Odo Marquard

Some concepts from Odo Marquard and in particular his collection of essays and talks, In Defense of the Accidental. Marquard is, as he says of himself, a philosophic belle-lettrist: he is not a theorist or a philosopher. But maybe we can think of him as a weak historical phenomenologist. At any rate, he's a conservative, and most of all in his refusal of any kind of materialism. This means he grants a concept like capitalism no explanatory force. But since in the end he accepts modernity, he's a rather qualified conservative by German standards anyway. He isn't engaged in commentary on other people's works, or in obvious debate with other philosophers. Although his concepts develop out of Weber, Gehlen, Schleher, Koselleck, Runge, Ritter, Heidegger, Blumenberg...he's not a disciple in the sense that Zizek is a disciple of Lacan for instance. In the end he's in Hume's tradition I suspect: a skeptic, looking for institutions and practices to control a social order that threatens to submerge us. It's a very different mode of writing than that which has currency in the anglophone academy. At its best its sparky and original, at worst its sermonic, somewhat obvious and cliched.

Anyway: some concepts

"Acceleration conformism": accommodation to the speeding up of history under modernity. The notion of acceleration is developed by Burkhardt. And acceleration conformism has some rather highly mediated consequences, and in particular a hanging on to continuities and traditions. It also produces notions like universal history in particular, which attempts to regularise acceleration. (The problem here is: what exactly accelerates?).

His defence of metaphysics: it is because metaphysics is interminably incomplete, raises more questions than it can possibly answer and so is open to ceaseless debate that we should resist the temptation to ditch it.

"Tribunalization": this is a by product of Marquard's claims about theodicy. For Marquard, theodicy is one basis for modern secular thought, a notion that spins off from Blumenberg's (rather unhistorical) ideas about gnosticism. For Marquard, around 1700, traditional justifications of God's creation (and in particular for God's tolerance of suffering and evil) mutated into a demand for justification of creation itself. The key text in this move being Leibnitz's Theodicy in which 1) God is removed as an agent upon worldly events and 2) everything that happens in the world happens for the best. This latter notion depends on what Marquard thinks of as "tribunalization of the world" (ie. a judging of it from inside it). (But note that this idea exists in a certain neo-Platonism: see Richard Hooker.) Here Leibniz also introduces a concept of compensation: the evil in the world is outweighed by, or is compensated for by, the good. This form of thought will become common in modernity. Man himself becomes the object of the tribunal or of critique and escapes by anointing himself his own redeemer through the notion of progress (which Marquard hates).

"The age of unworldliness [Weltfremdheit]": this is an expansion of the acceleration conformism notion. Because history now move too quickly to provide the terms for self-understanding and analysis, (because where we start from in a project will never provide the terms for its completion), thought is driven into strange aporias of which one of the most important is: modernisation as progress versus modernisation as fall. There is no getting beyond such aporias which constitute "unworldliness' or an estrangement from the world. But the acceleration of the world also infantalises us, since experience is replaced by information which needs to be taken on trust as our primary basis for knowledge. This infantalization, and the emphasis on life as continual learning and schooling is one of the reasons for our doubleness in relation to the world. In the age of unworldliness both fiction and scepticism become more common. Fictions because (as 'models') we increasingly needs props to simplify the conditions of existence (a version of Vaihanger' neo-Kantianism), and hence it becomes increasingly difficult to disentangle the fictive from the real.