[D66] Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher

[A.O.]

http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/060806-000-A/wer-also-war-althusser


Portrait of the Materialist Philosopher *)

The man's age doesn't matter. He can be very old or very young. The
important thing is that he doesn't know where he is, and wants to go
somewhere. That's why he always catches a moving train, the way
they do in American Westerns. Without knowing where he comes
from (origin) or where he's going (goal). And he gets off somewhere
along the way, in a four-horse town with a ridiculous railway station
in the middle of it.
Saloon, beer, whisky. 'Where d'ya hail from, bud?' 'From a long
ways off.' 'Where ya headed?' 'Dunno!' 'Might have some work for
ya.' 'Okay.'
And so our friend Nikos goes to work. He's a Greek by birth who
has immigrated to the USA like so many others before him, and he
doesn't have a penny in his pockets. He works hard and, a year later,
marries the prettiest girl in town. He scrapes together a little stake
and buys the first cattle in his herd. Thanks to his intelligence and
knack [Einsicht] for picking out young livestock (horses, cattle), he
ends up with the best bunch of animals around - after ten years of
hard work. The best bunch of animals = the best bunch of categories and
concepts. He competes with the other landowners, but peacefully.
Everyone admits that he's the best and that his categories and
concepts (his herd) are the best. His reputation spreads throughout the
West, and then the whole country.

 From time to time, he catches the moving train in order to see, talk,
listen - like Gorbachev in the streets of Moscow. Besides, one can
catch the train wherever one happens to be!
More popular than anyone else, he could be elected to the White
House, although he started out from nothing. But no, he'd rather
travel, go out and walk the streets; that's how one comes to under­
stand the true philosophy, the one that people have in their heads and
that is always contradictory.
This is when he reads the Hindus and the Chinese (Zen), as well
as Machiavelli, Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Cavailles,
Canguilhem, Vuillemin, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and so on.
Thus, without having intended to, he becomes a quasi-professional
materialist philosopher - not that horror, a dialectical materialist,
but an aleatory materialist.

He attains the level of classical wisdom, Spinoza's third kind of
'knowledge', Nietzsche's superman, and an understanding of the
eternal return: viz., that everything is repeated and exists only
through differential repetition. Now he can engage in discussions with
the great idealists. He not only understands them, but also explains
the reasons for their theses to them! The others sometimes come
round to his views with great bitterness, but, after all,

Amicus Plato, magis arnica Veritas!


*) Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, Later Writings 1978-87