[…] Lincoln's Death forces us to think about murder in principle. However, this is not possible without first distinguishing between the murder and the murderer. In a small, little-known text, Hegel reflects on the question of "who thinks abstractly" and illustrates his answer with the phenomenon of the murderer. Anyone who equates murderer with murderer, who cannot see and understand that motives, circumstances, specific constellations, purposes and consequences make a considerable, not to say decisive, difference in each case, is thinking abstractly. "Thinking abstractly means seeing nothing but the abstract in the murderer, that he is a murderer, and destroying everything else human in him through this simple characteristic." The condemnation or condemnation of a murderer can therefore not ignore these concretions, including and not least the purposes and goals that the murderer pursued and which qualitatively distinguish the primitive robbery-murder from the politically motivated assassination.
For the victim, on the other hand, the motives of the murderer have no significance, since the result – the extinction of a human life – is identical in all cases. But where a life comes to an end precisely because death is the end result, the question of meaning must be allowed – regardless of the perpetrator's arbitrary motives or other apparent coincidences that may lead to a violent, "premature" death. Are there coincidences? There is no doubt that the Lincoln assassin had the plan for his act within him for a long time; however, the manner and circumstances that suddenly gave him the opportunity to do so contain such an adventurously high degree of circumstances favorable to him for the execution of the act according to probability criteria that it is hardly scientifically and methodologically permissible to speak of "coincidences" here. A mathematically based theory, according to which it is a systemic law that if something can go wrong as a result of risk-calculated social action, it will also go wrong, can be reversed as a systematic hypothesis and thought through to the end: if none of the many concrete possibilities that could have prevented the assassination or the assassin occurred, then this suggests the conclusion of a higher necessity that caused the act. A positivist science will refuse to take the idea of "fate" or "predestination" seriously and relegates such explanatory patterns not only to the realm of faith, but rather to superstition, which makes it structurally blind to the really fascinating, exciting questions.
This is not about religious confessions, but about a scientific method that does not shy away from expressing those overall contexts of the historical-empirical world that qualitatively elude material quantification. Goethe, whose theoretical writings on the method of scientific observation are far too little known, took what he called the "apparently bold step" of categorically summarizing "all world phenomena" in their interconnectedness: "from the tile that falls from the roof to the luminous spiritual vision that dawns upon you". In the case of the Lincoln assassination, this approach makes it possible to ask the question of the fateful nature of this death without getting lost in mystical speculation. For the truth about this assassination, as important as it is, cannot be limited to the criminalistic reconstruction of the course of events and the description of the perpetrators. That would be just as banal as the reverse, the simple assumption of a divine decree. Goethe: "Rigid, divisive pedantry and disquieting mysticism are both equally disastrous."
Thirdly, the distinction between "murderer" and "Assassin" also applies to the apparently unambiguous category of "Assassination". Only those who think abstractly, i.e., far from reality, can allow themselves to put all assassinations of politically exposed persons or representatives on the same level or level of judgment, to subsume them under one category. However, any serious consideration must make a clear distinction here as well: Not all assassinations are the same. To distinguish only two possible, i.e. real, forms: [...]
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KRIPPENDORFF, Ekkehart, 1996. Abraham Lincoln 1865 (mit Reflexion zu Itzhak Rabin, 4. November 1995). In: DEMANDT, Alexander (ed.), Das Attentat in der Geschichte. Köln: Böhlau. ISBN 978-3-412-16795-0. p. 233–250, here: p. 236–237.