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Dying Today: Instructions for Living Right

  Currently, bourgeois writers are once again preoccupied with an old theme: speculation about an afterlife. While the economy prevents them from even offering the majority of their citizens the usual necessities—namely, a regular working life—the newspapers let people report on those who have "stood with one foot in the afterlife." The enlightenment of the age is reflected in these accounts of the briefly "clinically dead" in such a way that such experiences have made those affected more resilient, because, firstly, they are pleased to have been "given" a second life, and secondly, death has lost its terror for them. Only seemingly contradictory to this is the fact that dying itself has become a problem, and that process at which a person ceases to be a person is discussed as a matter of human dignity. While the everyday demise in conflicts between states and the commonplace breakdown of work life are at best registered as a statistic, the press discusses...
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From the world of science (I) The thing about the transition

If  a scientist were to present the following insight as a result of his research: "  Water is for washing  , faleri and falera, and can also be used for brushing teeth; water is needed by the dear livestock, falera and faleri, and the fire brigade also needs water very much... and Hawaii, the South Sea island, would be a dreary palm brush." While his originality might not be questioned, his academic qualifications would certainly be challenged, and even the greatest exam pressure wouldn't prevent students from considering such material banal or nonsense. This is not the case, however, when the same academic expresses similar views about political parties. "It is the political parties that, against this backdrop, make an election decision with alternatives possible in the first place, and thus the core of a democratic process. The parties influence opinion formation and the emergence of the electorate's will with their political concepts and pronouncements; they ...

Habermas' new book: An unusually reactionary political philosophy

When the German news magazine SPIEGEL recently reported on the shattering of Marxism's most tenacious dogma under the heading "Philosophers" in its "Culture" section, it gleefully quoted a rather unusual bourgeois ideologue. According to SPIEGEL, the "important social philosopher" Jürgen Habermas, in an anthropological examination of the transition from ape to human, discovered that humanity is not redeemed, as Marx believed, by marching off to work in the morning, but rather finds its fulfillment in returning home to its family in the evening: "Karl Marx saw work as a blessing, humanity's path to self-redemption, that which makes a person human. Now Habermas comes along and proclaims something that must disturb the left (not SPIEGEL, however): Not work, but family makes a person human." Thus, SPIEGEL was once again able to make use of the back pages of a man from German science whose life's work, which became known and useful in the ...