Henk Oosterling (1952) is a Rotterdam philosopher and writer with an impressive track record. In 1985 he graduated cum laude from Erasmus University with a thesis on the work of Michel Foucault.
Oosterling also studied Japanese in Leiden and is a gifted practitioner of the swordsmanship art kendo - with which he became Dutch champion in 1983. In 1996, he obtained his doctorate cum laude on French differential thinking and was awarded the Erasmus Research Prize for his dissertation. He was associate professor of philosophy at EUR until 2018. Despite this impressive academic career, Oosterling is by no means a mere man of theory.
You were recently knighted for your community involvement and service. What was that like?
Well, that knighthood was a curious event. You are taken somewhere and suddenly you're standing there and they pin a thing on your chest. You do it for the people who have been arranging this for years. Of course, it's a nice summation of your merits at the end of your career, but actually, there are plenty of other things in my trophy case that I think are more important. Like the Laurenspenning for my cultural activities, or the Lof der Zotheid Speld, because I am a voice in Rotterdam. And then, there is the Van Praag Prize, which I received for my entire body of work, and the Enlightened Society Award from the Shambhala Buddhists. Actually, that knighthood is kind of the crowning glory of all those other awards.
You are a great connoisseur of Foucault's work. In addition to philosophy, you also share a love of Japan with him. You are even a Dutch kendo champion. Coincidence?
Between my kandidaats and my doctorate, I went to Japan to study kendo. But at the time I considered it more as a break with philosophy than a continuation. I wanted to get more control over things. From the moment I started publishing about it, I suddenly realized that kendo and philosophy were parallel trajectories. Then it really took on a true philosophical value as well.
"The crux is that I am so eager to learn that I don't care about theory or practice."
Does the same apply to Foucault's philosophy and your civic engagement? Is theory intertwined with practice?
I mean, there you go. What exactly is theory and practice? How do they join together? I think my social engagement comes from a certain attitude. For me, the moment you stop learning, you stop living. Theory and practice are inseparable when you learn. You can then pick it apart again and start writing articles in your ivory tower, or you can think: let's put what I learned into practice.
The crux is that I am so eager to learn that I don't care about theory or practice. To go back to kendo for a moment: theory is of no use when you are facing a sword. There is theory, but only before and after. Or else: theory is embodied - you think with your body. And of course, in the West, that's a pretty unorthodox idea. But every parking method makes that clear.
With Foucault, you read that society teaches the body to think and act normally. When you examine this, you understand that you are being set up. Because that narrative imposed from above is the prevailing 'discourse'. That excludes certain groups. These groups do not belong or are not 'normal'. For Foucault, discourse includes both theory and practice. And then something very interesting happens: by thinking about it you get a sharper sense of the practice and you see the mechanisms of exclusion. I experience that as an appeal to change that injustice.
What message would you like to share in that context?
Students today live in a different world than students fifteen years ago. Being critical now is also of a different order than it was fifteen years ago. Now we are completely embedded in communication systems, screens and smartphones. It takes a critical attitude to make sure you are not completely wrapped up by media. I already described this as media literacy back in 2000.
When I introduce a term like eco-wisdom, it has to do with the way we consume uncritically without regard to the disruption of ecosystems. The naturalness with which we move through the world has become meaningless. Now everything revolves around AI, deep fake, data, so ultimately your smartphone. We live our lives to the measure of our means or media. When I call that a mediocre life, a lot of people start protesting.
Erasmus University's thinking has also changed. They had their backs to the city until 2009. When Aboutaleb became mayor, EUR turned to face the city. When your back is to the city, you can criticize the city. If you stand facing the city, then you're part of the discourse that you criticize and therefore you criticize yourself. You become part of the problem yourself. Yet most people prefer to use the time-honored us/them logic which always puts the problem on the other person. That logic, that discourse is disrupted from within and a new discourse with a different logic in which philosophy perhaps becomes ecosophy, is gaining ground.
Will I live to see the wide acceptance of the new logic? No idea, I hope so ... but until then we continue working on it.
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