WOLF LEPENIES
The Future of Intellectuals
In order to be immortal, wrote Karl Gutzkow, you have to blow it big–
time at least once. This Vormarz writer was right: intellectuals are to
blame for great errors. This, it would seem, is what has made them im–
mortal. Another writer, Leon Daudet, spoke of the nineteenth century as
the stupid century. In retrospect - not least because of intellectuals - the
last century of the second millennium is unsurpassed in stupidity. But
speaking of the end brings us back to life. No sooner had tired Western
novelists bewailed the end of literature than potential Nobel Prize mas–
terpieces began cropping up on the periphery of capitalism. No sooner
had the end of history been predicted by an American State Department
official than history itself began to run wild, upsetting not just old Europe
but the entire world as well. No sooner had obsessed intellectuals written
about the death of intellectuals than Enlightenment philosophers suddenly
reappeared on the scene.
In January 1993 a meeting was held, in Paris of course, that brought
together a number of influential intellectuals: writers such as Mario Vargas
Llosa, Octavio Paz, and Jorge Semprun; musicians like Yehudi Menuhin
and Luciano Berio; the scientists
Fran~ois
Gros and Joshua Lederberg; the
actress Liv Ullmann and the director Federico Fellini; as well as historians,
philosophers, anthropologists, architects, painters, and active and burned–
out politicians. In short, forty intellectuals besieged
Ia capitale
in order to
christen a new academy: the Academie Universelle des Cultures. The
new academy drew laughter from some, especially those who had once
freely associated with the Party. Their mockery, however, was not justi–
fied. On the contrary, the founding of the new academy merely proves to
what degree the future of intellectuals inevitably resembles their past.
Much can be said about the sophists, those intellectuals of Antiquity,
or about the many facets of medieval thought, as Jacques Le Goff has
shown. What the founding of the newest Parisian Academy reveals,
however, is just how relevant eighteenth-century Enlightenment
philosophers are to us today. We see them as the forefathers of modern
intellectuals and view their encyclopedic masterpiece as an early example
Editor's Note: This essay first appeared in
Der Spiegel
9/1993 as "Worwarts mit
der Autklarung," and is reprinted with permission.
