Philosophical anthropology

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Caspar David Friedrich , The Monk by the Sea (1808–1810). The picture addresses the question of the position and importance of man in the world as a whole.

Philosophical anthropology ( anthropology : "human studies", from ánthropos "man", and -logie ) is the field of philosophy that deals with the essence of man . As a separate discipline, Philosophical Anthropology , which emerged in the first half of the 20th century, is a comparatively young discipline; The subject matter and issues with which it deals were, however, largely reflected in different ways in earlier sections of human history . Nevertheless, as a co-founder of modern philosophical anthropology , Max Scheler generated considerable response with the statement:

“We are the first age in approximately ten thousand years of history in which man has become completely and completely problematic: in which he no longer knows what he is; but at the same time also knows that he does not know. "

Philosophical anthropology seeks to abstract from the individual and aims at general validity . The actual connection of every human individual to the respective time-specific, place-specific and cultural conditions of existence is assumed. Since the basic situation of philosophical anthropology is determined by the fact that people ask about people, it is on the one hand a matter of self-reflection as a concern and a mandate. On the other hand, this is only possible in the connection between the subject's inner perspective and the observer's outer perspective.

Philosophical anthropology makes use of a wide range of individual scientific findings in order to generally grasp the life situation of people. Conversely, there are anthropological implications for epistemology and individual sciences . The context of philosophical anthropology includes the so-called human sciences , which in particular include biology , primatology , neurosciences , psychology , linguistics , ethnology , paleontology , sociology and also the historical sciences as well as a large number of variations from these subjects such as the Sociobiology or Evolutionary Psychology . There is also a specific anthropology for each of these disciplines, such as a medical, educational, historical or theological anthropology.

Where people become a riddle or problem in self-contemplation , question themselves or question themselves and develop assumptions or answers concerning their own existence, they touch the field of philosophical anthropology. The range of human fields of action and possibilities raises questions about the ethically correct or good life, about the meaning of life in general, about the importance of egoism and altruism , about the "essence" of male and female gender , about social pressures to adapt and individual free ones Will up. For Michael Landmann, philosophical anthropology arises “from the necessity of that being who has to create itself and therefore needs an image towards which it should create itself. Both interlock. "

Classical views of man

Hildegard von Bingen , Liber Divinorum Operum (13th century). As a microcosm, man in the Middle Ages is a mirror of the macrocosm - and at the same time the image of God.

In ancient times , the role of man was determined by his position in the cosmos as created by the gods and related to them by the spirit . Man is the measure of all things . This saying of Protagoras (in Plato in Theaetetus ) marks the attitude of the sophists in antiquity, whose teachings were anti-metaphysical and who clearly distinguished between nature and culture .

On the other hand, according to Plato, it is essential or essential for man that, thanks to his immortal soul, he does not strive for earthly goods, but for the one, the divine, or at least should strive. The soul is just trapped in the body. The body and the instincts are secondary and are directed by the spirit. This image of man came into Christianity through the Neoplatonism of patristicism and thus strongly influenced the conceptions of the West .

Aristotle , on the other hand, also saw humans as part of nature. Body and soul form an organic unit. There is a parallel between nature and soul life. The instincts correspond to the vegetable, the sensuality to the animal and the thought to the divine. Man is the moral being who strives for the realization of virtue out of reason . As a rational being ( zõon lógon échon ) and as a social being ( zõon politikón ), man realizes himself through his life practice.

In late antiquity since Paul of Tarsus and in patristicism, especially through Augustine , ancient thought was combined with the Christian Jewish image of man as the image of God . People were created by God with body and soul (Greek: psyche , Hebrew: Neschome, Ruach). The truth lies within man. Man is now the fallen man, burdened with original sin , who cannot help himself to happiness alone and through his reason , but who needs the grace or forgiveness of God in order to escape the fate of purgatory or hell . Correspondingly, the question of the Middle Ages was how man poses himself in the order created by God.

According to Thomas Aquinas (similar to Aristotle) ​​the spiritual soul or the spirit as entelechy is an intelligible substance in which the spiritual and spiritual abilities of the human being are based. The soul can only be separated conceptually from the body during lifetime, but because of its immortality it also continues to exist separately after the death of the person. The body is an instrument of the spiritual soul, especially of reason. Man has the natural tendencies to preserve his life, to preserve his kind through offspring and a tendency to do what is good out of reason.

Albrecht Dürer , self-portrait (1500). A person in the pose of Christ , the Savior, a God

With the Copernican change , the self-image of humans shifted . He was no longer in the center, but was left alone in the open space and confronted with the infinity that frightened him ( Blaise Pascal ). The physics has been the method of declaration in the world ( Johannes Kepler , Galileo Galilei ). A naturalistic conception of man emerged ( Thomas Hobbes ' fight of all against all). At the same time, the contrast between body and soul could not be resolved. This led to René Descartes ' dualism : the human being is physical ( res extensa ) and at the same time has a soul ( res cogitans ). Man's explanation became the question of his capacity for knowledge. As the image of God, however, he still remains at the center of thought.

The philosophy of consciousness initiated by Descartes found different answers from the empiricists and the rationalists . What both have in common is that they gave psychological answers. John Locke and David Hume founded sensualism . The empiricists basically started out from human egoism . Also, the social behavior is based on the principle that more immediate is preferred. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz divided consciousness into conscious perceptions ( apperceptiones ), simple perceptiones ( perceptiones ), unconscious perceptions ( petit perceptiones ) and subconscious strivings ( appetitiones ). Christian Wolff differentiated between empirical and theoretical psychology and thus laid the foundation for the psychologism founded by Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart in the 19th century. The philosophy of consciousness since Descartes, however, has in common that it has not yet pursued anthropology as an independent topic.

Historical beginnings of anthropology

The term anthropology is first used by Magnus Hundt in the text Anthropologicum de hominis dignitate, natura et proprietatibus (Leipzig 1501). Another early evidence is the Psychologia anthropologica of Otto Casmann , a rector in Stade, from 1596.

While Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840) founded scientific anthropology, Immanuel Kant is considered the forefather of philosophical anthropology with the lecture first held in 1772 on "Different Races of Man" . Kant differentiated anthropology into physiological and pragmatic anthropology. While the first is about natural science , the second is about the philosophical subject of freedom and what man makes of it. Although humans are also animals , they are characterized and determined by reason to cultivate and moralize themselves in society . For Kant he is autonomous and thus able to overcome his animal tendency to laziness. The following applies:

“Man can only become man through education . He is nothing but what education makes of him. "

- Kant : About pedagogy

Johann Gottfried Herder also gave a significant impetus , from whom the conception of the deficient human being originates and who particularly focused on language as a special characteristic of human beings. Even as animals, humans have the language of sensations . But humans can also look at the world with reflection . By distinguishing things with the help of his senses he can designate them. In designating them, he thinks about them and develops understanding .

"Man is the first freedman of creation , he is upright. The scales of good and evil , falsehood and truth, hang on him; he can research, he should choose. "

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, on the other hand, was critical of anthropology, which he proposed to deal only with what is possible in man, while history looks at what is real in man.

Foundation of anthropology by Kant

In the preface to his anthropology (1798), Immanuel Kant differentiated physiological anthropology, which aims to research what nature makes of man, from pragmatic anthropology, which investigates “what he, as a free-trading being, of himself does, or can and should do. ”That is why the strict separation between physiological and pragmatic anthropology, which still has an impact today, is attributed to him, but this is imprecise.

Physiological anthropology is the (biological) natural science of humans. With the exception of occasional cross-references, Kant excludes this part of human studies as being unproductive for his purposes. Since man “does not know the brain nerves and fibers, nor understands how to use them for his purpose”, he remains only a spectator in this game of his ideas and speculative pondering about the natural causes of the sensations and memories is unproductive.

Kant's anthropology contains a broad 300-page study of the human being, including topics from general psychology (in today's sense), character studies , social psychology , psychopathology , health psychology and the beginnings of other psychological sub-disciplines. This "pragmatic anthropology" represents Kant's contribution to the widespread debate in the 18th century about how a general "science of man" should be developed methodically and theoretically, what its goals are and what its place in the totality of the sciences. Kant connects the topics mentioned with the philosophical determination of man as a reasonable and moral being. In the last chapter, on the character of the species, Kant sums up his general image of man: man is determined by his reason to be in a society with men and to cultivate, civilize and moralize himself in it through art and science; no matter how great his animal inclination may be, to surrender himself passively to the incentives of leisurelyness and well-being, which he calls bliss, but rather actively, in the struggle with the obstacles that cling to him from the brutality of his nature, worthy of humanity to make . (1798/1983, A 321) Kant asks how the pragmatic study of the human being and pedagogy must advance in order to develop the moral dispositions in such a way that they are no longer in conflict with the nature of human beings.

Kant's often cited definition of anthropology is not found in the lectures on anthropology in pragmatic terms (1798), but in logic :

“The field of philosophy in this cosmopolitan meaning can be reduced to the following questions: 1. What can I know? 2. What should I do? 3. What can I hope for? 4. What is man? The first question is answered by metaphysics, the second by morality, the third by religion, and the fourth by anthropology. Basically, however, all of this could be counted as part of anthropology, because the first three questions relate to the last. The philosopher must therefore be able to determine: 1. the sources of human knowledge, 2. the scope of the possible and useful use of all knowledge, and finally 3. the limits of reason. "

- Kant 1800/1983, A 25-26

Kant's much-cited text What is Enlightenment? (1784/1983), whose intention undoubtedly also determines pragmatic anthropology.

From a methodological point of view, Kant's anthropology is not based on so-called “inner experience”, but emphasizes that human thinking, feeling and desire can be obtained primarily through an investigation of publicly observable human action - above all social action - for which there is a systematic framework of basic concepts need. Accordingly, he developed a doctrine of observation : anthropology gains rules for the manifold experiences that we notice in humans. From a pragmatic perspective, his anthropology is largely a textbook on empirical psychology according to current technical understanding. However, all these insights are to be ordered and guided by philosophy. With the consistent distinction between rational (metaphysical) and empirical psychology, Kant redefined the field and methodology of psychology . It is no longer part of metaphysics , in which it used to be mostly treated as a theory of the soul. It now forms the main content of experience-based anthropology and receives an important pragmatic turn, for it opens access to what man makes of himself morally and educationally, educationally, health psychologically, etc. Psychology is “only” empirical science and in principle cannot arrive at unambiguous, secure, mathematically formulated regularities based on the model of the exact natural sciences. Even without this rank there is useful knowledge, with Kant's practical intentions being much clearer than that of most of the “psychologists” of the following century.

If Kant is to be seen as the most important psychologist before Wilhelm Wundt because of his empirical and method-critical orientation of anthropology / psychology , this could also be the reason for the ambivalent reception of Kant's anthropology in both disciplines. Many authors of philosophical anthropology still show a peculiar distance. On the other hand, Carl Gustav Carus had already honored Kant's anthropology in an outstanding way, and in the following years several books were published that were related to Kant's program, among others by Gottlob Ernst Schulze and Jakob Friedrich Fries on psychological anthropology. They also set themselves apart from the speculative theory of the soul and emerged with new methodological claims and concrete application recommendations (see also Friedrich Eduard Beneke and Rudolf Hermann Lotze .) In philosophy, however, Kant's anthropology had a surprisingly little effect, and the program developed by Kant became in the following period not sustainably absorbed, neither in philosophy nor in psychology. In psychology, basic pragmatic anthropology seems largely forgotten. It remains speculation whether a title “Textbook of Empirical Psychology” would have made more impact possible. For Kant, according to his preface, this “lecture aimed at knowledge of the world” was interesting, but of secondary importance compared to “pure philosophy”. In the entire subject of philosophy, there was no similarly broad conception in the period that followed.

Forerunner of modern philosophical anthropology

William Blake , Nebuchadnezzar (1795). Man as an animal, interpreted here as God's punishment.

Wilhelm Wundt , physiologist, philosopher and finally psychologist, was the most important founding father of the discipline of psychology. Against the background of his extensive philosophical work, he developed a comprehensive view of the human being, based on the experimental physiological psychology that he shaped and through his understanding of psychology as an empirical human science. This ranges from the psychology of language to the psychology of nations (for which he had also considered the term psychological anthropology). The broad human scientific horizon inspired Wundt to provide epistemological and methodological clarifications that are still important today. Wundt combined a methodological dualism (psychology versus physiology) with a method pluralism (within psychology) and a perspective monism (a life process from different perspectives). From this philosophical and at the same time interdisciplinary point of view, Wundt contradicted the incipient separation of psychology from philosophy.

Darwinism represented a revolution in anthropology . In the course of the evolution theory developed by Darwin, the insight gained acceptance that humans are 'built' according to the same general model as all other vertebrates. Arguments and evidence were found that humans come from the same evolutionary line as the gorilla and chimpanzee. Thus, it was believed by the majority to be refuted that man is the result of a special divine act of creation. Friedrich Engels writes in an anthropological essay a. a., work is "the first basic condition of all human life, and in such a degree that we have to say in a certain sense: It created man himself."

At the same time, Friedrich Nietzsche (inspired by Ludwig Feuerbach's materialism and Schopenhauer's doctrine of the primacy of the human will) began a criticism of the old definition of the human being as a reasonable living being. For Nietzsche, life can only be justified aesthetically: “We have relearned. We have become more modest in all respects. We no longer derive man from the 'spirit', from the 'deity'. We have put him back among the animals. "

A first approach to processing the newly created self-declaration of humans is with Kierkegaard the human being dependent on himself in his existence. Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis contributed to further disillusionment, as it sees people as being determined by unconscious lust and death . The cultural anthropological approach of Adolf Bastian with his doctrine of people in ethnic anthropology received less attention .

Processing can also be found in the philosophy of life , which established itself as an independent philosophical discipline at the end of the 19th century. In addition to Wilhelm Dilthey , Georg Simmel , Ludwig Klages and Otto Friedrich Bollnow should also be mentioned. The specific approaches of philosophical anthropology emerged on this foundation.

Justification of the more recent philosophical anthropology

Modern philosophical anthropology in the strict sense of the word came into being in the 1920s. The historical positioning of these approaches as attempts to describe a uniform image of man is not accidental. Their emergence can be explained by the emergence of the central theme 'Man' in modern science that has been emancipated from theological ties. As long as metaphysics was the dominant discipline, the empirical sciences could not find their way into a philosophical method. The growing tendency at the beginning of the 20th century to want to comprehensively define human beings through scientific standardization and systematisation and the associated search for a rational justification for their special position made it possible for philosophical anthropology to become an independent and much noticed area in philosophy: “The fact that philosophical anthropology only came up with the concept in the 20th century can be understood from the general tendency towards differentiation in the field of science and in social reality. In the biological age it becomes a discipline of knowledge that either opposes this general tendency or accompanies it in a reflective way. "

Philosophical anthropology is essentially shaped by the work of Max Scheler , Helmuth Plessner and Arnold Gehlen . One of the early pioneers was Paul Alsberg's work Das Menschlichkeits riddle from 1922.

Max Scheler's program

The writing of Max Scheler , the position of man in the universe from 1928, originally previously held for one year as a lecturer, is considered the founding document of modern philosophical anthropology. The earlier works already show his way there:

  • To the idea of ​​man. 1915
  • The overthrow of values. 1915
  • Of the eternal in man. 1923

As a motto he wrote in 1915:

"In a certain sense all central problems of philosophy can be traced back to the question of what man is and what metaphysical place and position he occupies within being , the world and God."

“Man just a worm”, caricature criticism of the materialistic reductionism of the theory of evolution (1882).

The anthropology developed by Scheler was still metaphysically determined. Based on Edmund Husserl , his philosophizing was an expanded application of the phenomenological method to the areas of ethics, cultural philosophy and the philosophy of religion . For Scheler, humans were determined on the one hand by their instincts, on the other hand they were self-responsible and jointly responsible for their actions in the world. The handed down by Aristotle and advocated by classical philosophy humanistic conception of man as a rational animal , as a rational animal he replaced with a this-worldly image of man . However, he considered Charles Darwin's teaching to be an error, at best an unproven hypothesis . It leads no matter how narrow bridge and away from 'homo naturalis' and its hypothetically constructed prequel to the 'people' of history . Instead, Scheler developed a ladder of the living, in which the plant is driven by a pure urge to feel without any consciousness, while the animal also has psychological properties, but only instinctual ones, which are more pronounced in humans, in fact, in essence higher. Man has a special position because he has spirit. According to Scheler, humans are not “bound by the environment”. He can be open to the world indefinitely . In this respect he has no environment, but world. The peculiarity of the spirit enables man to objectify his world as a whole and himself. This enables him to shape history, create culture and align his actions with norms and values .

As a biological phenomenon, as a living being, man is a “hereditary animal” that has “got lost in a dead end”, a “transition”, a faux pas , basically a mere embarrassment of nature. In this respect, this approach to humans is to be rejected by nature. The attempt at a natural explanation of man leads again and again to the repetition of the great error of European intellectual history: to humanism . The true essence of man lies beyond his biological and social, including rational functions: the mind is, from a biological point of view, a disease. The true essence of man is his spiritual personality , which is based on the fact that man transcends , even is a figure of transcendence . As a spiritual person, man is not “part of the world”, of objective reality , but of ideal reality . In order to constitute himself as a spiritual person, he must “develop” reality, abstract from what “is”, think of it as non-existent. In other words: Man as a being “who seeks God”, as a “seeker” or “seeker of God” and as a “living x”. Scheler decreed against the scientific criticism of religion , which goes back to Ludwig Feuerbach , that God is not an anthromorphic invention, but the other way round: man is theomorphic .

Helmuth Plessner's theory of eccentric positionality

Another student of Husserl was Helmuth Plessner , who pursued a zoologically sound approach. In the major work published at the same time as Scheler's work in 1928, The stages of the organic and man , Plessner determined man as an eccentric being. While the animal is bound to its immediate environment, man can step out of himself, as it were, and take the perspective of an observer of himself. He occupies an eccentric position . In contrast to Scheler, body and mind were one unit for him. I am body and I have a body. People are open to the world and have an urge for experience , but no fixed identity . Its essence is indefinable, it is placed in nothingness and must take a position on itself. According to Plessner, he is posited by his physicality and has to position himself in relation to the other.

Plessner rejected a teleological interpretation of evolution. For him there were three basic anthropological laws. The first is natural artificiality; H. it is in the “nature” of man to produce “artificialities” which then objectively confront him and thus have an effect on him. Culture is the detour via these artificial things. Second, the mediated immediacy, which means that people can only grasp their environment mediated - through cultural media , through language. The third relates to the utopian position that man takes when confronted with the question of being , of the contingent world. Man seeks the solution to this problem in the transcendence of religion .

Within the limits of the community. A criticism of social radicalism in 1924, Plessner took up the contradiction between community and society introduced by Ferdinand Tönnies and took a stand for a culture of the social. Above all, he asserted his anthropological views and tried to show that only the social way of life gives people the opportunity to fully develop according to their characteristics. This gives his anthropology a socio-political dimension that is of current interest. Plessner also became known with his work Lachen und Weinen (1941), in which he investigated the behavior of people in extreme situations.

Arnold Gehlen's shortcomings

Arnold Gehlen's main work The Man. His nature and his position in the world appeared in 1940. He strived for an empirically founded philosophy with the aim of abolishing the organizational division of science and the humanities and merging the various differentiated approaches into an overall theory of man. He refused to explain the nature of man from an exclusively biological point of view.

Gehlen wants to understand people from within themselves. To this end, he puts the concept of action at the center of his approach. He puts forward the hypothesis that man is to be understood as an acting being. Gehlen defines the human being, with reference to the work of Herder and Nietzsche, as a “special draft” of nature, as a unique “ defective being ”. Humans lack both specialized organs and a specific environment. Because of his “not being established”, his “incomplete” man is forced to act, not out of luxury but out of necessity of life. Gehlen continues Scheler's approach of " cosmopolitanism ". However, he sees the reason for the cosmopolitanism that distinguishes humans from animals in the “defective” morphology of humans and not, as Scheler, in the peculiarity of the spirit. Humans are open to the world because they are not adapted to any specific environmental section in terms of their organ properties. It does not have a clearly definable, delimitable habitat like an animal. On the contrary: it is potentially viable anywhere, provided that it transforms its environment into a world that serves it.

The human species ensures its survival by creating culture and institutions . In this way, humans achieve “relief” from their biological deficiencies. Through culture (such as language, technology and art) people are able to compensate for their shortcomings . By means of permanent social institutions as well as moral and legal norms, he achieves a stabilization and control of the way of life. Culture and institutions have the function of “management systems” of individual and social structures.

Ernst Cassirer's animal symbolicum

Ernst Cassirer's studies of people and culture stand on the border between philosophical anthropology and cultural philosophy . Cassirer's concept evolved systematically from its epistemology and the first as a cultural philosophy designed philosophy of symbolic forms . As a philosophical anthropology, he formulated his concept in the experiment on man (1944). Precursor of this approach can be found in terms of the symbol in the identity theory with the key concept of a significant symbol of George Herbert Mead and in the theory of cultural symbolization of Alfred North Whitehead , both of which are however not cited by Cassirer, who instead on Hermann von Helmholtz and Heinrich Hertz relates. With regard to the linguistic aspect, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Johann Gottfried Herder form the starting point.

After the developments in psychology, biology and the theory of evolution , a new key was needed for Cassirer to answer the question of what man is. Cassirer saw this in the theory of meaning of symbolic forms. Knowledge not only takes place conceptually in language, but also through myths , in religion and in art . Also, history , science , art and politics have their own symbolic forms.

According to Jakob Johann von Uexküll, every organism has a memory network and an active network according to its anatomical structure. More complex animals as well as humans - according to the results of Gestalt psychology - have a complicated overall perception system. Animals usually have a fixed stimulus-response scheme in relation to their perceptions . Before man acts, however, he processes what he perceives into symbols in his mind , which stand, as it were, as a mediated network of symbols between remembering and acting ( acting ). With a few, underdeveloped exceptions, animals process their perceptions as pure signs and can only express themselves symbolically (call of the jay ). They move, as it were, on the level of emotional language without syntactic or logical structures. They express something, but cannot represent anything. The fact that humans are able to make statements with meaning, such as formulating propositional sentences, distinguishes them from animals. By giving the sign a meaning, it becomes a symbol. Only through symbolic thinking can humans understand the abstract meaning of relationships.

Space and time as an organic sphere are common to humans and animals. In addition, humans also have the ability to conceptually form an abstract space. How difficult this is is shown by the description of Democritus , who calls this abstract space a non-being with true reality . The abstract space of the physicist does not follow any sensual, but only logical principles. The ability to use abstract symbols is a prerequisite for science.

In the conception of time, too, humans use symbols that go beyond the pure before and after. Remembering is not the restoration of an existing image, but rather a reconstruction . Thinking about the future and living in the future is part of human nature. Both the reproduction of the past and the experiences of expectation are based on symbolic thinking. Symbolic forms have an expressive function (the friendly smile takes away fear), a representation function (linguistic designation of facts with a pragmatic reference to the world) and a meaning function (abstract, relational theories on a logical-mathematical basis).

Franz von Stuck , Sisyphus (1920). The myth of Sisyphus was still used as a model by Albert Camus in the 20th century.

With the ability to create diverse shapes, Cassirer sees people transition from the realm of nature to the realm of freedom. He uses the concept of humanity in the sense of a universal subject "that allows the very different objectivations of life in mythical thinking, language and science to be brought to a common denominator, at least ideally."

Anthropology of need and ethics with Wilhelm Kamlah

Due to the possible reservation of a naturalistic fallacy from being to what is ought, most philosophical anthropologies have dispensed with linking the analysis of human identity and lifeworld with rules of action. However, one can certainly judge the respective status from the standpoint of expediency and make normative statements from this point of view . This is the approach of Wilhelm Kamlah , who viewed all human actions depending on their needs and experiences. The human being is not an individual being, but always dependent on the other. From this derives the need for rules of action, which Kamlah saw in a eudaemonistic ethic as a philosophy of the art of living . The included criticism of the prohibition of suicide in correspondingly negative living conditions was implemented in 1976 with his suicide .

Dialogic anthropology with Martin Buber and Kuno Lorenz

Martin Buber developed a dialogue . Central category is in the encounter updated interim . People learn to speak the basic word ICH-YOU and don't always stay with ICH-ES. Martin Buber's idea of ​​human existence, his concept of person, results from the relationship to the other through relationship. At the end of the first part of his work I and You , he sums it up as follows: “And in all seriousness the truth, you: without it, man cannot live. But whoever lives alone with him is not man ”. How do you become a person after Buber? Subject meets subject, entering into a relationship with the other (you) and the accompanying self-becoming. The individual's knowledge of himself as an I, through becoming (self-) conscious in the relationship with a you. For him, relationship is existential to the knowledge of the true existence of one's own person. The interpersonal, the relationship to the other make us human. “Man becomes I through you” Only when one individual recognizes the existence of another individual and enters into a relationship with him does it understand itself as a true self.

Following this and dealing with the anthropological philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, Albert Camus and Wilhelm Kamlah, Kuno Lorenz developed a dialogical anthropology. Only through the differentiated training of I and you and thus the connection of human works to the processes of individuation and socialization embodied in them can people become aware of their humanity. It is true that a dialogical transition possibility between the I-role and the you-role (possible in the performance of the action) is worked out, but warnings are given against leveling the object level and the drawing level in the representation of the action.

Anthropology and existentialism with Helmut Fahrenbach

A connection between Plessner's anthropology with existentialism and Heidegger's philosophy can be found in Helmut Fahrenbach , who points out that man is “given up”, that is, he only lives by leading a life . He can choose himself (Kierkegaard) without being able to exclude morality from his relationship with himself. In this sense, Fahrenbach combines anthropology, normativity and ethics in a way that cannot yet be found in the classics of anthropology.

Approaches in the present

The approaches outlined below are examples of current discussions.

Odo Marquard describes people as a homo compensator . The compensation idea, which can be found in both Plessner and Gehlen, has been placed in wide areas of education and sociology. Konrad Lorenz and Karl-Otto Apel have the moral described as a compensatory mechanism. Humans naturally compensate for major epidemics through high birth rates . The brain compensates for damage. Compensation is given as retaliation and compensation is given as compensation. Cicero already advocated a theory of the compensatory art of living of the wise. Marquard constructs a contrast between the philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology, to which he assigns a purely naturalistic position and at the same time criticizes it.

Alwin Diemer has attempted to develop philosophical anthropology from a systematic point of view, with distinguishing and defining features, with the demarcation above (God) and the demarcation below (animal world). His phenomenology of the human area enumerates an overwhelming number of aspects and questions. Diemer emphasizes the dual function of images of man and explains: “Talking about the image implies two things: firstly, the secondary element that is reminiscent of an image and likeness, but at the same time the primary element:“ Image ”then means both model and model . ... If the corresponding metaphysics or ideologies have political-social power, these models function as corresponding educational ideas ”.

Robert Spaemann sees the essence of the human being in the follow-up of Kant in the connection of the natural and the reasonable:

“Reason means reconciliation with what is in front of it: nature. [...] But above all: Recognition of an alien rational being can only be realized as recognition of this being in its naturalness. "

Spaemann turns against materialism, which is often associated with the theory of evolution. Concepts such as system, information, program or structure are abstractions and therefore not free from assumptions, but “theory-laden”. They are explanatory terms for the conditions for the appearance of new phenomena that cannot establish the origin of these phenomena themselves.

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela developed the theory of humans as a self-creating ( autopoietic ) system in conjunction with evolutionary epistemology . It is controversial whether this view implies radical constructivism . The idea of ​​the autopoietic system also influenced Niklas Luhmann , who transferred systems theory to sociology.

Gesa Lindemann developed the concept of reflexive anthropology following Helmuth Plessner's historical-reflexive anthropology . The starting point is a new kind of relationship between anthropology and sociology. Anthropology or anthropological assumptions are not understood as a socio-theoretical foundation, but made an object of observation. This approach deals with the question of how the circle of social persons is limited in societies and what function anthropology has in modern times.

Bálint Balla bases his sociology on the axiom that man is a being who deals in his own way with the basic problem of “ scarcity ”.

Dieter Claessens ' study The Concrete and the Abstract from 1980 has become significant as a critical sociological reorganization of Gehlen's thesis of deficiencies .

Gunter Gebauer wants to consider people in their living environment under their living conditions. Anthropology should not distinguish human beings from animals, but reflect human beings from the point of view of other people. Anthropology does not deal with ideas, the universal or the eternal. Man has biological starting conditions, but is a product of himself. Man is born into his environment, but he changes it. Man gives the world an objective shape through his actions. Anthropology is historical, both in its object and in its methods. She not only asks who I am, but also how I became what I am. Anthropology is first of all the expression of uncertainty. What is man's destiny when it is in his own hand?

Thomas Rentsch wants to understand people in their way of life and attach practical ethics to it. To do this, the basic human situation must first be analyzed as a follower of Kant. The existence of the human being is determined by the mutually dependent situativity, self-reflexivity and language. Morality is an inseparable part of human practice. The human being has the freedom to legislate and regulate himself, because the indeterminacy, the thrownness of the human being corresponds to his freedom to all possible postures. Ethics must therefore always be on the horizon of philosophical anthropology; it is part of the lifeworld.

Karl-Siegbert Rehberg takes on the institutional theory of Gehlen: He assigns two dimensions to social institutions: on the one hand, a restrictive and stabilizing function for the actors, on the other hand, social integration of individual actions. Institutions are ideally those social forms in which a synthesis is made between social structure , organization , knowledge of norms and facts. Institutions are mediating bodies for the production of cultural meaning through which cultural objectivations are made binding. Institutions are also understood as symbolic orders. This is based on the anthropological, epistemological and cultural-philosophical basic assumption of the symbolic mediation of all world and self-knowledge of man (see above Ernst Cassirer), who as a cultural being has to interpret situations and have other options for action ready. The use of signs and symbols enables such transcendent achievements and the availability of “significant symbols” (symbols whose meanings are shared with others) means at the same time to have “spirit” (GH Mead). Symbols are used to relieve pressure due to sensual urges or the awareness of mortality .

As part of his mimetic theory, René Girard designs a human science that covers the entire development of human culture - from the incarnation and the emergence of religion and institutions to the forms of social organization of the present - on the basis of the mechanisms that contain the Allow violence , explained.

Ernst Tugendhat ties in with Kant again and explains from today's perspective why anthropology is at the center of philosophy. Whatever metaphysics can mean, it is reduced to anthropology. From Tugendhat's point of view, all metaphysical subjects are actually elements of human understanding. Philosophical anthropology as a basic discipline of philosophy deals with this core area of ​​the human, understanding, and asks about the structure of this understanding. What remains as a question of the being of man, Tugendhat reflects, if everything historical were withdrawn in the sense of the traditional? Tugendhat sees anthropology as opposed to metaphysics as well as to orientation towards history, historically given, traditions, divine revelation, etc. Regarding the relationship between philosophical and empirical anthropology, Tugendhat thinks that both have different focuses, but must move towards one another. “The main focus of philosophical anthropology is characterized by the fact that it takes place in the first person and starts with a reflection on general structures, and by starting out with oneself, one-sidedness emerges, which one becomes aware of through the broader knowledge of empirical anthropology must be instructed ".

Ferdinand Fellmann defines the human being as a couple. The love relationship between man and woman is an anthropological radical that has separated people from the hordes of non-human primates. Fellmann underpins his image of man in terms of evolutionary biology, but understands his reconstruction of the primal scene of the incarnation as a contribution to philosophical anthropology. This approach is protected from biologism by the fact that the polarity of the sexes includes the moral dimension of human justification through love.

Hans-Peter Krüger (following Helmuth Plessner) re-founded philosophical anthropology. From a systematic point of view, their spectrum of phenomena consists between unplayed laughter and crying as the behavioral boundaries of personal living beings. It encompasses the public and therefore personal judgment in relation to the body-body difference, the aesthetic exposure of nothing in the modern arts, the natural philosophical exposure of something before the horizon of nothing in the natural sciences, the individualization of the person, the personalization of the individual and the question of sovereignty in the authorization for historical action as community and society (1999). This German-language philosophical anthropology was compared with the implicit and explicit philosophical anthropologies in the classical pragmatisms (Ch. S. Peirce, W. James, J. Dewey and GH Mead) using the Kant and Hegel transformations in both traditions (2001). The new founding of Philosophical Anthropology was expanded to include other German-Jewish thinkers (H. Arendt, E. Cassirer, M. Scheler) and opened up for comparison with neopragmatisms (H. Putnam, R. Shusterman, R. Rorty) (2009 ). It took place as a framework theory for neurobiological brain research (G. Roth, W. Singer) and the new comparative behavioral research (F. de Waal, M. Tomasello) in 2010.

Reception and criticism

In an extensive reconstruction and reflection process, Joachim Fischer defines philosophical anthropology in the light of its main exponents Scheler, Plessner and Gehlen as a twentieth-century line of thought that coincides in certain characteristics and distinguishes philosophical anthropology from it as a discipline among other philosophical disciplines such as ethics and natural philosophy or philosophy of religion. In addition, philosophical anthropology is also a characteristic line of thought in the philosophy of knowledge and science, in the philosophy of language, culture, social and technology. For the authors of Philosophical Anthropology, it is not reason or language, for example, but the “relationship between man and his body” that is the ontologically closest figure: “This human body, this place where layers are clinging together, this> distance to the body in the body <- or 'eccentric positionality' - as the ontologically most complex place to be methodically opened up and to operate from it, that is how the main contributors recognized each other and remained tied to each other. "

For a long time, the approaches of Scheler and above all of Gehlen dominated the reception, while Plessner received less attention; Recently, however, a Plessner renaissance has been recorded. For Gerald Hartung , the realignment of the image of man as a result of Darwin's theory of evolution in connection with the social and political catastrophes, which increased the uncertainty in the 20th century since the outbreak of the First World War, was the situation that paved the way for philosophical anthropology and gave impetus for reflection.

The main feature of philosophical anthropology as a whole is the turning away from the humanistic conception of man in classical philosophy. Scheler wrote: "Who does not see that behind the apparently so harmless demand for equality always and always, whatever equality is at stake - only conceals the wish for the humiliation of the superior, those who have surplus value to the level of the inferior." A general criticism of the Philosophical anthropology, e.g. B. Martin Heidegger has represented, argues that the investigation of the image of the human being has always been based on a previously established human image that determines the respective results. According to Christian Thies , anthropology has not been able to establish itself as a philosophical discipline; hardly any sub-area struggles with such identity problems. You can see ruins on a field of rubble, as it were. Only the demolition and a building that has to be planned and constructed from scratch can help.

Gerd Haeffner sees individual scientific and philosophical research on people referring to one another: “Both ways of asking grow at the same time on the basis of simple life experience and the everyday wisdom that arises from it. Both strive for a well-founded knowledge that aims at a concept of the human in general. The two can therefore only be separated to a certain extent; they are part of a single, never-to-be-completed knowledge project. ”So it could be said with Kant that anthropologically relevant empirical research would remain blind to a certain extent without philosophical attempts at clarification and synthesis, while philosophical endeavors remained largely“ empty ”if they were about their own field did not get out. Other philosophical disciplines such as ontology , ethics , natural philosophy , epistemology and aesthetics should also be included .

Patrick Wilwert investigates the position of philosophical anthropology in the whole of the philosophical disciplines with a skeptical double question: “Is the only possible basic discipline always anthropology, since it is always the human being who drives science and philosophy in whatever form? Or, in any case, it cannot be anthropology, since the human being living in the world is always part of what is first to be made understandable by a basic philosophical discipline, so that a philosophical anthropology would in a sense build on what is first to be explained ? ”He sees the twofold relationship between man and culture as significant for the function of philosophical anthropology: From the perspective of the social association, man is a creator of culture, but as an individual it is primarily a creature of culture with only a very limited creative influence. From Wilwert's point of view, human creativity as such and the associated responsibility for shaping culture relativize the importance of the individual psychophysical relationships to which humans are subject. Philosophical anthropology refers to the cultural dimension of human existence by including aspects of the social and historical. It is not a certain culture that has priority, but rather the creative power of man, from which “an infinite multitude of mutually relativizing cultures” could emerge.

Christoph Wulf generally doubts the possibility of uniform anthropological knowledge. A single one is already overwhelmed by it. In transdisciplinary research, on the other hand, the complexity of the questions and methodological approaches led to an increase in complexity, which would be increased by the inclusion of different cultural perspectives in a transnational framework. (See also: Human Issues .) It is not the reduction, but the increase in complexity that is the concern of anthropological research. “The more knowledge about historical-cultural relationships increases, the more ignorance also increases. The idea that one can permanently overcome ignorance falls short of the mark. Man is only accessible in parts; overall it necessarily remains hidden. "

See also

literature

Introductions

further reading

  • Philosophical anthropology. First and second part. (= New Anthropology. Volume 6 and 7). ed. by Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Vogler. Georg Thieme Verlag, Stuttgart 1974/1975, ISBN 3-13-476601-9 u. ISBN 3-13-476701-5 . (also Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, Munich 1974/1975, ISBN 3-423-04074-2 and ISBN 3-423-04148-X )
  • Reinhard Brunner a. a. (Ed.): Anthropology, Ethics and Society. Campus, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-593-36636-3 .
  • Joachim Fischer : Philosophical Anthropology. A 20th century mindset. Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-495-48369-5 .
  • Gunter Gebauer (Ed.): Anthropology. Reclam, Leipzig 1998, ISBN 3-379-01637-3 .
  • Anton Grabner-Haider: Critical Anthropology. Echter, Würzburg 1993, ISBN 3-429-01523-5 .
  • Klaus Hammacher: Legal behavior and the idea of ​​justice. Nomos, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8329-5477-2 .
  • Brian Jacobs, Patrick Kain (Eds.): Essays on Kant's anthropology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-521-79038-7 .
  • Fabian Johannes: Anthropology with an Attitude. Critical essays. Stanford University Press, Stanford 2001.
  • Gerd Jüttemann (Ed.): Wilhelm Wundt's other legacy. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2006, ISBN 3-525-49087-9 .
  • S. Karotemprel (Ed.): Philosophical Anthropology. Sacred Heart College, Shillong 1984.
  • Hans-Peter Krüger: Between laughing and crying . Volume 1: The spectrum of human phenomena. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-05-003414-9 .
  • Hans-Peter Krüger: Between laughing and crying. Volume 2: The Third Way of Philosophical Anthropology and the Gender Question. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-05-003515-3 .
  • Hans-Peter Krüger: Philosophical anthropology as politics of life. German-Jewish and pragmatic modernism criticism. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004605-1 .
  • Hans-Peter Krüger: Brain, Behavior and Time. Philosophical anthropology as a research framework. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2010, ISBN 978-3-05-004480-4 .
  • Hans-Peter Krüger, Gesa Lindemann (Ed.): Philosophical Anthropology in the 21st Century. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-05-004052-1 .
  • Jörg-Johannes Lechner : Anthropology of death. Philosophical-anthropological analysis of the borderline scientific phenomena dying, death and afterlife. Publishing house Dr. Kovač, Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-339-10600-1
  • Jörg-Johannes Lechner: Anthropology of Mysticism. “Mysticism” and “mystical experience” in the context of a philosophical anthropology . Publishing house Dr. Kovač, Hamburg 2020, ISBN 978-3-339-11410-5 .
  • Gesa Lindemann: Thinking the social from its limits. Velbrück, Weilerswist 2009, ISBN 978-3-938808-61-0 .
  • B. Mondin: Philosophical Anthropology. TPI, Bangalore 1985.
  • Thomas Rentsch: The constitution of morality. Transcendental Anthropology and Practical Philosophy. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, ISBN 3-518-29021-5 .
  • Marc Rölli: Critique of Anthropological Reason. Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2011, ISBN 978-3-88221-539-7 .
  • Christian Sternad, Günther Pöltner (Ed.): Phenomenology and Philosophical Anthropology. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4729-9 .
  • Robert Spaemann : The Natural and the Reasonable, Essays on Anthropology. Piper, Munich, ISBN 3-492-10702-8 .
  • Thomas Sturm: Kant and the human sciences. Mentis Verlag, Paderborn 2009, ISBN 978-3-89785-608-0 .
  • Leslie Stevenson, David L. Haberman: Ten Theories of Human Nature . Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008, ISBN 978-0-19-536825-3 .
  • Ernst Tugendhat : anthropology instead of metaphysics. Beck, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-55678-4 .
  • Christian Thies : New Paths in Philosophical Anthropology. Velbrück, Weilerswist 2018.
  • Stephen P. Turner: Philosophy of anthropology and sociology. Elsevier, Amsterdam 2007.

Literature on Plessner and its impact history

  • Joachim Fischer : Eccentric positionality. Studies on Helmuth Plessner , Weilerswist 2016, ISBN 978-3-95832-093-2 .
  • Gerhard Gamm, Mathias Gutmann, Alexandra Manzei (eds.): Between anthropology and social theory. On the renaissance of Helmuth Plessner in the context of modern life sciences. Transcript, Bielefeld 2005, ISBN 3-89942-319-4 .
  • Jan Beaufort: The social constitution of nature 'Helmuth Plessner's critical-phenomenological foundation of a hermeneutic natural philosophy in the stages of the organic and man. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2000, ISBN 3-8260-1937-7 .
  • Stephan Pietrowicz: Helmuth Plessner. Genesis and system of his philosophical-anthropological thinking. Alber, Freiburg i. Br./ Munich 1992, ISBN 3-495-47720-9 .
  • Hermann Braun: The susceptibility of the principle. Existential philosophy and philosophical anthropology before and after 1933. In: Perspektiven der Philosophie. New Yearbook 1991, pp. 345–383.

Biological anthropology

Web links

Remarks

  1. ↑ On the etymology Gerd Haeffner says: “Philosophy is the striving (philía) for solidly founded orientational knowledge (sophía). The subject of 'Philosophical Anthropology' is the human being (ánthropos), one wants to say clearly and universally what he is as such (lógos). ”Haeffner 2000, p. 17.
  2. ↑ The capitalization follows the common practice in secondary literature and in particular the approach of Joachim Fischer, who differentiates between philosophical anthropology as a discipline and philosophical anthropology as a school of thought in the theoretical history of the 20th century; see Fischer 2008, p. 595; see under reception and criticism .
  3. ↑ Max Scheler: The special position of humans in the cosmos. In: The candlestick. Worldview and way of life. Eighth book: man and earth. Darmstadt 1927, p. 162.
  4. ↑ Haeffner 2000, p. 87 f .; Christoph Wulf: Anthropology. History, culture, philosophy. Reinbek 2004, p. 266 f.
  5. ↑ Michael Landmann: Philosophical Anthropology. Human self-interpretation in the past and present. 4th edition. Berlin 1976, p. 10; quoted from: Werner Schüßler (Hrsg.): Philosophische Anthropologie. Freiburg / Munich 2000, p. 10.
  6. ^ Johann Gottfried Herder : Ideas for the philosophy of the history of mankind. (4 vols., 1784/91)
  7. ↑ Preface to anthropology, 1798/1983, BA III
  8. ↑ Cf. Thomas Sturm: Kant and the Sciences of Man. Mentis, Paderborn 2009.
  9. ↑ See Brian Jacobs, Patrick Kain (eds.): Essays on Kants anthropology. Cambridge 2003.
  10. ↑ Cf. Jochen Fahrenberg: The scientific conception of psychology in Immanuel Kant and Wilhelm Wundt. In: e-journal Philosophy of Psychology. 10 (2008), (online at jp.philo.at )
  11. ↑ See Schönpflug, 2004.
  12. ↑ Gerd Jüttemann (Ed.): Wilhelm Wundts other legacy. Göttingen 2006.
  13. ^ Marx / Engels - works. Volume 20: Dialectics of Nature. Dietz Verlag, Berlin 1962, p. 444.
  14. ^ Friedrich Nietzsche : The Antichrist . KSA 6, chap. 14, p. 180.
  15. ↑ Cf. on this in the following the thorough monograph by Joachim Fischer: Philosophische Anthropologie. A 20th century mindset. 2nd Edition. Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg / Munich 2009.
  16. ↑ Hartung 2008, p. 11.
  17. ↑ in: Scheler: Vom Umsturz I, 275
  18. ↑ Cf. the documentation of the debate about Plessner's writing: Wolfgang Eßbach , Joachim Fischer, Helmuth Lethen (eds.): Plessner's "Limits of the Community". Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2002.
  19. ↑ Hartung 2008, p. 104.
  20. ↑ Hartung 2008, p. 106 f.
  21. ^ Wilhelm Kamlah : Philosophical anthropology, language-critical foundation and ethics. Mannheim 1984.
  22. ↑ 1978, p. 231.
  23. ^ Bálint Balla : Scarcity as the origin of social action . Hamburg 2005.
  24. ↑ 2007, pp. 45-46.
  25. ↑ Fischer 2008, p. 595.
  26. ↑ Fischer 2008, p. 596 f.
  27. ↑ Hartung 2008, p. 10.
  28. ↑ In: Umsturz p. 193.
  29. ↑ Christian Thies: Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology. 2nd revised edition. Darmstadt 2009, p. 7.
  30. ↑ Haeffner 2000, p. 13.
  31. ↑ Patrick Wilwert: Philosophical anthropology as a basic science. Studies on Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner. Würzburg 2009, p. 175.
  32. ↑ Patrick Wilwert: Philosophical anthropology as a basic science. Studies on Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner. Würzburg 2009, p. 179 f.
  33. ↑ Wulf 2004, pp. 262/272.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on March 12, 2006 .