philosophy Archives - Page 4 of 10

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.

Immune to Criticism

In 1968 the philosopher Hans Albert published his Traktat über kritische Vernunft, Treatise on Critical Reason. In it he argued that every attempt to justify a claim with final certainty ends in one of three ways. The justification goes on without end, or it runs in a circle, or it simply stops at some point. He called this the Münchhausen trilemma, after the baron who claimed he had pulled himself out of a swamp by his own hair. Breaking off the chain of justification, Albert argued, amounts to an appeal to a dogma. German Wikipedia sums up its purpose: um den Behauptungen das Risiko des Scheiterns an möglichen Einwänden zu nehmen, to protect claims from the risk of failing in the face of possible objections. Since reason can err, theories must be exposed to criticism again and again. Albert was a leading voice of critical rationalism in Germany. In Germany, its best-known declared follower in politics was former Chancellor Helmut Schmidt.

Kant’s Touchstone

In December 1784 Immanuel Kant published his essay Was ist Aufklärung?, What Is Enlightenment? In it he asks whether a church assembly could bind itself and all later generations to fixed doctrines. He says it has no such right, and he gives a test for every law: Der Probierstein alles dessen, was über ein Volk als Gesetz beschlossen werden kann, liegt in der Frage: ob ein Volk sich selbst wohl ein solches Gesetz auferlegen könnte? (The touchstone of everything that can be decided as law for a people lies in the question: could a people impose such a law on itself?)

The Age of Criticism

In 1781 Immanuel Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason. In a footnote to its preface he wrote: Unser Zeitalter ist das eigentliche Zeitalter der Kritik, der sich alles unterwerfen muß. (Our age is the true age of criticism, and everything must submit to it.) Religion, through its holiness, and lawmaking, through its majesty, usually try to escape it. But then, Kant wrote, they arouse justified suspicion. They cannot claim the sincere respect die die Vernunft nur demjenigen bewilligt, was ihre freie und öffentliche Prüfung hat aushalten können, which reason grants only to what has been able to withstand its free and public examination.

Friction

In Vom Kriege, On War, Carl von Clausewitz has a chapter on friction. He writes: Es ist alles im Kriege sehr einfach, aber das Einfachste ist schwierig. (Everything in war is very simple, but the simplest thing is difficult.) Friction, he says, is the only concept that corresponds fairly generally to what distinguishes real war from war on paper. Action in war is movement in a resistant medium. Knowing this friction is a main part of the much-praised experience of war.

Articulated, Not Heaped

In the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant has a chapter on the architectonic of pure reason. There he writes: Ich verstehe unter einer Architektonik die Kunst der Systeme. (By an architectonic I understand the art of systems.) Kant describes a whole built from an idea: Das Ganze ist also gegliedert (articulatio) und nicht gehäuft (coacervatio). (The whole is therefore articulated and not heaped up.) And he adds: Die Idee bedarf zur Ausführung ein Schema, the idea needs a schema for its execution.