Discharge (sociology)
Discharge is a central concept in modern sociology and philosophical anthropology . It achieved a high level of awareness as a fundamental category of Arnold Gehlen's anthropology , presented above all in his main work Der Mensch .
Gehlen sees the tendency towards increasing relief to be a "fundamental human legality" due to the instinctual insecurity of humans and their less specialized organ equipment. This tendency ranges from magic as a relief from powerlessness in the face of the forces of nature to organ relief in the use of tools to the action-stabilizing function of institutions . Gehlen even used his term in art-historical image studies. Accordingly, it is a relieving characteristic of abstract images to be "freed from causal determination".
Paul Alsberg had already formulated a forerunner to Gehlen's concept of relief in his work "Das Menschlichkeitsrätsel" (1922) with his concept of body disconnection.
In sociology, Niklas Luhmann ties in with Gehlen with his concept of reducing environmental complexity and thus extends the concept of relief to systems. Only by excluding alternative courses of action, as it were by narrowing them down, can a deepening and specialized problem treatment be generated.
This exonerating concept of German provenance, however, meets with extensive misunderstanding in the thinking of Anglo-Saxon ethnology, social and cultural anthropology. The term makes sense heuristically. But the reduction of complexity and the creation of new complexity in institutions seem to be at least balanced; the original instinct arsenal is not completely eliminated by culture; the idea of relief from large institutions turns into metaphysics .
swell
- Arnold Gehlen: Man. Its nature and its position in the world (1940), Wiesbaden 1997; Cape. 8th
- Arnold Gehlen: The soul in the technical age. Social-psychological problems in industrial society (1957), Frankfurt 2007; Cape. 1
- Eduard Kaeser : The burden of relief: Anthropology in a technical context In: The perfection of people / Eric Kubli; Anna Katharina Reichardt (Ed.). - Bern [u. a.]: Lang, (2001). - ISBN 3-906766-37-3 . - pp. 235-259
Individual evidence
- ↑ http://www.bildwissenschaft.org/image/anders?function=fnArticle&showArticle=64 ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Dieter Claessens, Article Relief , Historical Dictionary of Philosophy, Vol. 2, 538 f.
