- Lived:
- Born 1947 · Karlsruhe, Germany; still living and writing there
- Tradition:
- Contemporary Continental philosophy; the German essayist line of Nietzsche — philosophy as literature, provocation, and diagnosis
- The Big Idea:
- Modern people suffer from "enlightened false consciousness" — they see through everything and change nothing — and the cure is not more critique but a new picture of how humans actually live: inside shared bubbles of intimacy, and inside practices by which we endlessly reshape ourselves.
- In their words:
- "Enlightened false consciousness" — his three-word diagnosis of the modern cynic.
- If you remember one thing:
- He is the philosopher who went to an Indian ashram, came back to write the best-selling German philosophy book since the war, and spent the next four decades arguing that humans are not thinking things but practicing, sphere-building, self-shaping animals.