This article argues that the dominant role played by intellectuals in East Central Europe was motivated by a deeply felt Enlightenment missionary belief. This establishes affinities between them and the ancient Sophists, and the ambivalence of such a position is illustrated through the case of Georg Lukács. As examples of philosophers in the classical sense of the term, the article provides four short portraits: the Czech Jan Patoc ka, who argued that Europe as a culture is rooted in the care (...) of the soul; the Hungarian one-time friends Károly Kerényi and Béla Hamvas, and the Polish bishop-philosopher Karol Wojtyla, who became Pope John Paul II. The central thrust of the argument is that while Western thought is increasingly trapped in an ever more desperately radicalized critique of metaphysics, in East Central Europe – ironically, to a large extent in the footsteps of Nietzsche – the most important intellectual figures have sparked a return to metaphysics. (shrink)