in the current of artificial public debates, often in the shade of pervasive buzzwords. This career-wise scriptural incontinence contravenes not only a appropriate economy of writing, but also certifies the occurred inability to relevant epochal works, in a sort of final sleep of the Western world. This epochal inability on the part of the recent generations with a epigonic vocation produces only the background noise of a infinite commentary to ever more distant legacies of thought, that are carefully dissected from a sterile and self-referential ›philosophical research‹. The absence of epochal works is poorly compensated by the production of a papers philosophy for academic journals or collections of contributions, that aims to communicate as quickly as possible the new findings of this specialized dissection at the cost of mainly misunderstood and in this way inexorably crystallized thinkers. The rush to the public advocacy of this instantaneous ›advances in research‹ through the depersonalized ›philosophical occupation‹ suffocates the strenuous slowness of a genuine elaboration of thinking.

It’s impossible to apply to the non-existent self-awareness of such ›research‹ with regard to the irreversible divergence between this academic professionalization and the more and more unaffordable vocation to thought. This divergence calls into question the entire story of a universitas magistrorum et schola­rium. The standardized philosophy of the universities who presides over this contemporary global factory of philosophical insignificance has no choice but to become what it has always been. It’s equally impossibile to believe that this is precisely the ›world philosophy‹ which Karl Jaspers planned and predicted after the end of the Second World War, when he foreshadowed a ineluctable twilight of european philosophy.

[English Summary of the sections 2.2 and 2.2.01 in the book Kritik des philosophischen Posthumanismus]

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