Jean Tinguely, Martin Heidegger: Philosopher (1988). Scrap iron and pipes, aluminium wheel, electric motor. 160 × 106 × 61 cm, catalogue raisonné: Bischofberger 0816. Museum Tinguely, Basel, Donation: Niki de Saint Phalle (image used on the cover of Grammars of creation, book by George Steiner) In my view, [literature and philosophy] are under threat today. Literature has chosen the domain of small scale personal relationships, and no longer deals with great metaphysical themes. We no longer have writers like Balzac and Zola, geniuses of human comedy who could explore every domain. Proust also created an inexhaustible world, and Joyce’s Ulysses is still very close to Homer… Joyce is the bridge between the two great worlds of classicism and chaos. In the past, philosophy could also claim to be universal. The entire world was open to the thought of a philosopher like Spinoza. Today an immense part of the universe is closed to us. Our world is shrinking. Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. How can we claim to speak of human consciousness if we overlook what is most daring and imaginative? I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations? Culture is in danger of becoming provincial. Perhaps we need to rethink our entire conception of culture. I would like share with you an experience that I found infinitely moving: one evening, I was asked by one of my Cambridge colleagues with whom I was having dinner, a charming man who is also a Nobel prize laureate, for help in deciphering a text by Lacan, which he found baffling. I was very touched that a great scientist could be so modest when faced with the pride and haughtiness of a Byzantine master of obscurity… [...] The quality of silence is organically linked to the quality of language. You and I are sitting here, in this house surrounded by a garden, where there is no other noise other than the sound of our conversation. Here I can work. Here I can dream and try to think. Silence has become a huge luxury. People are living in a constant din. There is no more night in cities. Young people are afraid of silence. What will become of serious and difficult reading? Is it possible to read Plato while wearing a Walkman? I find this very worrying. New technologies have transformed the dialogue with books. They abridge them, simplify them, and connect them. Our minds have become “wired.” We do not read in the same way today. The phenomenon of Harry Potter stands out as an exception. All the world’s children, from Eskimos to Zulus, are reading and rereading this ultra-English saga, with its rich vocabulary and sophisticated syntax. It’s wonderful. Books are great bulwark for private life. England is still very respectful of privacy, a quality that can have its absurd side: you can have neighbours that live next door to each other for fifty years without ever exchanging a single word. And the cult of private life has an immense political value, because it is also a capacity for resistance.
“George Steiner, a certain idea of knowledge”, interview to Juliette Cerf (available in 10 languages) 
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