Abstract

Er(r)go...

...humanistic levitations continue. Somebody is heralding the disappearance of the Thinking subject but these hopes are futile; from every pore crawls out some kind of thinking: independent thinking, critical thinking, cartographic thinking, abusive thinking, positive thinking, rhizomatic thinking, lateral thinking, spatial thinking, logocentric thinking, totalising thinking, patriarchal thinking, tenuous thinking and insecure thinking, ontological thinking, meandering thinking, free-floating thinking, impractical thinking, open thinking and unclosed thinking, thinking of Being (surely!), metaphorical thinking, relational thinking, moral thinking, network thinking, finally – who would have thought – thinking about human thought. All this, wrapped up in thought canonicity, reaches out to the prematter of thought. Luckily, to the rescue comes un thinking; what a relief for humankind!
A thinking reader will most likely be struck by the unexpected downpour of various truths and wisdoms; all one has to do is to temporarily activate un-thinking and go deeper and deeper. Culture is like foam. Humans have much bigger brains than insects and octopuses. Humanities study extremely complex phenomena. Rhinoceros’ horns are not aphrodisiacs. One cannot be partly free and partly enslaved. Each homotopia is essentially a heterotopia which had shed its heterotopic nature. The Anthropocene is thought-provoking (again!). Non-humans are pedagogically significant but only insofar as they remain in the hands of the humans. The concept of spirit is passé, and one should avoid it anyway. Contemporary humanism is quite schizophrenic. An attempt to offer the final answer as for why we need pedagogy could only be considered as arrogant. It is not so easy to get to the truth. Humanities allow for ambiguities. There’s no escaping from what’s human. It’s easy to turn neutral observation connected with education into surveillance. What we need most of all is a disciplining attitude. Culture, as secondary nature, is a product of primary nature. People have always lived in a post-truth era. Art can inspire management. Both the past and the future have lost their credibility. The humanities cannot be completely non-anthropocentric. And finally: diligence is the only virtue separating research from swindle. Today, we are witnessing the end of philosophy and, simultaneously, the end of the humanities.

Well now, philosophers have replaced the sages. Yet the wisdom of the humanities does not obscure the more or less dramatic events: death stops cutting deals with life, St. Januarius’ blood is boiling, man falls into the abyss of the reduction of being, meanwhile, a bunch of bizarre individuals are strolling leisurely down the humanities’ grand boulevards. Cheerful pessimism gets mixed up with gloomy optimism: conceptless humanity in materialistic amok does without books, knowledge and reflection rob experience of strength and depth, human kind is put to the test of humanity, houses of books are being emptied, here volumes get dusty, there the wind dusts off some values, life sciences deal with spirit, a certain space turns out to be the space of space. What a nice surprise: one of the authors refuses to be arrogant. Unfortunately, outrageous things happen, too: the subject is unable to legally experience elementary sexual fulfilment!

Interesting, though not always trustworthy individuals visit these pages: a non-mighty man, an unlovable womaniser, the Fallen Master, hordes of unreflective people, a Venetian hairdresser, a cat riding on a scooter with Napoleon’s hat, smoking a pipe, eulogists of the humanities etherising themselves in speculative mirages, withered bodies permeated with the odour of senility, the Author-Remaining-Human, iguanas, sea cows and parrots, an ageing dandy, a man of books (finally!). And in the background, sneaking off out of a memory-consciousness attic, as we have that one, too, phenomena habitually expected and unexpected: ruination of the University, an outpour of pointless classes, restraint – inherent in human mind, textually profiled processual implantations (eh?), elenctic tackle, spiritual sectarianism, galloping quantification of the world, a wallet stuffed with bank loan money, laboratory of anger, deadly deception, maieutic art, ever-present nervousness, the element of raw life, kitsch, trash and the overflow of intellectual trumpery, pride and lust, spiral knottiness, depression of burned-out teenagers, love exiled to the antipodes, rooty redoing, fundamental split of human existence, toxic ethos of vulnerability. And on top of that, some other particular disciplines: humanistic humanities, anthropological anthropology, neurophilosophy, and even neurophenomenology. Aristotle and Husserl are already dancing by the fire, hopsasa!   All these complications, entanglements and intricacies lead to one plain and simple conclusion, quote: only the humanities can protect us against the degrading influence of instrumental reason and the fetishization of the technical. We are in need of far-reaching changes in the perception of the humanities, the full recognition of their difference from the sciences, and different principles of their evaluation, organisation, and financing.   Wojciech Kalaga https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4874-9734   PS The questions were many, but one seems particularly noteworthy: what exactly is water?