Werner Stegmaier

Werner Stegmaier (born July 19, 1946 in Ludwigsburg ) is a German philosopher . He was the founding director of the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Greifswald after the fall of the Wall and from 1994 to 2011 he held the chair for philosophy with a focus on practical philosophy. He is the author of the Philosophy of Orientation (2008). His second major research area is Nietzsche's philosophy. Both research areas are linked in Nietzsche meets Luhmann. Orientation in nihilism.

Life

After studying philosophy, German and Latin studies , Stegmaier received his doctorate at the University of Tübingen in 1974 under the supervision of Karl Ulmer and Josef Simon . He taught at grammar schools for a number of years, also held a teaching position at the University of Stuttgart and became a research assistant to Josef Simons at the University of Bonn, where he wrote his philosophy of fluctuation in 1990 . Dilthey and Nietzsche completed their habilitation. He dedicated his inaugural lecture to Kant's treatise "What does it mean: To orient oneself in thinking?", From which he developed his philosophy of orientation . After a substitute for a professorship in Berlin , he went to Greifswald , where he still lives. In 1995, Stegmaier founded the North and East European Forum for Philosophy , which came into contact with the institutes for philosophy around the Baltic Sea, organized summer schools with them and reoriented the philosophy in the countries formerly belonging to the Soviet Union in a DFG project “Empirical Philosophy Research “Accompanied. From 1999 to 2017 Stegmaier was co-editor and editor of the Nietzsche Studies. International yearbook for Nietzsche research as well as the monographs and texts on Nietzsche research (both published by de Gruyter, Berlin / Boston). He has organized numerous scientific conferences on Nietzsche's philosophy, the philosophy of orientation, signs and time, the philosophical topicality of the Jewish tradition and Nietzsche and Luhmann's thinking. The philosophy of orientation has u. a. broadcast in sports science , linguistics , musicology , psychotherapy , architecture and theology . A translation into English is in preparation. The Hodges Foundation for Philosophical Orientation was established in Nashville, Tennessee in 2018 to continue it .

Think

1. Substance and fluctuation

In his dissertation on substance as the basic concept of metaphysics , which, according to him, Aristotle as substance-accident relation, Descartes as substance-substance relation and Leibniz as substance-relation relation, Stegmaier recognized that substance as a concept of constant in being in the river or, as Stegmaier called it in his habilitation thesis on Nietzsche and Dilthey, is a fluctuation, a unit that can exchange all its characteristics over time and thus completely change its identity. With Friedrich Nietzsche and Wilhelm Dilthey, who philosophically took up Charles Darwin's evolutionary ideas and wanted to believe in constant generalities as little as in constant biological species, Stegmaier consistently placed all philosophical and scientific thinking under the condition of time and also accepted it Alfred North Whitehead apart.

2. From the Jewish tradition to the philosophy of orientation

With Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida , to whom he devoted numerous contributions, Stegmaier worked out the Jewish tradition, which has remained largely foreign to European philosophy as far as it was derived from the Greeks, and which sees the Torah as a source of ever new orientation. The philosophical concept of orientation, which was first brought into play by Moses Mendelssohn, a Jew and one of the most famous enlightenmentists of his time, which Kant took up after his death in his treatise "What does: Orient oneself in thinking?" And which since then has hardly anyone else Philosophical term has entered the everyday usage of most European languages, but also many others, became the basic concept of a new philosophy of the present in Stegmaier's main work Philosophy of Orientation . Today, in the face of ever new orientation crises, both in the private and in the public sector, he has dominated the debate without attracting any particular attention. It is used regularly, especially in philosophy, but also in the sciences, to define other terms without being defined itself. It is already a prerequisite for one's own analysis (orientation over orientation) and is such an ultimate concept that one arrives at when one tries to go back behind it. In terms of itself, it is also in the matter: if you orient yourself in a situation, the situation changes, and the new situation makes a new orientation necessary. However, since every situation is different, general guidelines are not to be expected. According to Stegmaier, orientation precedes all thinking and acting, and therefore all thinking and acting must and can be conceived in terms of it and its specific structures. She structures herself using clues that she takes from the situations in her environment according to her own needs. She arranges them from a respective point of view in a respective horizon in a respective perspective into recognizable patterns and abbreviates them into symbols, through which communication and thus orientation to a different orientation is possible. However, clues and signs always leave room for interpretation, which each orientation fills in its own way; one always orientates oneself to something, i.e. in individual and situational leeway. According to Stegmaier, orientations do not find support in an inherently existing general, but in routines that over time become so natural that they no longer attract attention and disappear from consciousness. So they relieve the orientation. The thinking, which traditional philosophy has unquestionably started, starts with disturbances of routines, including linguistic routines; it distances itself from the obvious and creates its own hold in its own order, including logic, which is then the logic of a certain kind of orientation, including scientific, not that of the world. The orientation towards a different orientation remains (here Stegmaier takes on a figure of thought by Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann) doubly contingent: The other can always react differently in interaction and communication than one expects, and both know that. This double contingency must realistically all social orders (according to Luhmann's functional systems of communication in society) proceed. Stegmaier shows how this happens in business, politics, law, science, art and religion, how they in turn orientate themselves and how the individual orientates himself again towards them. They each professionalise certain orientation needs. In ethics, the moral orientation as self-binding through general norms and values ​​can be differentiated from the ethical orientation as a reflection of such self-binding and the renunciation of generality and reciprocity: thus there are virtues that are valued by everyone, but that have been neglected by previous moral philosophy, such as open-mindedness and impartiality, Benevolence and kindness, tact, nobility and kindness in their right. Finally, Stegmaier shows how standardization makes world orientation conceivable in global communication, how traditional metaphysics can be understood as a mode of orientation and what significance death has for orientation.

3. Nietzsche research

In Nietzsche research, in which he gained great influence, Stegmaier particularly emerged with the thesis that Nietzsche in his Zarathustra as the hero of a didactic poetry in the famous doctrines of the superman and the eternal return of the same Mouth, and the doctrine of the will to power is also about "anti-doctrines" that go back behind the assumption of the general in itself. According to Stegmaier, this is where they have their unit. With what he calls contextual interpretation, which always understands Nietzsche's philosophical content in connection with her literary figures, he has created a methodical paradigm for Nietzsche research, which he himself includes in the fifth book of Nietzsche's "Happy Science" exemplified and that has received strong attention ever since. Most recently, he has shown in numerous contributions how Nietzsche's basic philosophical decisions can be further developed for the 21st century with Luhmann's sociological system theory.

Works

Monographs (selection)

• 1977: substance. Basic concept of metaphysics. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog 1977, 232 pp.
• 1987: (together with Karl Ulmer and Wolf Häfele) conditions of the future. A scientific-philosophical dialogue. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog 1987, 247 pp.
• 1992: philosophy of fluctuation. Dilthey and Nietzsche (habilitation thesis Bonn 1990). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 1992, 413 pp.
• 1997: interpretations. Major works of philosophy. From Kant to Nietzsche. Stuttgart: Reclam, 464 pp.
• 2008: Philosophy of Orientation. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter 2008, 804 pp.
• 2009: Levinas. Master thinkers series. Freiburg / Basel / Vienna: Herder 2002, 224 p., Reprint Hamburg: Junius, 249 p.
• 2011: Nietzsche for an introduction. Hamburg: Junius, 212 pp.
• 2012: Nietzsche's liberation of philosophy. Contextual interpretation of Book V of the Gay Science . Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter, 754 pp.
• 2016: Luhmann meets Nietzsche. Orientation in nihilism. Berlin / Boston: de Gruyter, 436 pp.
• 2018: Europe in a ghost war. Studies on Nietzsche. Edited by Andrea Bertino. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 638 pp. (Open access)

Editorships (selection)

• 1992 (Ed., With Tilman Borsche): On the philosophy of the sign. Berlin / New York: de Gruyter, 231 pp.
• 1993 (Ed., With Gebhard Fürst): The council as a source of ethics. On the practice of dialogue, Stuttgart: Academy of the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart, 132 pp.
• 1997 (Ed., With Daniel Krohabennik): Jüdischer Nietzscheanismus. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter, 476 pp.
• 1998–2000 (Ed., With Josef Simon): Signs and Interpretation IV-IV. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​approx. 300 pages each.
• 2000 (Ed.): European Philosophy. Berlin / New York: Walter de Gruyter, 194 pp.
• 2000 (Ed.): The philosophical actuality of the Jewish tradition. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, ​​517 pp.
• 2004 (Ed.): Felix Hausdorff, Philosophisches Werk. Heidelberg: Springer, XX + 920 pp.
• 2005 (Ed.): Orientation. Philosophical Perspectives. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 362 pp.

literature

• Andrea Bertino, Ekaterina Poljakova, Andreas Rupschus, Benjamin Alberts (eds.): On the philosophy of orientation. Berlin / Boston 2016: Walter de Gruyter, 415 pp.

Web links

• Literature by and about Werner Stegmaier in the catalog of the German National Library
• Career on the website of the University of Greifswald
• academia.edu
• researchgate.net
• stegmaier-orientierung.de