Crises have something in common with philosophical thinking. A crisis doesn’t think it’s just happening, but just like philosophical questions and questioning, it makes the self-evident not self-evident. The state of emergency makes the prerequisites of coexistence generally visible, which in normal operation remain below the threshold of perception. Seen in this way, societies activate a critical mode of knowledge in times of crisis, which determines philosophical thinking in its ordinary everyday business. However, crises are in a hurry, so to speak, especially if they arise from an "infection event". Even if they start creeping, they are under pressure to act and time as soon as they appear on the radar.
Such pressure is not always conducive to knowledge - and in view of this, some friends of thorough thinking like to remember a sentence that Hegel wrote down two hundred years ago about the heraldic animal of the goddess of wisdom: “The owl of Minerva is only just beginning their flight with the onset of dusk. ”Geert Keil and Romy Jaster also bring the fowl of words into play; In the foreword to a paperback they published (“Thinking about Corona”. Philosophical essays on the pandemic and its consequences. Reclam, Stuttgart 2021. 136 pp., br., € 12) they quote Hegel and comment: “Yes, thinking takes some time, and philosophy usually comes a little late. But it still comes too late soon enough: Philosophers ideally contribute something to social debates,that has a longer half-life than statements about daily politics. "
Hegel, however, does not claim that philosophy is “a little late” or “too late” or that it is slow (Minerva's little owl is a quick hunter).
Rather, he says that when philosophy begins to bring something to the concept, then this something gradually comes to an end - or in his own words: "then a figure of life has grown old".
In the context of Hegel's mindset, this “then” actually means an “if”: Only when a figure in life begins to grow old and what it is all about can it be recognized.
The risk of intervening philosophical thinking would be to get to work too early.
In this light, Keil's and Jaster's pretty phrase "still early enough too late" then almost breathes the spirit of Hegelian dialectic.
Was Hegel dubious?
And what does philosophy contribute to “thinking about Corona”? On this point, too, the editors are reflected in a dictum by Hegel that comes from the same context as the ornithological commonplace. Philosophy, it is said in the preface to the philosophy of law, is "your time captured in thoughts". Such a “high” claim on the philosophical “commentary on the course of time”, according to Jaster and Keil, can “hardly be met seriously”.
At first, their assessment seems to relate only to the analytical philosophy to which they know they belong and whose style of thinking the essays presented are obliged to contribute to an “essay competition” of the Society for Analytical Philosophy. “Analytical philosophers are better at carefully dissecting problems than looking at the big picture,” they write - but suggest that “global diagnoses” as such are of little use because “the Corona era” is due to “diversity and complexity “Is marked. A "sober, sorting, concept-clarifying and reasoning problem access" would do more justice to this. Hegel claimed to do both - to dismantle the problems and thereby mentally penetrate “the whole” of his time.But it apparently only serves as a keyword and a decorative contrast film.
Keil and Jaster also delimit the analytical ones from (only impaled in general) "a number of statements from the guild of philosophers" that "did not honor the guild", and from colleagues who were carried away with "steep theses" in the "public media" Efforts in the matter of Corona. Analytical philosophers apparently want to honor their craft by means of - guilty things; through what they do in their professional life and with their tools - clarifying terms, sorting out questions, examining arguments. For example: What is the difference between “trust” and “rely on”? In what situations are guesses more appropriate, more accurate than assertions? Are “conspiracy theorists” really less rational than other people?
Proper problem grinders do not appear as intellectuals, not with culturally critical impetus or moral verve. But for all the modesty of craftsmanship with which they bake small rolls, there is no lack of a sense of mission that educates the people.