Birgit Recki

Birgit Recki (born June 13, 1954 in Spellen ) is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg . Her work focuses on the areas of ethics , aesthetics and cultural philosophy / anthropology with historical emphasis in the 18th century and in modern times . She is the editor of the collected works of Ernst Cassirer in the "Hamburg Edition".

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Recki received his doctorate in 1984 on the subject of aura and autonomy. On the subjectivity of art in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno . From 1985 to 1992 she taught at the design department of the Münster University of Applied Sciences and at the Münster Art Academy , and from 1985 to 1997 she taught at the Philosophical Seminar of the Westphalian Wilhelms University in Münster . Her habilitation followed in 1995 with Aesthetics of Morals. The affinity of aesthetic feeling and practical reason in Kant . Between 1993 and 1997 Recki was a lecturer at the position of a research assistant in the Department of Cultural Studies at the University of Lüneburg , since 1997 she has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hamburg, and from 1997 to 2009 she was the head of the Ernst Cassirer office.

Since 2006 she has been chairwoman of the International Ernst Cassirer Society.

From October 2011 to February 2015 she was President of the German Society for Aesthetics; she organized the IX. Congress of the DGfÄ, which took place under the title "Techne - poiesis - aisthesis. Technique and Techniques in Art Aesthetic Practice" from February 17th to 20th, 2015 at the University of Hamburg.

Birgit Recki was a fellow at the Alfried-Krupp-Wissenschaftskolleg Greifswald from October 2011 to September 2012 .

In February 2013 he was appointed member of the board of the "Research Institute for Philosophy Hannover" foundation; In June 2013 he was appointed to the scientific advisory board of the Klassik Stiftung Weimar.

In the summer semester 2013 she was visiting professor at the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Vienna.

On December 1, 2014, she took over the management of the Warburg House in Hamburg (together with Uwe Fleckner and Cornelia Zumbusch).

In the 2016/17 winter semester she was a guest with lectures at the University of Koblenz-Landau as part of a fellowship in the research focus "Cultural Orientation and Normative Binding".

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Aura and autonomy. On the subjectivity of art in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno

The work is a text-based, but decidedly critical contribution to the examination of the meaning of the art theories of Benjamin and Adorno. For Recki, both authors have failed in essential issues of their theories. Benjamin is highlighted as an inventive mind - as a decisive source of ideas for Adorno's Aesthetic Theory , but his theoretical program of a materialistic theory of art is criticized as metaphysically unacceptable and systematically inconsistent. Adorno is honored because of the greater systematic density of his theory and as a defender of the autonomy of art , but at the level of reflection of the theory with the systematic ( historical-philosophical and socio- theoretical ) specifications of his negative dialectics, he violates this claim to autonomy of art.

The work interprets the art-philosophical approaches of Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno as contributions to a concept of art with which the aesthetic experience is understood within the framework of the paradigm of subjectivity theory. In the first part, it deals with Benjamin's writings, which, according to the widespread reading, can be seen as his contribution to a theory of (modern) art , above all with the powerful essay " The work of art in the age of its technical reproducibility " from 1936. Benjamin's thesis: Under the conditions of the technical production of art (photography and film) the aura is “smashed”, which leads to an emancipation of art from its “parasitic existence in ritual”, as art is set free through this loss of authority and prestige will be responsible for all kinds of pragmatic functions such as B. the critical documentation of the living and working conditions of the modern masses and the practice of certain modes of reaction that would benefit people under the conditions of the acceleration of perception in the modern world.

Recki pursues the argument that 1. such a functional theory of art does not do justice to it, because the entire aspect of aesthetic experience is neglected, and that 2. Benjamin uses conceptual means that would require different and more necessary than him himself has in mind. In in-depth, text-based interpretations (as in the confrontation of the various versions of the reproduction essay ) it is shown that the central provisions of the analysis given here on the functional change in art, which are based on the concept of the aura of a work of art and its loss, are less fundamental for an ontology of art (with Benjamin in the terminological variant of a “materialistic theory of art”) than for a transcendental-philosophical theory of aesthetic experience - that they would have their legitimate place in a completely different theory program than Benjamin had in mind. Recki works out that Benjamin's descriptions of an aura of natural things and works of art essentially describe a peculiar attitude through which aesthetic experience, especially in the space-time relationship that supports it, has features in common with religious experience. In this context she recurs on religious-philosophical , phenomenological , symbol-theoretical approaches: Rudolf Otto ; Eduard Spranger / Philipp Lersch ; Max Weber ; Ernst Cassirer . In this context, the chapter on the implicit theory of the aura is important, which the author recognizes in Proust in his Recherche du temps perdu : Proust, with whose work Benjamin was familiar as a translator and interpreter, is therefore a key witness of that theory of the subject-philosophical an aesthetic experience for which Benjamin had the terms, but which had to be lost in his approach.

In his Aesthetic Theory, Adorno decisively criticized Walter Benjamin's famous essay and, in return, concentrated all his theoretical endeavors on withdrawing art in a society distorted and alienated by domination as any form of functionalization, as the embodiment of the principle of freedom of domination and thus as an authority to expel the criticism. In the second part of the work, the conceptual elements of Adorno's art theory are shown in detail that the concept of the autonomy of art is to be taken seriously here as an expression for a sane subject and his claims, as Benjamin's concept of aura is metaphorically to the liveliness of a person Subject refers: Both terms mark art as a quasi-subject - as an instance of subjectivity . A counterpart to the Proust chapter in the Benjamin part can be found here in the detailed chapter on the concept of the monad, which Adorno applies to the work of art in the Aesthetic Theory : the author divides this concept into the moments intended by Leibniz and finds it confirmed by this analysis as a suitable candidate for the central concept of a theory of living subjectivity. But it also shows that he did not get into Adorno's theory through reading Leibniz, but through the reception of the epistemological preface to Benjamin's tragedy book (“The Idea is Monad”). The interpretation thesis of the Adorno part: For Adorno, art is of great importance as a compensation for the loss of autonomous subjectivity, through which the actual subjects of social action, the people, have become incapable of acting under the conditions of a universal delusion . But just as Benjamin does not meet the claim set by his central concept - to take the aesthetic experience seriously - so Adorno does not meet the claim to emphasize the autonomy of art in his theory, since art here always has a higher functionalization The next step is: the functionalization within the framework of a negative philosophy of history and social theory, the author of which needs it as the last instance of the remaining hope .

Aesthetics of Morals. The affinity of aesthetic feeling and practical reason in Kant

The title Aesthetics of Morals is a Kantian quote from the Metaphysics of Morals , where Kant expressly uses this term to describe the doctrine of the role of feelings in morality. The aim of the Kant interpretation presented here is also quite clear, with the role that feeling plays in Kant's theory of morality, at the same time that of the faculty of aesthetically reflective judgment that is responsible for feelings. Contrary to the mainstream of Kant's reception, according to Recki, feeling continues to play an important role in Kant's moral conception, even after his decisive rejection as a moral principle: although not in the foundation of morality, since, according to Kant's critical insight, it can only be based on reason - but in theirs Implementation, since according to Kant, in addition to the rational insight, a motivation (“driving force”) is required so that this insight can become practical. The work would therefore be misjudged if one wanted to see in it above all a contribution to the Kantian aesthetics - it rather treats aesthetics and moral philosophy in equal parts .

Since, according to Reckis, the meaning and the proportion of feelings for morality can be worked out most clearly when 1. the validity claims of moral and aesthetic judgments are already methodologically separated in the course of the critique of reason and 2. the concept of feeling in Kant's critical system Reason is fully developed, after a first part devoted to prehistory, which describes Kant's struggle for a moral-sensualistic approach in his so-called "pre-critical" phase (1764–1768) and the uncritically represented proximity of the aesthetic and the moral, it approaches, so to speak , retrospectively Moral philosophy approaches: In Part II (“The good thing about beautiful”) it first gives a detailed interpretation of the critique of judgment , in which Kant's analysis of the subject's “feeling for life”, i.e. the aesthetic feeling as an effect of the free play of cognitive powers in the Perception of the beautiful, and what he himself called “Ge feeling ”of the sublime . The subjective functional condition of feeling is worked out as the achievement of a reasonable faculty, the aesthetically reflective judgment. Recki already emphasizes this textual representation to the affinity of the aesthetic judgment to moral consciousness, as it includes in the discussion in detail all the motifs found in the KU of the importance of aesthetic reflection for the moral self-understanding of the experiencing subject.

In this context, special emphasis is placed on the interpretation of § 59 of the Critique of Judgment “Of the beautiful as a symbol of morality”: Here the interpreter emphasizes that the experience of the beautiful, due to its character, is a free reflection, as it is in the analytics as free play of the powers of knowledge has been conceptualized, represents a reference to the idea of freedom in the mode of feeling and that that ominous "supersensible substratum" that was mentioned in the previous paragraphs emerges from the Kantian text as the idea of ​​(transcendental ) Let freedom qualify (not as the idea of ​​God, as many interpreters have intuitively assumed). The final section of this second part on the sublime also deserves special attention, as Kant recognizes a striking reflection on the practical determination of man in the experience of the sublime: While after a reflection of the early 1770s, which Recki makes the guide in the main part of her interpretation, the "beautiful things" indicate "that man fits into the world", according to their interpretation, show the sublime things of nature - thus shows the shock in the feeling of the sublime in the dialectic of the inevitably imposing recourse to the indestructible intelligible on people - that he can and must make the world fit himself where he does not seem to fit directly into it. The sublime is thus, also expressly for Kant, another symbol of freedom.

On the basis of this interpretation of the critique of the power of judgment, which is pointed towards the practical self-understanding, the feeling as an achievement of the aesthetically reflective power of judgment is sufficiently clearly defined, so that it becomes recognizable how Kant already in his writings on moral philosophy achievements of the reflective power of judgment and especially the aesthetically reflective power of judgment Uses judgment as an element of moral awareness. Part III (“The sublime in the good”) initially presents the role of judgment in the context of morality. It is important for the author to demonstrate that it is not just about explicitly expressed moral judgments, but that judgments are always invested in actions are. But even if the ubiquity of judgment is shown in this way, initially only the determining power of judgment is meant. In addition, the author searches for the systematic determinations of moral consciousness, in which reflection and: aesthetic reflection take place in a concise sense: that one follows the moral law according to the claim of the chapter on the “typics of pure practical judgment” with the process of analogy formation, the Kant described in § 59 of the KU that it should be viewed as a law of nature ; that, according to Kant, there is expressly a “leeway” for reflective judgment when determining moral duties; that in the little-noticed methodology of the Critique of Practical Reason [KpV] the pedagogical status of the good example is also based on a liking for the beautiful example, in which the elements of what Kant analyze as the feeling of the beautiful in the third Critique are recognizable becomes. Finally, Recki attaches particular importance to the interpretation of the chapter “From the mainspring of pure practical reason” in the KpV, in which she describes the exact analogy in the structure of the feeling of respect for the law, which for Kant ultimately functions as a moral motivation, with feeling of the sublime. This part of the work ends with a reassurance of the importance that Kant attaches to feeling in morality by recourse to the corresponding passage in the Metaphysics of Morals, in which he explicitly deals with an "aesthetics of morals" where next to the Feeling of respect also includes conscience, compassion and other moral feelings.

The systematic intention that gives the work the framework is made clear by the author in Part IV (“Neither in heaven nor on earth”). This heading is also a quotation from Kant - from the foundation of the metaphysics of morals, where the formulation alludes to the level of the justification of the moral law: neither empirical nor transcendent in the sense of a theological justification. Here Recki outlines an argument that is intended to correct what Kant's constant insinuation that the moral law applies to all reasonable beings in general is supposed to say: Not that Kant thought his ethics (contrary to his explicit rejection) for angels or gods ; Rather, this formula is intended to express at the same time the epistemological reservation of modesty that we cannot know whether there are other rational beings besides us who need morality, and the universal claim to validity of morality. For Kant, however, according to Recki, it is clear that morality is only there for those finite beings who need morality. She brings this to the notion that Kant's moral philosophy, which he always wanted to be protected from a purely anthropological in the sense of an empirical justification, is nonetheless part of a rational anthropology.

The work is literally framed by a “prologue in heaven” and an “epilogue on earth”. Both deal with the problematic relationship between the beautiful and the good: the first tells the anecdote of Moses Mendel's son's marriage (according to which marriages are made in heaven), the platonic point of which is that the beautiful is the beautiful soul; the latter is Gottfried Benn's poem “Menschen Made”, which ends with the following information: “I have often asked myself and found no answer where the gentle and the good come from, I don't know today either and now I have to go.” Interpretation of Kant's contribution to the relationship between the beautiful and the good, to which the author attaches the greatest possible weight in solving this systematically unadverted question.

Culture as practice. An introduction to Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms

The work is an introduction of a special kind: on the one hand, an introduction to Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms , of which it is asserted that, as a transformation of the critique of reason into the critique of culture, it inherited the legacy of Kantian thought after the Copernican turn and represents one of the most elaborate systematic outputs of Kantianism in the 20th century; on the other hand, a general introduction to the philosophy of culture. Cassirer's problem awareness and theoretical program, so the systematic claim, can be seen as exemplary for the understanding of cultural philosophy as that philosophical anthropology, which in its discipline already announces the most important result that has yet to be explicated in detail: that man is essentially a cultural being, its constitutive reality is culture.

In Part A, Birgit Recki exposes Cassirer's symbol-theoretical approach, his concept of culture against the background of the general sketch of a broad and emphatically occupied concept of culture. Since we cannot think about culture differently than from our own cultural self-image, since the understanding of culture necessarily communicates the elements of human self-image, so the most striking thesis of the work, the concept of culture also shares the evaluative and normative understanding of ourselves With.

In Part B, Cassirer's foundation of culture is presented in a concept of consciousness as “natural symbolism”: He already understands consciousness as an elementary reference context in which the spiritual is constantly represented in sensual representation. The pragmatic use of signs puts the resulting (symbolic) meaning in the long term and thus makes it available. Symbolization leads to objectification and thus to a gain in distance, which the subject uses and expands as scope for disposal - and which it needs in order to be able to act. In this function of enabling action by gaining distance, Recki sees the genus proximum of all symbolization and thus all cultural activity according to Cassirer's theory. According to her interpretation, this is also the basis of the specific understanding of culture as practice, to which she (in the awareness that culture as the sphere of production of works according to the Aristotelian scheme of juxtaposing poiesis and praxis is traditionally assigned to poiesis) through her choice of title seeks to gain validity in intentional provocation: For Cassirer, culture remains poiesis as the creation of symbols of all kinds - but as the origin of action and the exercise of freedom in an elementary sense, it is both practical and ethical. - This is followed by the presentation of the cultural diversity of the symbolic forms language, myth (better: mythical awareness) and art, which Recki discusses in separate chapters. It is important to her to safeguard the methodological primacy of language as the fundamental form of culture, which Cassirer does not unambiguously highlight everywhere. The fact that Cassirer ascribes primacy to language in the system of culture is particularly evident in the fact that, within the framework of his philosophy of language, he develops a theory of radical metaphor in which the transfer into a foreign medium is understood as the basic structure of all symbolization and thus of the entire cultural process shall be. However, it is also important to her to discuss Cassirer's concept of myth as the attitude of consciousness, which is characterized by physiognomic perception, dominance of feeling and overpowering consciousness by images. Recki points out that, although its phenomenology is mainly sought in examples from archaic cultures, according to Cassirer's understanding, even in the age of dominance of scientific rationality, mythical consciousness remains a symbolic form that is simultaneous and of the same origin: the topicality of myth.

On this basis, Part C develops the author's actual interest in argument: the reconstruction of Cassirer's unwritten ethics. Recki emphasizes the high ethical appetite of this philosophy of culture. She also underlines this finding through exemplary recourse to the moral stature of Cassirer with his ethos as a university lecturer and as a citizen, supported by moral courage, convinced liberalism and political judgment. She then investigates the question of why the otherwise productive Cassirer did not write a moral-philosophical monograph and, above all, invalidates the assumption, which has been renewed occasionally since Donald Verene , that this was systematically made impossible for him by the symbol-theoretical approach. According to Recki's textual interpretation findings (here in particular the speech on “The Idea of ​​the Republican Constitution” from 1928, where Kant is referred to as a “symbolic thinker” in the dispute between the faculties due to his entangled reception-aesthetic approach in the theory of the historical sign), according to Cassirer's understanding, the Understand morality as a symbolic form. Recki then makes the exact assumption that there was a significant lack of clarity in the basic concept of this cultural philosophy that stood in the way of Cassirer's development of his ethics: The concept of freedom is in a way 'used up' by the fact that Cassirer applied it unspecifically to the whole Applies the area of ​​culture and is then no longer able to specify it in terms of moral philosophy. However, according to Recki, this is not the last word, but the invitation to pick the membra disiecta of Cassirer's moral philosophy from the texts. The author sees the specifically ethical understanding of freedom articulated in Cassirer's contradiction to Georg Simmel's theory of the tragedy of culture: We should act for the sake of our own self-image (especially in the interest of our practical resilience in view of the possible endeavors for the permanence of culture) not conceptualize culture as the medium of our self-actualization as tragedy. Here the evaluative estimation of culture as humanity expressly asserts itself as a normative claim on practice and theory. Recki calls this piece of theory, in which a significant transition from being to ought takes place, a "doctrine of postulates" with an emphatic allusion to Kant. Finally, when discussing the positions of Heidegger and Cassirer at the Davos Disputation in 1929, which for Recki apparently represents the culmination point in the search for Cassirer's unwritten ethics, she brings an unpublished manuscript from the estate originally kept in Yale and edited in Berlin since 1995 - Cassirer's Davos lecture manuscript on death. In the juxtaposition of the ancient pagan fearlessness in the face of death, which Cassirer represents here, and which he connects with the postulate of the commitment to culture as the sphere of endurance, the correlate to the claim to transcendence that Cassirer in the protocolled disputation against Heidegger's restriction of the Kantian concept of reason to finitude in the concept of freedom.

Fonts

• Aura and autonomy. On the subjectivity of art in Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 1988, ISBN 978-3-88479-361-9 .
• Aesthetics of Morals. The affinity of aesthetic feeling and practical reason in Kant. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2001, ISBN 978-3-465-03150-5 .
• Culture as practice. An introduction to Ernst Cassirer's philosophy of symbolic forms. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2004, ISBN 978-3-05-003870-4 .
• The reason, its nature, its feeling and the progress. Essays on Immanuel Kant. Mentis, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 978-3-89785-431-4 .
• Freedom. UTB / facultas.wuv, Vienna 2009, ISBN 978-3-8252-3233-7 .
• Form uma. Elementi fenomenologije slobode [translation of seven articles into Croatian], Matica Hrvatska, Zagreb 2012, ISBN 978-953-150-964-0 .
• Cassirer [Basic Knowledge Philosophy series], Reclam, Stuttgart 2013, ISBN 978-3-15-020285-2 .

Editions

• Ernst Cassirer, Collected Works . Hamburg edition in 25 volumes with a register volume, ed. by Birgit Recki [ECW 1-26], Hamburg 1998-2009, ISBN 3-7873-1793-7 .
• Rudolf Harms: Philosophy of Film. His aesthetic and metaphysical foundations (1926), with an introduction by Birgit Recki, Hamburg 2009, ISBN 978-378-73183-0-8 .

Anthologies

• Image and reflection. Paradigms and Perspectives of Contemporary Aesthetics , ed. by Birgit Recki and Lambert Wiesing, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-7705-3156-6 .
• Cassirer and Goethe. New aspects of a philosophical-literary elective affinity , series: Studies from the Warburg House, ed. by Barbara Naumann and Birgit Recki, Berlin 2002, ISBN 978-3-05-008083-3 .
• Kant lives. Seven speeches and a colloquium , ed. by Birgit Recki, Ingmar Ahl and Thomas Meyer, Paderborn 2006, ISBN 3-89785-248-9 .
• Philosophy of Culture - Culture of Philosophizing. Ernst Cassirer in the 20th and 21st centuries. 33 contributions to the international Ernst Cassirer conference in Hamburg from 4. – 6. October 2007, Hamburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-7873-1975-6 .
• What is evil good for? , ed. by Birgit Recki, Münster 2016, ISBN 978-3-95743-050-2 .
• Which technique? , ed. by Birgit Recki, Dresden 2020, ISBN 978-3-943897-55-5 .

Web links

• Literature by and about Birgit Recki in the catalog of the German National Library
• https://www.philosophie.uni-hamburg.de/philosophisches-seminar/haben/recki-birgit.html

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Birgit Recki (ed.): Ernst Cassirer: Collected works. Hamburg edition (ECW), Meiner, Hamburg 1998-.
2. ^ Walter Benjamin, The Origin of the German Tragedy, Berlin 1928.
3. ↑ Immanuel Kant: The Metaphysics of Morals. AA VI, 406.