Dialectics and democracy: even enemies can cooperate

«I just like to say: ‘a house’. It is repugnant to me to say: ‘a half-timbered house’, ‘a clinker building’, ‘a wall plastered like crumble cake’, etc. Any kind of disparate description contributes to the mischief of distraction and over-information, which threaten us enough as it is. (. . .) We have lived on the wealth of difference for too long.” And Botho Strauss, who wrote these sentences in 1981, more than forty years ago, in “Couples, Passers-by”, adds: “Without dialectics we think stupider right away, but it has to be: without them!” If ever art was political, it’s here.

No more differences in judgment, no fisimatents of experience! Although Botho Strauss initially meant it existentially and poetologically, this is precisely the basic attitude that is inherent in all anti-dialectical attitudes of this and nothing else. That is the origin of all unconditionality, any totalitarian simplification, simplification. Let your speech be «Yes, yes, no, no»! But like all civilized art, every democracy needs mediating, merging nuances.

god or devil

Douglas Kennedy’s latest novel, Afraid of the Light (2021), is set in an anti-abortion America where ultra-conservative evangelical thinking is on the rise again. God or devil, nothing in between!

Kennedy’s story has since been confirmed by US jurisdiction. The Republican-dominated Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade» (1973) repealed; since June 24, 2022, every state has the right to ban abortion unconditionally. The radicalized “anti-abortionists” are not willing to weigh up the circumstances, which realistically leads Kennedy to the shooting of a former university professor who, as a member of a liberal aid organization, accompanies pregnant women in their distress – and her death, one could say , stands for the death of all civilized reasoning.

In recent years it has become increasingly clear that the market value of tolerance in favor of Jacobean attitudes is declining.

In a conversation with the magazine “Die Furche” on June 23, 2022, the intellectual cosmopolitan Franz Schuh reflects on the conditions of such reasoning. “In Austria, people have learned that it is better for the country if the forces cooperate and work together, even if they hate each other.” But he adds pessimistically that the “cooperation of the mutually hating” is beginning to break down under the lure of right-wing populism; this is such a great power because it offers the discontented the prospect of being allowed to hate without having to cooperate.

And it is not for nothing that Schuh places the “cooperation of those who hate each other” in the context of procedural democracy. Because the alternative to the procedural buffering of “hatred” is the authoritarian – essentially illiberal – decision of an autocrat, his claqueurs and institutions dependent on him. Since John Stuart Mill at the latest, it has become obvious what – to put it loosely in terms of the term – as the dialectic of the liberal method first nourishes and fertilizes democratic life. In his 1859 paper On Liberty, Mill had argued that even the prohibition of manifestly wrong viewpoints was pernicious. Because this turns the truth, which never has to prove itself against contradictions, into a lifeless dogma.

The cement of togetherness

Then, in the 20th century, the scientific and social philosopher Karl Popper argued that the dialectical challenge of a claim – and not the nuanced “either-or” – is the real engine of progress. Because the “falsified” thesis often continues to exist as a special case of its antithesis and precisely because of this it conveys a deeper insight into the nature of the matter. In his “Logik der Forschung” (1934), Popper discusses the example of Newton, whose concept of space-time in Einstein’s theory of relativity is “suspended” at speeds far below that of light – i.e. within our everyday world – because it is sufficiently valid.

Analogous dialectics can now also be found in politics. Anyone who sacrifices terms such as “home”, “tradition” or “patriotism” because of their repressive aspects to the emancipatory furor does not free human nature from its social chains. On the contrary, such terms are rather defining features of our humanity, and beyond that the cement of our social interaction. Political wisdom consists in shaping history-steeped, public-interest-oriented and universalistic aspects of humanity into a reason of state in such a way that conservative and liberal forces can carry out their opposition in a compromise-oriented (“dialectical”) way.

Furthermore: man is a homo religiosus. There is no doubt that the beginnings of the major religions are archaic and totalitarian, neither averse to blood sacrifice nor brutal sanctions. Anything pluralistic is considered the work of the devil that must be destroyed. Since the beginning of rational thinking, this has been opposed by atheism. Over the course of many centuries, those religious standpoints that approach an integral view through the mediation of theses and antitheses – not continuously, but persistently and under the strain of fundamentalisms flaring up again and again – have gained in importance.

This dialectical dynamic is characterized by Immanuel Kant as “religion within the limits of mere reason” (1792) – as an ethical community of good hearts without a leader, without “false belief and idolatry”. It could be argued that in all civilized societies the religious and the atheistic elements do not meet as arch-enemies, but gradually converge. The philosopher of religion John Hick spoke, probably a little too energetically, of the “Rainbow of Faiths” (1995), in the context of which the scientific world view, in search of the alpha and omega of all being, contributes an indispensable shade of colour.

Imperious “Away with it!”

Of course, dialectic processes have framework conditions. The sentence attributed to the enlightener Voltaire – falsely, but in accordance with his sentiments: “I disapprove of what you say, but would defend your right to say it to the death.” For reasons of state, he advocated a mild, just form of monarchy. Mill advocated representative democracy; however, participation should be limited to the educated classes, not least because of school privileges.

If you look from here at the authoritarian moralism that the democratic community is confronted with today, whether it is about political correctness, the new vigilance (“wokeness”) or the cancel culture, then one characteristic immediately stands out Eye: The respective hostile language traditions, “narratives” or cultural manifestations are not given any historical authority at all, with which a significant part of the citizenry identifies. The imperious “Away with it!” has increasingly gained the upper hand among the new “moral entrepreneurs” – as the hypermoralists of the 1950s were called by the US sociologist Howard Becker: “moral entrepreneurs”.

From a dialectical perspective, it is not a matter of boldly taking sides against the demand to «gender» language or «cancel» monuments of former colonialists. However, it is important to help those who are harassed with shitstorms and who can expect professional sanctions because of their different perspectives. In the meantime there are even, implicitly, publication bans for those who oppose the uncontrolled growth of gender with legal complications.

Decreasing Tolerance

So it’s about the threatening shutting down of liberal discourse, about preventing compromise-oriented strategies in dealing with controversial social phenomena. In a word, it is about defending democratic openness. The “cooperation of those who hate each other” is in danger of falling under the ban of moral entrepreneurship – whether of evangelical, feminist, left- and right-wing radical or eco-fundamental origin. One is prepared to demonize one’s opponent, and as is well known, only exorcism helps against the devil’s indwelling. . .

Now one might think of rabid moralism as a phenomenon that ekes out an annoying but relatively isolated existence in the context of our democratic life. A precautionary warning must be given against this optimistic view, which is a result of liberalism that has grown historically and has become self-confident. Because in recent years it has become increasingly clear that the market value of tolerance in favor of Jacobean attitudes is declining. Their “inflexibility” has become a parade ground for floating hatred that can be used politically as an instrument of domination.

Either we cultivate social dialectics more strongly again – the striving for political syntheses within the legal scope of democratic procedural rules – or we gambled away what the Enlightenment had always fought for. Winston Churchill, considered by many to be the most important British statesman of the 20th century, found those words before the House of Commons on November 11, 1947, which rejected all moral entrepreneurship and any totalitarianism of opinion: “Democracy is the worst of all forms of government – apart from all the other forms which have been tried from time to time.”

Peter Strasser is university professor i. R. He teaches philosophy at the Karl-Franzens-University Graz.