Essentialismus als Strategie

Abstract

KEYNES: [...] Let me tell you a little story. There was once a young man who dreamed of reducing the world to pure logic. And because he was a very clever young man, he actually managed to do it. And when he had finished, he stood back and admired his handiwork. It was beautiful: a world purged of imperfection and indeterminacy, like countless acres of gleaming ice stretching silently to the horizon. Each object in this world sparkled in the purity of its being, each thing cleanly demarcated from its neighbours. So the clever young man looked around at the new world he had created, and decided to set out and explore it. He took one step forward and fell flat on his back. You see, he had forgotten about friction. The ice was smooth and level and stainless, but you couldn’t walk there. So the young man sat down and viewed his marvellous creation and wept bitter tears. And after some years had passed, he grew up into a wise old man, who came to understand that roughness and ambiguity and indeterminacy aren’t imperfection — they’re what make things work. He wanted to run and dance; so he had to dig up all those gleaming acres of ice until he discovered the rough ground beneath them. And the words and things scattered up on this ground were all battered and tarnished and ambiguous; and the wise old man saw that this was the way things were. But something in him was still homesick for the ice, where everything was radiant and absolute and relentless. And so, though he liked the idea of the rough ground, he couldn’t bring himself to live there. So now he was marooned between earth and ice, at home in neither; and this was the cause of all his grief.1