Außenseiter

The Sophists owe their place in the history of philosophy to Plato – but also their bad reputation. He uses them to profile his image of the philosopher against them. For him, sophistry is the ultimate in distance from philosophy while at the same time being close to philosophy; it is as related to this »as the wolf is to the dog«. I first trace the negative exaggeration of sophistry and the sophists in Plato, which is reflected in the ineradicable negative connotation of »sophist« and »sophistic«. The great intellectual-historical importance of the Sophists does not lie primarily in what they independently contributed to philosophy, but in the establishment of a conception of rhetoric as we encounter it in Isocrates, which became the most important educational institution in antiquity alongside and before philosophy.

The article deals with the question of the extent to which Friedrich Nietzsche tried out various roles of being an outsider as well as the extent to which he also wanted to be an insider again and again. Special emphasis is placed on the problem of »historical philosophizing«, to which Nietzsche committed himself in 1878.

Using the art-brut theory by Jean Dubuffet as a starting point, the text aims to give profile to the changes, the figure of the outsider has experienced since the collapse of the category of the avant-garde. Under the auspices of cognitive capitalism and with the help of social media, the concept of outsiderness has transformed itself from a figure of authenticity and resistance against oppressive social circumstances to the realization of the unmediated, tactless, and brutal universalization of particularities.

The text tries to base a theory of dilettantism on the definition of the dilettante as an insufficiently skilled underperformer who is well-aware of his shortcomings. Various measures designed to undermine the difference between professionals and dilettantes do not alter the fundamental distinction. Catherine Drinker Bowen’s »Friends and Fiddlers« (1935) is read as a moralizing self-testimony of musical amateurism that celebrates community and humility, against the imputed selfishness of the virtuoso.

The outsider as a phenomenon belongs to the realm of the social world. Nevertheless, the concept of outsiderness is also of interest from a cultural philosophical point of view, namely in two respects: First, a certain form of acquisitive thinking seems to have contributed to its emergence: the distinction between mine and yours. Secondly, in the conventional, purely functional view, the outsider himself is missing, i. e., the outsider as a figure.

The essay examines the topology associated with the figurative semantics of the »outsider« – it is one of boundaries and exclusion or even exclusion. However, after a period of booming use of the pejorative term »outsider« (as well as the positively connoted figure of the »dropout«) in social philosophy, the use of these terms is waning. Likewise, the associated idea of the social as a large and homogeneous »interior (space)« seems to be fading. Socio-philosophical topologies of the present time have become more complex – so the author’s thesis. Perhaps our models of the social are even no topologies at all, namely no more spatial figures.

Marc Rölli, Anthropologie dekolonisieren, Frankfurt a. M.: Campus 2021.Daniel Martin Feige, Die Natur des Menschen. Eine dialektische Anthropologie, Berlin: Suhrkamp 2022.Josef Früchtl, Demokratie der Gefühle. Ein ästhetisches Plädoyer, Hamburg: Meiner 2021.Hannes Bajohr / Sebastian Edinger (Hrsg.), Negative Anthropologie. Ideengeschichte und Systematik einer unausgeschöpften Denkfigur, Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2021.