conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a book titled The Lure of Technocracy about Emeritus, Professor, Philosophy with the genre: Politics & Social Sciences, Politics & Government.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: the author is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt and one of the most influential social and political thinkers in the world today.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this book.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Lure of Technocracy
  The new time consciousness to which Heine gives literary voice makes him into our contemporary. With him we share the modern consciousness of a dynamic flow of time that, like Benjamin's angel, rushes towards present generations from the future, tearing them out of the past and confronting them with the demand to choose responsibly between alternatives and find the right answer within the horizon of their respective futures. At the same time, contemporaries understand the engine that accelerates the flow of time in this way as 'modernity'. They want to take control of this process, whether in order to slow down modernization or to speed it up. From this perspective, contemporary history acquires not only the character of an appeal that the present must confront. The process of history simultaneously acquires a direction, with some peoples belonging to the vanguard, while others are left behind. There is now a benchmark against which progress is measured, and the simultaneity of the non-simultaneous is measured against the most progressive. It is a well-known fact that, for Heine, German philosophy was nothing but the dream of the French Revolution. And Marx would observe that the Germany of this time was 'below the level of history' and belonged in the 'junkroom of modern nations'.13
  The dimensions of the past and the future acquire negative or positive values for contemporaries depending on what weights they attach to the gains and losses they expect from modernization. This political colouring of the dimensions of time first found a spatial representation in the seating arrangement of the French National Assembly. The conservatives separated themselves from the liberals. The one side was convinced that the losses entailed by the disintegration of traditional ways of life outweigh the gains promised by a chimerical progress. The others objected that the average net gains of creative destruction far outweighed the suffering of the losers of modernization. Finally, what set the Left apart was its sensitivity to the paradoxes of progress: the wounds inevitably inflicted by social modernization could be healed only by the revolutionary leap into true modernity.
  This was also Heine's view. The uprooted ways of life of the past contain an inviolable substance that the men of action can rescue for future generations only if they are guided by a dialectical interpretation of progress. Heine's mentality is profoundly marked by this ambivalence between longing for the overdue overthrow of the repressive forces of the nobility and the Church, which at this time were stifling progress, and the desire to rescue a vulnerable, because non-renewable, human heritage that must remain beyond the reach of fanatical iconoclasts. Heine, who was enchanted by the July Revolution, certainly celebrates the break with the past: 'All reverence for tradition will be renounced' (III.590). However, when he arrived in Paris after the revolution, he first made his way to the Bibliothèque Royale, where he requested to see the 'Manessische Handschrift' and the manuscripts of the troubadours.
  We remain contemporaries of this modern time consciousness. Nothing has changed in the political colour theory and the seating arrangement in parliaments, which continue to reflect the profit-and-loss calculation of an economically trivialized progress. To be sure, in view of the global alignment of social infrastructures, it is tempting to say that today all societies are modern. But failed development aid programmes, and especially the failure of naïve and over-hasty attempts to export democratic institutions and procedures indiscriminately all over the world, have taught us about the non-simul-taneity of cultural traditions and mentalities. However reluctant we are to make value judgements about other cultures, we nevertheless continue to apply the standard of modernization as a matter of course, at least in the economic measures of unit-labour costs and competitiveness. Every day we read about the 'backwardness' of the Southern European countries compared to the exporting countries of the North.
  At this point, however, Heine specialists might warn against cheap polemics and turn the tables: wasn't it Heine who, in his 'mattress grave', revoked his youthful revolutionary fantasies of creating the kingdom of heaven on earth? Didn't he recognize the error of inflating claims and making excessive demands on our political forces? Didn't he expiate the sin of self-deification with his late conversion to belief in a personal God? In view of the limits of political intervention and organization, wouldn't a good measure of fatalism, or at any rate self-restraint, have even spared our peoples the extremes of the twentieth century?
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me another paragraph.. End with the sentence '17'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Until then, Heine had assimilated Hegel's philosophy of mind as the delineation of a process of human beings' self-deification. On this reading, Hegel is supposed to have taught 'how man becomes God through cognition, or, what amounts to the same thing, how God in man attains to self-consciousness' (VI.I.479 and II.510).16 Heine, who was impressed by Saint-Simonism, was convinced that he was merely divulging the 'secret doctrine' of German idealism when he – as one of the first Young Hegelians – proclaimed the imperative to proceed from thought to action, from theory to practice. However, this philosophical idea of a radical upheaval had a Romantic tinge in Heine's lyrical 'I' from the beginning. The party of flowers and nightingales was supposed to ensure the reconciliation of social justice with beauty and happiness. The dream of reconciling Jerusalem and Athens that Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling had shared in the seminary in Tübingen was finally supposed to be fulfilled. 'Spiritualism' was finally supposed to become fused with 'sensationalism', as Heine now put it, hence the egalitarian liberation of society with the emancipation of the senses and the flesh. This utopia continued to resound later in the desire to reconcile 'Jewish asceticism' with 'Hellenic naturalism'. But Heine would now renounce the extravagant revolutionary idea of hybrid self-deification. Now he could give free rein to the fear of revolution that he had suppressed until then. Thus, in 1854, Heine admitted that: 'Like many other dethroned gods of that period of upheaval [i.e., the years 1830– 48], I had sorrowfully to abdicate, and to retire once more into private life as a human... I returned to the humble folds of God's creatures, and I paid homage to the power of a great Almighty Being' (VI.I.475).17
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last five paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Until then, Heine had assimilated Hegel's philosophy of mind as the delineation of a process of human beings' self-deification. On this reading, Hegel is supposed to have taught 'how man becomes God through cognition, or, what amounts to the same thing, how God in man attains to self-consciousness' (VI.I.479 and II.510).16 Heine, who was impressed by Saint-Simonism, was convinced that he was merely divulging the 'secret doctrine' of German idealism when he – as one of the first Young Hegelians – proclaimed the imperative to proceed from thought to action, from theory to practice. However, this philosophical idea of a radical upheaval had a Romantic tinge in Heine's lyrical 'I' from the beginning. The party of flowers and nightingales was supposed to ensure the reconciliation of social justice with beauty and happiness. The dream of reconciling Jerusalem and Athens that Hegel, Hölderlin and Schelling had shared in the seminary in Tübingen was finally supposed to be fulfilled. 'Spiritualism' was finally supposed to become fused with 'sensationalism', as Heine now put it, hence the egalitarian liberation of society with the emancipation of the senses and the flesh. This utopia continued to resound later in the desire to reconcile 'Jewish asceticism' with 'Hellenic naturalism'. But Heine would now renounce the extravagant revolutionary idea of hybrid self-deification. Now he could give free rein to the fear of revolution that he had suppressed until then. Thus, in 1854, Heine admitted that: 'Like many other dethroned gods of that period of upheaval [i.e., the years 1830– 48], I had sorrowfully to abdicate, and to retire once more into private life as a human... I returned to the humble folds of God's creatures, and I paid homage to the power of a great Almighty Being' (VI.I.475).17
  Of course, the bedridden Heine also reflected on the infirmity of the invalid in need of help as a much less convincing motivation for his repentance. Formerly he had scoffed that 'So many freethinkers... have been converted on their deathbed' (III.634),18 and now he had crawled on his knees to the cross himself. Thus, the touching, almost childlike lament that he intones in his mattress grave cannot completely efface the malicious doubt awakened in him by the charitable intent of his religious conversion. The melody of Heine's confession is, like everything else, self-deprecating:
  Above all, however, Moses now assumed a larger-than-life presence for Heine. Liberty had always been 'the great emancipator's leading thought' and this idea, Heine wrote, 'breathes and glows in all his statutes concerning pauperism'.24 Of course, Heine cannot desist from his old game of playful teasing even in the face of death. Every reader of his poems has the experience that Heine initially entices her into succumbing to the ingratiating and desublimating allure of his moving tone, but that at the latest in the closing line he breaks the enchanting spell to prevent the reader, who is on the point of succumbing, from drifting into sentimentality. Heine, because he still feels the itch of Feuerbach's criticism of religion, even throws such a tongue-in-cheek 'last line' into his homage to Moses: 'May God forgive the sacrilegious thought, but sometimes it appears to me as if this Mosaic God were only the reflected radiance of Moses himself, whom he so strongly resembles in wrath and in love' (VI.I.480).25 However we understand Heine's religious turn, one thing it is not: it is not a deflation of the claim to an improvement of this world. At the end of his life, Heine postponed the longing of the poet for happiness, which had always been religiously tinged, to the hereafter. But that did not mark a break with the balladeer's enthusiasm for liberty, or with the political ire and the militant revolt of the intellectual and citizen whose sense of justice has been injured. He made no concessions when it came to his Kantian-inspired philosophy of history with a cosmopolitan intent. Nothing suggests that he felt less distain in his old age than in younger years for the disconsolate realism of those who 'shake their heads over our struggles for freedom', or that he had relented in the fight against the fatalism of those for whom there is 'nothing new under the sun'. His polemic against the conception of history 'of the worldly-wise men of the historical school', the Savignys and Rankes, remains in force: 'They mock all the efforts of a political enthusiasm that wants to make the world better and happier' (III.21).
  In his darkest moments, the ageing Heine may have thought that not even the existing shabby balance between good and evil could be maintained if we do not try our utmost to make the world better in spite of everything without being afraid of making fools of ourselves. 'Improving the world' has always had a pejorative ring in Germany. Today, at a time of frenzied stagnation, this concept has an especially strident overtone. Under the weight of the crippling complexity of a 'God become money' (Heine), the mood of resignation is spreading that nothing works any more even though everything is changing. Every thought that looks beyond the present is suspect. Yet, a century after Heine's abortive revolution of 1848, we saw that progress was possible, at least in the domain of legality. Heine's anticipatory liberal notions of democracy in Germany have prevailed. Why shouldn't his European notions of overcoming national prejudices with the aid of the cunning of economic reason be able to come true?
  When Heine travelled to Poland as a twenty-five-year-old student at the invitation of a friend, he was deeply moved by the exuberant patriotism he encountered there. In view of the unhappy fate of this nation divided for the third time, he exclaimed: 'These death throes of the body of the Polish people are a terrible sight!' However, compassion did not prevent him from observing at the same time: