Bad thinking

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Bad Thinking is an essay from the field of philosophy published in 2016 bythe German philosopher, historian and author Bettina Stangneth .

Bettina Stangneth at the award ceremony for the Bavarian Book Prize 2016, for which "Bad Thinking" was nominated.

Structure and content

The book is designed as a four-part essay . Each chapter is divided into several sub-chapters, each of which is preceded by a quotation from a scientific or literary work. Instead of the usual comments in scientific works, “very personal recommendations for reading on” follow at the end, combined with the author's offer to answer questions about specific sources.

The work propagates “an ethics-based, fact-based reason that keeps pace with developments in the 21st century.” The focus is on the question of what is good and what is bad. This is to be seen against the background of historical development: In view of the state of the world in the present, the great hope of the Enlightenment that man comes to himself and morality through mature thinking has lost its innocence.

Yes! But ... Or: Radical Evil (Immanuel Kant, 1792)

At the beginning of her considerations, Stangneth puts a sentence from Immanuel Kant: Man is “radically evil” (from the Latin radix = the root, that is, from the root), naturally evil, and this evil must therefore be “best human “Are required.

First, Stangneth works out what can be considered the basis for moral action. Knowledge is out of the question, because the content of thinking is limited and makes people neither good nor free, because knowledge is never enough to show us in individual cases what we should do. But man can concentrate not only on the content of thought, but also on the form, and this, according to Kant, is clear: Kant calls our sense of consistency and inconsistency reason. It is the yardstick, the fixed point from which man can act responsibly. The categorical imperative can be used as a standard for this : "Act in such a way that you use humanity, both in your person and in the person of everyone else, at all times as an end, never as a means."

Then Bettina Stangneth investigates why people constantly undermine their own moral claims. Kant said that man as a free being is “aware of the moral law and yet has included the occasional deviation from it in his maxim.” Radical evil consists in having a moral disposition, but nonetheless when it comes to that own actions go to keep distance from her. So man must first learn to deal consciously with his moral disposition. With Kant, Bettina Stangneth distinguishes three levels of explanation for the inconsistency that arises when acting immoral against better judgment:

  • They claim to have known what responsible knowledge would have been in the relevant situation, but they were too weak for that.
  • It is said that one's own action was halfway what is considered to be moral; the motives are of minor importance.
  • Admit that you deliberately did not take the voice of reason as seriously as other driving forces.

Evil cannot be blamed on a lack of reason or emotional deficits. We can neither declare terror gangs, torturers, cynical rip-off scam companies or people who send hateful messages on the Internet to be stupid, nor do such actors lack empathy. On the contrary, they know very well the weaknesses of their victims. In general, root cause research comes to nothing. Anyone looking for points of infection for what is accusable, for sources of malice, with a magnifying glass will not find anything. By no means does every difficult childhood lead to crime, and even well-cared for people can act unscrupulously.

If I had known ... Or: The Banality of Evil (Hannah Arendt, 1963)

Kant, according to Stangneth, asked how it is possible that we knowingly do something bad. In view of the crimes of the National Socialists, Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, looked for explanations for "how it is possible to do something bad unknowingly." doing something wrong ". The evil that becomes possible in this way is based on “not thinking, that is, in a state that leaves these people convinced that there is no alternative to their own actions”. The reasons for one's own action are banal because there is a blatant disproportion between the motive for action and the act. This is how the banality of evil arises. Stangneth made the connection between the perpetrator under National Socialism and jihadist radicalization and internet hatred: "People tend to ask insignificant questions and are so devoted to banal stuff that morality no longer comes into view."

One can still think so! Or: academic evil

However, one should not only reckon with the evil out of comfort or inconsistency, as Kant had described it, but also with an "academic evil". By this, Bettina Stangneth understands the evil "that originates from systematic thinking itself" and addresses us as "mature, educated people". This knows several stages:

  • the illusion that “you can stay out of everything and still say something about everything”, the hiding of knowledge and commitment behind masks.
  • In the arbitrariness of world interpretations, in the xenophobia and in the call for a strong, isolated state, Bettina Stangneth sees variations on Eichmann's excuse that everyone is right in his own way.
  • “Thinking is not like stumbling”, as the author puts it: We are responsible for following a certain way of thinking and letting it determine our actions. Any expectation of the possibility of science and morality in general is meaningless without the idea that all people are in fact equal before reason. Therefore, theorists would have to acknowledge their responsibility for the actions of other people that result from a certain way of thinking.
  • The fixation on the self in its extreme forms only knows two ideals of self-perfection: the “self-optimization mania” and the suicide bombing. If the individual set himself the standard instead of reason, the demand to act at all times in such a way that one's own decision can also be presented to every other person as correct is lost.

Thinking alone, according to Bettina Stangneth, is not enough; What is required is a sensible way of thinking that is also ethical and informed thinking.

From morality

Finally, Bettina Stangneth summarizes the central terms of the book: Morality is “the expression of the hope that our world can become better than it is, and the will to find out how to change the world without making things worse. Enlightenment [is] the demand on each individual to start with exactly what he can change himself ... And reason [is] nothing but the most suitable means that we know to overcome unreason and all our other fascinating talents and inclinations to open up the greatest possible space in which they can unfold without causing damage that cannot be repaired. "

style

In order to make it easier for the readers to receive it, Stangneth also uses examples from everyday life in her text and addresses her readers directly in the style of a popular lecture. Thus, the final passage of the book is introduced with the sentence: "Since you have been with me so faithfully to the end of this thinking way, you can make it long without me." Bettina Stangneth used the personal pronoun I , becoming perceived as a person, "What is red for you? A mere color? - For me, red is my neighbor's lipstick ... "

reception

Quite a number of reviewers saw Bettina Stangneth's goal of making readers think as fulfilled.

Petra Gehring praised the book in the FAZ : It was "written brilliantly" and provoked "with wit and bitter seriousness". It lays "reason on the maxim of a comprehensive coherence, which should always be checked [...]" and does not solve all the problems mentioned, but forces experts and laypeople alike to "look into those abysses that the concept of the program Enlightenment to bridge investigated ". Wolfram Schütte praised the author using the Socratic method , which is "not insignificantly the sympathetic charm of Bettina Stangneth's considerations".

Caroline Fetscher criticized Bettina Stangneth's skepticism towards the sciences of sociology , education , psychology and psychoanalysis , which led to the abandonment of a worthwhile interdisciplinary dialogue. Stangneth overlooks “that neither Freud nor his academic descendants reject morality when they seek causes for actions, and thereby consult dreams, fantasies, traumas of individuals or groups.” Necessary links to psychology were missing, because “pure reason without that.” Including the other, the unconscious, can no longer exist with the current state of the Enlightenment ”. Caroline Fetscher also accused Bettina Stangneth of a lack of conceptual sharpness. Stangneth's claim that empathy is the necessary condition of sadism is a mistake. Psychopaths , especially sadists, showed no real empathy, but a “typical mixture of hyper-awake paranoia and an early learned, cognitively reaping watchful eye on the psyche of the other person”. Caroline Rehner noticed at the time that Stangneth's constant swipes at evil ways of thinking today were not very convincing.

Awards

literature

expenditure

  • Bettina Stangneth: Bad thinking. Original edition. Rowohlt Hamburg, 2016, ISBN 978-3498061586 .
  • Bettina Stangneth: Bad thinking. ePUB, Rowohlt E-Book Hamburg, 2016, EAN 9783644052611.

Reviews and other secondary sources (selection)

Web links

Quoted edition

  • Bettina Stangneth: Bad thinking. Original edition. Rowohlt Hamburg, 2016, ISBN 978-3498061586 .
  1. ↑ pp. 248-251.
  2. ↑ p. 21.
  3. ↑ p. 56.
  4. ↑ p. 29 ff.
  5. ↑ p. 37.
  6. ↑ p. 41.
  7. ↑ p. 42.
  8. ↑ p. 51.
  9. ↑ p. 53.
  10. ↑ p. 54.
  11. ↑ pp. 54-56.
  12. ↑ p. 95.
  13. ↑ p. 95.
  14. ↑ p. 95.
  15. ↑ p. 95.
  16. ↑ p. 146.
  17. ↑ p. 146.
  18. ↑ p. 156.
  19. ↑ p. 159.
  20. ↑ p. 185.
  21. ↑ p. 206.
  22. ↑ p. 207.
  23. ↑ pp. 167-168.
  24. ↑ p. 167.
  25. ↑ p. 246.
  26. ↑ p. 245.
  27. ↑ p. 30.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f g h i j Caroline Fetscher: Bettina Stangneth: Bad thinking: Man is bad - culture - Tagesspiegel. In: tagesspiegel.de . June 5, 2016, accessed November 27, 2016 .
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Petra Gehring: Forced to look into the abyss. In: FAZ.net . August 1, 2016, accessed November 27, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Wolfram Schütte: Bettina Stangneth - Bad Thinking. In: glanzundelend.de. September 20, 2016. Retrieved November 27, 2016 .
  4. ↑ a b Caroline Rehner: Bettina Stangneth: A little more moral, please! In: zeit.de . October 13, 2016. Retrieved November 27, 2016 .
  5. ↑ Wolfram Schütte: Bettina Stangneth - Bad Thinking. In: glanzundelend.de. September 20, 2016. Retrieved November 27, 2016 .