Erich Rothacker

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Erich Rothacker (born March 12, 1888 in Pforzheim ; † August 10, 1965 in Bonn ) was a German philosopher .

Life

Origin and education

The son of the merchant Emil Th. Rothacker spent his childhood in Naples and Pforzheim. There he passed the matriculation examination at the Reuchlin-Gymnasium in 1907 . Studies in philosophy, psychology, history, art history, Romance studies, economics as well as biology and medicine followed in 1908/1909 in Kiel with Paul Deussen , Götz Martius , Carl Neumann , Ferdinand Tönnies , 1909 and 1916 to 1918 in Strasbourg , 1909 to 1913 in Munich with Max Scheler , Moritz Geiger , Heinrich Wölfflin , Franz Doflein , Lujo Brentano , Karl Vossler , 1910 to 1912 in Tübingen and 1913/1914 in Berlin , where he heard with Georg Simmel , Carl Stumpf , Benno Erdmann and Alfred Vierkandt , among others . From 1916 to 1918 Rothacker did stage service in Alsace.

In 1911, Rothacker received his doctorate from Heinrich Maier at the University of Tübingen with a thesis on the historian Karl Lamprecht , the main features of which already contained his future scientific orientation: the exploration of man's confrontation with himself ( anthropology ) and with his historical achievement ( Culture ). In 1920 Heinrich Maier habilitated him at the Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg for philosophy , there he became an assistant at the Philosophical Seminar in 1920/21 and from 1924 a non-official associate professor. In 1928 he moved to the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn as the successor to Gustav Wilhelm Störring . He taught philosophy and psychology. In 1940 at the latest he was director of the Psychological Institute at the University of Bonn.

Stand up for National Socialism

Rothacker belonged to the DVP between 1919 and 1928 , but increasingly distanced himself from the Weimar Republic. On July 29, 1932, he signed an appeal for Adolf Hitler by 51 university lecturers , became a member of the National Socialist German Teachers' Association in November and a member of the NSDAP in March 1933 . He signed the declaration of 300 university lecturers for Adolf Hitler in March 1933. As a department head in the Propaganda Ministry , he was the liaison for student book burning under the motto “Action against the un-German spirit” in 1933 . In his book Geschichtsphilosophie , published in 1934 , the fourth volume of the handbook of philosophy published by the Nazi philosopher Alfred Baeumler , he advocated the National Socialist racial theories : " In addition to the thought of the state, the thought of Germans, the thought of the people, the idea of ​​race is an integral part of all ". But he kept his distance from Hans FK Günther's understanding of race and emphasized the role of the cultural: “The decisive steps towards German unity are obviously not due to the Nordic race, which is purer in Scandinavia, but to the 'Prussian spirit' and the spirit of the NSDAP , ie both lifestyles won, educational products, which, of course, generated from the spirit of Nordic traditions, were nevertheless formed from a raw material that was racially very questionable when measured by Günther's standards. "This corresponded to Hitler's racial understanding, which he celebrated:" From what with the instinctual certainty of the great statesman Adolf Hitler drew the conclusion, in that his book of life assigns the idea of ​​the national community to the first place in the order of political values ​​... "and further:" So national-socialist, if nationally German, and if socialism means solidarity with the people. If this social point of view is in the foreground of practical domestic politics and its ideology today for many reasons, often right up to the limit of the Jünger's apotheosis of the 'worker' as the only people and state-building stratum, then an emphatically 'national education' would be called for, In addition to 'political upbringing' and 'social upbringing' of a conscious cultural policy, to put the third indispensable guiding principle. ”Rothacker consequently worked out a plan for education under National Socialism and spent two weeks in April 1933 in Joseph Goebbels ' private residence. In 1934 Rothacker became a member of the National Socialist Academy for German Law and co-founder of the Committee for Legal Philosophy . During the Second World War he took part in the Nazi project “ War Mission of the Humanities ”.

Work after 1945

In the post-war period he resumed teaching after a brief suspension in 1947 and remained a professor in Bonn until his retirement in 1956. At the Philosophers 'Congress in Mainz in August 1948, the second philosophers' congress after 1945, he gave a lecture on Max Scheler's work The Position of Man in the Cosmos .

Rothacker was considered the founder of the humanities cultural anthropology and is in part also associated with the philosophy of life . During his lifetime he counted himself alongside Scheler , Plessner and Gehlen to the philosophical anthropology . Rothacker was the doctoral supervisor of Karl Albert , Jürgen Habermas , Hermann Schmitz and a teacher of Karl-Heinz Ilting , Karl-Otto Apel and Gerhard Funke .

philosophy

Rothacker initially dealt primarily with Wilhelm Dilthey's foundations of the humanities in dealing with the historical school . This is reinterpreted in terms of the philosophy of life, as Rothacker tries to escape relativism by seeing knowledge as an expression of creative vitality. In 1926 he published his own logical and systematic foundation. Below is a typology that traces the differences in the humanities back to different world views . In this “new critique of reason” theories are reduced to practical acts of will, “to will and choice”. As methods in the humanities he describes a developmental, a comparative and a method of organism thought . In systematics, he assigns different ideals of truth to comprehension , recognition and understanding . He traces the selection of a certain worldview by an individual spirit back to fate and to deeper layers of consciousness. Existential interest binds subject and thing together. Weltanschauung battles are inevitable in life.

In the 1930s Rothacker dealt with the “Layers of Personality” (1938) based on the example of Sigmund Freud , Max Scheler and Ludwig Klages . For the unconscious he coined the term "deep person". “Practically, people live out of their deep person.” Below the wakeful and clear object consciousness , the ego penetrates and controls its pictorial experience through a specific pre-form, the emotive inner being , the “ primal and most primitive form of developed consciousness”. In the rest of his life's work, Rothacker examined the construction conditions of the cultural world in the living world . The fundamental openness to the world is limited by the development of certain aspects and interests. Language takes on a central mediation between subject and object. This is how different lifestyles with cultural structures emerge as symbolic forms (similar to Ernst Cassirer ). The young Jürgen Habermas also took up these thoughts .

Fonts

  • About the possibility and the benefits of genetic historiography in the sense of Karl Lamprecht. phil. Diss., Tübingen 1912.
  • Introduction to the humanities. Habilitation thesis. Mohr, Tübingen 1920; 2nd edition 1930. Reprint 1972.
  • Logic and systematics in the humanities. Manual of Philosophy. Oldenbourg, Munich, Berlin 1926; 3rd edition, Bonn 1948.
  • Philosophy of history . In: A. Baeumler, M. Schröter (Hrsg.): Handbuch der Philosophie. Oldenbourg, Munich, Berlin 1934, pp. 3–150.
  • Cultures as styles of life. In: Journal for German Education. 1934.
  • The essence of the creative. In: Leaves for German Philosophy. Volume 10. 1937.
  • The layers of personality. Barth, Leipzig 1938. 2nd edition 1941, 7th edition 1966.
  • Problems of cultural anthropology. In: Nicolai Hartmann (Ed.): Systematic Philosophy. Berlin 1942, pp. 59–119.
  • Man and history. Old and new lectures and essays. 1944; New edition 1950.
  • The war importance of philosophy. Bonn 1944.
  • Scheler's breakthrough into reality. Bouvier, Bonn 1948.
  • Self-presentation. (1940). In: Werner Ziegenfuß, Gertrud Jung (Hrsg.): Philosophen-Lexikon. Concise dictionary of philosophy by persons. 2 volumes. Volume I. Berlin 1949/1950.
  • The effect of the work of art. In: Yearbook for Aesthetics and General Art History. Volume 2. 1952/1953, pp. 1-22.
  • The dogmatic way of thinking in the humanities and the problem of historicism (= treatises of the Academy of Sciences and Literature. Humanities and social science class. Born 1954, Volume 6). Verlag der Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur in Mainz (commissioned by Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden) Mainz 1954, pp. 239–298.
  • Psychology and anthropology. In: Yearbook for Psychology. 1st half band. 1957.
  • Cheerful memories. Athenaeum, Frankfurt am Main, Bonn 1963.
  • Intuition and concept. An interview with J. Thyssen. Bouvier, Bonn 1963.
  • Philosophical anthropology. Lectures from the years 1953/1954. Bouvier, Bonn 1964; 2nd edition 1966.

Posthumously

  • On the genealogy of human consciousness. Introduced and reviewed by Wilhelm Perpeet. Bouvier, Bonn 1966.
  • Thoughts on Martin Heidegger. Lecture 1963. Bouvier, Bonn 1973.
  • The "book of nature". Materials and basic information on the history of metaphors. Edited from the estate and edited by Wilhelm Perpeet. Bouvier, Bonn 1979.

literature

  • Leonore Bazinek:  Erich Rothacker. In: Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon (BBKL). Volume 8, Bautz, Herzberg 1994, ISBN 3-88309-053-0 , Sp. 752-756.  ( Article / beginning of article in Internet archive )
  • Volker Böhnigk: Cultural anthropology as racial theory: National Socialist cultural philosophy from the point of view of the philosopher Erich Rothacker. Wurzburg 2002.
  • Gerhard Funke (Ed.): Concrete reason. Festschrift for Erich Rothacker with bibliography. Bonn 1958.
  • Ernst Klee : Erich Rothacker. In: The personal dictionary on the Third Reich. Frankfurt am Main 2005.
  • Joachim Fischer : Philosophical Anthropology - A School of Thought of the 20th Century. Munich, Freiburg 2008.
  • Wilhelm Perpeet Erich Rothacker: Philosophy of the spirit from the spirit of the German historical school , Bonn 1968.
  • Wilhelm Perpeet:  Rothacker, Erich. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 22, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-428-11203-2 , p. 117 f. ( Digitized version ).
  • Guillaume Plas: The students of Erich Rothacker. Offshoot of historicist thought in German post-war philosophy In: Archive for Conceptual History 54 (2012), pp. 195–222.
  • Ralph Stöwer: Erich Rothacker: his life and his science of man , Göttingen: V&R Unipress, Bonn Univ. Press, Bonn / Göttingen 2012 (= Bonner Schriften zur Universitäts- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte , Vol. 2) (At the same time: University of Bonn, dissertation, 2009), ISBN 978-3-89971-903-1 .
  • Frank Tremmel: Human science as an experience of the place - Erich Rothacker and German cultural anthropology. Utz, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-8316-0885-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Kürschner's German Scholars Calendar 1940/41 , ed. by Gerhard Lüdtke, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1941, p. 510.
  2. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Personenlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. 2nd edition. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2005, ISBN 978-3-596-16048-8 , p. 510.
  3. ↑ Quoted from Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger. The Introduction of National Socialism into Philosophy , Berlin 2009, p. 42.
  4. ^ E. Rothacker: Geschichtsphilosophie , p. 146; quoted from Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger. The Introduction of National Socialism into Philosophy , Berlin 2009, p. 44.
  5. ↑ Emmanuel Faye: Heidegger. The Introduction of National Socialism into Philosophy , Berlin 2009, p. 40.
  6. ↑ a b Ernst Klee: The dictionary of persons on the Third Reich. Fischer, 2005, p. 510.
  7. ^ Thomas Laugstien: Philosophy Relationships in German Fascism. Hamburg 1990, ISBN 3886191699 , p. 12 f.
  8. ↑ Philosophisches Jahrbuch 59 (1949), p. 107.
  9. ↑ Quotes The Layers of Personality. Barth, Leipzig 1938; 2nd edition 1941; 7th edition 1966, p. 11 u. 70.
personal data
SURNAME Rothacker, Erich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher and sociologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 12, 1888
PLACE OF BIRTH Pforzheim
DATE OF DEATH August 10, 1965
Place of death Bonn