Saturday, March 23, 2013

Let's be fair

In Selbstversuch, Sloterdijk mentions the European religious wars of 400 years ago: "In the 16th and 17th centuries, all of Europe was a battlefield for confessional armies. In psychoanalytical terms: hysterics and obsessional neurotics, armed to the teeth, were beating each other over the head in an attempt to force their symptoms on their opponents." Somewhere Luhmann wonders why philosophers of ethics do not conclude that one cannot, in good conscience, allow all questions to be decided by a bad conscience - nor by a good conscience. He says that they never address these matters.