Talk duo Precht and Flaßpöhler
Photo:
Juliane Eirich / ZDF / Juliane Eirich
Before I explain why I think the reputation of philosophy is needlessly getting worse and worse and why I have a very special mix of foreign shame and horror when I see what is called "philosophy" in some television formats, I would like to share something Start personal.
When I was 19, I made the decision to study philosophy relatively spontaneously. I had thought about studying physics, or math, because those were my advanced courses and I was sure that basically it was meant for me to do theoretical physics because that was what fascinated me and what I was good at. But because I was also fascinated by other things, including the texts by Adorno, Beauvoir and Erich Fromm, I decided to do philosophy first, at least for a year. Almost like my friends did "
work and travel
"
after graduation
, only in their heads.
Let's not kid ourselves, even back then, philosophy had the reputation of being an absolute gossip among many people. I knew people were saying that there was basically nothing you could do with it, except either a professor or a taxi driver, and I didn't even have a driver's license; But I didn't care, I wanted to watch it.
Maybe I would finish my studies, maybe not.
It was said that it would keep you poor, but I thought to myself that I learned from my parents how to get by on relatively little money and that I will find some kind of job.
My main motivation was to learn how to think about big questions in a serious way.
Not in the sense of "I sometimes wonder what the point is", but really seriously with technical skills that you have to learn first.
I wanted to know how it can be that in discussions some people are right and others are not.
How arguing works.
What I loved about the subject
I stuck with it in the end and got a bachelor's and master's degree and felt like it was one of the best decisions of my life.
I found what I was looking for and more.
Of course, the subject also attracts irradiated chatterboxes, vain snobbugs or people who mainly see red wine and joints as philosophical tools;
but that's okay too, people aren't that much more serious about law or psychology.
In any case, what I loved about the subject was the ability to use nothing but my own brain to advance on issues that I would not have dared to tackle beforehand.
And it was all the absurdly long reading, asking yourself questions that you would never have thought of before, and the extreme joy in questioning things that seem obvious.
Now, of course, I know that some people will say that what I am working on today is not noticed so much that I have learned to argue precisely.
Or the other way around: You notice that I only studied babbling subjects and nothing "real".
That doesn't bother me much, because after all I've learned when to take a statement seriously, hehe.
Today I do not call myself a philosopher and I also do not believe that what I do in my books or columns is philosophy, but without this degree I could not do what I do today, because I would not trust myself to do it without what I learned in college.
As you now probably know, "philosopher" or "philosopher" is not a protected professional title, just like "thinker", "intellectual" or "feminist".
Everyone can call themselves that or be called that.
That's okay for now.
To some, "philosopher" sounds like something honorable, to some like something embarrassing.
Unfortunately that seems to be shifting towards the latter at the moment.
more on the subject
Dealing with the unvaccinated: The fourth wave is politicalA column by Christian Stöcker
There are so many questions that could be discussed from a philosophical point of view in a pandemic: What actually is responsibility?
What is solidarity?
What kinds of freedoms may conflict with one another?
How do you act when you have to make decisions but don't have enough knowledge of the situation?
How do political collectives come about?
How much of the social can be transferred to the digital?
What are the tasks of the state in emergency situations?
And how do you stand people dying?
Spread the bad reputation more evenly
What we get instead are Richard David Precht and Svenja Flaßpöhler: Both appear in the public debate as philosophers, neither play a role in academic philosophy (except Precht in his own events, of course), and everyone would Uni seminars get horrified laughter if their names were put on the literature list.
You can of course practice philosophy outside of the university and in understandable language, but you can also drag it into the mud. Precht and Flaßpöhler are similar in that they like to represent populist opinions without caring too much about evidence, and both come out with absolutely precise accuracy in their deliberations on the right edge of bourgeois, anti-emancipatory thinking, regardless of whether it is about the pandemic or about Gender roles.
Richard David Precht's contributions to the pandemic were recently completely condemned here in SPIEGEL.
The point was that Precht expresses himself without any specialist knowledge on questions of the immune system, warns against child vaccinations and unrestrainedly moves on a lateral thinker level.
Precht teaches philosophy on a part-time basis at universities, but very few people know that he actually did his doctorate in German.
He studied philosophy, German literature and art history for a full eight semesters (considerably short by the standards at the time) and then did his doctorate on Robert Musil - which of these gives him the right to speak publicly about the effects of mRNA vaccines?
Rhetorical question.
"Well, I'd never vaccinate kids anyway," he said on his podcast.
Sure, you wouldn't, because you're not a doctor.
more on the subject
Vaccination theses by Richard David Precht: Who is Dr.
Confused and if so, how many really? A statement from Marco Evers
If you ask me, Precht should no longer be presented as a philosopher on talk shows, but as a German scholar, simply to spread the bad reputation a little more evenly across the various humanities.
In a "Zeit" portrait of Precht in 2011 he was once quoted as saying: "I'm not a junkie, I was washed into this role, I could just as well live completely privately and meditate for three hours in front of my aquarium fish." Yes, that would be something.
Many intelligent people today consider Precht dubious, unlike Svenja Flaßpöhler. There was a praiseworthy portrait of her here in SPIEGEL: "She curbs her talent for clarity and sharpness, she relies on understanding." But one could also say: She has been banking for a while, at least since her book "Die potent Frau" , to the absolute gratitude with which the bourgeois media and individuals soak up it again and again when a woman, a doctor of philosophy, an editor-in-chief - obviously an intellectual and doer - explains to them in educated language why she is skeptical of everything on the left , against feminism and anti-racism, just be right. There will be something to it. Flaßpöhler is sometimes celebrated as an intellectual in the bourgeois milieu, which sees itself as liberal,because she has not been around as long as Richard David Precht and we like to hear why the young,
woken
internet
brats
all exaggerate.
In »The Potent Woman« she attacks the metoo movement as an assembly of passive crybugs without self-confident sexuality and with lynching morality, she railed against »hashtag feminism« without bothering to back up anything with quotations, and she succeeds it then also to portray Simone de Beauvoir as an essentialist, although she was the opposite of it (existentialist).
This intellectual dishonesty and sloppiness continues in her current book “Sensibel”, when she writes that assigning biological characteristics to men and women is now considered “trans-hostile”: “that is, discriminatory towards people who do not fit into any of these categories”.
So she confuses intersexuality with transsexuality, but hey, it's okay, the main thing is that you take with you that some freaks have become overly sensitive.
"As an intellectual, my main skill lies in differentiating," she once said in a "taz" interview, but you don't always notice it.
more on the subject
The philosopher Svenja Flaßpöhler and her love for dialectics: "I'm the old white man now" by Tobias Becker
So it's no wonder that she got along so well with Richard David Precht on the talk show, whether it was about allegedly effeminate men or a lack of eroticism in the workplace or about anti-racism. Or even, when it comes to the Holocaust and Flaßpöhler explains that you have to hear the Jewish perspective, "but it is absolutely necessary to convey this perspective of those affected with a perspective of those not affected", "because both positions see something that the other does not see «- aha? Is that the famous golden mean between ... yes what?
"Are we sensitizing ourselves to death?" Was the name of the program, which should certainly be an allusion to Postman's "We amuse ourselves to death" in a pandemic in which masses of people are dying, but which is a strange focus. Julia Encke described in the “FAS” what you could see on this program: “Like a discourse that evokes the alleged curtailment of freedom, social constraints and self-imposed censorship, from the milieu of vaccination skeptics and corona deniers gradually into the bourgeois middle is transported. «Precht and Flaßpöhler jointly complain how much we are losing freedom while, according to Encke,» are of one opinion in an almost bizarre way «, an opinion that» on every 'lateral thinker' - Demo would be able to win a majority. "
You don't have to be surprised when people say, “We have a philosophical crisis” (Jörg Kachelmann) or “German contemporary philosophy is intellectually unreasonable” (Mohamed Amjahid) or a professor (Johanna Sprondel) reports on Twitter that she has Although she did her doctorate, published and taught in philosophy, asked her editor to delete "philosopher" from her short biography because: "Precht, Flaßpöhler".
Sure, there are other public speaking people who are philosophically educated and who you can tell that too. There are Jürgen Habermas, Eva von Redecker, Nils Markwardt, Şeyda Kurt, Hilal Sezgin, Bini Adamczak, Carolin Emcke, to name just a few. It is all the more bitter when the public perception of »philosophers« is reduced to figures like Precht or Flaßpöhler. Certainly there is no one true way of practicing philosophy, but the minimum would be to remain intellectually honest, argue precisely and provide evidence for alleged social tendencies, instead of simply presenting opinions that happen to be reactionary, unsolid and disaffected Are positions that we have too much of anyway.
Far too many people already think that philosophizing basically means "babbling", and then people like Precht and Flaßpöhler come along and confirm exactly this picture.
They ruin the reputation of a science and at the same time ennoble reactionary opinions as "philosophy" for their followers.
That is humiliating for the whole subject.