German Philosophy

The following is an excerpt from a very old number of the Michigan Law Journal--out of an article entitled simply German Legal Philosophy. I thought it might tickle the fancy of those of my friends who, like me, suffered through too many seminars on Hegel, Heidegger, and similar goobers. Some of the vituperation is admittedly ascribable to the date of publication (1918), but I still find it amusing for its sheer mass of sarcasm.

So it is in the philosophy of the law. Professor Beinkopf finds something that strikes him as an idea in English or French or Italian writing. He at once invents a new theory, sounds a new watchword and savagely criticizes his rivals as without discernment. Thereupon Doctor Schlechtbier retorts with a rolling thunder of German amenities prounouncing Beinkopf a hollow sham. This rouses Professor Raucher who writes a grund-something-or-other to prove to a demonstration that both Beinkopf and Schlechtbier are mere dabblers in science, arrogant peacocks, and a disgrace to a learned country. The noise of the conflict arouses the Geheimrat Rauhbart, and by a mere multiplying of language, beginning with the heavy patter of metaphysics degenerating into a slow, steady, endless drizzle of words, he drowns the others and demonstrates that Beinkopf, Schlechtbier and Raucher are all of them totally wrong. But after the storm has passed it is found that they were all asserting the same thoughts in different words, and the only residual matter is their denounciations of one another. Professor Kocoureck apologizes for this "elemental savagery" of German "criticism" by the fact that "the German language is blunt and plain." It seems to be an extraordinary sort of language in which a man cannot express himself without being a blackguard. As a matter of fact, the German language is like their critical thought and writing. What is needed is justness of perception in dealing with involved facts. But in this sort of perception the German mind, as a great critic has remarked, is naturally wanting. Their mind is like their language, not clear, but vague and gauche; it has in it "something splay and something blunt-edged, unhandy, infelicitous--some positive want of straightforward, sure perception." The language permits and encourages the invention of awkward, vague compounds, with no restraint on their ugliness. This gives their language to ordinary eyes its tremendously learned appearance. The average man is bound to assume when he sees such agglutinative monstrosities as Militarstrafgerichtsverfahren, Gerichtsverfassungsgestez, Poliszussammengehorigkeit, Geschlechtsgenossenschaft, Buffelshalsbuckelsfettigheit, Entwickelungsgeschichte, or Volkerrechtswissenschaftslehre sprawling their uncouth lengths of tremendous consonantal thicket across the page, that thelanguage is learned and the thought profound. But that is all illusion. Aristophanes or Plautus did this kind of thing for fun, but the Germans are in deadly, sober earnest.

John M. Zane, German Legal Philosophy, 16 Mich L. Rev. 287, 366-67 (1918).