#continental philosopher

To enter the forest of worlds is a cruel ordeal for any tribe. A vast emptiness littered with illusions of sense, and just a few scarce signposts.

If we see philosophy as having torn away from every kind of objectivism and renounced any kind of fetish belief in a prior, autonomous existence, we can say that after (Johann Gottlieb) Fichte it entered a zone of absolute freedom. The ego, previously addicted to the world, was extinguished in this zone and replaced by an "endogenous" kind of unconditional vitality illuminated by consciousness. From then on, the wise man was a pure functionary of the absolute. He saw himself as a ray emanating from the divine stored in every ego in the phenomenal world.

With regard to this specific point, the Power of the citizens of a 'democratic' State does not differ in essence from that of an oligarchy, or even that of an 'absolute' monarch or a 'tyrant,' 'dictator,' and so on.

The 'snob' is a man who imagines himself to be 'authentic,' 'personal,' and so on, but who is in fact the slave of an Authority (no less than the 'petty bourgeois'), of 'What would people say?'; it is simply that he does not recognize any Authority other than that which he believes to be the 'elite' by tacitly supposing that this is by necessity only a Minority.

We teach young academics to search for the transpersonal standpoint without their having to fast and pray. We educate the novices of theory to respect the general in particular and the particular in general; we awaken them to the sense of the formal side of everything, initiating them into the self-effacement of thinkers. Today, too, the moral of history is: as far as possible, people should make themselves invisible behind their terminological methods.

Thus imperial theology, whether Egyptian, Mesopotamian, Hellenistic or Roman, emerged as the field in which the traditional distinction between domestic and foreign policy faded. That translations between the (religious) cults were usually supported by the monarchs and priesthoods of trans-ethnic state constructions is a result of their unmistaken interest in synthetic concepts and ecumenical solutions.

This seems to imply in real thinking, thoughts belong more closely to their fellow thoughts than the thinker to the world around him. Anybody who experiences this in reality is uprooted from his or her everyday relationship to circumstances and totally absorbed in "internal" operations.

What music and theology have in common is that, when things get serious, they can both be closer to the affected person than the person themselves -- as expressed by Saint Augustine in his confessional phrase 'interior intimo meo' ('more inward than the most inward place in my heart').