Letter to Paul on His 65th Birthday

Dear Paul,

I welcome you to the circle of those for whom the last (hopefully as long as possible) chapter has been opened, but who by no means give in to the world-weariness that is so popular today, but instead tirelessly search for the delicacies of life. Above all, this requires a divine gift - humor.

Oh those philosophers! If they comment on humor at all, it usually becomes morose immediately. Only Plato probably had a deeper insight into what this is all about which is why he wrote so many amusing dialogues that, if you understand them properly, you can read them with a gleeful smile. He also encapsulates his own wisdom with the sentence that Socrates utters to his table companions dozing in the mist of wine: The philosopher is the true poet of comedy and tragedy. A comedy writer, insofar as he appeals to the comic nature of man to fancy himself in the inflated state of absolute knowledge, when that knowledge can bring him down even a single argument - and a tragedy writer, insofar as he reveals that metaphysical eros - child of wealth and poverty, - who never releases himself from the eternal tension to the truth, but understands it as a never-ending task. (Which the apostles of the falsification principle did not understand either, because they turned this principle into an intolerable dogma.)

Well, for me you are the philosopher of humor par excellence! Don't you scoff at every form of dogmatism (which you find in its innermost lair where it is least suspected: in the exact sciences)? Don't you advise not to take even the most successful theory seriously, but to immediately look around for alternatives? You not only rob such content of all solemnity, but even the methods that are used for it. Incidentally, Against method gets all its spice precisely from the fact that it does not want to be taken seriously in every point, which is why all those young anarchists who see you as an ally were just as mistaken as the scholars' guild, which began to suspect you of something like the incarnation of evil. On the other hand, anyone who would like to make you a pure Eulenspiegel is also wrong - because how much seriousness cannot always be gleaned from your works at the same time! And what an immense breadth, depth, and fullness of mastered material one can admire in it! Above all, you are - in your sense of humor - a cliché destroyer. The bad thing about today is precisely that they know nothing about their clichés, whereas in the past they were at least represented with conscious pride and the deepest faith. But the secret clichés are the most dangerous because they immunize us against any of their threats. This secrecy comes from the fact that we think we live in the Age of Enlightenment and thus of tolerance or constant criticism, when in fact we only identify certain attitudes with these words and thus blind ourselves to alternatives. So we speak of reason, rationality, empirical openness - but at the same time we restrict these noble terms to science, for example, and thus bracket everything that is outside of it as unreasonable, irrational and dogmatic. Alas, the history of our time, which seems so enlightened, reasonable and tolerant, is a long history of terrible clichés and dogmatism! The fresh wind that blew through the spiritual scene from you has delighted and encouraged me from the first time I heard from you.

My thoughts go back to those beautiful days when I first met you personally. It was at the Hochschultage in Alpbach, where we conducted a seminar on the philosophy of quantum mechanics together. I remember how a speaker tried diligently to clothe his statements in nothing but logical formulas in order to give them the appearance of precision and to cover their filthiness with the king's mantle of science. You listened to all this without moving your face, and when he had finished you said to him: "Now please translate all this into Latin for me." Or do you still remember how on a wonderful day - it had rained continuously before - we decided that we would rather be lazy and climb up to an alpine pasture than do quantum mechanics in the musty Jagerstüberl of our hotel and went from room to room with the participants of our course, to incite the others to such a revolutionary act, to the horror of most of the course instructors, who, according to the custom of the time, had to submit to humiliating votes and then follow us nolens volens with a sour expression? Everything finally ended in a wine party in some Alpbach pub, where we flirted with a mysterious Indian woman. And do you still remember our joint seminar at the Technical University in Berlin, where you came up with the brilliant idea of taking a longer break each time, during which you had sausages and beer served? Rarely have I seen students more eager to learn than I was then - probably not out of an obligation to say thank you for what was offered during the break, but rather because everything was so full of fun and in the best of moods.

So, old friend and archphilosopher with a humor worthy of Plato, ambassador of a gay science, accept my congratulations on your 65th birthday - nobody could offer them to you more sincerely.

Your Kurt