Intuition und Sokrates

Es wäre eine Überlegung wert, ob man Intuition als überraschende Erkenntnis, "Geistesblitz", nicht mittels der sokratischen Gesprächsführung, der Maieutik, provozieren könnte.

Weisheit

Weisheit hat immer etwas Resignatives - zumindest von der Jugend aus betrachtet.

Wirtschaft und Ethik

Man sagt oft, Wirtschaft und Ethik seien nicht miteinander kompatibel. Aber so einfach liegen die Dinge nicht.

Yggdrasil

Perhaps it is really owing to the Biblical Tree of Judgement that belief and knowledge are separated. Of course, you never can tell. But one thing is for sure: Philosophers' essential contribution to culture has been to reflect on the relation between the two. Anyway, since then people have been labouring over this opposite pair of terms. Apart from maybe tribal societies mankind falls into two groups: the one to claim the priority of belief and the one to favour knowledge. Both parties appeal to human reason, and it is a question of belief which is more convincing.
At the latest Enlightenment seemed to have decided for the believers in knowledge who all too often criticized belief in belief as superstitious. But just the way theologists endeavoured to back their belief with knowledge, philosphers realized in most cases they only believed to know something. This quite remarkably disappointed the belief in progress, and the last century gave naive optimism the rest.
But the dilemma of enlightened Enlightenment, post-modernism, -structuralism, deconstructivism is that a pitiless criticism of an only technical rationalism cannot go back behind the watermarks of Enlightenment. It is impossible to conceive that dead gods can be revived, that the Tree of Judgement can be felled. Mark you: Even fundamentalists use the WWW. Reason suggests that belief and knowledge are united on a level that is beyond reach. We have to belief in reason – we cannot know about it and we cannot belief in anything else either.
That quest for unity modern human beings undertake can only be held promising for the price of esoterics. And here there is another price taxing the material countervalue to transcendent illumination: The seminar fees and book prices the cosmic sages raise, whose success is due to the modern dilemma of enlightened Enlightenment, as has been explained above. After all, esoterics differs from rational science in its blunt claim to belief, but from religion in its try to give reason to its belief. Esoterics does not balk at scientific theorems or hypotheses; quite the contrary, it resolves them from their scientific background and recombinates it in its own cosmic context. And is just that manner which safes it from acquiring only a relatively small group of scatter-brains as customers who – owing to their transcendent way of life – have rarely developed a satisfactory attitude towards making money. No, the complementary group is recruited, too, namely those who want to know what to belief – the collateral damages of Enlightenment, the scepticists of modern age.
That is why there is something which is to replace the Tree of Judgement; to remain botanical, let us simply call it Yggdrasil – that cosmic ash-tree in Germanic mythology which is an explanation to everything – including and especially what is beyond human reason. Any seminar in esoterics, any book will fare well at following the Yggdrasil-principle; that is not just to dismiss modern science as a disastrous error, but to (to exhaust botanics) build of the exuberantly growing sprouts of the Tree of Judgement the Trojan Horse. Esoteric creativity will show in the kind of connections it can make; quickly archaeology and ufology can be linked, fantasy and psychology be exchanged. All that is needed is a two-valued symbol which appeals both to rational tradition and to mysticism. How? Well, diagrams, tables and curves are by no means tabooed; all one has to do is to point out they express a Higher Truth. This way metaphysics will be practiced with the aid of physics.
And reversely one will be well-advised to link speculations on the fateful or divine powers with scientific results. No member of the esoteric circle will ask if that works in the first place, for due to their membership the followers have deprived
themselves of their right to do so. This way mythology is not only established, but sold as well.
The one part of the customers poses scrutinizing questions until it believes; the other one does not want to know anything, in order to believe. But they have one thing in common: the strict separation from what esoterics as the hermetic inside world excludes: exoterics, the outside world. After all, exoterics neither comprises the ignorant nor the unbelievers but the non-initiates. Nowadays we can buy our entrance tickets on our own by paying for the access to the seminar rooms or the books.
Let us sum up the Yggdrasil-principle:
1. Turn away from the Tree of Judgement.
2. Turn towards Yggdrasil.
3. Place adverts in the newspapers.
4. Let the hyper-naive and the hyper-sceptic people in.
5. Call them the illuminate
6. Choose a symbol and give it a double content.
6.a. Give the naive something to believe and call it the original power.
6.b. Give the sceptic something to know and show diagrams.
7. Make sure the checks have sufficient security.

Xanthippe

Whatever we might think about Xanthippe - she is imperturbable all right. She categorizes human species in such a clear manner which is alien to our time which lacks principles. Her steadfastness - which the patriarchal-chauvinist discourse originally reserves to the exploiters and violent criminals - deserves admiration.
Of course, there are also negative sides to Xanthippe's character. For example, she has some difficulty in distinguishing a controversy from an unfair provocation. This is due to the fact she has not spent much thought about self-fulfilling prophecies yet. But it should go without saying a busy person like her has no time for that. All the time she is preoccupied screaming the eternal truth into the oppressors' stout hairy faces, morally erecting the desperate victims, here encouraging a university lady teacher to be in gender studies, there wishing good luck for a research project in Feminist Linguistics which has already proven that men and women talk differently; a minute ago she threw a new light on the issue refuge for battered women, assured a female parliament delegate of her journalistic assitance and put the statistic interdependence between being male and raping in a nutshell. Women after all have been silent for a too long time. Right now it is time to follow the direction that was taken 40 years ago more consequently. Whenever Xanthippe finally brings herself to put herself in the enemy's place with her emotional, typically female, artistic, intelligent traits of character, it makes sense to her it would be asking too much to expect that from men, too. And then it occurs to her that of course the nototious female passivity has encouraged male ignorance; how illusionary to expect the XY beings to have the intellectual capacity to change things themselves. Anyway, encouragedly she inquires into the quota of wordings discriminating against women.
Xanthippe's sharp view of things could make a manager grow pale; for he struggles to get rid of everything which might impede his decisions, to work hard for the so-called absorption of uncertainty with the aid of highly-paid consultants, whereas Xanthippe is naturally endowed with it. Boys and men as victims of male or sometimes female violence at best cross her mind as statistically deviant collerateral damages in th ebattle of the sexes. Who could want to blame women for passing on what has been done to them (which is by the way only meant to be an explanation, not an excuse)?
But it is not the enemies who cause her the biggest trouble; after all she expects nothing but primitive oppression and clumsy exercion of power from them. The worst of them even cite her indirectly, harrass their secretaries and grin later when drinking beer with their peers one has to take along as much as possible as long as Xanthippe has no say yet. No, the worst are the female deviationists from her own camp; e.g. the professional celebrities with a plunging necklace who exhaust the image of the clever female fool in commercials and chat shows and score points with a bawling mixed (!) audience. This is a serious setback for more than hundred years' history of Women's Liberation and, what is more, for Xanthippe herself.
In contrast, she has grown resistent to chauvinist offense. She has fought for legalizing the termination, so she knows best that humanity is no impossibility. The circumcision of young girls, still prevalent in other cultures, will stop, too, for there are the boys left. There is no way to outdo Xanthippe with reason; when men agree with her, they prove her infallability, when she becomes the target of dirty jokes, she may feel confirmed. Moreover, since Xanthippe has diligently never decided on the question whether sexual difference is biologically or culturally founded, she can freely stroll around between sex and gender, as soon as it serves the truth.
For that reason, her husband is wise enough not to express his own views in conversations too often, but to frequently inquire and to confess to know not to know anything. Still, it is too bad Xanthippe is not married to a mean macho. That constellation would do justice to both of them.
All in all it is a little difficult to like Xanthippe without reserve - perhaps because there will be always a remaining gap between true insight and right action. But until a female head of government is a natural phenomenon in any country, we shall probably have to put up with her - and that rightly so!

Windfall profits

In old films produced when it had not yet been trendy to be uniformly indivudual there was a character who seems to have died out by now: the crank, mostly dwelling in a village society, ridiculed, eccentric, at best jovially tolerated. But then, out of nowhere, some danger threatens the cozy rural company - be it a natural disaster, a band of gangsters, an alien reconnaissance patrol ready to conquer. Helplessness everywhere. The local elites fail one after the other. And then, when the plot reaches its climax, of all characters the crank begins to utter sharp directions, grabs the rein, only legitimated by the resignative insight he will not make things worse. As usual the crank turns out to be a genius disguised as a village idiot and gets rid of the problem of his own. Whether he will later obediently guide the elites out of their hideout or develop dictatorial ambitions remains an open question, for the film ends here.
This is of course mere fiction, but nonetheless there is a true core to it - a social system must live by its own ignorance. It must save a rest of unused competence to be eruptively set free as soon as the environment critically changes - qualification on the waiting list, as it were. Now, the point is that the system rather unconsciously cultivates this reservoir, for letting potential intentionally go to waste contradicts the organizational self-image. In other words: just by trickig itself an organization is capable of surviving crises. Necessity is the mother of invention, because it motivates creativity.
The Bible knows this principle, too; somewhere in the New Testament we are told about the stone the construction workers dismissed turning into a corner stone - quite a fitting image, for it implies organizational structures must know the difference between constance and rigidity. But we need not resort to exterrestrials or Bible words - the principle applies to everyday life, too. The elder people are avoided until the own children need low-price baby-sitting. And suddenly the death-bound methusalems over 40 actually can be useful.
Economics calls this cornerstone phenomenon windfall profits - unexpected chances virtually brought by the wind no strategy regardless how sophisticated it might be can take into account. Of course orgnaizations try to take chance into consideration, for instance with the aid of looking out departments; these departments are meant to generate the necessary sensitivity to environment as a kind of early warning system. However, this creates the problem of facing a paradoxy - namely generating a crisis by waiting for it to no effect at all for a long time. (It is the classical example of the risk insuracne.) At the age of small budgets the point of mere precaution investitions is less and less obvious. Opportunity costs become a luxury nobody will want to afford if that means one has to lower one's salary expectations. And after all does the inccalculable emerge not unexpectedly?
The general situation is that bad because all those who love to regard tehmselves as the elite have shut down their shutters and decided to lock out the windfall profits in order to lament the loss of profit inside. Not till the plight will have become big enough, innovativeness will be an evolutionary factor. Then the before exluded groups will gain access to the companies - not to the factory buildings, but where they in turn will lock themselves off later, as soon as they are saturated.
Recognizing windfall profuts in time is that difficult because the routine formula Since X, no Y suddenly turns into Just because X, necessarily Y. This is highly irritating, just as if black was white, the hero the coward, the fool the sage. In contrast, other cultures, be it the Ancient Rome, bei it Japan, windfall profits even have had their special day reserved - when the waelthy were to serve the slaves, when the employees are to give their employers a piece of their minds. And here? Well, we do have the carnival. But windfall profits require a conscious craziness - not a fuddled one the dawn will make forgotten.

Wail

It will be always difficult to give an attribute to an entire nation - last but not least because it has to be clarified what is meant by a nation in the first place. Do we associate a political and/or an ethnic and/or a cultural unit with it? Then there is the attribut as such; its regularity virtually cries for the exceptions to the rule, too. No doubt there are diligent Spaniards, honest Poles, abstinent Russians, humourless Englishmen, lavish Scots, dull Frenchmen or enlightened Italians. In the end a German will be ashamed to have not borne that in mind and thinks this is typically German.
Here we are at the core of the issue. It goes without saying the image a nation has of itself is especially hard to conceive, for it gives other nations the opportunity to simply adopt its critical implications or to scold it for its arrogance. In other words, the national self-image suffers from the same problems as is the case with organizations: As soon as the reflection upon corporate identity starts, one gets into a hell of a mess.
Since the gradual EU East-expansion it has become more and more obvious the classical German attributes like punctuality, diligence, discipline cannot serve as the defining characteristics anymore which are solely reserved to Germany. In more globalized terms: Germany has lost its cultural USP. Other characteristics such as obedience, planning, militarism have been inopportune for quite a while, too. So - what is the German self-conception like?
Of course it does not make much sense to arm oneself with notepad and pencil and comb house for house, street for street, to ask each German for his or her opinion - this could be handled neither logistically nor intellectually. Fortunately modern societies are independent of that, for - after all: what is the public for? So we are allowed to pose the question more precisely with a sigh of relief: What image does the German public have of itself?
Till the inclined amateur will have been set right, it seems to him the present characteristic of German society is its wailing. Unemployment, the reforms of Public Health and of the national pension scheme insitution, the decreasing birth-rate, the Euro - apparently any issue is appropriate to make the public sullen. And whoever dislikes that is not wailing about these issues, but about the others' wailing. Above all, there is common consent the general mood is appalling. But how can wailing be characterized?
In contrast to other verbal actions such as complaining or mourning wailing can especially easily dispense with a precise object. Usually we complain about physial or mental pain, maybe to somebody, but wailing seems to be much more self-satisfactory. Furthermore its durative implications are more obvious, that is it knows neither a definite starting- nor an ending-point, but can easily become permanent. So the object of wailing remains indefinite, which makes wailing highly flexible. Virtually any fact can trigger it off. The main thing is keeping it going. Wailing is, to borrrow an Aristotelian thought, an action of praxis, not of poiesis; it pursues no aim beyond it, it is done, pardon, for the joy of it.
This modest analysis already displays why wailing is that unprofitable: it paralyzes, since it has no ending after which things could get better. Wailing will only result in a truly deplorable situation if it kept long enough, because in that case improvement will have been fatally delayed, so that only negative things can turn out. And then wailing will justify itself. Withoudt a doubt every kind of society has its own problems - some of them are more difficult, some less, some latent, some exaggerated. But their global weight differs. Even th emost reactonary progressive will not be able to help accepting the pile-up of reforms seems to be less important in comparison with famines or genocides in other parts of the world. From that perspective we hardly have any right to wail. All the same, it is typically modern to shift future to present and so to speak make projections whose attractivity increases insofar as they make us expect negative consequences. According to that, any change is a threat. And this is the point of wailing: It can be only justfied in future times, and, since it does not recognize that, it actually will be justified then.