Jürgen Frese

Jürgen Frese 2006

Jürgen Frese (born April 14, 1939 in the Hörde district of Dortmund ; † March 24, 2007 in Bielefeld ) was a German social philosopher and phenomenologist and professor at Bielefeld University .

Life

Frese studied philosophy, psychology and sociology at the University of Münster and was then assistant to Hermann Lübbe in Bochum. He received his doctorate in sociology under Helmut Schelsky in 1966 . He was a member of the founding committee of Bielefeld University and has been teaching philosophy here since 1970, most recently in the role of director of studies in the university service. He completed his habilitation for philosophy in Bochum in 1975 and was appointed adjunct professor at Bielefeld University in 1978.

Act

Frese's socio-philosophical works were received only very selectively. They combine phenomenological categories with process-philosophical approaches, especially by Whitehead . Only the concept of connectivity that he formed , which was picked up and popularized by his Bielefeld colleague Niklas Luhmann , found its way into the specialist vocabulary of the social sciences and philosophy (see Frese 1967, 50f and word for word Frese 1985, p. 77: “The sense of one Acts is the ensemble of possibilities, given as a specific situation, to connect further acts to this act; ie the meaning of an act is the diversity of connectivity that it opens up ”). Unlike Luhmann, Frese did not incorporate the term into a systems theory, but developed it further in his theory of forms (see below).

Frese has been investigating the phenomenon of the group since the early 1980s and was able to prove that it is not a social natural given, but a social invention that is no older than 300 years. In modern societies, groups compensate for specific “structural problems of bourgeois individuality”, as Frese 1982 (p. 24) states. They are therefore not to be found in premodern societies, or at least not necessary. In the same text, Frese not only thoroughly analyzed how groups function internally, he also included his concepts and theses in a later text (2000), which summarizes the results of many years of research, using the example of intellectual associations ( George Circle , Blauer Reiter , Vienna Circle , etc.) empirically deposited.

While Frese's theses on the history of the “group” phenomenon were widely received, other terms and theses from Freses are still waiting to be received. This includes in particular the term “form”, which Frese initially used to describe expectation structures. He expands the concept to the concept of the mythical form: Such a form is a meaningful narrative scheme.

In his studies on the phenomenology of feelings, Frese illustrated the importance of forms for emotional processes and illustrated them with examples. In expanding and specifying Hermann Schmitz's philosophy of feeling , he speaks of emotional scores and develops terms for a more precise description and a deeper understanding of emotional processes.

Among the thinkers with whom Frese grappled is (besides Spinoza , Heidegger , Whitehead , Luhmann and Schmitz ) especially Carl von Clausewitz . In addition to Whiteheadian approaches, Frese has also included suggestions from Clausewitz in his own theory of action . Against the background of Clausewitz's analyzes, he presented his own analysis of the supposedly modern phenomenon of the “ little war ” (2005).

Fonts

• "Ideology". Attempt to clarify a concept in the sociology of knowledge. Dissertation Münster 1965.
• Speaking as a metaphor for action , in: Hans-Georg Gadamer (Hrsg.): The problem of language. Fink, Munich 1967, pp. 45-55.
• Dialectics of the group. In: Gruppendynamik im Bildungsbereich 9,3 / 4 (1982), pp. 5-33 (reprinted several times in other anthologies).
• Processes in the field of action. Klaus Boer, Munich 1985, ISBN 3-924963-06-1 .
• Emotional scores. In: Michael Großheim : body and feeling. Contributions to anthropology. Lynkeus, Studies on New Phenomenology, Vol. 1. Academy, Berlin 1995, ISBN 3-05-002715-0 , pp. 45–70.
• Intellectual associations. In: Richard Faber , Christine Holste (ed.): Circles, groups, frets. On the sociology of modern intellectual associations. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1747-1 , pp. 441-462.
• Objection as a beginning in philosophizing. In: Quarterly Journal for Scientific Pedagogy 79.2 (2003), pp. 166–183.
• In the back of the regular. In: Lennart Souchon (Ed.): Small wars. Clausewitz-Information 1/2005, pp. 15-33, ISSN  1615-1135 .

literature

• Manfred Bauschulte, Volkhard Krech , Hilge Landweer (eds.): "Paths - Pictures - Games". Festschrift for Jürgen Frese's 60th birthday . Aisthesis, Bielefeld 1999, ISBN 3-89528-209-X .
• Andreas Leutzsch (Ed.): Nomaden. Interdisciplinary "walks" in the field of forms and myths. Festschrift for Jürgen Frese. Transcript, Bielefeld 2003, ISBN 978-3-89942-111-8 .

Web links

• Jürgen Frese ( Memento from February 27, 2006 in the Internet Archive ) at Bielefeld University
• Conference on 23/24 July 2008 at the ZiF in memory of the philosopher Jürgen Frese: Press release / conference program ( Memento from May 31, 2015 in the Internet Archive )