In Eristische Dialektik, published after his death and widely read as Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten, the art of being right, Arthur Schopenhauer lists tricks for winning an argument. The last one is to go personal. Beim Persönlichwerden aber verlässt man den Gegenstand ganz, und richtet seinen Angriff auf die Person des Gegners: man wird also kränkend, hämisch, beleidigend, grob. In going personal, one leaves the subject entirely and directs the attack at the opponent’s person. One becomes hurtful, spiteful, insulting, rude. German Wikipedia summarizes: the argument against the person is a way out when the opponent seems to be winning.
philosophy
The Child in Front of the Class
In summer 1943, after his arrest, the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer worked on a fragment titled Was heißt: die Wahrheit sagen?, what does it mean to tell the truth? Its best-known example: Ein Kind wird von seinem Lehrer vor der Klasse gefragt, ob es wahr sei, dass sein Vater oft betrunken nach Hause komme? A child is asked by his teacher in front of the class whether it is true that his father often comes home drunk. The child denies it. For Bonhoeffer, the denial is untrue, and yet it also expresses a truth. The family is an order of its own, which the teacher had no right to enter. The guilt for the lie falls on the teacher alone.
No Right to Lie Out of Kindness
In 1797 Immanuel Kant published Über ein vermeintes Recht aus Menschenliebe zu lügen, on a supposed right to lie out of love of mankind, in the Berlinische Blätter. He answered Benjamin Constant, who had argued that one may lie to a murderer who asks whether our friend has fled into our house. Kant disagreed. Wahrhaftigkeit in Aussagen, die man nicht umgehen kann, ist formale Pflicht des Menschen gegen jeden. Truthfulness in statements that one cannot avoid is a person’s formal duty toward everyone. A teaching unit for grade 10 ethics classes is built on the case.
Serving the Matter
On 7 November 1917 Max Weber gave his lecture Wissenschaft als Beruf, science as a vocation, to students in a Munich bookshop. In it he said: „Persönlichkeit“ auf wissenschaftlichem Gebiet hat nur der, der rein der Sache dient. In the field of science, only the person who serves the matter purely has personality.
The False Promise
In his Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten of 1785, Immanuel Kant considers a man who sieht sich durch Not gedrungen, Geld zu borgen, is forced by need to borrow money. He promises to pay it back, mit dem Vorsatz, es nicht zu halten, with the intention of not keeping it. Kant asks what would happen if everyone did this. It würde das Versprechen und den Zweck, den man damit haben mag, selbst unmöglich machen, would make promising itself impossible, and every promise would be laughed at as eitles Vorgeben, empty pretense.
Discretion in the Ethics Class
A teaching unit in the journal Ethik & Unterricht (2/2013) asks pupils to work with Georg Simmel’s essay Psychologie der Diskretion of 1906. Simmel writes: So gibt es ein seelisches Privateigentum, in das einzudringen eine Lädierung des Ich in seinem Zentrum bedeutet. So there is a private property of the soul, and to intrude into it injures the self at its center. He names acquaintance as der eigentliche Sitz der »Diskretion«, the true seat of discretion. The pupils are asked to work out what consequences a lack of discretion has, in the author’s view.
The Mask of the Role
In 1924 the philosopher Helmuth Plessner published Grenzen der Gemeinschaft, the limits of community. He defended distance, tact and the Sehnsucht nach der Maske, the longing for the mask. German Wikipedia summarizes his idea of the mask. Through it a person becomes general and turns von der Privatperson zur Amtsperson, from a private person into an official person. Tact, in the same summary, dient der Entspannung unter Menschen, die man nicht kennt, eases things between people who do not know each other. Plessner wrote against a strong longing of his time for total community. His view stood largely alone in Germany at the time, and the book was only rediscovered in the early 1980s.
Everyone Has Secrets
In Die Metaphysik der Sitten of 1797, Immanuel Kant writes about friendship. A person feels a strong need to open up to others. But fear of misuse forces him to keep a good part of his judgments, above all about other people, locked inside himself. Ein jeder Mensch hat Geheimnisse und darf sich nicht blindlings Anderen anvertrauen. Every person has secrets and may not confide in others blindly. Moral friendship, Kant writes, ist das völlige Vertrauen zweier Personen in wechselseitiger Eröffnung ihrer geheimen Urteile und Empfindungen, is the complete trust of two persons in opening their secret judgments and feelings to each other. A confidant with these qualities is rare, Kant says, as rare as a black swan. Yet such moral friendship does exist now and then.
Community and Society
In 1887 the sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies published Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, community and society. The following lines are from a later edition. Alles vertraute, heimliche, ausschließliche Zusammenleben (so finden wir) wird als Leben in Gemeinschaft verstanden. All trusted, private, exclusive living together, so we find, is understood as life in community. Gesellschaft ist die Öffentlichkeit, ist die Welt. Society is the public, it is the world. Man geht in die Gesellschaft wie in die Fremde. One goes into society as into a foreign land.
The True Is the Whole
In the preface to his Phänomenologie des Geistes, published in 1807, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel wrote: Das Wahre ist das Ganze. The true is the whole. The whole, he went on, is only the being that completes itself through its development. Of the absolute he said that it is essentially a result, and that only at the end is it what it truly is. A result without the path that led to it is worth nothing to him. Das nackte Resultat ist der Leichnam. The bare result is the corpse.
Theodor W. Adorno later turned the sentence around in Minima Moralia. Das Ganze ist das Unwahre. The whole is the untrue.