Naturalization

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Naturalization refers to the explanation of human-made and social orders from the “nature” of things and thus defines historical results as a form of nature. The concept of naturalization uses an ontologically understood concept of nature and is based on the dichotomy of the nature-culture antithesis. A naturalization of things means the construction of nature through the rasterization and ordering of the things assigned to nature in categories such as form, number, situation and relative size. Representations and statements that explain social and historical orders with the form of nature refer to these categories instead of history and sociology. If one refers to the categories of biology, one speaks of biologism .

Philosophical foundations

Kant's critical reason

In his work, Critique of Pure Reason for the Enlightenment in Germany, Immanuel Kant for the first time formulated constructivist considerations that lead to his concept of the thing in itself . According to this, it is first of all the mind of the person himself, namely of the subject , which forms and constructs the appearances for himself. The subject orients itself to its scheme of action or thought and selects the appropriate stimuli. With reference to the understanding, Kant formulates: all his ideas and concepts are merely his creatures, man thinks originally with his understanding, and he thus creates his world. (Immanuel Kant: Works. Vol. VII, p. 71)

Concepts of nature are concepts of the subject about nature, which he does not take from nature but, shaped by his understanding, puts into this nature. The organization and the context, the relationship of things to each other are not given, but depend on how we experience them for us:

"We bring in the order and regularity of the phenomena that we call nature ourselves, and would not be able to find them in them either, had we not had them, or the nature of our minds originally put them into it."

- Immanuel Kant 1781

Naturalizing practices and naturalizing thinking that oppose the insight into a critical reason ( cf.criticism ) can, on the other hand, be criticized for proceeding ideologically and considering their own constructs such as race to be nature and not a product of scientific or pseudoscientific knowledge production or one lived practice. The racial classification of people based on physical characteristics - such as skin color - is based on a delimiting classification into a category on constructions and not on "nature", which is used in this "knowledge" as a justification for the terms. Reason "works on external things ... at least since Marx and Mannheim it has ... lost its social innocence and is subjected to ideological criticism". Nevertheless, Kant also tried to justify his concept of race .

Naturalization in language

There are numerous examples of naturalizations in everyday language. The statements "men are naturally this way" and "Germans are naturally this way" contain biological naturalizations. But terms that are common in politics and science, such as people and ethnicity, are based on naturalizing statements. Roland Barthes shows how extensive and subtle naturalizations exist in the press and art in contrast to these examples . The occasion for his investigations was “mostly a feeling of impatience in the face of the naturalness that the press or art have incessantly given to reality, a reality that, even if it is the one we live, is no less historical. So I suffered from seeing how nature and history are constantly being confused ”. According to Barthes, the power of naturalization shows itself in its catchiness, in what “goes without saying”. According to Barthes, this is “an ideological abuse”, which he investigated in his “Myths of Everyday Life”.

Instead of history, myth posits nature

According to Roland Barthes, it is an essential function of myth - such as the human condition of classical humanism - to replace the history of things with an imagined “nature”: “The myth of the human condition is based on a very old one Mystification, which has always consisted of placing nature at the bottom of history. ”Through this naturalization, social injustice and inequality can be withdrawn from their history and criticism and are thus codified.

Through naturalization, the myth transforms “ reality ” into a “state of affirmation”. But the naturalizing statement already has its fundamental condition in its temporal and historical determinacy. Myths do not inevitably arise and they do not come from what society imagines as “nature”: “Are there necessarily suggestive objects ...? Certainly not: one can imagine very old myths, but there are no eternal ones; for only human history allows the real to pass into the state of the statement, and it alone determines the life and death of mythical language. Far back or not, mythology can only have a historical basis, for myth is a proposition chosen by history ; he cannot emerge from the 'nature' of things. "

literature

  • Roland Barthes: Myths of Everyday Life. Frankfurt / M. 1964

swell

  1. ↑ criticism DRV, works, A, Bd.IV, S. 125th
  2. ↑ Wulf D. Hund: The reality of the race. In: AG gegen Rassenkunde (ed.) (1996): Your bones - your reality. Texts against racist and sexist continuity in human biology. Unrast Verlag , pp. 20, 21
  3. ↑ In this context, see also Kant's argument with Foster. In addition: Kant: About the use of teleological principles in philosophy In: Kant: Works, Volume VIII, Darmstadt 1968, pp. 141 and 144 as well as Manfred Riedel: Historicism and Criticism. Kant's argument with Georg Forster and Johann Gottfried Herder. See literature
  4. ↑ Patrick Frierson: Anthropology in a Pragmatic View
  5. ^ Arnold Farr : How whiteness becomes visible. Enlightenment Racism and the Structure of a Racized Consciousness. In: Maureen Maisha Eggers, Grada Kilomba, Peggy Piesche, Susan Arndt (eds.) (2005): Myths, Masks and Subjects. Critical whiteness research in Germany, Münster.
  6. ^ Roland Barthes: Myths of everyday life. Frankfurt / M., Suhrkamp. 1964. page 7.
  7. ^ Roland Barthes: Myths of everyday life. Frankfurt / M., Suhrkamp. 1964. page 17.
  8. ^ Roland Barthes: Myths of everyday life. Frankfurt / M., Suhrkamp. 1964. page 19.
  9. ^ Roland Barthes: Myths of everyday life. Frankfurt / M., Suhrkamp. 1964. page 86.