Ferdinand Fellmann

Die neuzeitliche Ethik hat den teleologischen Naturbegriff der Antike durch den Begriff der praktischen Vernunft ersetzt, deren Normen alle Menschen unterworfen sind. Dieses von Immanuel Kant entwickelte Modell hat den Vorteil, Ethik als deduktive Disziplin zu behandeln, es hat aber den Nachteil, dass der Ausgangspunkt eine abstrakte Konstruktion ist. Konstruiert wird als Kern des Menschen eine rein logische Instanz, die sich selbst nach dem Prinzip des Widerspruchs Gesetze des Handelns gibt. Davon getrennt bleibt die empirische Wirklichkeit, in der die Menschen nach dem Prinzip der Selbsterhaltung agieren. Damit hat Kant die antike Tugendethik, die zugleich als Lebenskunst auftrat, gespalten in Moralphilosophie und Anthropologie.

Die Kunstwissenschaft zeichnet sich in den letzten Jahrzehnten dadurch aus, dass sie analog zur Entwicklung in der Kunst keine übergreifende Stilbildung mehr betreibt. In der vorliegenden Publikation nähern sich nun international anerkannte Kunstwissenschaftler, Philosophen und Medienwissenschaftler dem Begriff »Bild« – sowohl durch klassische Bildanalysen und ästhetische Fragestellungen als auch durch Versuche, einen neuen wissenschaftlichen Begriff für Kunst zu finden. Die Autoren, darunter Felix Ensslin, Frieder Nake, Jean-Baptiste Joly, Ute Meta Bauer, Katharina Sykora und Beat Wyss, erörtern, wie wir Bilder lesen und welchen Stellenwert diese in unserem Denken heute einnehmen. Beispielhaft zeigen 30 Kunstwerke, etwa von John Baldessari, Gianfranco Baruchello, Holger Friese, Matthias Hoch, Christian Jankowski, Stephan Jung, Markus Schinwald oder Peter Weibel, die ganze Vielfalt der heutigen Bildproduktion in der Kunst.

This paper proposes that the human mind in its creativity and emotional self-awareness is the result of the evolutionary transition from sexuality to eroticism. Eroticism is arrived at and defined by the high amount of energy displayed in animal sexuality. We propose that the unique human emotional intelligence is due to this “overflow” of mating energy. What from the survival viewpoint looks like an enormous waste of time and energy reveals itself to be an unexpected psychological benefit. The diversion of sexual energy from procreation — a process that results in erotic fantasies — turns intimacy into a source of human self -consciousness. This places different emphasis on the meaning of eroticism and provides a coherent scenario of mental development beyond mere cognitive capacities. Arguments are presented on how erotic imagination, or sexual excitation as an end in itself, promotes the human propensity for explorative curiosity; data from ethology, psychology, sociology, and neuroscience are presented to support these arguments. As philosophical anthropologists, we do not provide new empirical data, but the available results of comparative behavioral research confirm our hypothesis.

In contrast to the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, which maintains the interpretation of classical texts, I emphasize the role of images in our everyday understanding. I see the added value of images in the fact that they show the latent background, from which the manifest messages draw their actual significance. Before Thomas Mitchell’s “pictorial turn”, I referred to the iconic turn as “imagic turn” in order to emphasize the originary connection between images and magic rituals. The magical component of the hermeneutic image is to the human ability to make something absent present.

In this paper I claim that the metaphysical concept of culture has come to an end. Among the European authors Georg Simmel is the foremost who has deconstructed the myth of culture as a substantial totality beyond relations or prior to them. Two tenets of research have prepared the end of all-inclusive culture: First, Simmel's formal access that considers society as the modality of interactions and relations between individuals, thus overcoming the social evolutionism of Auguste Comte; second, his critical exegesis of idealistic philosophy of history, thus leaving behind the Hegelian tradition. Although Simmel adheres in some statements to the outdated idea of morphological unity, his sociological and epistemological thinking paved the way for the concept of social identity as a network of series connected loosely by contiguity. This type of connection is confirmed by the present feeling of life as individual self-invention according to changing situations

This article addresses the emergence of human personality in evolution. The mechanisms of natural and sexual selection developed by Darwin are not sufficient to explain the sense of self. Therefore we attempt to trace the evolutionary process back to a form of selection termed “emotional selection.” This involves reconstructing selection out of subjective qualities and showing how emotions enable human forms of life that are relevant for the cultural level of cooperation that marks our species. We see a paradigm shift in the concept of emotional selection that binds emotion and evolution closer together, thus closing the explanatory gap between classical ethology and modern evolutionary psychology.

The pair-bond model of human origin proposed by Lovejoy in his “Reexamining Human Origins in Light of Ardipithecus ramidus” combines fossil records with the unique sexual behavior of modern humans. This construct, however, seems to lack an emotionally important element. By connecting ovulatory crypsis with frontal copulation and face-to-face contact, the transition to the complexity and subtlety of human emotional life becomes more evident. Reproductive success and emotional representation are considered as two interacting levels in the phylogenetic scale. Thus, the behavioral frame of sociobiology is extended to psychobiological phenomena and a bridge is built between natural sciences and philosophy. Light from both sides will be thrown on the origin of man, including his unique cultural history