Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hampe, Michael
• Schoellner, Karsten

Titel

Wisdom in Individual, Political, and Cultural Transformations: Brecht, Nietzsche, and the Limits of Academic Philosophy

Ist Teil von

• Philosophy east & west, 2021-07, Vol.71 (3), p.624-643

Ort / Verlag

Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2021

Quelle

Project MUSE

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Hampe discusses about transformations and wisdom. Oblomov, the main character in Gontscharow's novel named after him, is an extraordinary person since he does not want to change, to develop, or to transform himself or his environment into something else or better. He stays the same by staying on his sofa. Robert Walser's Institute Benjamenta in his novel Jakob von Gunten does nothing with its pupils, or, perhaps, if it does do something to them it deletes their wishes to become a certain type of person. They are supposed to leave the school as ambitionless nils. Is Oblomov already wise? Is Walser's school the ideal school because it does not nourish but deletes any false ambitions in its pupils that would only make them unhappy in the end? Both books are so strange because it is normal for us today as individuals, and as members of institutions and societies, to try to transform ourselves and each other: individuals are transformed by educational institutions, by political situations, by cultures, and they feed back into these structures by their actions; individuals can transform institutions, political situations, and cultures.