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This paper presents the metaphysics of liberal rights reasoning on the one hand and that of demographic reasoning on the other, as exemplifying two worldviews that both compete and complement each other in the contemporary German public debate on demographic decline.First, this essay outlines the way in which liberal theorists of various outlooks, perfectionist and neutralist alike, assume that a wide range of rights serves not only the interests of those individuals who possess them, but that it constitutes the foundations of a just and stable political order in general and therefore is to the advantage of everyone.Second, the essay explains how demographic reasoning questions the assumption of harmony shared by the liberal approaches.Third, it provides an impression of the way in which demographic arguments have been deployed in the public sphere in Germany in the last few years. These arguments associate the autonomy of women with the demise of Germany. They claim that by encouraging women to pursue self-realization as self-interested individuals, the modern secular ethos of Germany as a democratic welfare society may be self-destructive in the long run, since it leads to sub-replacement fertility.Finally, the essay stresses that liberal and demographic perspectives share a "blindness" of historical events. In response, the conclusion brings history back in, by historicizing both demographic reasoning and demographic developments in Germany, with the aim of defusing some of the anxieties that may have been aroused by the current debate.

Freud uses paradoxical and conflictual rhetoric to create an unstable and conflictual picture of the mind. Thus he diverges from both dominant traditions of thought in the West: the Judeo-Christian way of filling all gaps in meaning by putting a single omnipotent divinity in charge of them, and the Enlightenment quest for a final, causal language to describe reality. By both suggesting and displacing a plurality of perspectives on the unconscious, Freud's text mirrors what it claims happens in our minds, in which unconscious impulses undermine the pretense of total rational self-control. Though Freud suggests that a mechanistic description of the mind may bring us nearer to the reality of the unconscious, he also explains that this reality will remain dark. He not only develops an ostensibly mechanistic vocabulary for unconscious mental processes, but also clarifies that his terminology is most fictional precisely when it seems most scientific. Hence, Freud's science of the unconscious cannot be assimilated to an empiricist position; its philosophical underpinnings are both Kantian and Nietzschean, with metaphors and analogies playing a crucial role. Two dramatic images, in which the mind appears as a domain of warring gods and a realm of political conflict, demonstrate that Freud did not regard the unconscious as some kind of true inner self. He depicts the mind in general and the unconscious in particular as a pagan, conflictual universe over which no god or goddess can gain exclusive control and where no rigid dictatorship is possible.

This essay provides a critical history of the debate on the Rorschach Inkblot Tests administered to 22 leading figures of the Third Reich who were imprisoned in Nuremberg in 1945–1946. This debate occurred in two stages. The question at the heart of the first stage was whether the Nazi leaders were sane or psychopaths. Despite a strong disagreement concerning the use of these diagnostic labels, there was a surprisingly broad agreement on the actual substance of the discrepant diagnoses. Divisions of opinion, however, arose from political dissension in two areas: the nature of liberal democracies and authoritarian regimes, and the possibility of trust in any political leadership. The second stage was marked by an ideology of convergence aimed at establishing a consensual "scientific truth" on the Nazi Rorschachs. Thus, the politics of the second phase were motivated by interests and ambitions internal to the field of Rorschach expertise, rather than by extraneous political anxieties.