I've always enjoyed turning sentences around. At school, there was the novella "Clothes make the man", where my uncle made coats and knew better: people make clothes. At university, we learned that it is not history that makes people, but that it is people who make history. And when the duo of the American James Watson and the Englishman Francis Crick presented the elegant double helix as the structure of genetic material, the Briton said that they had not made the double helix, but that the double helix had made the two men.
In Robert Musil's novel "The Man Without Qualities", the main character ponders the relationship between people and truth, only to come to the conclusion that it is not people who pursue the truth, but that, on the contrary, the truth drives people on. And when it comes to the big issues, Karl Marx's statement that being determines consciousness can first be quoted and then reversed, because it is consciousness that determines being. The storming of the Bastille did not take place because people were hungry (being), but because an idea had matured (consciousness). Anyone thinking about the human condition today may well come to the conclusion that there must be limits to growth. But optimists are more likely to trust science to bring about a growth of limits. And while you are doing this, you should refrain from using your cell phone, because otherwise you could end up being controlled by it without being able to control it yourself. When a famous philosopher was not habilitated by a faculty, one could read that it was not the scholar at the university who failed, but the university in him. The dispute was about the question of whether science can explain the mysteriousness of the world, but the applicant thought that the opposite was true. Of course, there is a lot of dialectics in this game, for example because not only does a servant need a master, but because someone can only be a master if they have a servant. And secularized people now know that not only does God create them, but they also create him. But they have to be careful: Although people need nature, nature does not need them.
