He felt how needles were put into his body at night. Stuff just flew, hop, out of his backpack. He roamed by India, slept with farmers and in the open air – until he finally got back his money and passport and could turn home exhausted.
Demons were the Amsterdam professor Otto Duintjer on the heels, he said after returning to the Netherlands. He had spent weeks in an Ashram in the Himalayas in an exceptional state of consciousness, had jumped from rock to rock and was in heavenly harmony – to a power struggle after the death of his teacher, the guru babaji, and he was awarded a glimpse into the more dark forces that the universe and populated. He was deported by the new ‘owners’ and had to save himself.
That was in the mid -1980s. Duintjer (1932-2020) was then professor of metaphysics at the University of Amsterdam, where the philosophy bubbled and sometimes overcooked. Since the 1970s, explosively grew in student numbers, the field was in turmoil, due to austerity and reorganisations of Minister Deetman. It had to be stricter and more businesslike, philosophy students also had to learn another academic profession if possible.
On that fracture surface of philosophical suite and new business, Duintjer was one of the most striking appearances in Dutch academic philosophy. He wrote a masterful dissertation about Kant en Heidegger (1966), but after a series of retirement experiences, it was interested in Eastern philosophy and spirituality – and ended up in India. Not that he became ‘floating’. On the contrary, Duintjer remained a subtle thinker, at home in both the analytical work of Wittgenstein and Kant and in the impenetrable being mysticism of the German Martin Heidegger.
A critical representative of the new age, that of conditional financing and faculty mergers, was Wouter Oudemans (1951-2024), colleague and in a sense a pupil of Duintjer, with whom he shared a fascination for Heidegger and disagreement about ‘modern age’. Once a professor in Leiden, he was considered the black sheep of academic philosophy, a crossbar who collected a fanatic crowd of followers.
About and from both striking philosophers have now appeared posthumously new books that give a sharp picture of the time they philosophized – and against which they are opposed.
Clear and uncritical
Around Dao From philosopher Woei-Lien Chong is both an extensive representation of Duintjer’s work and a tribute to the philosopher who died in 2020. Chong, that earlier Philosophy with the butterfly stroke (2016) and Learn to navigate (2024) wrote about Daoism (or Taoism) got to know Duintjer and had a series of conversations with him. She gives extensive, clear and – that must be said – uncritical summaries of his books Around rules (1977), Around metaphysics (1988) and Hints for a diagnosis (1988). The latter was Duintjer’s confrontation with lace and the ‘rational empirical consciousness’ that, according to him, has mastered the modern world since Descartes and Kant and that he tried to rise.
In addition, her book is a beautiful biographical sketch of Duintjer that does not brush away the frictions in his life: his farewell to faith, the struggle with his bisexuality, the difficult relationship with his daughter (who wrote a key novel about him). And so that fight with demons in India – a ‘psychotic’ episode for others, he would say later. He had given him insight into the existence of evil forces, but also the hope that they are not ultimate reality and at most are ‘admitted’ by what he called ‘the good’.
It turned around that source or ‘dimension’, which he also called ‘the inexhaustible’. A space ‘around’ every concrete, rational reality to which we as a child still have some access, which gradually clogs up, but for which we can again become sensitive. For Duintjer that was a mystical ‘dimension’ that could be met with ‘groundless trust’.
And which can also be physically experienced through all kinds of spiritual training. Duintjer, writes Woei-Lien Chong, always saw the importance of ‘bodywork’, such as meditative exercise, yoga and tai chi. He distrusted the spiritual pride of Eastern and other masters who have everything to do with the body want to leave as quickly as possible on his way to ‘the higher’. He also remained skeptical about gurus after his Indian pilgrimage. In the 1980s he wrote a admonishing letter to the Bhagwan (with whom he never started) to keep the master in the lesson.
In their heyday they had a guru -like attraction for students
After Hits for a diagnosis No more strict philosophical work of Duintjer appeared. He did, however, write a well -arranged series of articles about spirituality – and a about Eros at Plato – that were collected in the bundle Inexhaustible is reality (2002), of which a posthumous reprint has now appeared.
Is that still philosophy? Chong makes rake connections with Chinese Daoism, the doctrine of philosophers such as Laozi and Zhuangzi over ‘De Weg’ (Dao). Those similarities are countless, which agreed: the attention for the subtle ‘energy’ in everything, from nature to one’s own body, the intuition of a cosmic game that goes beyond the ratio, the confidence that everything is ultimately ‘good’. Only those similarities are so wide that you can also lay them with Buddhist devotion or, even better, with Christian mystics as the 14th-century Meister Eckhart.
But what can you say about the ‘space around all rules’? That remains the dilemma of philosophers who seek a comprehensive reality beyond all the concrete and finite manifestations, which can still be said with rational means.
Does that also apply to Wouter Oudemans, of whom the last work has now been published posthumously?
Personal and in style the spotbar seems contrary Oudemans the opposite of the distinguished ‘Freelance mystic’ Duintjer. Yet there are numerous similarities. Both were philosophers who ran against the boundaries of the world of knowledge and experience in which we find ourselves and who did not do that for less than everything: with Duintjer the ‘inexhaustible’, with Oudemans a tough ‘mother’ nature, the indifferent cosmic game of energetic erupties. Both were looking for what Oudemans calls ‘excessiveness’ (a characteristic of ‘real’, European philosophy).
Both also had an esoteric, guru-like attraction to students in their heyday or not against will and thanks, which often seemed to be followers. The rivalry between haughty ‘Oudemansians’ and other, more modest spirits at Leiden University was notorious for years.
From Real philosophy (2012) Oudemans published a series of quirky books that thought about the end of Western philosophy – according to him the only one who deserves the name. The field had become meaningless because of the scientific revolutions of the 17th century and later. The last major revolutions are those of Darwinism – of the struggle for survival To the selfish genes of Richard Dawkins – and the laws of thermodynamics. Everything that exists is a finite game of energetic eruptions that flare up and extinguish.
Real philosophy – according to him something very different from the ‘philosophology’ that controls university and public philosophy – only arises when such an old world implodes, existing language and thinking and a new world arises that we can at most explore the contours ‘resonate’.
In posthuma Far from balanced -A title that refers to his fascination with entropy but also looks a self-portrait-Oudemans discusses two ‘excessive’ European philosophers that were on such a fracture surface, Heraclitus (ca. 500 BC) and René Descartes (1596-1650). At Heraclitus, the old ‘meaning world’ of gods and myths crumbles and rises from the universal ratio.
That gets new speed with the ‘I think, so I am’ from Descartes, the beginning of a scientific and technological way of thinking that the world controlled for a long time – and that is now imploding before our eyes. In a what he sarcastically calls ‘entertaining’ accumulation of crises, the climate crisis first, but also that of migration.
And then Heraclitus appears again. The Greek is not only the father of the logosor in Latin ratiobut with his oracle saying that “the fire” the source of everything is also of modern thermodynamics. Everything that exists falls prey to entropy, the fire.
Oudemans’ own work, which over the years ended in radically disappointed post-humanism. Already in his dissertation The divided man (1980) Him set a sense of human finiteness and existential split, which gradually became deeper.
Ultimately, the question is what you can handle with their work, if you are beyond the first fright or shock
What is left then?
Not much. “I am superfluous,” says Oudemans himself. Everything is decaying, now also the rational modern world – and therefore the philosophy. We can only see the contours of the new meaning world and ‘new humanity’. In the meantime, Oudemans makes himself a kind of seer, who thinks he knows more than others. But, apart from the question of what physicists would think of his representation of thermodynamics, is his enlargement not a finite, highly personal interpretation, which ultimately does not last? Or even a cynical form of Wishful Thinkinga sort of crushing ease?
Despite his similarities with Duintjer, the differences here are just as great. At Duintjer, the surrender, full of groundless trust, is on the ‘good’, a theme among mystics. Nihilistic resignation prevails at Oudemans, in the sobered realization that we are part of an indifferent nature.
In his politically tinted writings, that results in a radical-right social Darwinism and the conviction that Europe will perish if it does not know how to protect itself against the barbaric outside world. Like Oudemans the romance and, in a sinister passage Real philosophythe loss of Germany in World War II saw the last resistance against the advance of the liberal, counting thinking. That is miles from the spiritual humanism of Duintjer, who was looking for excessive inspiration outside of Europe.
In the end, both philosophical outsiders raise the question of what you can handle with their work, if you are beyond the first shock or shock. As the brilliant American language philosopher Donald Davidson stated, when the darkness of Heidegger was mentioned: very interesting, but Where do we go from there? Yes, nowhere.
Well, Duintjer might say with an amused smile: we don’t have to go either, because we are already there. Oudemans also seems to have found an end point for his thinking in the inexorable – and for him also wry -comfortable – thermodynamics.
Is this still philosophy? Not in the sense of arguing and clarifying what we think we know or understand as is common in professional philosophy. Insight into ‘everything that is’ as expressed by this unlikely duo professors – as different as they are – leads to a kind of wisdom of life rather.
With one person is full of confidence in ‘the good’, with the other it is cosmic fatalism. In both cases, this is for philosophy in a more academic sense, who tries to reason or understand something with rational arguments, no starting point, rather an end point.