World wisdom
World wisdom (Latin sapientia saecularis) is a basic philosophical current that is based exclusively on the knowledge of reason and understanding and rejects any religious revelation or transcendence as a source of knowledge, and yet tries to build a spiritual or even a systematic world structure. Representatives are sometimes called "worldly wise" or in the scientific sense "doctor of world wisdom". The term has been used since the 16th century and defines philosophical concepts of the 18th and early 19th centuries, which is a difference between Leibniz's metaphysics and the speculative designs of Romanticism. Sometimes the term is used as a synonym for philosophy. In addition to the scientific concept of world wisdom, which is legitimized by systematic thinking, the concept can also be understood in the popular sense as a guide and adviser to a happy and fulfilled life.
Intellectual history
Ancient and early Middle Ages
The term comes from the 1st letter to the Corinthians of the apostle Paul , who was well versed in Greek and wrote the following comment about philosophy and its efforts to be intelligent:
"Didn't God make world wisdom known as folly?"
This remark stigmatized all philosophical endeavors throughout the early Middle Ages. A world that owes its origin to a creator god, which therefore did not arise out of itself, could not therefore be explained out of itself. The claim of philosophy to be able to give a world explanation approach was condemned to fail from the outset and philosophy was considered foolishness. The church father Hieronymus even saw world wisdom as necrosis that should be eradicated. In the fever he experienced a frightening dream vision in which he stood before the judgment seat of God and was accused of not being a Christian, but a Ciceronian (Ciceronianus es, non Christianus) . Hieronymus then promised to part with the books of Cicero in order to obtain God's grace, but he already knew texts from these works by heart and had to confess that he could not erase the knowledge he had already acquired from his memory. This brought him into serious trouble of conscience, as he regarded the study of such literature as sinful. From this he concluded that only a person who denies God would use secular books (saeculares codices), whereas believing Christians were forbidden to read such books. Finally, under Pope Gregory the Great , all philosophy that presents itself in contrast to Revelation was rejected as world wisdom or as vain human wisdom. He complained that the joy of Cicero's style kept young people from reading the Bible, so he suggested that the pagan orator's works should be destroyed. World wisdom (Latin sapientia saecularis) remained incompatible with theology (sapientia divina).
middle Ages
That changed only in 711 with the arrival of the Moors in Spain. For the first time, Christian thinkers were in contact with Islamic scholars who by no means ignored Greek philosophy: such as the Arab philosopher al-Kindī and al-Fārābī the Persian philosopher Avicenna and many more. It was only through the Moors that the Christian West regained knowledge of its own ancient roots. Thomas Aquinas was the first Christian thinker to be able to answer this. In his work Summa contra gentiles he showed himself to be able to cope with the interreligious philosophical discourse. He rejected the claim of philosophy to explain the world, the world wisdom, and assigned it the task of a limited auxiliary science for theology, which was expressed in the term: Philosophia ancilla theologiae . Aquinas countered Jerome's argument that if it was not even allowed to read secular books, then the writings of profane authors would also have to be banned from dealing with theological writings. The acquisition of world wisdom could be fruitful for the Christian. From then on philosophy was recognized as a meta-level in religious exchange and its logic as the basis of science; but it did not receive the rank of theology. Aquinas' doctrine of nature says that God is at work everywhere and thus the truth cannot be privatized and privileged, not even by the official church. But since human judgments are subject to error, it is up to the head of the church in the sense of church unity to decide which truths of faith are recognized as error-free. But Thomas Aquinas does not say a word about whether the Pope can be wrong.
enlightenment
“Throughout the Middle Ages, world wisdom was a dirty word for philosophy. Kant, on the other hand, always uses the term in a provocatively different sense. It becomes clear that philosophy is no longer the handmaid of theology, but claims to be an independent and independent science. "
Kant uses this term in the sense of the origin: A philosophy that wants to arrive at wisdom in and through the world: in the real sense the transcendental philosophy .
"Transscendental - philosophy a world wisdom of pure, merely speculative reason."
But since the world in transcendental idealism is an imaginary structure generated by the individual himself, world wisdom is a goal that can only be achieved individually and that becomes the basis for the emancipation of superstition and heresy.
romance
In the age of classicism and romanticism , the term - often from a Spinozist perspective - acquired a pansophist meaning . This tendency characterizes the natural philosophy u. a. - in different respective orientations - by Goethe , Schelling and Hegel .
"The production of thinking and, more precisely, philosophy has rightly been called world wisdom, because thinking makes the truth of the spirit present, introduces it into the world and thus frees it in its reality and in itself."
According to Friedrich Schleiermacher , world wisdom is the full concept of philosophy in the totality of real knowledge, which in reality can only be realized as growing knowledge in the approach to the idea of world wisdom. Or with Goethe after overcoming nature and spirit and a holistic understanding of the world , to know what holds the world together in its innermost being.
art
"Ways of World Wisdom" and "Hermannsschlacht" by Anselm Kiefer
| Ways of world wisdom - the Hermann Battle |
|---|
| Anselm Kiefer , 1980 |
| Woodcut, acrylic, shellac on canvas |
| 400 × 700 cm |
| Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum of Contemporary Art (Collection Erich Marx), Berlin
[ Ways of world wisdom - the Hermannsschlacht ( Memento from January 2, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Link to the picture] |
The cycle of pictures, Ways of World Wisdom - The Hermann Battle , created between 1976 and 1980, is one of the “most impressive, but also most controversial, of his early work”. The group of works consists of a monumental painting (up to seven meters wide, depending on the variant), a number of woodcut collages and two book objects consisting of woodcut portraits in which well-known people from German cultural history are printed. One of them, entitled “Ways of World Wisdom”, brings together personalities from the bourgeois-republican Gottfried-Keller-Kreis, the second under the heading “The Hermannsschlacht”, portrait heads that were taken from a Nazi publication in which poets like Hölderlin and Eichendorf as well as philosophers like Kant and Heidegger were appropriated. In the collage, Kiefer brought together people from the left and right-wing bourgeois spectrum, apparently arbitrarily, as in his work Germany's spiritual heroes before . The unifying subject of the ensemble is the Hermannsschlacht, whereby Kiefer is primarily concerned with the national history of reception and the “tendency towards nationalism and chauvinism in the German intellectual tradition”, which Arminus, known as Hermann, the Cheruscan made into the German national hero and founder of identity. The picture title Ways of World Wisdom quotes a philosophical work by the Jesuit father Bernhard Jansen from 1924 and refers to the context of the Enlightenment, which opposes the idea of the all-ruling deity with a secular counterpart, comparable to Hegel's "Weltgeist". Kiefer recalls the epoch marked by "idealism, romanticism and the wars of freedom by inviting contemporaries from culture and politics by means of portraits", among them the pedagogue Friedrich Schleiermacher , the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte , the generals Blücher and Clausewitz , the poets Klopstock and Grabbe , but also the modern poets Rainer Maria Rilke and Stefan George and the philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was controversial because of his attitude in the Third Reich . Most of the heads are arranged towards the center of the image. There are more than half a dozen versions of the monumental collage with different variations on the same theme. Some of the works were exhibited to a larger audience in Eindhoven in 1979 and in Venice a year later.
His pictures and sculptures by Georg Baselitz caused a stir at the Venice Biennale in 1980. The viewer had to decide whether the apparently National Socialist motifs were meant ironically or whether they were meant to convey fascist ideas. On huge canvases he created epic images that recalled the history of German culture with the help of a “Compendium of German History” (Klaus Gallwitz). With this "Genealogy of German nationalism" (Robert Hughes), Kiefer continued the tradition of historical painting as a means of addressing the world. Kiefer's orientation towards the iconographic repertoire of National Socialist painting prompted Werner Spies to write in his Biennale report: "You must be warned about the sowing!"
literature
- Werner Flach : The idea of the transcendental philosophy. Immanuel Kant. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2002, ISBN 3-8260-2363-3 .
- Thomas Grundmann : Analytical Transcendental Philosophy. A criticism. Schöningh, Paderborn 1993, ISBN 3-506-73446-6 .
- Otfried Höffe : Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. The foundation of modern philosophy. 4th edition. Beck, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-406-50919-3 .
- Nikolai F. Klimmek: Kant's system of transcendental ideas (= Kant studies . Supplements. Volume 147). Verlag Walter de Gruyter , Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-11-018349-8 .
Individual evidence
- ^ Elke Richter: The Strasbourg concept books. P. 367.
- ^ 1 Corinthians 1.19 translated by Albrecht. or "For this world's wisdom is folly with God" with Luther
- ↑ epist. 21, itaque et nos hoc facere solemus, quando philosophos legimus, quando in manus nostras libri veniunt sapeintiae saecularis, they quid in eis utile repperimus, ad nostrum dogma covertimus
- ↑ Hieronymus: Letters 22.30 ( Ad Eustochium ).
- ↑ Real encyclopedia for the educated classes. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1848, Volume 15. (books.google.de)
- ^ Johannes Helmrath: Studies for the 15th century. Munich 1994, p. 424.
- ^ Herder's Conversations Lexicon. Freiburg im Breisgau 1857, Volume 5, p. 697. (zeno.org)
- ↑ Benezet Bujo: moral autonomy and standard finding in Thomas Aquinas. Paderborn 1979, p. 363.
- ↑ The so different theories of space and time, The transcendental idealism of Kant in relation to Einstein's theory of relativity. Osnabrück 2000, ISBN 3-934366-33-3 , p. 136.
- ↑ Kant: AA IV, Critique of Pure Reason, p. 25.
- ^ Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. P. 358.
- ↑ Dialectic 1814 A § 218, 68
- ↑ Kristine Hannak: Goethe between Pansophie and Weltweisheit, an anthology examines the longevity of analogical-philosophical concepts. Geneva 2002, p. 132.
- ↑ a b Sabine Schütz: Anselm Kiefer's ways of world wisdom - The Hermann battle. A German genealogy. In: Klaus Gallwitz (Hrsg.): Anselm Kiefer: Ways of world wisdom / The women of the revolution. Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, p. 16.
- ↑ Sabine Schütz: Anselm Kiefer's ways of world wisdom - The Hermann Battle. A German genealogy. In: Klaus Gallwitz (Hrsg.): Anselm Kiefer: Ways of world wisdom / The women of the revolution. Richter Verlag, Düsseldorf 2007, p. 17 f.
- ↑ Sabine Schütz lists 5 variants. See Sabine Schütz: Anselm Kiefer - history as material. Work 1969–1983. DuMont, Cologne 1999, p. 240, fn. 7.
- ^ Sabine Schütz: Anselm Kiefer - history as material. Work 1969–1983. DuMont, Cologne 1999, p. 255.