Thought had long waited to debase itself. But someone sufficiently godless was needed to help it along. Someone who had “the taste and the genius for provocation,” like Saint Paul, Nietzsche, and Joseph de Maistre, but who dared take a step that had so far been avoided: to lump together metaphysics and mad ravings, and buckle them from one end to the other with an elegant clasp.⁵²⁸ The task fell to a teacher at Madame Gropius’s school for young girls from respectable families, who wrote in the Berlin gazettes in the years just before 1848 under the name Stirner.

Many later declared what many others had suspected, without daring to say it—that metaphysics consisted, generally speaking, of mad ravings. An idea that suited the coarseness of the times. More disarming was another idea, to which scarce attention was given: that mad ravings could be metaphysical. Stirner made a generous contribution to forever muddying the waters of thought. After him, the distinction between who is a philosopher and who is not would be a simple administrative consideration. Implicit in every phrase of Wittgenstein is a contempt for philosophy as a profession. Each morning, between five and eight, Valéry put down his thought experiments in dozens of notebooks but was careful not to mention them during the day in the salons, at the Académie, or dining out. Musil camouflaged himself among the scientists who, with a faint hint of a smile, frequented Diotima’s cocktails of the Spirit. Mad ravings now coated everyone with benevolence, harboring them in its deep crevices.

They said they were witnessing the advent of disenchantment. But for how many centuries (some even spoke of millennia) had such disenchanted continued to survive! And the world carried on: it remained enchanted. Stirner describes how a disenchanted being ought to live—and his irony stems from the observation that such a being does not exist. If it could exist, it would be classified by disappointed scientists as a survival from ancient times: mute, violent, unpredictable, protean. With no ascertainable identity. Unique.

The division of people between Platonists and Aristotelians can also be put in another way, using perhaps a more accurate distinction: people can be divided between those who think the world is governed by magic and those who don’t. Among those who don’t, many make the mistake of believing that magic is some practical illusion (though an interesting prelude to science). But Wittgenstein made it clear: the magic is not how the world is, but that it is.