#HERMES TRICKSTER PROFESSIONAL#

Hopefully, this article can make it transparent that between their works and ideas there are more than superficial similarities.

#HERMES TRICKSTER PROFESSIONAL#

Michel Serres was by all means trained as a philosopher, and yet the gatekeepers of professional philosophy failed to accept him as such. Yet, Voegelin insisted on being a philosopher, and in the broader scale of the matter – from where much of what is today considered as ‘professional philosophy’ certainly would qualify as cheap and meaningless sophistry – was certainly right. Introduction: Another Philosopher Beyond Contemporary PhilosophiesĮric Voegelin was not trained as a philosopher, and many – if not most – professional philosophers in our days would not consider himself as such. Third, Serres also considered as fundamental for philosophy both the return, beyond modern rationalism, to Antiquity, to classical reason, just as the use of literature for philosophising.

Second, apart from championing the thinking of Leibniz, he repeatedly attacked modern rationalism at its core, arguing – just as Voegelin did repeatedly, even against his life-long friend Alfred Schutz (about this, see my review of the Voegelin-Schutz correspondence in the 23 and 30 January 2013 issues of VoegelinView) – that the Descartes – Kant/ Hegel – Husserl lineage is by no means the only tradition in philosophical thought (in order to avoid misunderstandings, this was by no means done in Derrida’s way: Derrida was actually his university classmate and a close friend for a time, but then any reference to Derrida completely disappears from Serres’s life and work). His reward for such audacity was not missing: he was prevented to teach philosophy, being assigned instead a post in the history of science. First, he wrote his dissertation on Leibniz, one of the recurrent philosophical ‘heroes’ of Voegelin as well, and there explicitly argued that Leibniz and not Descartes should be considered as the central, founding figure of modern rationalistic philosophy. It is enough to mention three basic facts about Michel Serres. Serres by the way came to Stanford on the invitation of René Girard, who was his life-long friend, and the connections between Voegelin and Girard by now are well established, among others due to the work of Stefan Rossbach. While I do not know about any direct contact, even a distant reference, between Voegelin and Serres, given the academic conditions of the second part of the last century, this should not be surprising –though actually Serres taught in Stanford from 1984, so they missed each other really just by an inch, just as it happened in the case of Foucault, who gave a talk in Stanford in 1979, but Voegelin could not attend due to sickness. This, however, I hope, should not be difficult.

It remains to be argued why this article, on Michel Serres, should be interesting for the readers of VoegelinView. Having been born and raised in Hungary, I’m not new to such developments, but we should not let unchecked, in so far as it is in our ability, the increased sovietisation of our world – not to use a stronger word. All this is just another sad indication of the current state of academic-intellectual life, where due to a combination of ideological and actual-political reasons not just academic principles, but even the minimal degree of courtesy is disrespected. Then, here again, the editor changed, and though I even made the – minor – revisions required for publication, the new editor simply and repeatedly failed to reply to my correspondence, just as it happened with the author of the review. Here, the article was again commissioned by another journal which also commissioned a review on one of my recent books, even asked me whom I could suggest doing the review. However, in the meanwhile he got sick, could not finalise the issue, the editors changed, and the new editors surgically removed just my article from the special issue. The guest editor, a Canadian sociologist sympathetic to the work of Voegelin – thus, a rare one of its kind – much liked the article, and it was accepted for publication.

There, the article was commissioned for a special issue of a journal – let the veil of forgetfulness fall over its name. The background story to this article is not so different from that of my article published on Novemin VoegelinView, not told there.

Hermes trickster