New hero the country needs

at the University of St. Gallen, teaching the philosopher Dieter Thomä has seen in his life more than the Interior of the lecture halls. For example, he has occupied houses, a study of aborted and resumed, worked as a Journalist and a guest lecturer at the New School of Social Research held.

in this CV acquired inside of a Wide and interested in and have benefited from his books and reflected in its almost provocative case in point topics: father of weightlessness, happiness, Self, self-narrative, life story. His last two publications to develop a philosophical anthropology of perverseness: "Puer robustus" brought in 2016, the political qualities of the Neinsagers and destructive nature to the application.

democratic efforts

The new book "Why democracies need heroes. A plea for a contemporary heroism" presents an almost forgotten figure of the old European cultural history into the spotlight of modern Räsonnements and to the test of democratic virtue virtuosity.

That there are also democratic heroism, and that it is needed, is anchored with a strong Intuition and cultural history in depth. A black-and-white TV series based on John F. Kennedy's classic, "Profiles of Courage" in the early ' 60s, is one of the most intense memories of the thirteen-year-old.

your conventional images were later blended by Gary Cooper's hat, vest, gun, face in Fred Zinnemann's "High Noon". And they went up again in the collective memory of my Generation, as Lech Walesa in 1980, on the shoulders of his colleagues on the Lenin shipyard worn and Nelson Mandela in 1994 was elected President of South Africa.

Political obstinacy was in these heroes of the masses, easier to Polish, and South Africa biographies taken against fellow human beings, and they had carried to victory over racial and class totalitarianism. Now the troubles of the democratic level could begin. As the undemocratic (the war) Hero of the democratic is a figure of sovereignty, the lonely Dezision, the inner independence, of self-sacrifice for others, and the incalculable risk.

Left concerns

Dieter Thomä have to spend a lot of space, eloquence and acumen, in order to defend the possibility and legitimacy of democratic heroism against prior to legislation expected objections and attacks of the liberal and left side. He prepared the heroic character moves carefully from their original to the martial context of–. Stubbornness, altruism, memo rabilität, risk-taking, foresight, resilience, willingness to help prove civil recoded and sort of "secularized", as indispensable for democracies. Because these are stable-unstable, from the beginning to experimental societies, including crises and decision-making situations, by definition.

With his Deco procedures struiere Thomä is as a student of Max Weber's. "The Hero enters as a counter-player of the red tape stage," he writes, and quotes the bureaucracy theorists, the 1909 for it argued, the "right people" managed the steel housing of the managed world heroic dispositions to oppose, "to the Rest of humanity to keep it free from this parcelling of the soul, from this alone, dominion Bureau autocratic ideals of Life".

In one of the most compelling passages of his book, Thomä cited the countless other part contrary to conflicting interpretations and Reinterpretations of the hero-figure of Odysseus speak as a Testament to the plasticity and universality of what we call the heroic, and the neither Modern nor liberal society waive.

Risk Intervention

Thomä is also a formation of sociologically interesting shape. He embodies in the presence of a type of audience-friendly, but technically proven, and knowledgeable philosophical writer who quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson (the Thomä in his book of Heroes often and approvingly) in the United States of the early 19th century. Century entered the stage, in the early years of the 20th century. in Germany, in the forgotten cultural-critical work of Walther Rathenau re-emerged in the eighties, with the early work of Peter Sloterdijks, the small political writings of Jürgen Habermas and some well-placed provocations, Niklas Luhmann's audience became effective. This writer type seems to occur when the long-ruling ideas defended or new have to be considered: the empiricism is inadequate, the Harvard Divinity School in the America of the 1830's, the ' 68-pulse to 1980.

Today, it is the idea of liberalism itself, which is taken by powerful political and intellectual movements under fire. If it is, how to make Dieter Thomä plausible, the task of the hero is a vulnerable procedure, a risk of Intervention to secure, or develop, then the book itself has a heroic aspect.

Created: 06.12.2019, 17:33 PM