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.
philosophy
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.
The Hardest Structure to Break
In Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft, economy and society, published in 1921–22 after his death in 1920, the sociologist Max Weber wrote: “Eine einmal voll durchgeführte Bürokratie gehört zu den am schwersten zu zertrümmernden sozialen Gebilden.” A bureaucracy, once fully developed, is among the social structures hardest to smash. He called it a practically unbreakable form of rule.
The Spirit of Thoroughness in Germany
In the preface to the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, dated April 1787, Immanuel Kant names the philosopher Christian Wolff as the originator of der Geist der Gründlichkeit in Deutschland, the spirit of thoroughness in Germany. Wolff showed, Kant writes, how a science should proceed. It needs principles established by rule, clear definitions of concepts, rigorous proofs, and no bold leaps in its conclusions. Kant adds that this spirit had not died in Germany. It had only been shouted down for a short time by a fashion for genius-style freedom of thought.
The Will to a System
Ich mißtraue allen Systematikern und gehe ihnen aus dem Weg. Der Wille zum System ist ein Mangel an Rechtschaffenheit. I distrust all systematizers and avoid them. The will to a system is a lack of integrity. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote this in Götzen-Dämmerung, Twilight of the Idols.
To Cancel and to Keep
The German verb aufheben has opposite meanings. A receipt is aufgehoben when it is kept. A law is aufgehoben when it is cancelled. In his Science of Logic, first published in 1812, Hegel made this double meaning one of his central ideas: Aufheben hat in der Sprache den gedoppelten Sinn, daß es so viel als aufbewahren, erhalten bedeutet, und zugleich so viel als aufhören lassen, ein Ende machen. (In the language, aufheben has a double meaning. It means to preserve and to keep, and at the same time to let stop and to put an end to.) In Hegel’s thought, what is overcome is not thrown away. It is kept in what comes after it.