Roads and sideroads of philosophy. From Anaximander to Wittgenstein is a fine philosophical book. It collects several of Rafael Ferber’s kleine Schriften, published mostly in German in different venues over a period of approximately thirty years. Ferber has been widely known among German-speaking students of philosophy for his Philosophische Grundbegriffe. Eine Einführung (Munich, 1994; translated in English as Key Concepts in Philosophy. An Introduction, Sankt Augustin, 2015), an introduction to the fundamental concepts of ‘philosophy’, ‘language’, ‘knowledge’, ‘truth’, ‘being’, and ‘good’. Such a work naturally presupposes extensive acquaintance with the history of philosophy. Ferber’s Wege und Seitenwege der Philosophie is a testimony to this acquaintance, despite the fact that the essays contained in the book are intentionally systematic in character.
According to Ferber himself, the Wege refer to paths that have been already walked, though in a different way, by previous scholars, whereas the Seitenwege refer to paths walked for the first time by the author. This is certainly true in both respects. Ferber sheds new light, for instance, on the relation between Kant’s transcendental idealism (in particular, “the supreme principle of all synthetic judgments a priori”) and the philosophy of early Wittgenstein, whilst he shows late Wittgenstein’s dependance on the philosophy of language of Oswald Spengler, an intellectual figure now largely forgotten but highly influential during the German Weimar era (Spengler was a key figure in the Conservative Revolution). Ferber convincingly argues that the Wittgensteinian term ‘form of life’ (Lebensform), around which the philosophy of language of late Wittgenstein is structured, as well as his seminal idea of the ‘language game’ (Sprachspiel), were appropriated by Wittgenstein from Spengler’s Untergang des Abendlandes. Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (1923) and Der Mensch und die Technik. Beitrag zu einer Philosophie des Lebens (1931). In 1931, as evidenced by his Cambridge Lectures, Ludwig Wittgenstein was still adhering to the picture theory of language that he put forward in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). Ferber brings into light also the fact that, although Friedrich Nietzsche regarded Marcus Aurelius¾alongside Plato, Epicurus, Epictetus, and Seneca¾as one of the great ‘Moralists’ who were fatal for the course of philosophy, he modeled his self-image (and that of those “generous and rich in spirit”) as “a spring of pure water” that purifies itself regardless of what is thrown into it (The Gay Science, aphorism 378 ) on Marcus Aurelius (see Ta eis heauton 8.51). These examples beautifully illuminate the meaning of the title of Ferber’s book. Nonetheless, the Wege (and the -wege) convey also the idea, at least to me, that even historically distant philosophies are somehow intricately linked. This is most evident in Ferber’s claim that both Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s posits of formal identity¾between the forms of experience and the forms of the objects of experience in Kant’s case, between the form of sentences and the forms of facts in Wittgenstein’s case¾ultimately transform the identity of thinking and being posited for the first time in the poem of Parmenides. It is noteworthy that no philosopher is confined to a single essay in Ferber’s collection. Nietzsche, for instance, first appears in Die „Melancholie des Genies“ oder die „Rosenfarbe des Montblanc“ as an extension of Arthur Schopenhauer’s life-related approach to philosophy. Schopenhauer was since his youth fascinated with his experience of the weather in Montblanc, in which he saw a symbol of the genius’ change from serenity to melancholy. Marcus Aurelius, in turn, sheds light on the stance of the Swiss philosopher-poet Ludwig Hohl (1904-1980) towards a fragment of Heraclitus, 22 B74 Diels-Kranz (“We should not [think or act] like children of our parents”). Hohl himself makes his first appearance in the first essay of the collection, where his notion of “early arrival” (verfrühte Ankunft) is aligned with Anaximander’s intuition that the explanans of nature (viz. ‘the infinite’) cannot itself be one of its explananda. Despite the author’s preliminary warning about “the fragmentary character of this collection” (this contrasts with a previous publication of Ferber’s kleine Schriften, namely his Platonische Aufsätze, Berlin, 2020), there is a unifying thread across all the essays: Ferber’s deep intellectual commitment to certain philosophers and the interconnectedness of their thought. Proclus’ overturning of Aristotle’s simile of the soul as a tabula rasa is tellingly adapted by Ferber to the theory of knowledge of Kant, for whom “the soul is always fully-written, a tabula that, insofar as it writes itself, also writes the book of nature” (169).[1]
The volume opens with Ferber’s two inaugural lectures, the one given at the University of Zurich on the emergence of science in Anaximander (Der Ursprung der Wissenschaft bei Anaximander von Milet) and the other at the University of Lucerne (when Ferber was given the newly founded chair of philosophy) on the opening sentence of Aristotle’s Metaphysics („Alle Menschen streben von Natur nach Wissen“); it closes with Ferber’s valedictory lecture given at the University of Lucerne on reasonableness as criterion of good religious worldviews (Was ist eine gute Weltanschauung?). Philosophy of religion, philosophy of language, and ancient philosophy, make the central themes of the book. Ancient philosophy is explored either in itself (The Mortality of the Soul and Immortality of the Active Mind (nous poêtikos [sic]) in Aristotle – Some Hints) or in its extension to contemporary philosophical problems (Zeno’s Fundamental Paradox and the Mind-Body Problem). Three of the essays (Der Grundgedanke des Tractatus als Metamorphose des obersten Grundsatzes der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, „Lebensform“ oder „Lebensformen“? Zwei Addenda zur Kontroverse zwischen N. Garver und R. Haller, and Wittgenstein und Spengler) deal with the philosophy of early and late Wittgenstein. Das normative „ist“, das Sein Gottes und die Leibniz-Schelling᾽sche Frage, one of the best essays of the collection, argues in favor of a normative meaning of ‘is’ (distinct from its constative meaning, shared by both Aristotle and Frege/Russell), on the basis of which the author answers Leibniz’s and Schelling’s question “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. Einige Bemerkungen zur Entstehung der modernen „Gedanken-, Gewissens- und Religionsfreiheit traces the origin and development of the concept of freedom of religion, which, as the author argues, could only emerge through the interpretation of Christian faith. Warum und wie sich die philosophische Ethik im Verlauf der Neuzeit von der theologischen Ethik emanzipiert hat examines the transition from ethics grounded in theology to the autonomous philosophical ethics characteristic of the modern era.
Of particular interest are the two essays on Ludwig Hohl, whom Ferber aptly describes as an atopos anêr, paraphrasing Plato (Symposium 215a2 and 221d2). Although not widely known, Hohl revivified in the twentieth century the ancient ideal of philosophy as a way of life. In Bemerkungen zu Ludwig Hohl als Philosophen and „Man soll nicht [handeln und denken] als Kinder seiner Eltern“. Zu Ludwig Hohls herakliteischem Lebensmotto, which are also self-standing interpretations of Heraclitus fr. B117 and B74, Ferber articulates Hohl’s intellectual debt to the thought and aphoristic style of Heraclitus. It is telling that Hohl’s opus magnum consists in ‘Notizen’ (Die Notizen oder Von der unvoreiligen Versöhnung, translated into English as The Notes, or On Non-Premature Reconciliation). Ferber illuminates Hohl’s emancipation from his Protestant ancestry by juxtaposing Heraclitus fr. B74 with Moses’ fourth commandment. But Hohl went far beyond in his rejection of superficiality (compare Heraclitus fr. B1). He abandoned his native Swiss German dialect and even redefined the meaning of certain High German words, most notably the meaning of the word ‘Arbeit’ (work). ‘Work’ encompasses a person’s knowledge and corresponding attunement, in action, with the cosmic law of perpetual change. As Ferber explains, Hohl’s Heracliteanism led him to oppose all philosophical systems and to champion ‘fragmentarism’, which he saw as a uniquely suitable form to capture the ‘stream’ or ‘imperishable being’ (Hohl, Notizen XI.12; Ferber p. 217).
Some of Ferber’s presuppositions reflect somewhat outdated perspectives. His discussion of the shift from mythos to logos in his otherwise bold and engaging essay on the emergence of science in Anaximander adopts a framework that contemporary scholarship has largely refined, and his sharp contrast between Aristotle and Plato at several places in the book seems overly rigid. Similarly, Ferber’s tackling the thorny issue of the immortality of the poiêtikos nous in Aristotle (On the Soul 3.5, 430a12, 23) by introducing a mortal nous poiêtikos symmigês (‘mixed active mind’, a term coined by Ferber) seems unnecessary. According to Ferber, the active nous is immortal only in its ‘deindividualized’ or ‘depersonalized’ state, i.e. insofar as it “has no personal mental images to work on and therefore also no memory of them” (57). Although this sides with the anti-Thomistic denial of personal immortality in Aristotle’s psychology, it seems to link the active nous too closely to the passive nous and makes difficult to understand the exact state of the immortal active nous, which, Ferber argues, “survives only as ‘impassible’” (my emphasis). Ferber takes 430a25, καὶ ἄνευ τούτου οὐδὲν νοεῖ, as referring to the passive nous (“without the nous pathêtikos nothing thinks”) but this seems problematic. Not only does τοῦτο in the preceding line (430a24, τοῦτο μὲν ἀπαθές) clearly refer to the active nous, but Aristotle’s point seems to be, as [ps.-?]Alexander, De intellectu well saw, that the active nous is always involved in our thinking (in our thinking either enmattered forms or, more genuinely, immaterial forms), although it itself, unlike our own thoughts, is perfectly identical to its object.
Even if the reader will not always agree with Ferber’s interpretations—or may find some of his claims puzzling, such as aligning G. E. L. Owen’s ‘focal meaning’ with Aristotle’s paronyma (Categories 1a12-15) rather than τὰ πρὸς μίαν λεγόμενα φύσιν (Metaphysics 1003b13-14)—this collection of essays is certainly worth reading from its beginning to its end, not least because of the author’s profound commitment to philosophy as a perennial intellectual pursuit. Not many philosophers nowadays can engage with such a vast array of themes.
Notes
[1] Cf. Proclus, In primum Euclidis Elementorum librum commentarii 16.8-10 Friedlein: καὶ οὐκ ἄρα ἦν ἡ ψυχὴ γραμματεῖον καὶ τῶν λόγων κενόν, ἀλλὰ γεγραμμένον ἀεὶ καὶ γράφον ἑαυτὸ καὶ ὑπὸ νοῦ γραφόμενον. Cf. Aristotle, De anima 3.4, 430a1-2.