Session Information
13 SES 04 B, Parallel Paper Session
Parallel Paper Session
Contribution
The idea of a human nature has indeed often been a blind for conservative ideologies. By converting cultural practice into nature, a preferred political, social or sexist order appears to be innocent, unchangeable and true. And when the conservative idea of nature is challenged, nature as such is often abandoned in the name of emancipation.
Some thinkers have held on to the idea, that without a feasible concept of human nature we will need a fundament for criticizing education and culture.
Adorno and Horkheimer launched the program “Remembrance of nature within the subject”, but it was never redeemed except in a nostalgic or eschatological way.
I shall present two attempts to reopen an epistemic access to human nature.
Christoph Menke defends the idea of nature as an active component in the creation of a social identity. He attacks, however, the idea of nature as an independent reality prior to the social and the idea of a real existing, inner and natural “I-core” that lingers on when the individual is socialized. On the other hand Menke also rejects the idea, that the natural is totally absorbed in the social. To him subjectivation does not mean normalization and disciplination, as Foucault claims.
The growing up of individuals means learning and practice of social standards and of cognition. Without “external” help from the social sphere, Menke claims, human beings would only be able to have vague thoughts, feelings, sensations and actions. But, on the other hand, if there was no natural power or force to vague cognition and action, i.e. no “dim power”, social learning would work in vain. Our access to the dim ground, i.e. to our nature, is only possible through a specific cognitive activity, which Menke calls a genealogical reflexion.
Gernot Böhme integrates the “Leibphänomenologie”, the phenomenology of the body, from philosopher Hermann Schmitz in his philosophy of nature. The body is, in Böhme’s wording, the nature we ourselves are. The phenomenology of Schmitz is a comprehensive analysis of the “felt body” (der Leib), which is differentiated from the physical body. The felt body (not unlike Merleau-Ponty’s “corpse proper”) is the non-visible and non-tangible body which we have unmediated access to. Or rather: which have unmediated access to us. This body we know of through “affective involvement” that comprises two sorts of sensation: a bodily “self-givenness” and a “finding oneself” situated in the surrounding world. These type of bodily experiences give access to a “pre-I” before the division into subject and object, rationality and animality or society and nature. During our socialization a real subject is developed from the felt body. In the age of enlightenment and emancipation this subject is interpreted as an autonomous, disembodied active reason. Böhme rather talks of a “sovereign” human being, who is not estranged from its own nature and the loss of control or resistance this could bring along with it. The sovereign I can learn to regress to its nature through various practices.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
-Böhme, Gernot. Ethik leiblicher Existenz [Ethics of the bodily existence], Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2008 -Böhme, Gernot: Die Natur vor uns. Naturphilosophie in pragmatischer Hinsicht [The Nature before us. Philosophy of nature in a pragmatic perspective], Küsterdingen: Die Graue Edition, 2002. -Schmitz, Hermann: Leib und Gefühl. Materialien zu einer philosophischen Therapeutik [Body and Feeling. Materials for a philosophical therapy], ed. Gausebeck, H. & Risch, G., Paderborn: Junfermann-Verlag, 1992. -Schmitz, Hermann: Der Leib [The body], Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011 -Schmitz, Müllan & Slaby (2011): “Emotions outside the box – the new phenomenology of feeling and corporeality”, Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, vol.10, nr. 2, (2011), pp. 241-259. Retrieved October 4th 2011 on: http://www.springerlink.com/content/97014n707350p5m1/fulltext.pdf -Menke, Christoph: ”Innere Natur und soziale Normativität. Die Idee der Selbstverwirklichung [Inner nature and social norm. The idea of self-realization]”, in: Die kulturellen Werte Europas [Cultural Values in Europe], hrsg. Joas & Wiegandt, Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 2005. -Menke, Christoph: Kraft. Ein Grundbegriff ästhetischer Anthropologie [Power. A fundamental concept in aesthetic anthropology], Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp 2008
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