Lügenbegriffe und Lügenpraxis in der Moderne

Lies occupy a surprisingly favorable place within our daily life. As the Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec once remarked: if you want to see the lie you need to face the obvious truth. With lies, we do not simply stigmatize the dark part or the “backside” of the humankind. To lie, meaning the ability to deceive, with or without words, even to deceive with the truth (for example in statistics), is one of the intellectual modalities of human existence, as well as an expression of misery. This leads to the paradox: One cannot live with lies or, at the same time, live without them. Lies thus reveal their double nature; they attempt to maintain vivid things, just as they generally tend to destroy them. This double nature of lies makes it impossible to condemn them by means of “ethical conviction”, as Max Weber would put it, or with the words of another famous French philosopher of our present time, Vladimir Jankélévitch, who says that consciousness is already provided with an inner disposi-tion to lie, as a litmus test of its noble and mean sides.

O pojęciach i praktyce kłamstwa w epoce nowoczesnej

Lies occupy a surprisingly favorable place within our daily life. As the Polish aphorist Stanisław Jerzy Lec once remarked: if you want to see the lie you need to face the obvious truth. With lies, we do not simply stigmatize the dark part or the „backside” of the humankind. To lie, meaning the ability to deceive, with or without words, even to deceive with the truth (for example in statistics), is one of the intellectual modalities of human existence, as well as an expression of misery. This leads to the paradox: One cannot live with lies or, at the same time, live without them. Lies thus reveal their double nature; they attempt to maintain vivid things, just as they generally tend to destroy them. This double nature of lies makes it impossible to condemn them by means of „ethical conviction”, as Max Weber would put it, or with the words of another famous French philosopher of our present time, Vladimir Jankélévitch, who says that consciousness is already provided with an inner disposition to lie, as a litmus test of its noble and mean sides.

Bertrand Russell: Cognitivism, Non-Cognitivism and Ethical Critical Thinking

Bertrand Russell converted from ethical cognitivism to ethical non-cognitivism and this was historically important, as it gave rise in part, to meta-ethics. It also clarified the central problem between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Russell’s view was that defining “good” is the basic problem of ethics. If “good” is not amorphous, the rest of ethics will follow. He did not believe in ethical knowledge per se and asserted that reason is, and must only be, the servant of desire. A factual statement is thus true if there is an equivalent fact, but as ethical statements do not state facts, there is no issue of a corresponding fact or the statement being true or false in the sense in which factual statements are. Ethics has no statement whether true or false, but consists only of desires of a general kind and people know intuitively what is “right” or “wrong”. To Russell critical thinking is entrenched in the structure of philosophy. His epistemological conviction was that knowledge is difficult to attain, while his ethical conviction showed that people should be expected to exercise freedom of inquiry when arriving at conclusions of something being either “good” or “bad”.

Bertrand Russell on Critical Thinking

The ideal of critical thinking is a central one in Russell's philosophy, though this is not yet generally recognized in the literature on critical thinking. For Russell, the ideal is embedded in the fabric of philosophy, science, liberalism and rationality, and this paper reconstructs Russell's account, which is scattered throughout numerous papers and books. It appears that he has developed a rich conception, involving a complex set of skills, dispositions and attitudes, which together delineate a virtue which has both intellectual and moral aspects. It is a view which is rooted in Russell's epistemological conviction that knowledge is difficult but not impossible to attain, and in his ethical conviction that freedom and independence in inquiry are vital. Russell's account anticipates many of the insights to be found in the recent critical thinking literature, and his views on critical thinking are of enormous importance in understanding the nature of educational aims. Moreover, it is argued that Russell manages to avoid many of the objections which have been raised against recent accounts. With respect to impartiality, thinking for oneself, the importance of feelings and relational skills, the connection with action, and the problem of generalizability, Russell shows a deep understanding of problems and issues which have been at the forefront of recent debate.

The “Open Society” and its Fallacies

A little over 100 years ago John Stuart Mill wrote in his essay On Liberty that “… there ought to exist the fullest liberty of professing and discussing, as a matter of ethical conviction, any doctrine, however immoral it may be considered.” The sentence from which this is taken is not obiter: Chapter Two of his book is devoted to arguments, putatively philosophical in character, which if they were sound would warrant precisely such a conclusion; we have therefore every reason to assume that Mill meant by the sentence just what it says. The topic of Chapter Two is the entire “communications” process in civilized society (“advanced” society, as Mill puts it); and the question he raises is whether there should be limitations on that process. He treats that problem as the central problem of all civilized societies, the one to which all other problems are subordinate, because of the consequences, good or ill, that a society must bring upon itself according as it adopts this or that solution to it. And he has supreme confidence in the Tightness of the solution he offers. Presumably to avoid all possible misunderstanding, he provides several alternative statements of it, each of which makes his intention abundantly clear, namely, that society must be so organized as to make that solution its supreme law. “Fullest,” that is, absolute freedom of thought and speech, he asserts by clear implication in the entire argument of the chapter, is not to be one of several competing goods society is to foster, one that on occasion might reasonably be sacrificed, in part at least, to the preservation of other goods; i.e., he refuses to recognize any competing good in the name of which it can be limited.