inwardness
In philosophy, inwardness is used to denote all processes of consciousness, thoughts and emotions associated with the subject in contrast to the world outside of him, the "outside world". On a cultural level, Germans were often ascribed inwardness in the sense of a withdrawal of the subject from the world, but also as a level-headed and sensitive mood. This is expressed in the standing term German inwardness .
Concept history
The term first appeared in Klopstock in 1779 and referred to one of nine elements of poetic representation: "Inwardness, or emphasis on the actual innermost nature of the thing." From 1787 Goethe used it in the plural "inwardness" to describe the "inner nature" of the To describe people or a nation. The singular can only be found from 1828.
Inwardness in philosophy
In his work De vera religione ( The true religion ) Augustine urges : “Do not go outside, come into yourself; in the inner man lives the truth "This means that the search for truth is directed inward, for Augustine to a gradual ascent leads to God. from the outside world ( foris ) to inwardness ( downed ) towards the innermost ( Intimus ), is ultimately God as the The source of truth grasped.
In the Reformation , through the “retreat into inwardness”, an external authority as mediator between God and man is rejected.
In his speech at the grammar school of 1809, Hegel continued the pre-philosophical use of “inwardness”. If the term was used here to describe a mood of prudence and spiritual alertness, Hegel developed it in 1805/06 in the Jenenser Realphilosophie in its philosophical dimension. In doing so, he subjects the conception of inwardness as mere self-enjoyment sentimentality, or as “housing” the subjectivity in oneself, to a sharp criticism. He contrasts it with a concept of the exchange between subjective inside and general outside. Inwardness is therefore rated negatively by him when it stands in the way of mediation from inside and outside.
In addition, Hegel uses the term in two other meanings:
- as the sphere of reflective spiritual being
- as a quality that works of art and genres, but also historical epochs, can have if they are characterized by a high degree of subjectivity.
In criticizing Hegel, however, Kierkegaard returns to inwardness as the only assurance of faith, since he considers attempts to objectively prove Christianity to be true (through history, biblical criticism and speculation) to be meaningless. In Kierkegaard's work, the characteristic of inwardness is suffering, since the death of the relationship to the outside world makes people painfully aware of its finiteness. Kierkegaard denies the possibility of an expression of inwardness on the outside and at the same time pushes the outside back into insignificance.
In his second Untimely Consideration , Nietzsche criticizes, among other things, this “strange contrast of an interior to which no exterior corresponds, an exterior to which no interior corresponds, a contrast that the ancient peoples did not know. The knowledge (...) now no longer acts as a transforming, outwardly driving motive and remains hidden in a certain chaotic inner world, which that modern person with strange pride describes as his peculiar 'inwardness'. "Nietzsche criticizes the German inwardness for which he blames Luther's Reformation as the moment that is aesthetically and politically responsible for the backwardness of the Germans.
German inwardness
- “The mind becomes serene in the knowledge of the mind and the eye becomes clearer through inward sensation. Through all intellectual and artistic works of a people, a single basic tone of feeling and inner life vibrates through all times and this melody comes to life in all songs, images, domes, figures and thoughts in a new way and finds its echo in every mind that which absorbs thoughts and images. "
This description of German inwardness by Ulrich Christoffel from 1940 does not do justice to social and historical reality with its claim to general validity, but above all it shows what German inwardness was perceived as: as a way of thinking, feeling, perceiving and perceiving, their similarity made a cultural identification possible. German inwardness can be applied as a term to the period from the eighteenth to the beginning / middle of the 20th century.
In politics and art
- Political and geographical situation
The term is also used in the political arena when personal political freedom is to be preserved in the interior. In the 19th century people often talked about “German inwardness”, which was opposed to the social drama at court. Culture, customs, art and fashion were strongly influenced by French culture at the time, which was modeled on the court of Louis XIV . The courtly culture of France was often perceived by the Germans as artificial and disguised. For example, Goethe's Hofmann Tasso complains: “This is how life forces us to shine.” Since there were no cultural centers comparable to the French court in Germany, the social dynamics of the cultural processes were not in the foreground here. Rather, at that time all great intellectuals were distributed over a large number of principalities, the disputes took place in the quiet and in the private sphere. The German mastery of music, which was understood as an expression appropriate to inwardness, is also brought into this context.
In On the Process of Civilization , Norbert Elias points out that inwardness originally did not express a national, but a purely social contrast. Since the German bourgeoisie, unlike the French, for example, was excluded from life at court for a long time, it formed its identity through education:
- “[W] as their self-confidence, their pride, lies beyond economics and politics: in what is precisely because of this in German called 'Das Rein Geistige', in the book level, in science, religion, art, philosophy and the inner enrichment, the 'education' of the individual, primarily through the medium of the book, in the personality. "
Only later, after the "originally medium-sized social character" had been declared a national character against the court, which was disreputable as French, did the predominantly socially determined inwardness become a national characteristic.
- The role of Lutheran Protestantism
According to Helmuth Plessner's study of intellectual history, the forced state organization of German Protestantism , unlike in England, which was shaped by Calvin , strongly inhibited the creative involvement of the individual in church affairs. This bureaucratic character meant that the individual was less aware of his role as a member of the congregation and that he was unable to live out his shared responsibility for the church. Instead, the worldly field now appeared as that of development; activity and probation were now directed here. Thus the secularization of the whole of life got itself a religious impetus, a specifically German form of world piety emerged .
The compulsory organization of the state church deepens the break between inwardness (probation in the personal field) and the public . In Germany, there was no mediating body between the two extremes, such as free churches could have been. The religiously motivated distance from the world and the withdrawal to one's own inwardness, life in the home and family, reinforced that indifference to questions of politics in relation to public life.
- Criticism and renewal
Following on from Hegel, the term expands and offers aesthetics and poetics a new perspective, for example in Vischer's Aesthetics (1846) and in Moritz Carrière's The Essence and Forms of Poetry from 1854.
The political situation favored a rather quiet discussion of the ideas of the time, but was already viewed by contemporaries as provinciality . Even Thomas Mann complained in 1933 the German inwardness as the "way of the German bourgeoisie (...) from revolution to disillusionment, to pessimism and a resigned, power-protected inwardness." Even Helmuth Plessner writes in 1923 with the Community limits a tract against the German trend to rely solely on inwardness, which prefers a life in community and perceives all social and public life as superficial. Thomas Mann later assessed German inwardness more sharply in his speech Germany and the Germans , which he gave in English in the research library of the US Congress shortly after Germany was liberated from National Socialism . He portrayed the ambiguity of the phenomenon and connected it to both German culture and German guilt.
In the first half of the 20th century, the innovator of Marxist philosophy Georg Lukács took up the term again and used it to differentiate between novel and epic . According to Lukács, the novel, as a literary form of the modern age, is characterized by the inwardness into which a subject, disturbed by the foreign world, withdraws. In the novel the poet is able to put the intrinsic value of inwardness into his right by using the lost totality as a regulative idea in the Kantian sense.
After this last attempt at updating, the term is almost only used in the humanities and there mostly only in a historical dimension, when inwardness is ascribed to medieval mysticism , pietism , Hamann , Herder and romanticism .
Quotes on German inwardness
"The German inwardness wants their dressing gown and their peace and wants to keep their children silly and crawls behind salads and neatness and wants to keep the spiritual in the form of a bridge club."
“A piece of clothing whose invention does not cause a headache, which does not take any time to put on, that is, a piece of clothing borrowed from a foreign country and imitated as casually as possible, is immediately considered by the Germans as a contribution to German costume. The sense of form is almost ironically rejected by them - because one has the meaning of the content: they are the famous people of inwardness. "
“What I told you in brief… is the story of German inwardness. One thing this story may lead us to heart: that there are not two Germanys, one bad and one good, but only one who did his best by devil's trick to evil ... "
See also
literature
- Ulrich Christoffel: German inwardness. Piper, Munich 1940, DNB 572605676 .
- Werner Kohlschmidt: Form and inwardness. A. Francke Verlag, Bern 1955, (Lehnen, Munich 1995, DNB 452511607 ).
- Kurt Flasch: Value of inwardness. In: Hans Joas, Klaus Wiegand (Hrsg.): The cultural values of Europe. Federal Agency for Political Education, Bonn 2005, ISBN 3-89331-638-68 , pp. 219-236.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock: About language and poetry. Herold, 1779, p. 252 ( limited preview in Google book search).
- ↑ Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, essays and treatises, From the representation. In: zeno.org. Retrieved February 8, 2015 .
- ↑ “The inwardness of man, his dispositions and developments”, in: Italienische Reise , December 25, 1787, report, Goethe, Johann Wolfgang, autobiographical, Italian journey, second stay in Rome. In: zeno.org. Retrieved February 8, 2015 .
- ↑ Historical Dictionary of Philosophy . Schwabe Verlag, Basel 1976, under: Innerlichkeit
- ↑ Keyword inwardness in: Historical Dictionary of Philosophy , Vol. 4, Basel 1976, Sp. 387.
- ^ Ulrich Christoffel: German inwardness. Piper Verlag, Munich 1940, from the foreword.
- ^ Goethe: Torquato Tasso. 4th act. 5th appearance.
- ↑ For example Helmuth Plessner in: The belated nation. In: Collected Writings VI. Frankfurt am Main 2003, p. 17.
- ↑ Norbert Elias: About the process of civilization. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1997, p. 120.
- ↑ For example Helmuth Plessner in: The belated nation. In: Collected Writings VI. Frankfurt am Main 2003, pp. 74ff.
- ↑ Thomas Mann: Nobility of the Spirit. 1945, p. 463.
- ^ Georg Lukács: Theory of the novel. 1920.