“I’m genuinely on the fence on this one. My only claim is that one legitimate argument to do it (censor inflammatory rhetoric) does exist. Depending on the specific case, that reason may be outweighed by more significant arguments.”
Laws are written as general documents. You don’t write laws that say: “Censorship is supposed to be done by the government on a case by case basis after careful analysis of the case.”
At least we don’t do this in the West. As a result we have a stable democratic system. Having a stable democratic system is a way to have a peaceful society where communal riots aren’t commonplace.
Unfortunately I don’t know enough about the dynamics of Indian communal politics to give recommendation about how India should specifically deal with it.
The Wikipedia summary suggests that there a provision in India to censure speech to protect the public order. That seems much more targeted at riots than provisions about speech against minorities (hate speech laws).
On the other hand, consider that in the 20th century, England, the land of consequentialists, survived, while Germany, the land of deontologists, collapsed. Dewey seems to have thought considering ethics to be a form of duty is not entirely unrelated with the rise of militarism: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42208
Like I said, I agree on the necessity of uniform laws. But first, we must determine which laws would be good laws to apply uniformly. To do that, we must consider the relative importance of cases where censorship leads to good consequences.
Though incidents of the kind I described do indeed occur, it would be impossible to enforce hate speech laws with even a semblance of uniformity in India, so this is the compromise I suggest:
Any form of speech is allowed as long as the other side is allowed to answer. Any speech that the other side is not allowed to answer is forbidden.
This seems to satisfy the demands of principle and does away with all-powerful propaganda at the same time. Propaganda acquires total power by forbidding debate, right? This formulation forbids forbidding debate, but I’m still worried that debate will be de facto forbidden by tricks such as demeaning the opposition.
(Would you say it would be better to consider pluralism as an ideal to aspire to, or should we try to reach it all at once? Eg. We can forbid inflammatory rhetoric with the aim of gradually loosening the restrictions.)
On the other hand, consider that in the 20th century, England, the land of consequentialists, survived, while Germany, the land of deontologists, collapsed.
England also had a much stronger tradition of free speech than Germany.
Any form of speech is allowed as long as the other side is allowed to answer. Any speech that the other side is not allowed to answer is forbidden.
What does “allowed to answer” mean?
A Singapore style mandate that a newspaper has to give room for the government to tell it’s side of the story?
On the other hand, consider that in the 20th century, England, the land of consequentialists, survived, while Germany, the land of deontologists, collapsed.
England lost their empire in the 20th century. Germany losts wars but it didn’t collapse.
(Would you say it would be better to consider pluralism as an ideal to aspire to, or should we try to reach it all at once? Eg. We can forbid inflammatory rhetoric with the aim of gradually loosening the restrictions.)
If “we = India” then I unfortunately don’t know enough about the Indian political conflicts.
It would also help if you would use more concrete terms then “inflammatory rhetoric”. That term is broader then just speech that threatens the public order.
The situation I am thinking of is like this: Suppose you get up in public and give a long speech denouncing some minority. If they want to, representatives of that minority should be allowed to tell their side of the story from the same platform without being molested or demeaned. If that’s allowed, you can say whatever you like about them. Is that not good?
The German state failed completely and a warlord wannabe came to power. (Although it just occurred to me that you might not call the failed democracies that turn into dictatorships in Latin America “failed states”, and you might not describe the transition as a “collapse”. I don’t know the correct term for such polities, but that’s the kind of state Germany was.) A similar situation occurred in Russia, only an insane religious group took control there. (I know less about Russia, but my information comes from Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, a monumental work of scholarship which describes the state’s total failure in lurid detail. Russia is another country besides France where the aristocratic ideal failed completely and doomed the country to revolution. However, Russia’s collapse was much more severe than Germany’s. The latter’s militarism at least formally grew as a continuation of the old order.)
The German warlord tried to invade Russia even though Russia wouldn’t have invaded Germany any time soon, lost, and the nation was divided up among the victors. The victors then had a falling out between themselves and Germany was divided into two halves for over 40 years! Thanks to the failure of the state and the opportunist policies of the warlord, each of the victors got to indoctrinate Germans living in their territories with their pet ideologies, and a staggering 10% of the world population of Germans died during the war. (Not to mention territorial losses.)
And you say Germany didn’t collapse? I’m sorry, I completely disagree with your interpretation of what occurred.
Meanwhile, England lost its empire after its fight with Germany, but the state didn’t collapse at all. It even put someone like Winston Churchill who had definite warlord-like tendencies and might have become one in any other society in power during the war, removed him after the war, and then brought him back later when he campaigned separately as a peacetime leader. They might of course have done better in hindsight, but that is breathtaking success as a society as far as I’m concerned.
I can’t find similar short descriptions of what Germany was like prior to WWI, but here is Chesterton speaking his mind in his own amusing way: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11560 Reading between the lines, you can see how Germany’s foreign policy managed to alienate all its neighbors at the time.)
If they want to, representatives of that minority should be allowed to tell their side of the story from the same platform without being molested or demeaned. If that’s allowed, you can say whatever you like about them. Is that not good?
To me this seems to be badly thought out. You don’t specify a mechanism. Are those people who hold those speeches supposed to preregister them so that the opposing site can bring a speaker?
If a speech goes against blacks and multiple black people want to hold the counter speech, who decides which of them get’s the speaking slot?
You can of course trace the historical causes of Germany’s collapse as far back as you like.
German territory is bigger today than it was 200 years ago. You could call Germany to be in perpetual collapse over it’s history but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s today the strongest economic force in Europe and you have Greeks speaking about the 4th Reich.
I haven’t specified a mechanism because I’m proposing a principle, not a law as yet. Laws are allowed to implement the principle imperfectly even when the principle is accepted as the basis of society.
(For example, let’s start with the absolutely minimal requirement: Would you agree with a law that requires all platforms to at least declare that they abide by the pluralist principle of letting the opposition voice their point of view regardless of what goes on in practice? If this is acceptable, we can move on to more rigorous demands like declaring platforms that routinely violate this requirement to be illegal. We can decide on punishments afterwards.)
I’m not saying Germany isn’t doing well today, but today’s Germany is keeping up with and outcompeting the Anglo-Saxon world on its own terms. Germany the deontological “theocracy” (I can justify the term) collapsed in the 20th century and disappeared forever from history. (Even if the transition to dictatorship was not a collapse, surely its results qualify as a genuine collapse.
I don’t understand your point regarding territories. I have tried to reconstruct your argument in various ways, but none of my attempted interpretations that hold together are relevant in the context of the utterance. Germans were forcibly relocated, etc. Are you unaware of the German territorial shrinkage, or are you just being cute by referring to the multiple German nations that previously existed? If it’s the latter, that’s like saying the Italian nation gained a lot of territory in the national unification, even though territories like the Azure Coast, which were culturally Italian, voted to join France. Ask the Germans if they feel like they’ve won out after all. If I were inclined to make arguments of this kind, I could propose the Holy Roman Empire as a German state larger than today’s Germany.)
How many German generals today would cite Kant and Fichte as the basis for their thinking? How many thinkers would use their formulations for calling the Germans to war? (Despite all of Habermas’ tirades against “instrumental rationality”, his thought is saturated with the pragmatic tradition, and German thinkers today are instinctively consequentialist rather than deontological, though still not instrumentalist or utilitarian per se.
Even when they try to deny it, their appeals to consequences remain extensive. For example, Habermas was driven to look to the English intellectual tradition when formulating his philosophy because he decided that the German tradition lacked the resources to criticize Nazism. This means that even if he decides never to appeal to consequences again, at the root, his philosophy was motivated by an appeal to consequences: fascism was bad and he wanted the resources to criticize it.)
(China is also not too shabby at the moment, but to say that Chinese civilization did not collapse in the 20th century would be misleading to say the least. Contemporary Germany is not deontological in the same sense that contemporary India does not represent an authentic continuation of Hindu or Mughal civilizations with respect to their intellectual traditions.)
For example, let’s start with the absolutely minimal requirement: Would you agree with a law that requires all platforms to at least declare that they abide by the pluralist principle of letting the opposition voice their point of view regardless of what goes on in practice?
Requiring people to declare that they stand by a specific principle that’s not in line with their platform is not good.
In general I don’t think that laws that require people to declare that they stand by any set of specific principles are good. I don’t believe in thought crime.
If I run a blog, I don’t think there should be a requirement that I allow comments on that blog that allow anybody that disagrees with me to voice their opinions on my blog. On the other hand pluralism means that they are free to host their own blog. and voice their criticism on their blog.
I’m not allowed to run a DDoS on their blog but that’s needs no additional law.
How many German generals today would refer to Kant and Fichte to rouse the fighting spirit of their soldiers?
At the time Kant lived there was no unified Germany.
Fichte believed in Germany, but it’s important to note that at the time he did that there was no German nation but a lot of separate German territories.
You could say that the “German idea” collapsed by there being a German state. It became the European idea.
The German idea was to have a political government that has more territory than the states in which Kant and Fichte lived. Today we speak of Europe and the European project very similar than Kant and Fichte spoke about Germany.
Among current civil servant the sentiment that’s they execute the law because they swore an oath on it, even when they disagree with is still alive and well.
It neither died in 1918, 1933, 1945 or 1968 or whenever you see the collapse of Germany.
Our standard legal doctrine still works roughly the same way.
In our democracy we have less privacy protection than there were 120 years ago but privacy is still more important in Germany today than it is in the US.
So you really do think that “the Italian nation gained a lot of territory in the national unification, even though territories like the Azure Coast, which were culturally Italian, voted to join France.” I honestly don’t know what to say to that. I said “nation”, not “state”. A nation is not a nation state.
I think your main error is to conflate duty with legalism. The ethics of duty is decidedly NOT legalistic, it is existential at the root. (The Dewey book gives some concrete examples.) Kant was of part-Scottish ancestry and was inspired by Scottish thinkers to try and come up with a deontological/existential approach to legalism, but it is consequentialism that is naturally legalistic. (with exceptional periods of “emergency”, etc, but on the existential side you have stridently anti-legalistic eschatologists like Dostoevsky or even Berdyaev, really: https://archive.org/details/russianidea017842mbp Dostoevsky would of course have denied being an existentialist, and in a strict sense he would’ve been right, but I’d have trouble honestly justifying the claim that his approach is not existential in the loose sense that’s relevant in this context, where Kant is also existential in the final analysis.)
(I’ll let Orwell explain how much you owe to the culture of England: http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Unicorn England is probably the least existential culture of our times. As you probably know, the Austrian school economists were trying to theorize the developments in England. Many German theorists belonged to English-inspired schools like that, but even legalist thinkers who considered themselves proudly non-English were more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSNJGymnLG4
That is satire, but notice how progressive Germans were accused of imitating the English in EXACTLY the same way that Islamists accuse progressive Arabs of copying the West. The nature of the relationship of England to the rest of Europe was previously identical to the nature of the relationship of Europe to the rest of the world.
That’s what you get when you have existentialism at the bottom of your legalism. (And once you approve of the existential approach, it’s difficult to shut the door when extremists start clamoring for a purer version of the approach to which you’ve already fixed your seal of approval.) I strongly disagree with the notion that the contemporary European idea is anything like that. (See Habermas’ objections against Heidegger. Habermas is arguably the philosopher of contemporary Europe.) Even the notion of an “European idea” including Britain is an oversimplification because if you ask Europeans, many of them will tell you that England has a different culture from the rest of Europe. You need to integrate a lot more facts to get less crooked outlines of such matters IMO.
I don’t want you to think I’m putting German culture down or anything, but proposing an interpretation of “the German idea” that has the figure of Faust expurgated from it is like confusing Islamic culture with the Arabian Nights theme.)
That is satire, but notice how progressive Germans were accused of imitating the English in EXACTLY the same way that Islamists accuse progressive Arabs of copying the West.
You call the collapse of democracy in 1933 a collapse of Germany but that democracy mostly was an American idea. After mostly losing to the US in WWI German’s spent a decade wanting to copy the US.
You can’t at the same time label stopping to copy other countries systems a collapse and copying other countries system a collapse.
I don’t want you to think I’m putting German culture down or anything, but proposing an interpretation of “the German idea” that has the figure of Faust expurgated from it
The phrase “the German idea” refers to something particular the same way the phrase “the German question does”. Neither of them happen to do something with Faust. Faust is a part of German culture but it’s not about the German idea. Goethe would have had political problems to publish in favor of the the German idea at his time because that would have meant to question the authority of his government.
Faust is still part of German culture. It get’s read in schools.
Even the notion of an “European idea” including Britain is an oversimplification because if you ask Europeans, many of them will tell you that England has a different culture from the rest of Europe.
The European idea is an ideal. It’s a wish for the future. It’s a wish for the future in the same way the German idea was a wish for the future in the early 19th century.
Nevertheless England get’s partly governed by Brussels. The English might not like it, but Brussels has power.
The referendum is going to be interesting. Does the British public make a choice to consent to be governed by Brussels or don’t they?
Germany mostly losing to the US in WW1? We may have tipped the balance, but our troop commitments were modest compared to the other actors. I suppose the loss can be attributed to that change, but there was a reason they started unrestricted submarine warfare—they were already in trouble.
Also, which people in Germany were imitating the US? The common folk? The government?
Look, the collapse of a state is the collapse of state regardless of ideological roles. (Modern Germany is fundamentally Anglo-American in design and very successful. That is the point, since you were citing the success of contemporary Germany.)
(...Nah, it would take far too long to discuss the state of Germany prior to WWI.)
Faust really was a central figure in the German idea, I’m afraid. I don’t know how consciously Goethe was complicit in this, and this has nothing to do with what he would have had problems for saying what when he published Faust.
Of course Faust is still a part of German culture. He’s part of world culture, a typically German vision of the universal man. (I am personally a huge fan of Faust.)
I don’t understand the contradiction in saying that X and Y have different wishes for the future owing to cultural differences. (And I don’t understand what Habermas’ Europe has to do with the 19th century German idea. Habermas has openly stated that the German intellectual tradition is inadequate for criticizing fascism and consciously borrowed from Anglophone thinkers. The most striking difference between thinkers who have gained a standing in the Anglophone world and thinkers from the rest of the world is their careful, deliberate anti-existentialism.)
In the 19th century the German idea was about not having wars between German states. It was about not having border but being unified under shared law. It was in it’s nature cosmopolitan.
“Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” meant when it was written to have something that’s bigger than the individual states.
The European idea is given credit for preventing European nations from waging war against each other after WWII.
Kant is commonly admitted to be a romantic philosopher
When reading Kant in a school philosophy study group, our teacher told us that discussing whether or not someone is a romantic philosopher, is an Anglo-thing.
German intellectual discourse usually doesn’t focus on putting those kinds of labels on people but tries to be more discerning.
I also think that you overrate the impact of philosophers. A lot of important thought isn’t done by philosophers.
Today the Bertelsmann Stiftung produces more ideas that are relevant for political policy than Habermas.
Oh well, I agree with the English that Kant was a romantic philosopher. Rousseau was a primary source of inspiration for him. (I agree with Dewey that writers (Goethe) and philosophers (Kant) give expression to popular views more than shaping them. OTOH, as much as I admire Goethe, I think Oswald Spengler went too far in trying to interpret him as a universal philosopher.)
“In the 19th century the German idea was about not having wars between German states,” is a true statement, but it leaves out crucial details. For example, there are many people who agree that European nations should not war against each other, but are bitterly critical of the details of how that general plan was implemented in practice.
I think it follows that the European idea is not reducible to the notion that European states should not fight. If you do not agree, then I apologize for using terms like “European idea” and “German idea” in a sense you didn’t intend, but my point can be easily reworded using “implementation of the German idea” in place of “German idea”.
The point I’m trying to make is that, like I said, Germany is currently outcompeting the Anglo-American world on the terms of the Anglo-American world, not on the original terms of Germany. Arguably, England wanted to end European wars in the 19th century as well. Who would you say got their way in the end, England or Germany?
Sir Humphrey: Minister, Britain has had the same foreign policy objective for at least the last five hundred years: to create a disunited Europe. In that cause we have fought with the Dutch against the Spanish, with the Germans against the French, with the French and Italians against the Germans, and with the French against the Germans and Italians. Divide and rule, you see. Why should we change now, when it’s worked so well?
Hacker: That’s all ancient history, surely?
Sir Humphrey: Yes, and current policy. We ‘had’ to break the whole thing [the EEC] up, so we had to get inside. We tried to break it up from the outside, but that wouldn’t work. Now that we’re inside we can make a complete pig’s breakfast of the whole thing: set the Germans against the French, the French against the Italians, the Italians against the Dutch. The Foreign Office is terribly pleased; it’s just like old times.
Hacker: But surely we’re all committed to the European ideal?
Sir Humphrey: [chuckles] Really, Minister.
Hacker: If not, why are we pushing for an increase in the membership?
Sir Humphrey: Well, for the same reason. It’s just like the United Nations, in fact; the more members it has, the more arguments it can stir up, the more futile and impotent it becomes.
Hacker: What appalling cynicism.
Sir Humphrey: Yes… We call it diplomacy, Minister.
Europe today looks a lot more unified than it was in the 19th century, so that went more towards the German strategy.
Their are issues like accounting rules where we Germans gave up our superior accounting rules under which a crisis like the one of 2008 would be less likely to happen for the sake of having international accounting standards.
On the other hand now the Bundesbank does manage to mostly set the course of European monetary policy.
Laws are written as general documents. You don’t write laws that say: “Censorship is supposed to be done by the government on a case by case basis after careful analysis of the case.”
At least we don’t do this in the West. As a result we have a stable democratic system. Having a stable democratic system is a way to have a peaceful society where communal riots aren’t commonplace.
Unfortunately I don’t know enough about the dynamics of Indian communal politics to give recommendation about how India should specifically deal with it.
The Wikipedia summary suggests that there a provision in India to censure speech to protect the public order. That seems much more targeted at riots than provisions about speech against minorities (hate speech laws).
On the other hand, consider that in the 20th century, England, the land of consequentialists, survived, while Germany, the land of deontologists, collapsed. Dewey seems to have thought considering ethics to be a form of duty is not entirely unrelated with the rise of militarism: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42208
Like I said, I agree on the necessity of uniform laws. But first, we must determine which laws would be good laws to apply uniformly. To do that, we must consider the relative importance of cases where censorship leads to good consequences.
Though incidents of the kind I described do indeed occur, it would be impossible to enforce hate speech laws with even a semblance of uniformity in India, so this is the compromise I suggest:
Any form of speech is allowed as long as the other side is allowed to answer. Any speech that the other side is not allowed to answer is forbidden.
This seems to satisfy the demands of principle and does away with all-powerful propaganda at the same time. Propaganda acquires total power by forbidding debate, right? This formulation forbids forbidding debate, but I’m still worried that debate will be de facto forbidden by tricks such as demeaning the opposition.
(Would you say it would be better to consider pluralism as an ideal to aspire to, or should we try to reach it all at once? Eg. We can forbid inflammatory rhetoric with the aim of gradually loosening the restrictions.)
England also had a much stronger tradition of free speech than Germany.
What counts as the “other side”. Do I have to invite the flat earth society whenever I want to talk about geography?
What does “allowed to answer” mean? A Singapore style mandate that a newspaper has to give room for the government to tell it’s side of the story?
England lost their empire in the 20th century. Germany losts wars but it didn’t collapse.
If “we = India” then I unfortunately don’t know enough about the Indian political conflicts. It would also help if you would use more concrete terms then “inflammatory rhetoric”. That term is broader then just speech that threatens the public order.
The situation I am thinking of is like this: Suppose you get up in public and give a long speech denouncing some minority. If they want to, representatives of that minority should be allowed to tell their side of the story from the same platform without being molested or demeaned. If that’s allowed, you can say whatever you like about them. Is that not good?
The German state failed completely and a warlord wannabe came to power. (Although it just occurred to me that you might not call the failed democracies that turn into dictatorships in Latin America “failed states”, and you might not describe the transition as a “collapse”. I don’t know the correct term for such polities, but that’s the kind of state Germany was.) A similar situation occurred in Russia, only an insane religious group took control there. (I know less about Russia, but my information comes from Kotkin’s biography of Stalin, a monumental work of scholarship which describes the state’s total failure in lurid detail. Russia is another country besides France where the aristocratic ideal failed completely and doomed the country to revolution. However, Russia’s collapse was much more severe than Germany’s. The latter’s militarism at least formally grew as a continuation of the old order.)
The German warlord tried to invade Russia even though Russia wouldn’t have invaded Germany any time soon, lost, and the nation was divided up among the victors. The victors then had a falling out between themselves and Germany was divided into two halves for over 40 years! Thanks to the failure of the state and the opportunist policies of the warlord, each of the victors got to indoctrinate Germans living in their territories with their pet ideologies, and a staggering 10% of the world population of Germans died during the war. (Not to mention territorial losses.)
And you say Germany didn’t collapse? I’m sorry, I completely disagree with your interpretation of what occurred.
Meanwhile, England lost its empire after its fight with Germany, but the state didn’t collapse at all. It even put someone like Winston Churchill who had definite warlord-like tendencies and might have become one in any other society in power during the war, removed him after the war, and then brought him back later when he campaigned separately as a peacetime leader. They might of course have done better in hindsight, but that is breathtaking success as a society as far as I’m concerned.
(You can of course trace the historical causes of Germany’s collapse as far back as you like. Here are some relatively short descriptions that give an idea of the ground-level realities of the Weimar republic: http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37184&p=1086708&hilit=democracy#p1086708 http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37184&p=1086725&hilit=democracy#p1086725 http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=37184&p=1086786&hilit=democracy#p1086786 Though none of these specifically address Hitler’s takeover, you can probably tell that the situation was a close parallel to what you find in parts of Latin America.
I can’t find similar short descriptions of what Germany was like prior to WWI, but here is Chesterton speaking his mind in his own amusing way: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/11560 Reading between the lines, you can see how Germany’s foreign policy managed to alienate all its neighbors at the time.)
To me this seems to be badly thought out. You don’t specify a mechanism. Are those people who hold those speeches supposed to preregister them so that the opposing site can bring a speaker? If a speech goes against blacks and multiple black people want to hold the counter speech, who decides which of them get’s the speaking slot?
German territory is bigger today than it was 200 years ago. You could call Germany to be in perpetual collapse over it’s history but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s today the strongest economic force in Europe and you have Greeks speaking about the 4th Reich.
I haven’t specified a mechanism because I’m proposing a principle, not a law as yet. Laws are allowed to implement the principle imperfectly even when the principle is accepted as the basis of society.
(For example, let’s start with the absolutely minimal requirement: Would you agree with a law that requires all platforms to at least declare that they abide by the pluralist principle of letting the opposition voice their point of view regardless of what goes on in practice? If this is acceptable, we can move on to more rigorous demands like declaring platforms that routinely violate this requirement to be illegal. We can decide on punishments afterwards.)
I’m not saying Germany isn’t doing well today, but today’s Germany is keeping up with and outcompeting the Anglo-Saxon world on its own terms. Germany the deontological “theocracy” (I can justify the term) collapsed in the 20th century and disappeared forever from history. (Even if the transition to dictatorship was not a collapse, surely its results qualify as a genuine collapse.
I don’t understand your point regarding territories. I have tried to reconstruct your argument in various ways, but none of my attempted interpretations that hold together are relevant in the context of the utterance. Germans were forcibly relocated, etc. Are you unaware of the German territorial shrinkage, or are you just being cute by referring to the multiple German nations that previously existed? If it’s the latter, that’s like saying the Italian nation gained a lot of territory in the national unification, even though territories like the Azure Coast, which were culturally Italian, voted to join France. Ask the Germans if they feel like they’ve won out after all. If I were inclined to make arguments of this kind, I could propose the Holy Roman Empire as a German state larger than today’s Germany.)
How many German generals today would cite Kant and Fichte as the basis for their thinking? How many thinkers would use their formulations for calling the Germans to war? (Despite all of Habermas’ tirades against “instrumental rationality”, his thought is saturated with the pragmatic tradition, and German thinkers today are instinctively consequentialist rather than deontological, though still not instrumentalist or utilitarian per se.
Even when they try to deny it, their appeals to consequences remain extensive. For example, Habermas was driven to look to the English intellectual tradition when formulating his philosophy because he decided that the German tradition lacked the resources to criticize Nazism. This means that even if he decides never to appeal to consequences again, at the root, his philosophy was motivated by an appeal to consequences: fascism was bad and he wanted the resources to criticize it.)
(China is also not too shabby at the moment, but to say that Chinese civilization did not collapse in the 20th century would be misleading to say the least. Contemporary Germany is not deontological in the same sense that contemporary India does not represent an authentic continuation of Hindu or Mughal civilizations with respect to their intellectual traditions.)
Requiring people to declare that they stand by a specific principle that’s not in line with their platform is not good. In general I don’t think that laws that require people to declare that they stand by any set of specific principles are good. I don’t believe in thought crime.
If I run a blog, I don’t think there should be a requirement that I allow comments on that blog that allow anybody that disagrees with me to voice their opinions on my blog. On the other hand pluralism means that they are free to host their own blog. and voice their criticism on their blog. I’m not allowed to run a DDoS on their blog but that’s needs no additional law.
At the time Kant lived there was no unified Germany.
Fichte believed in Germany, but it’s important to note that at the time he did that there was no German nation but a lot of separate German territories.
You could say that the “German idea” collapsed by there being a German state. It became the European idea. The German idea was to have a political government that has more territory than the states in which Kant and Fichte lived. Today we speak of Europe and the European project very similar than Kant and Fichte spoke about Germany.
Among current civil servant the sentiment that’s they execute the law because they swore an oath on it, even when they disagree with is still alive and well. It neither died in 1918, 1933, 1945 or 1968 or whenever you see the collapse of Germany.
Our standard legal doctrine still works roughly the same way. In our democracy we have less privacy protection than there were 120 years ago but privacy is still more important in Germany today than it is in the US.
So you really do think that “the Italian nation gained a lot of territory in the national unification, even though territories like the Azure Coast, which were culturally Italian, voted to join France.” I honestly don’t know what to say to that. I said “nation”, not “state”. A nation is not a nation state.
I think your main error is to conflate duty with legalism. The ethics of duty is decidedly NOT legalistic, it is existential at the root. (The Dewey book gives some concrete examples.) Kant was of part-Scottish ancestry and was inspired by Scottish thinkers to try and come up with a deontological/existential approach to legalism, but it is consequentialism that is naturally legalistic. (with exceptional periods of “emergency”, etc, but on the existential side you have stridently anti-legalistic eschatologists like Dostoevsky or even Berdyaev, really: https://archive.org/details/russianidea017842mbp Dostoevsky would of course have denied being an existentialist, and in a strict sense he would’ve been right, but I’d have trouble honestly justifying the claim that his approach is not existential in the loose sense that’s relevant in this context, where Kant is also existential in the final analysis.)
(I’ll let Orwell explain how much you owe to the culture of England: http://wikilivres.ca/wiki/The_Lion_and_the_Unicorn England is probably the least existential culture of our times. As you probably know, the Austrian school economists were trying to theorize the developments in England. Many German theorists belonged to English-inspired schools like that, but even legalist thinkers who considered themselves proudly non-English were more like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSNJGymnLG4
That is satire, but notice how progressive Germans were accused of imitating the English in EXACTLY the same way that Islamists accuse progressive Arabs of copying the West. The nature of the relationship of England to the rest of Europe was previously identical to the nature of the relationship of Europe to the rest of the world.
That’s what you get when you have existentialism at the bottom of your legalism. (And once you approve of the existential approach, it’s difficult to shut the door when extremists start clamoring for a purer version of the approach to which you’ve already fixed your seal of approval.) I strongly disagree with the notion that the contemporary European idea is anything like that. (See Habermas’ objections against Heidegger. Habermas is arguably the philosopher of contemporary Europe.) Even the notion of an “European idea” including Britain is an oversimplification because if you ask Europeans, many of them will tell you that England has a different culture from the rest of Europe. You need to integrate a lot more facts to get less crooked outlines of such matters IMO.
I don’t want you to think I’m putting German culture down or anything, but proposing an interpretation of “the German idea” that has the figure of Faust expurgated from it is like confusing Islamic culture with the Arabian Nights theme.)
You call the collapse of democracy in 1933 a collapse of Germany but that democracy mostly was an American idea. After mostly losing to the US in WWI German’s spent a decade wanting to copy the US.
You can’t at the same time label stopping to copy other countries systems a collapse and copying other countries system a collapse.
The phrase “the German idea” refers to something particular the same way the phrase “the German question does”. Neither of them happen to do something with Faust. Faust is a part of German culture but it’s not about the German idea. Goethe would have had political problems to publish in favor of the the German idea at his time because that would have meant to question the authority of his government.
Faust is still part of German culture. It get’s read in schools.
The European idea is an ideal. It’s a wish for the future. It’s a wish for the future in the same way the German idea was a wish for the future in the early 19th century.
Nevertheless England get’s partly governed by Brussels. The English might not like it, but Brussels has power. The referendum is going to be interesting. Does the British public make a choice to consent to be governed by Brussels or don’t they?
Germany mostly losing to the US in WW1? We may have tipped the balance, but our troop commitments were modest compared to the other actors. I suppose the loss can be attributed to that change, but there was a reason they started unrestricted submarine warfare—they were already in trouble.
Also, which people in Germany were imitating the US? The common folk? The government?
Look, the collapse of a state is the collapse of state regardless of ideological roles. (Modern Germany is fundamentally Anglo-American in design and very successful. That is the point, since you were citing the success of contemporary Germany.)
(...Nah, it would take far too long to discuss the state of Germany prior to WWI.)
Faust really was a central figure in the German idea, I’m afraid. I don’t know how consciously Goethe was complicit in this, and this has nothing to do with what he would have had problems for saying what when he published Faust.
Of course Faust is still a part of German culture. He’s part of world culture, a typically German vision of the universal man. (I am personally a huge fan of Faust.)
I don’t understand the contradiction in saying that X and Y have different wishes for the future owing to cultural differences. (And I don’t understand what Habermas’ Europe has to do with the 19th century German idea. Habermas has openly stated that the German intellectual tradition is inadequate for criticizing fascism and consciously borrowed from Anglophone thinkers. The most striking difference between thinkers who have gained a standing in the Anglophone world and thinkers from the rest of the world is their careful, deliberate anti-existentialism.)
(Kant is commonly admitted to be a romantic philosopher, and I found this link: http://philosophyisnotaluxury.com/2010/08/12/romanticism-and-existential-philosophy/)
In the 19th century the German idea was about not having wars between German states. It was about not having border but being unified under shared law. It was in it’s nature cosmopolitan. “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles” meant when it was written to have something that’s bigger than the individual states.
The European idea is given credit for preventing European nations from waging war against each other after WWII.
When reading Kant in a school philosophy study group, our teacher told us that discussing whether or not someone is a romantic philosopher, is an Anglo-thing. German intellectual discourse usually doesn’t focus on putting those kinds of labels on people but tries to be more discerning.
I also think that you overrate the impact of philosophers. A lot of important thought isn’t done by philosophers. Today the Bertelsmann Stiftung produces more ideas that are relevant for political policy than Habermas.
Oh well, I agree with the English that Kant was a romantic philosopher. Rousseau was a primary source of inspiration for him. (I agree with Dewey that writers (Goethe) and philosophers (Kant) give expression to popular views more than shaping them. OTOH, as much as I admire Goethe, I think Oswald Spengler went too far in trying to interpret him as a universal philosopher.)
“In the 19th century the German idea was about not having wars between German states,” is a true statement, but it leaves out crucial details. For example, there are many people who agree that European nations should not war against each other, but are bitterly critical of the details of how that general plan was implemented in practice.
I think it follows that the European idea is not reducible to the notion that European states should not fight. If you do not agree, then I apologize for using terms like “European idea” and “German idea” in a sense you didn’t intend, but my point can be easily reworded using “implementation of the German idea” in place of “German idea”.
The point I’m trying to make is that, like I said, Germany is currently outcompeting the Anglo-American world on the terms of the Anglo-American world, not on the original terms of Germany. Arguably, England wanted to end European wars in the 19th century as well. Who would you say got their way in the end, England or Germany?
England and Germany are not words on the same category. It’s a bit apples to oranges.
Comparing England with Prussia or Britain with Germany would be a step in the right direction but it still misses the different nature.
Yes, it’s that unification is the right strategy to prevent fighting.
In the early 19th century the call was for a free, unified and democratic Germany.
The part about democracy was copying other nations. Doing something in a different way than other nation wasn’t the point.
The British geopolitical goal was to divide continental European powers.
To quote “Yes, Minister”:
Europe today looks a lot more unified than it was in the 19th century, so that went more towards the German strategy.
Their are issues like accounting rules where we Germans gave up our superior accounting rules under which a crisis like the one of 2008 would be less likely to happen for the sake of having international accounting standards. On the other hand now the Bundesbank does manage to mostly set the course of European monetary policy.