The philosopher Richard David Precht, who likes to present himself as a sensitive thinker, does not like men who are too sensitive in his eyes, not really masculine, too soft - then they are missing something fundamental.

For him they are like "non-alcoholic beer".

If you have beer, please have the right one.

He sits in the television studio, enveloped in darkness, in a brown designer armchair, complains about new constraints and too little eroticism in society.

Opposite him, also in the dark, his colleague Svenja Flaßpöhler took a seat, only their heads are brightly illuminated from many light sources from above, which is supposed to be something like the starry sky above them.

Julia Encke

Responsible editor for the features section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung in Berlin.

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"Are we sensitizing ourselves to death?" Is the name of the program that will be broadcast on the Second German Television this Sunday evening - and in which something becomes visible that can be observed in the ongoing pandemic as a whole: such as a discourse about the alleged circumcision conjured up by freedom, social constraints and self-imposed censorship, is gradually being transported into the middle class by the milieu of vaccination skeptics and corona deniers. There it is celebrated in a particularly cultivated manner with philosophical adeptness and with the philosophical library of the whole of the West at its back.

Flaßpöhler, editor-in-chief of the philosophy magazine, invented a big city man named Jan in her recently published book “Sensibel - About modern sensitivity and the limits of the reasonable”, upper middle class, married, two children of elementary school age. Someone who, when he was little himself, was never beaten. “Even with his children,” it says in the book, he relies on “the power of affection and discourse”, takes time for them, cuddles and speaks to them in detail. And when he reads “Pippi Longstocking” to his six-year-old daughter, he omits the “N-word” and instead says “King of the South Seas” so that his child does not even use the term that black people have been using for centuries and still are take over his vocabulary.

So the man is sensitive in “Sensibel” - and Precht finds him bland: “This Jan,” he says, looking for the other person's gaze, “comes across as erotic in your description as blotting paper. You get the feeling that he has lost his erotic core. Isn't that alcohol-free beer? Isn't there a lot going to be lost if I can only act out certain behaviors in shelters? "

The sociologist Norbert Elias, the philosopher knows, described how in the 11th century people were no longer allowed to urinate in the same room in which they ate - how it was then outsourced. In the same way, we have now outsourced eroticism at work in order to free ourselves from the possibilities of abuse. So with good motives. “But I think the shot really backfires”, says Flaßpöhler, “because you are no longer alive.” Sensitization goes hand in hand with “regulation”. “Self-censorship” is the “downside of a free society”; Language will be "re-regulated", the social environment will be "regulated". We threatened to "enter into a state of social sterility". - The two never stop conjuring up the self-chosen bondage in ever new turns,into which we are supposedly moving or which, according to them, we are already in.