In 1946 in the aftermath of World War II the German philosopher Karl Jaspers undertook a series of lectures about questions of guilt and recovery.
He argued that the most effective cleansing of Germans must consist of a profound change in their attitude towards discussion. “Germany can only return to itself when we communicate with each other,” he said.
His comments then are profoundly significant to politics around the world today.
Harold Jahner’s book, Aftermath, which looked at Germany after the fall of Berlin, its occupation by the Russians, the US and the British and the decades after concludes by citing Jaspers.
But first Jahner recounts in detail the destruction, the occupation and the lives of survivors. He concludes with discussing the German “unspoken pride at the editing of the past” and its belief in itself as a “world expert champion in the field of coming to grips with the past.”
Yet he also details how much of the population and political leaders (with some notable exceptions) managed to convince themselves that they knew nothing of the Holocaust and that they were, personally, proud that they had never been Nazis.
It was in this context that Jaspers argued that German addressing of guilt must consist of a profound change in their attitude towards discussion and in 1946 he delivered a series of lectures on questions of guilt.
Jahner describes Jasper’s belief that the most effective cleansing of Germans must consist of a profound change in their attitudes towards discussion and that the precondition for this was unsparing honesty. “He knew that through excessive relativisation we can duck out of any kind of obligation” Jahner said.
Jahner then quoted Jaspers: “Let us learn to talk to one another. That is, let us not merely repeat our opinion, but hear what the other person thinks. Let us not only assert, but reflect in context, listen for reasons, remain prepared to reach a new insight. Let us inwardly attempt to assume the position of the other. Yes, let us actually seek out that which contradicts us. Grasping what we hold in common with contraction is more important than hastily finding exclusive standpoints with which the conversation draws hopelessly to an end.”
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says of Jaspers that he “obtained his widest influence, not through his philosophy, but through his writings on governmental conditions in Germany, and after the collapse of National Socialist regime he emerged as a powerful spokesperson for moral-democratic education and reorientation in the Federal Republic of Germany.”
This is a verdict many of his contemporaries – and even some thinkers today would be proud to have said about them. However, the Stanford book says: “…he did not attract a cohort of apostles, and outside Germany at least, his works are not often the subject of high philosophical discussion. This is partly the result of the fact that the philosophers who now enjoy undisputed dominance in modern German philosophical history, especially Martin Heidegger, Georg Lukács and Theodor W. Adorno, wrote disparagingly about Jaspers, and they were often unwilling to take his work entirely seriously.”
Perhaps they were dismissive of the accessibility of Jaspers’s prose – not a common phenomenon among contemporary philosophers let alone those to which Stanford refers.
In a not so subtle put down the Stanford listing on Jaspers said: “To all these factors, one might add the fact of Jaspers’s association with the more prosaic periods of German political life, and of his name being tarred with an aura of staid bourgeois common sense.”
Well today we don’t see much staid prosaic bourgeois common sense in the US or Australia. Indeed, we could say today that there is not only no bourgeois common sense but very little common or ordinary common sense and decency in political discourse.
Donald Trump could hardly be seen as the inheritor of a tradition which asserted that “Let us learn to talk to one another. That is, let us not merely repeat our opinion, but hear what the other person thinks.”
Peter Dutton and the various Australian other right wingers aspiring to be mini-Trumps would also hardly subscribe to Jasper’s ideas.
Their approach is epitomised each day by changes in the nature and content of most media.
Social media is the antithesis and progenitor of the political discourse which Jaspers deplored. It fosters misinformation and disinformation. But it is not only social media of course. Mainstream media – particularly the Murdoch media – epitomise a new and dangerous approach to reporting.
Where once the media mantra was if it bleeds it leads today it is if it bleats it leads.
Jaspers died a year before the Baader–Meinhof Group (or Baader–Meinhof Gang) began its terrorist activities. He had lived through the First and Second World Wars.
Today Donald Trump seems to be threatening that, if he loses, a version of that depicted by the recent film Civil War could conceivably come play out.
It is highly improbable that it will come to that in the US, but it is no longer possible to find it unimaginable.
The way to avoid it rests in those words of Jasper’s. “Let us learn to talk to one another. That is, let us not merely repeat our opinion, but hear what the other person thinks. Let us not only assert, but reflect in context, listen for reasons, remain prepared to reach a new insight.”