Philosophies of the Modern Age: The Great Lives of the "Shoeshiners of Posterity"

"Philosophers (the so-called kings of the world) are in truth only the shoeblacks of posterity," Georg Lichtenberg states with acerbic insight in one of his aphorisms, perhaps having in mind Jacob Brucker's Historia critica philosophiae, published in the same year in which he was born, 1742, which had presented the history of philosophy as a progressive affirmation of the conquests of reason. This enduringly successful prosopography, unlike Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy, held that philosophy should always be shaped, in its form and content, "by the personality and character of the individual."

One might be tempted to see a Sainte-Beuvism ante litteram in this choice to explain a thought by first considering the life of its author. A decision that, when not surreptitious or disguised, appears far from reprehensible, much less unusual, if one considers Greek and Latin literary civilization, where every biography contained a certain conception of philosophy; but above all, it was scientifically legitimate; indeed, commendable. Such a method of inquiry would indeed allow one to avoid the double ignominy of sterile erudition and false familiarity, as well as to restore to an author—as Gilles Deleuze would say—"a bit of that joy, that strength, that political life and love that he knew how to bestow, to invent." Although not always possible, philosophical biography, in its aim to facilitate understanding a given individual as a philosopher, would ultimately be "a good thing"—as James Conant stated, with Anglo-Saxon succinctness, discussing the relationship between philosophy and biography decades ago. This is now confirmed in the volume, edited by Giuseppe D'Anna and Gianluca Garelli, "Philosophies of the Modern Age," recently published by Einaudi. This multi-authored work introduces the history of European philosophical modernity, starting with the inspirations that inspired its humanistic-Renaissance origins, and concludes with an examination of the speculative tendencies that animated the "Age of Goethe," through a detailed illustration of the most relevant authors and concepts, including a presentation and annotation of each philosopher's most significant texts. Indeed, the reader finds himself assisted in his study by the "perspective candor of the commentary": by a judicious leveling, which never gives in to the didactic simplifications of pedagogical welfare, from which it also distances itself by establishing spaces for theoretical reflection that are as sober as they are essential.

Such are the biographical profiles that seal each of the three parts that compose the work, and which not only seem to coincide in many ways with a recit, in the wake of a tradition that begins with Diogenes Laertius and continues to Pierre Michon, but also, by pouring an author's work and thought into life, allow us to recover for the term "biography" a meaning, consistent with its etymology, which ensures that the self is discovered to be only a "paper self." Since "subjectivity," as the seat of the Modern Age, finds itself caught up in a series of supervening events, unforeseen events that increasingly lead it elsewhere, to the "land of cloak and shadow": deconstructed, disunited, diverted, without support, without foothold. A subjectivity in farewell and in announcement, which reflects the passage from the classical age, inclined to prepare man to know himself, to the modern age, prey to the disturbing fear that man inspires in his own ego.

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