Rolf Kühn (philosopher)

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Rolf Kühn during a lecture in Brussels on the occasion of the awarding of the Cardinal Mercier Prize on November 17, 2005

Rolf Kühn (* 1944 in Essen ) is a German philosopher in the fields of phenomenology , psychological and philosophical anthropology , religious philosophy and cultural philosophy . Kühn is a representative of the phenomenology of life established by Michel Henry .

Life

Rolf Kühn received his licentiate in Catholic theology from the Institut catholique de Paris in 1970 . In 1985 he received his doctorate at the Sorbonne Paris with Claude Bruaire with a dissertation on Simone Weil on the topics of reflection philosophy and hermeneutic phenomenology . In 1992, Kühn completed his habilitation at the Faculty of Basic and Integrative Science at the University of Vienna with the text Leiblichkeit und Lebendigkeit on Michel Henry's complete works, with special attention to the life-ideological relationships between subjectivity , affectivity and corporeality . From 1990 to 2002 Kühn worked as a university lecturer at the University of Vienna. Then he received teaching assignments a. a. in Beirut, Nice, Lisbon and Freiburg im Breisgau.

Rolf Kühn and Michael Titze have been working together since 1985 . This cooperation resulted in the establishment of a research group for philosophy and psychotherapy in Tuttlingen , in which the integration of Michel Henry's phenomenology of life into depth psychology is discussed.

Since 1992 Kühn has translated three major works and numerous essays by Michel Henry. Through this, and through numerous publications and editorships of his own on Henry's phenomenology of life, as well as lectures and seminars, Kühn contributed to the reception of the French philosopher in the German-speaking world. Kühn also translated Maine de Biran .

Together with Günter Funke, Kühn has been publishing the life-phenomenological series Soul, Existence and Life at Verlag Karl Alber since 2005 . In the same publishing house, Rolf Kühn, Jann E. Schlimme and Karl Heinz Witte have been publishing a yearbook for psychotherapy, philosophy and culture under the title psycho-logik since 2006 .

Rolf Kühn lives as a private lecturer and freelance author in Gundelfingen near Freiburg im Breisgau.

position

At the beginning of Rolf Kühn's philosophical path of thought, there was an examination of Simone Weil's thinking. The request formulated by the French thinker at the end of her short life to choose between life and truth challenged Kühn to choose life as that originally appearing, which in a radical-phenomenological sense makes all holding-to-be-true possible. For him, Michel Henry's “radical phenomenology of life” was so inspiring that one could certainly long think that Kühn only saw himself as a mouthpiece for it. However, the rapidly changing conditions after the turn of the century and Henry's death in 2002, especially in the interrelated areas of religion , aesthetics and political economy, made it necessary to continue Henry's approach to the extent that this task was carried out Kühn's own philosophical contribution has come out more and more clearly. He not only further emphasized the role of mysticism, and in particular Meister Eckhart, for contemporary philosophy, but also provided important building blocks for a culture-critical aesthetic and drew conclusions for the present from Michel Henry's political and economic criticism. In all of this, Kühn decided not only to distance himself from all approaches of philosophy oriented towards scientific knowledge, but also from classical hermeneutics and so-called postmodern philosophy (or poststructuralism or deconstructivism ), insofar as all these approaches are based on assumptions, but which would not be possible in a radical sense without a previous living self-givenness of a thinking, speaking or perceiving ego.

As a radical phenomenological thinker "avant la lettre" (already understood in this way by Henry), Kühn recently worked out the philosopher Maine de Biran , who was usually associated with 19th century French spiritualism .

Kühn's position receives criticism primarily from phenomenologists such as Bernhard Waldenfels or (in the factual discussion more intensely) Hans Rainer Sepp , who deny Kühn that it is appropriate to speak of an original "self-affection" (of incarnated life) without the meaning being the same of "foreign affection" to be considered. The warning formulated by the theologian Saskia Wendel that Kühn's philosophy of Christianity is in danger of falling into a theological monism that basically negates the free personal confrontation between God and man is in line with this criticism .

Memberships

  • Advisory Board of the Central European Institute of Philosophy (Středoevropský Institut Filosofie SIF), Prague .

Publications

Monographs

  • Corporeality as vitality. Michel Henry's phenomenology of absolute subjectivity as affectivity. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 1992, ISBN 3-495-47738-1 .
  • French philosophy of reflection and spirit. Profiles and analyzes. Hain, Frankfurt am Main 1993.
  • Husserl's concept of passivity. On the critique of passive synthesis in genetic phenomenology. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 1998, ISBN 3-495-47884-1 .
  • Radicalized Phenomenology. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2003, ISBN 3-631-50390-3 .
  • Birth in god. Religion, metaphysics, mysticism and phenomenology. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2003, ISBN 3-495-48087-0 .
  • Gift as a body in Christianity and phenomenology. Echter, Würzburg 2004, ISBN 3-429-02553-2 .
  • Inner certainty and living self. Basic features of the phenomenology of life. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2005, ISBN 3-8260-2960-7 .
  • Beginning and forgetting. Phenomenological reading of German idealism. Fichte, Schelling, Hegel. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-17-018529-2 .
  • Word and silence. Phenomenological studies on the original understanding of language. Olms, Hildesheim 2005, ISBN 3-487-12910-8 .
  • Pathogenesis and fullness of life. A phenomenological-psychotherapeutic foundation. Together with Renate Stachura. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2005.
  • Pierre Maine de Biran - sense of self and self-apperception. A pioneer of concrete transcendentality in phenomenology. Olms, Hildesheim 2006, ISBN 3-487-13087-4 .
  • Power of feelings. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-495-48313-8 .
  • Practice of phenomenology. Exercises into the unimaginable. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2009.
  • Religion of life. Immediacy of the religious as a reference to reality. Text & Dialog, Dresden 2013, ISBN 978-3-943897-02-9 .
  • French philosophy and phenomenology of religion today. Metaphysical and post-metaphysical positions on the (im) possibility of God. (FeG 15), Herder, Freiburg i.Br. u. a. 2013, ISBN 978-3-451-34167-0
  • Emptiness and attention. Studies on revelation thinking Simone Weils. , Text & Dialog, Dresden 2014, ISBN 978-3-943897-10-4 .

Editing

  • Michel Henry. For self-testing of life and culture. Together with Stefan Nowotny. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2002, ISBN 3-495-48087-0 .
  • Epoché and reduction. Forms and Practice of Reduction in Phenomenology. Together with M. Staudigl. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2003, ISBN 3-8260-2589-X .
  • Existential Analysis and Life Phenomenology. Together with Günter Funke and Renate Stachura. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2006, ISBN 3-495-48162-1 .

literature

  • Sophia Kattelmann, Sebastian Knöpker (ed.): Life phenomenology in Germany. Homage to Rolf Kühn. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2012, ISBN 978-3-495-48520-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Sophia Kattelmann, Sebastian Knöpker (ed.): Life phenomenology in Germany. Homage to Rolf Kühn. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2012, p. 10.
  2. ↑ Michael Titze: The organization of consciousness. Strategies of typing in "normal" and schizophrenic worldview. Alber, Freiburg im Breisgau / Munich 2011, p. 28.
  3. ↑ See: Simone Weil, Ecrits de Londres et dernières lettres, Paris 1957, pp. 210 f., 213, 255 f. from the year 1942/43; see. also: Dies., Lettre aux Cahiers du Sud sur les responsabilités de la littérature of April 1941, in: Dies., Œuvres Complètes, tome IV, volume 1 (Écrits de Marseille), Paris, 2008, p. 71, in relation on Henri Bergson : "Au center de la philosophie (de Bergson) se trouve une notion essentiellement étrangère à toute considération de la valeur, à savoir la notion de vie". (Note: If life does not contain any conceptual, general "value" (a key term in Simone Weil), then conversely, life does not imply any "truth", because truth is the basic value of all axiology and epistemology , Ethics and religion).
personal data
SURNAME Bold, Rolf
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH eat