Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz: Odo Marquard’s 33-Letter Joke About What Philosophers Can Do

Last updated: October 19, 2026

Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz, “the competence to compensate for incompetence”, is a word coined by the German philosopher Odo Marquard (1928 to 2015) to describe what is left of philosophy after the sciences have taken over most of its old territory. He used it in an essay collected in Abschied vom Prinzipiellen (Reclam, 1981), where he sums up the history of his discipline in a single sentence: philosophy was first competent for everything, then for some things, and “schließlich … nur noch für eines: nämlich für das Eingeständnis der eigenen Inkompetenz”, finally only for admitting its own incompetence.

Marquard meant it half as a joke and half as a thesis. At 33 letters it also shows what German does when nobody takes the keyboard away.

Three Nouns Walk Into a Word

The word is built from three German nouns: Inkompetenz (incompetence), Kompensation (compensation) and Kompetenz (competence), glued together with a linking “s”. Read from the end, as German compounds work, it means a competence for compensating incompetence.

German lets you stack nouns this way indefinitely, which is why the language produces words that look like typing accidents to English speakers. The shape of the word mirrors the claim: a competence wrapped around an incompetence, a little play with double negation. Marquard taught philosophy at the University of Giessen from 1965 until his retirement in 1993, according to the university’s obituary, and he spent much of his career writing essays rather than systems, so the form suits him.

From Competent for Everything to Competent for One Thing

Marquard’s thesis is that philosophy has lost one field after another to specialised disciplines, until the only competence left to it seems to be admitting what it cannot do. His word names the next step: a competence for dealing with, and making up for, that incompetence instead of denying it.

The sentence that launched the word starts like a textbook summary. “Erst war die Philosophie kompetent für alles; dann war die Philosophie kompetent für einiges”: first philosophy was competent for everything, then for some things. Anyone who has sat through a history of science lecture knows the backstory. What we now call physics, biology and psychology were long treated as parts of philosophy, and each gradually became an independent science with its own methods. Isaac Newton’s great work of 1687 was still called Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. With each departure, philosophy kept the questions that nobody else could answer conclusively, such as what we can know, how we should live, and what any of it means. On this reading the leftover role is still a role, and a discipline that knows roughly where its competence ends tends to be more trustworthy than one that pretends there is no end.

What “Competence” Actually Means Here

Marquard describes competence, with deliberate vagueness, as a match between three things: being responsible for something, being able to do it, and being willing to do it. His joke is that in philosophy the three have rarely lined up.

In the same essay, as quoted in René Dausner’s slides for a 2018 conference of the German Rectors’ Conference (HRK), he writes that competence “hat offenbar irgendwie zu tun mit Zuständigkeit und mit Fähigkeit und mit Bereitschaft”, “apparently somehow has to do with responsibility and with ability and with readiness”, and that it exists when the three coincide. With philosophy, he adds drily, that cannot necessarily be counted on, since there have been philosophies “für nichts zuständig, zu manchem fähig und zu allem bereit”: responsible for nothing, capable of some things, ready for anything. The incompetence compensation competence is the skill of working in that gap in good faith. Damian Peikert, writing about the concept for Heidelberg’s Marsilius Kolleg, sums up the attitude in one line: “Wenn schon inkompetent, dann wenigstens kompetent damit umgehen”, if you must be incompetent, at least handle it competently.

A Sceptic Who Wrote Like a Comedian

The joke in the word is deliberate. Marquard was a philosophical sceptic with a famous sense of humour, and his whole approach treats human beings as creatures who compensate for what they lack.

The Giessen obituary calls him a self-declared “Berufsskeptiker”, a professional sceptic, and a “Meister der kleinen Formen”, a master of short forms. In 1984 the German Academy for Language and Literature gave him its Sigmund Freud Prize for academic prose, praising his ability to put difficult thoughts so gracefully that the reader “das Fürchten verlernt”, unlearns fear. Compensation runs through his work. Building on Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen and his teacher Joachim Ritter, he described the human being as a homo compensator, a creature that makes up for its deficiencies through culture. He applied the same idea to the humanities: in his 1986 lecture “Über die Unvermeidlichkeit der Geisteswissenschaften” he calls them “erzählende Wissenschaften”, narrating sciences, that help compensate for the damage modernisation does. Seen in that context, the word is less a confession than a job description: lacking things and making up for them is the normal human condition, and philosophy is the discipline that does it with its eyes open.

How the Business World Turned It Into an Insult

Outside philosophy, the word has drifted towards the opposite meaning. In German career and management writing it often describes someone who is good at hiding that they cannot do their job.

The career site Karrierebibel, for example, defines it as “die Fähigkeit, die eigene Unfähigkeit durch geschickte Strategien zu überspielen”, the ability to cover up your own inability with clever strategies, and treats it as a problem that burdens colleagues. That reading is understandable, because the word sounds like a description of a bluffer. Karrierebibel even credits Marquard with that meaning, which flattens his point: for him, the competence lies in dealing openly with incompetence, not in hiding it. The bluffer’s version is closer to what Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, describes exposing in Athens: people who believed they knew things they did not. Marquard and Karrierebibel are describing the same gap between responsibility and ability; they just disagree about whether you are supposed to mention it.

So What Can a Philosopher Actually Do?

On Marquard’s account, the philosopher’s distinctive skill is locating the point where knowledge runs out and still saying something useful there.

That idea is older than Marquard by about 2,400 years. Socrates, in Plato’s Apology, claims to be wiser than others only in that he does not think he knows what he does not know, a stance we explain in our post on Socrates’ theory of knowledge. Marquard turned that ancient move into a modern job description. Anyone hoping it settles what jobs a philosophy degree leads to will be disappointed; Marquard was asking what philosophy is still for once the sciences have taken the measurable parts of the world. Read practically, that points to skills you can actually name: spotting where a question outruns the evidence, saying so without bluffing, and still making a useful distinction. That he packed it into a single absurdly long word was, presumably, part of the answer.

For the original version of admitting what you do not know, read Socrates’ Theory of Knowledge: What He Meant by Knowing Nothing.