Abstract
The paper deals with the motto for life of the Swiss poet-philosopher Ludwig Hohl (1904-1980): “Ou dei hôs paidas tokeonôn. My greatest intellectual achievement: At the end of my childhood, how I emancipated from my parents, in a few years. Without model or confirmation from the outside” (my translation). The Greek motto is from Heraclitus (Fr. 74 Diels/Kranz): “We should not [think or act] like ‘children of our parents’”. Heraclitus seems to say that we have to follow the cosmic rule of change without following the (inter alia religious) traditions. Hohl seems to follow this motto by freeing himself from what his parents thought: (1) His father was a stout Protestant pastor, while Hohl was a confessing atheist: He is, for example, an internalist with respect to questions of God and the meaning of life. There is no instance outside of us which makes life meaningful: God does not exist and only the power of love gives an answer to the question of the meaning of life. (2) Hohl also frees himself from his mother tongue: After 1937, he no longer used Swiss German, but only High German (Hochdeutsch) and French. Finally, he has changed the meaning of some German words, such as “Arbeit”, by giving them the wider connotation of a personal attunement with the cosmic law of change.
Ferber, Rafael