Is German the language of bad people?
This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.
German is the language of bad people edit
Pro edit
- Argument for German is the language of the mass-murderous Hitler and the German Nazis.
- Argument for German is the language of the pseudophilosophers Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
- Objection These are not generally recognized as pseudo and bad people.
- Argument for German is the language of Marx, one of the most dangerous men who ever lived, whose pseudophilosophy and pseudoeconomics has caused untold harm and still presents a tangible risk to the world.
- Objection That assessment of Marx is not generally accepted.
- Objection Even if we accept the above: if German is the language of thinkers, also bad thinkers are likely to end up using the language.
- Objection English is also a language of thinkers, but one struggles to find anything as bad as Marx (or other culprits/suspects). (French, another language of thinkers, fares worse than English given all those post-modern pseudophilosophers.)
- Argument for German is the language of the absolutist and rigid Austro-Hungarian empire, oppressing the poor non-German nations in it.
- Objection This seems very one-sided; one should be able to say good things about the empire.
- Argument for German is the language of two of the three empires that partitioned the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century, per Wikipedia:Partitions of Poland.
Con edit
- Argument against German is the language of great poets (e.g. Goethe, Schiller, Rilke).
- Argument against German is the language of great literary authors (e.g. Goethe, Mann, Schiller).
- Argument against German is the language of great philosophers (e.g. Leibniz, Kant, Schopenhauer, Popper, Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle)
- Argument against German is the language of great mathematicians (e.g. Leibniz, Euler, Riemann, Gauss, Weierstrass, Cantor, Dedekind and Hilbert).
- Argument against German is the language of great logicians (e.g. Frege and Gödel)
- Argument against German is the language of great scientists (e.g. Kepler, Mendel, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger).
- Argument against German is the language of great musicians (e.g. Mozart, Bach, Beethoven, Brams and Handel).
- Argument against German is a major language in Switzerland, the only (or one of very few?) world's direct democracy, where citizens really participate on the government.