In 1714 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wrote the Monadology, in French. Section 32 states the principle of sufficient reason. No fact can be true or existing without a sufficient reason why it is so and not otherwise. In German it became der Satz vom zureichenden Grund. German philosophy kept returning to it. Arthur Schopenhauer wrote his doctoral thesis on it in 1813, Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde. Martin Heidegger wrote Der Satz vom Grund.
philosophy
Vanity, the Enemy of the Matter
In his 1919 lecture Politik als Beruf, Politics as a Vocation, Max Weber named three qualities a politician needs. “Leidenschaft – Verantwortungsgefühl – Augenmaß.” Passion, a sense of responsibility and a sense of proportion. Then he named the danger. It is ordinary vanity, “die Todfeindin aller sachlichen Hingabe und aller Distanz,” the deadly enemy of all devotion to the matter and of all distance. Vanity tempts the politician to become an actor and to ask only about the impression he makes. In politics, Weber wrote, there are in the end only two kinds of deadly sin. One is Unsachlichkeit, losing sight of the matter. The other, often though not always the same, is irresponsibility.
Inconvenient Facts
In Wissenschaft als Beruf, Max Weber set out the first task of a university teacher. Wenn jemand ein brauchbarer Lehrer ist, dann ist es seine erste Aufgabe, seine Schüler unbequeme Tatsachen anerkennen zu lehren, solche, meine ich, die für seine Parteimeinung unbequem sind; und es gibt für jede Parteimeinung – z.B. auch für die meinige – solche äußerst unbequeme Tatsachen. If someone is a useful teacher, his first task is to teach his students to accept inconvenient facts, I mean facts that are inconvenient for his party opinion. And for every party opinion, including my own, there are such extremely inconvenient facts. The prophet and the demagogue, Weber said, do not belong at the lectern.
The Last Trick
Around 1830, Arthur Schopenhauer wrote a short manuscript on the tricks people use to win arguments. It was found among his papers and is known as Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten, The Art of Being Right. The last trick reads: Wenn man merkt, daß der Gegner überlegen ist und man Unrecht behalten wird, so werde man persönlich, beleidigend, grob. When you notice that your opponent is superior and you are going to lose, become personal, insulting and rude. Schopenhauer explains that this means leaving the matter and attacking the person. He calls it an appeal from the powers of the mind to those of the body, or to the animal. His remedy is great composure.
A Teacher of Slow Reading
In the preface to Morgenröte, Daybreak, Friedrich Nietzsche calls himself ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens, a teacher of slow reading. Philology, he writes, is a venerable art that asks one thing of its admirer above all. He calls it a goldsmith’s art and connoisseurship of the word. He ends with a request to his readers to learn to read him well.
The Philosopher’s Walk
In 1834, Heinrich Heine described the daily life of Immanuel Kant in Königsberg. Aufstehn, Kaffeetrinken, Schreiben, Kollegienlesen, Essen, Spazierengehn, alles hatte seine bestimmte Zeit. Getting up, drinking coffee, writing, lecturing, eating, walking, everything had its fixed time. When Kant stepped out of his door for his walk, Heine wrote, die Nachbarn wußten ganz genau, daß die Glocke halb vier sei. The neighbors knew exactly that it was half past three. Heine wrote this three decades after Kant’s death. It is a literary portrait, not an eyewitness account.
Plan the Forms, Not the Process
From 1932, economists of the Freiburg School around Walter Eucken developed ordoliberalism. In this view, the state creates an Ordnungsrahmen, a framework of order, that guarantees competition and the freedom of citizens in the market. Eucken’s formula is often quoted: Staatliche Planung der Formen – ja; staatliche Planung und Lenkung des Wirtschaftsprozesses – nein. (State planning of the forms, yes. State planning and steering of the economic process, no.) Ludwig Erhard’s economic policy after the war drew on these ideas. Ordnungspolitik, policy that shapes the economic order through stable framework conditions, is still one of the three classic areas of German economic policy.
The Imperative of Responsibility
In Das Prinzip Verantwortung (The Imperative of Responsibility, 1979), the philosopher Hans Jonas proposed a new rule for an age of powerful technology: Handle so, dass die Wirkungen deiner Handlung verträglich sind mit der Permanenz echten menschlichen Lebens auf Erden. (Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life on earth.) Where the risks are uncertain, he asked for a Heuristik der Furcht, a heuristic of fear. That means to die schlechtere Prognose der besseren vorzuziehen, to give the worse forecast priority over the better one.
All Those Affected
In Faktizität und Geltung (Between Facts and Norms, 1992), the philosopher Jürgen Habermas defined which rules are valid: Gültig sind genau die Handlungsnormen, denen alle möglicherweise Betroffenen als Teilnehmer an rationalen Diskursen zustimmen könnten. (Valid are exactly those norms of action to which all those possibly affected could agree as participants in rational discourse.)
Legitimacy Through Procedure
In 1969, the sociologist Niklas Luhmann published Legitimation durch Verfahren, legitimacy through procedure. Luhmann argued that people do not accept decisions by the state because of ideas about what is right. They accept them because they believe in the procedure that produced them, while the outcome is still open, and because they took part in that procedure.