Vinzenz Rüfner

Vinzenz Rüfner (born September 17, 1899 in Dettingen am Main , † May 29, 1976 in Bonn - Bad Godesberg ) was a German philosopher.

Life

After graduating from high school in Aschaffenburg , Rüfner, the son of a small farmer, did military service in the last months of the First World War . Then he studied from 1919 to 1924 in Würzburg , first chemistry , then English, French, philosophy and pedagogy for the teaching profession . In 1921 he joined the Catholic student union WKSt.V Unitas Hetania . As a member of the technical emergency aid , he was used as a strike breaker in the lignite mining industry in 1922 and was seriously injured in the process. After the first part of the state examination for modern foreign languages ​​in October 1923, he taught as a trainee lawyer at the Realgymnasium in Würzburg. He passed the second part of the state examination in June 1924. At the same time he received his doctorate from Hans Meyer , who later held the concordat chair , in July 1924 with a thesis on "The naturalistic - Darwinian ethics of England ". On September 1, 1924, he received a position as an assessor at the grammar school in Aschaffenburg, but taught from September 20, 1924 to April 1935 at the Episcopal Rector's School in Großauheim near Hanau . During this time he gave lectures in the Görres Society and in the Aschaffenburg local branch of the Catholic Academic Association .

Rüfner completed his habilitation in 1931 at the University of Würzburg under Hans Meyer with the topic "The transcendental question as a metaphysical problem". The work is a critique of idealistic thinking from a Catholic point of view. In doing so, he turned against Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's excessive emphasis on the state . He was then a private lecturer in Würzburg until he was appointed to a professorship at the Philosophical-Theological College in Bamberg in December 1936 . There he was on June 29, 1937 a regular associate. Appointed professor. When the Second World War broke out , the university was closed in 1939. Rüfner was nevertheless made a civil servant for life in January 1940 and initially remained on hold. From the summer semester of 1941 he was able to represent Siegfried Behn at the University of Bonn until his return in 1943. When he did not get any immediate employment, he turned to Carl August Emge with the request to support him in a further use. He finally received a teaching position for philosophy at the Catholic faculty of the University of Freiburg after the philosophical concordat chair of the late Martin Honecker had been filled with Robert Heiss , who specializes in psychology, in violation of the contract .

During the Nazi era, Rüfner was a member of the NSV and RLB from 1933 , joined SA Reserve II in 1934 and became a member of the NSLB on April 1, 1934 (member number 336.178). On May 1, 1937, he became a member of the NSDAP (Member No. 4,401,685). After the end of the war, he took up his work at the reopened university in Bamberg in 1945 and was appointed full professor in 1948. In 1951 he accepted a position at the University of Bonn .

Teaching

Rüfner's focus was on natural philosophy and the theory of the state . In addition, he dealt with the philosophy of the Middle Ages and anthropology . Rüfner was classified on the one hand as a "Catholic philosopher", but on the other hand was considered loyal to the line.

Rüfner rejected a mechanistic worldview as well as Darwinism , which he regarded as the "expression of the worldview of liberal-capitalist thought". On the other hand, he saw Einstein's theory of relativity and the new physics positively, because they raised new, holistic questions. In biology, he oriented himself more towards Edgar Dacqué , Jakob Johann von Uexküll and Hans Driesch in terms of the philosophy of life .

“In place of the truth that an organ can only become effective at all when it is made available by the innermost core of life , mechanistic development has assumed that need creates the organ, which is only an adoption of economic teachings; because it is the natural-philosophical correspondence of the competitive economy, which is always prepared to awaken new economic needs and thus new economic organs. "

Rüfner moves in with his thoughts on people who race as a determinant worth serious consideration. However, this is only one of several relevant variables.

"Furthermore, man is bound by time and history , by all those powers of the ' objective spirit ', in which even the natural conditions of the climate and the soil as well as those human natural factors of race, heredity, etc. have an impact."

Above all, he emphasizes that the external factors alone do not make a person, but that his mental abilities and attitudes are decisive.

“The influence of blood, race and biological health result in a multitude of variations in human existence . However, natural factors cannot give that which makes man man; they do not come close to the diversity of spiritual human existence. Because people, even if their biological basis remains essentially the same, should be called a different person depending on their worldview and their moral and religious way of life. "

According to Rüfner, who referred to Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger , a purely scientific view of humans can not fully grasp them , especially in their existential situation:

“The world means more than a calculable quantity that the knowing subject dominates. Neither can man confront God in a merely contemplative attitude . It is not just a question of the cognitive, but of the whole human being who not only confronts the course of the world with contemplation, but is involved in many other attitudes of being, because he lives, acts, dares and decides against higher powers. This is the very meaning of true existence. "

From this holistic view, Rüfner comes to the meaning of the community , for which the person decides morally:

“Man knows himself to be committed to the community again in what it gives him, what he has to take up, carry on and hand over to others as well-cared for in trustworthy hands. For us, the human being in the community rests on a deeply metaphysical foundation, which German thought struggled with difficulty in Romanticism . Today we have to pick up again where the individualistic development with the endeavor to understand all being out of the mechanical world had broken in and had brought about social individualism: namely with German law and its incomparably deep community doctrine, which is leadership and allegiance , Responsibility and loyalty builds on the innermost core of human personhood . "

From the idea of ​​the organic community - not society in the sense of the sociological demarcation in Ferdinand Tönnies - an ideal state develops .

“We now have to observe how the essential principles of genuine community assert themselves in the life of the family , people and nation . This will lead over by itself to the political formation of community will in the state. "

The ideal state based on the organic community must, according to Rüfner, eliminate all institutions based primarily on economic interests.

"Overcoming class society therefore requires the destruction of all organizations that, like the socialist trade unions or employers' associations and also the parliamentary parties , primarily faced each other as economic interest groups in the struggle for power ."

Without directly referring justified Rüfner with this position, the DC circuit by the Nazis. For him, however, the ideal state has its limits in morality , which opposes despotism and dictatorship .

“These external borders are particularly necessary where the state sees itself as a government that is internally alien to the people. But where state and people penetrate each other so closely, as is the case with the idea of ​​the total state , only the state's internal borders come into question. These are none other than the moral norms . The state can therefore not dispose of everything as it sees fit in arbitrary sovereignty , it is never entitled to demand something immoral, indeed it cannot do it without destroying its being itself. "

One could evaluate this passage in connection with the conception of an ideal state as a criticism of the ruling National Socialism. When looking at the entire work, this view is not necessary. In particular, the considerations subsequently developed on the formulation of the law are in little agreement with this. For Rüfner, the law is determined by the circumstances prevailing in the community.

"The law is the unique form and life law of a people, the invisible constructive idea of ​​a völkisch community in struggle with all destructive powers of destruction and decomposition, floating invisibly above the people's becoming ." Life is good.

A law is therefore "synonymous with moral norms, with authoritarian orders to refrain from or act, as it corresponds to the leadership state." It does not even need legal provisions to make certain acts punishable if they contradict the underlying legal ideas and "the healthy folk belief "calls for punishment. This interpretation of the law extends to the preventive detention , with the theme of protective custody explicitly is not addressed. In general, the only thing that applies is that the legal structure must be subject to the interests of the community.

"This purpose is served not only by life imprisonment and the death penalty , which used to be fought so often because of humanity contrary to the community , but also by the newly introduced preventive detention, which, like all criminal law, is based on the protection of the community and not on combating individual crimes."

As part of the denazification process , Rüfner stated that the Nazi examination commission had notified the publisher that the sale of the books was forbidden for both nature and man in it , as well as for community, state and law . While there are reasons for the prohibition of natural philosophy because Rüfner on the one hand assessed “Jewish physics” positively and on the other hand criticized Darwinism, this cannot be directly understood for the philosophy of the state, unless one sees the reason in the fact that Rüfner consistently for has taken a fair place in religion and should be restricted as a "Catholic philosopher".

Fonts

• The struggle for existence and its foundations in modern philosophy. Critical study on the idea of ​​order in modern times . Niemeyer, Halle 1929.
• The transcendental question as a metaphysical problem. Study on the metaphysics of German idealism . Niemeyer, Halle 1932.
• The nature and the person in it. Bonn 1934.
• Community, state and law. Bonn 1937.
• The philosophical ideas and the forms of art. In: Journal for German Cultural Philosophy. Volume 7, 1941, pp. 217-239.
• Basic forms of state-philosophical thinking in modern times from the 15th century to the 19th century . War lectures of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn a. Rh. , H. 94, Bonn 1943.
• The philosophy of history Giambattista Vico . War lectures of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn, 106, Bonn 1943.
• Basic concepts of Greek science. As an introduction to philosophical thinking . Bamberg 1946.
• The development of the soul. Introduction to Comparative Psychology . Bamberg 1947.
• Psychology. Basics and main areas . Volume IV of the Systematic Philosophy by Hans Meyer, Paderborn 1969.

literature

• Claudia Schorcht: Philosophy at the Bavarian Universities 1933–1945 . Harald Fischer, Erlangen 1990.
• Christian Tilitzki : The German university philosophy in the Weimar Republic and in the Third Reich. Academy, Berlin 2002.

Web links

• Literature by and about Vinzenz Rüfner in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Wolfgang Burr (ed.): Unitas manual . tape 1 . Verlag Franz Schmitt, Siegburg 1995, p. 357 .
2. ^ Claudia Schorcht: Philosophy at the Bavarian universities 1933-1945 . Harald Fischer, Erlangen 1990, pp. 288–289 with quotations from the Nazi lecturers' association.
3. ↑ Vinzenz Rüfner: Nature and man in her. Bonn 1934, p. 70.
4. ↑ Vinzenz Rüfner: Nature and man in her. Bonn 1934, p. 71; Schorcht points out that there is a similar criticism of Darwinism in Marx (Marx to Engels, June 18, 1862, Marx-Engels-Werke Volume 30, p. 249): Claudia Schorcht: Philosophy at the Bavarian universities 1933–1945 . Harald Fischer, Erlangen 1990, p. 336.
5. ↑ Vinzenz Rüfner: Nature and man in her. Bonn 1934, p. 80.
6. ↑ Vinzenz Rüfner: Nature and man in her. Bonn 1934, p. 82.
7. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 5.
8. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 7.
9. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 58.
10. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 109.
11. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 118.
12. ^ Claudia Schorcht: Philosophy at the Bavarian universities 1933-1945 . Harald Fischer, Erlangen 1990, p. 342.
13. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 151
14. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 154.
15. ^ ^{A b} Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 159.
16. ^ Vinzenz Rüfner: Community, State and Law. Bonn 1937, p. 160.
17. ^ Claudia Schorcht: Philosophy at the Bavarian universities 1933-1945 . Harald Fischer, Erlangen 1990, pp. 285-286.
18. ^ Claudia Schorcht: Philosophy at the Bavarian universities 1933-1945 . Harald Fischer, Erlangen 1990, p. 343.