Offenses of mankind

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Insults to mankind is a term coined by Sigmund Freud in 1917 for revolutionary scientific discoveries which, according to Freud's thesis, called into question people's self-image in the form of a narcissistic insult .

Freud

In his work “A Difficulty in Psychoanalysis” from 1917, Freud describes the resistance that, in his view, opposes the psychoanalysis he developed before it was generally recognized. Like any scientific innovation, it must prevail against established thinking. But the “ greater part comes from the fact that strong feelings of mankind have been injured by the content of the teaching. "

Freud names three major cuts that the naive narcissism of human consciousness has suffered as a result of the historical progress of scientific knowledge:

  1. The cosmological offense : The first shock was the discovery linked with the name Copernicus that the earth is not the center of the universe (cf. Kopernican turn ).
  2. The biological offense : The second offense was the discovery that humans emerged from the animal line ( Charles Darwin and others).
  3. The psychological offense : The third offense is the libido theory of the unconscious that he developed ; a considerable part of the soul's life withdraws from the knowledge and control of the conscious will. Psychoanalysis confronts consciousness with the embarrassing insight (...) that the ego is not master in its own house .

Freud puts his theory of the unconscious in a context with the theories of Copernicus and Darwin, which were revolutionary in the history of science . Psychoanalysis stands in the tradition of German philosophy, especially the metaphysics of Schopenhauer , whose doctrine of the unconscious will theoretically prepared what is practically and concretely brought to bear in neurosis therapy .

Criticism and reception

The factual justification of Freud's assertions about the effect of the discoveries of Copernicus and Darwin has been repeatedly disputed. With reference to Clarence Irving Lewis , Arthur O. Lovejoy , Hans Blumenberg and Rémi Brague , Michael Pauen points out that in the Aristotelian view of the world the earth had the lowest place in the cosmos. Early critics of the Copernican system also complained that the doctrine that the earth is a celestial body like the other planets of the solar system, the earth is unjustifiably increased.

Freud's remark has been taken up by numerous later authors since Rudolf Carnap and the number of insults has been expanded by further posts. In addition to Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, Carnap also mentions Marx , Nietzsche and the eliminative physicalism of the psychic which he himself represented .

In 1993, the philosopher Johannes Rohbeck spoke of the technological offense that mankind was dominated by self-created works and compared the situation of man with that of Goethe's apprentice sorcerer . Barbara Guwak and Matthias Strolz also see the fourth offense in the fact that the human-made world can no longer be controlled. The media journalist Sascha Lobo spoke in a contribution to the FAZ feature section of the awareness of the network surveillance uncovered by Edward Snowden as the fourth, digital offense of mankind, since the Internet is not the desired instrument of freedom, but is used for the opposite. In a reply, the journalist Sascha Kösch said that the fourth offense was, more generally, that mankind could not master the technology it had created, which was already evident from the invention of nuclear weapons . In terms of ecological and economic conditions, Reiner Klingholz sees the fourth offense of humanity in the fact that "regardless of all technical possibilities, we cannot preserve nature in a state that would suit us", and that an involuntary transition to a post-growth society without Population and economic growth take place.

In terms of quantity, the German physicist and philosopher Gerhard Vollmer took it to extremes in 1994 when he pointed out ten insults of humanity:

number Kind of hurt By comment
0 I am part of the world each child The I recognizes itself as part of the world.
1 cosmological Copernicus 1543 The earth (and therefore man) is not the center of the world.
2 biological Darwin 1859 Humanity is integrated into the development system of organisms.
3 psychologically Freud 1895 Man is not even the master of his own actions, but is guided by the unconscious .
4th ethologically Heinroth 1910 Not only our physique, but also our behavior emerged from the animal kingdom.
5 epistemological Lorenz 1941 Our perception and the ability to think are also limited to the mesocosm to which we are phylogenetically adapted and even there not objective.
6th sociobiological Wilson 1975 Even our social, moral and altruistic ways of thinking and behaving, even the demand for the preservation of humanity, are based on evolutionary selection.
7th Computer model of the mind present The prospect of machines ( artificial intelligence ) that match and even surpass our mental performance.
8th ecologically Near future The human being is tied into the biosphere that is essential for him and, because of hurt no. 5, unable to fully understand and control it.
9 neurobiological 21st century Dissolution of the dualism of body and soul.

Mirko Lüttke, on the other hand, emphasizes that the results of modern natural sciences as a whole offend people by shaking the age-old anthropocentric notions that people and the world fit together in a special way.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johannes Rohbeck : Technological judgment. On ethics of technical action , Frankfurt a. M., 1993, p. 10. Quoted from Cornelia Klinger: Perspektiven des Todes in der Moderne Gesellschaft . Akademie Verlag , 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004442-2 . P. 229 .
  2. ↑ Barbara Guwak, Matthias Strolz : The fourth offense: How we find our way in a chaotic world . Goldegg Verlag , Vienna 2012, ISBN 978-3-902729-98-9 .
  3. ^ Sascha Lobo : Farewell to utopia: The digital offense of humans. FAZ, accessed on May 25, 2014 .
  4. ↑ Sascha Kösch : The fourth offense of humanity. In: de-bug.de. January 14, 2014, accessed May 25, 2014 .
  5. ↑ Reiner Klingholz : Slaves of Growth. The story of a liberation . Campus, 201, ISBN 978-3-593-39798-6 . P. 108.
  6. ↑ Reiner Klingholz: The end of growth is closer than we think. Learn to love shrinking! The Huffington Post , March 29, 2014, accessed May 25, 2014 .
  7. ↑ Gerhard Vollmer : The fourth to seventh offense of man. The brain, evolution and the concept of man. In: Enlightenment and Criticism 1/1994, pp. 81 ff. January 1, 1994, accessed on May 25, 2014 .
  8. ↑ Mirko Lüttke: The offense of people. The natural sciences and the end of the ancient-medieval worldview. Königshausen and Neumann, Würzburg 2012, ISBN 978-3-8260-5006-0 .