Carlo Michelstaedter
Thought
Thought
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For Michelstaedter, common life is an absence of life, narrow and deluded as it is by the god of pleasure, which deceives man, promising pleasures and results that are not real, although man thinks they are. *Rhetoric*—that is, the conventions of the individual, the weak, and society—comprises social life, in which man overpowers nature and himself for his own pleasure. Only by living in the present as if every moment were the last can man free himself from the fear of death, and thus achieve *Persuasion*; that is, self\-possession. Resignation and adapting oneself to the world, for Michelstaedter, is the true death.

His thought has been recognized as a precursor of [Heidegger](/wiki/Martin_Heidegger "Martin Heidegger") in [philosophy](/wiki/Philosophy "Philosophy"), of [Wittgenstein](/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein "Ludwig Wittgenstein") in the critique of [language](/wiki/Language "Language"), of [Derrida](/wiki/Jacques_Derrida "Jacques Derrida") in [hermeneutics](/wiki/Hermeneutics "Hermeneutics").

There are three phases in the development of his philosophy.

Between 1905 and 1907 – his university years – Michelstaedter's thought was characterized by a decadent, "Dannunzian" influence, albeit with constant attention to the relationship between the individual and society, to everything social that impedes the individual's expression of singularity.

From late 1907 through 1908, Michelstaedter made a key contribution in Europe to the study of the tragic as a possible means of salvaging an immanent meaning, a resistant centre to the "crisis of the foundations" that had transformed existence. In 1908 Michelstaedter added his voice to those of Henrik Ibsen, Otto Weininger, Scipio Slataper, and Giovanni Amendola in Italy, who would turn to "tragic thought" as a response to the abyss opened by nihilism.

In 1909, catalysed by the task of writing a university thesis on the concepts of persuasion and rhetoric in the works of Plato and Aristotle, Michelstaedter's thought underwent a shift – one that would continue after he returned to Gorizia. His analysis now sought to provide the possibility of resisting the abstracting force that social consensus exercised on both philosophical and quotidian forms of thought. It is clear in his later writings that he understood that all philosophical approaches must be analysed in terms of how they are abstracted (alienated) from themselves within the structures of societal consensus. Building on this foundation, he came to understand culture as societal behavior rather than as something created by the subject; this paved the way for a series of reflections on the relationship between epistemology and ideological consensus that would have more in common with Lukács's ideas in History and Class Consciousness (1922\).


How does culture relate to societal behavior according to Michelstaedter?