Free play of forces
The free play of forces is a concept - occasionally also used normatively and ideologically - for explaining orders and directed developments, which has increasingly gained importance since the 18th century, especially in economic and state theory, but also in aesthetics and natural philosophy , Philosophy of history and pedagogy. It is implicitly opposed to models of centralized control and coordination and often ascribes the formation of beneficial structures and results to open, decentralized and spontaneous self-organization of individual movements, impulses and actions. For example, it became the catchphrase of liberalism or the supporters of the free market economy , that is to say, in particular, "spared" from state intervention . In his earlier work on the theory of the state, Wilhelm von Humboldt contrasts ideas for an attempt to determine the limits of the state's effectiveness with the free play of forces in the state's power. (WvH, works in five volumes, vol. 1, p. 72)
The term was also made fruitful early on for the explanation of aesthetic phenomena, for example in Kant's concept of aesthetic experience, in which sensuality and understanding harmonize in "free play" and without one faculty dominating the other and thus a specific one Pleasure in the beautiful object is generated. Kant's production aesthetics, his doctrine of genius, also contains the free, but at the same time purposeful interplay of imagination and understanding as a fundamental element.
In addition, it is used in education (“self-development” instead of “training”), romantic natural philosophy (for example in early Schelling) but later also in evolutionary theory (“ survival of the fittest ”).
Individual evidence
- ↑ See Kant, Immanuel: Critique of Practical Reason. Critique of Judgment. 1968th edition. Kant's works. Academy Text Edition; Vol. 5, Berlin 2003, p. 237.