Thomas Wentzer

Whereas caring is commonly perceived as a moral virtue or a socially beneficial ethical practice, resentment appears to represent its opposite. Advocates of care ethics have vehemently criticized the abstract and aloof nature of traditional ethical theories and argue that care ethics offers a perspective from which we may appreciate interpersonal sensitivity and responsiveness to individuals, per se. Following in the philosophical tradition of Nietzsche and Scheler, resentment—taken as the emotional state of lingering animosity towards individuals, combined with the inclination to withhold assistance and abstain from caring—is often identified as an unjustified and unethical disposition. The paper aims to challenge this perspective and support the moral and historical validity of resentment in specific situations. It thereby recalls a social historical dimension to the often merely physiologically and individually dominated discourse about aging. Drawing on Jean Améry’s seminal account, I suggest viewing resentment as an attitude that asserts the authority to reevaluate the historical situation and to challenge the primacy of immediate needs (the here-and-now of a person in need of care). From this perspective, resentment too displays sensitivity to individuals and their life stories, yet it invokes a sense of justice that exceeds the temporal framework of caring if restrained to bodily and physiological needs. To illustrate this argument, this paper recounts an incident in a nursing home in postwar Germany, in 1986.

In times of the Anthropocene, we are in need of philosophical anthropology, revisiting the question concerning the human condition. I suggest rethinking what one may call ‘human transcendence’ in terms of a responsivist paradigm. Drawing on Heidegger and Plessner, the idea is that we should think of the eccentric or ecstatic position of the human in terms of something we undergo, instead of it being a human capability or something we do. It is a gift, emplacing us to the time-space of responsive embodied existence. The paper will follow this agenda in five steps. Having introduced what I take to be the challenge for a timely ontology, I will unfold the problem entailed in the very idea of philosophical anthropology according to Heidegger. I then focus on Heidegger’s (hidden) rapprochement to Helmuth Plessner’s anthropology, recalling Plessner’s analysis of laughter as a bodily expression displaying the ‘eccentric positionality’ of the human. I suggest rephrasing this kind of transcendence in a responsivist paradigm: Humans are responsive beings.

Dialectic is the parting of ways in philosophy. The analytical movement inaugurated by Moore and Russell took its departure in an attack against Neo‐Hegelianism in Britain, presenting analysis as the cure for the dialectical disease. Gadamer's contributions to Greek philosophy and, in particular, his readings of Plato, arguably the most significant thinker for Gadamerian hermeneutics. Hence, in Gadamer's hermeneutics, the dialectic of question and answer does not function as a maxim that one should apply in exegetic business instead of other competing maxims or methods. Gadamer acknowledges a speculative dimension; but he finds this dimension in our everyday understanding, promoted by the web of ordinary language. Gadamer's hermeneutic not only promotes language holism, but claims the possibility of experiencing the inherent dialectic of the whole and its parts that the traditional doctrine of the hermeneutical circle in methodological respect had formulated.

Christian theology has entered into the discourse of finitude via the contrast to the attributes of divine infinity; human finitude is hence interpreted as the culpability of a life form that depends on divine grace and redemption. This chapter elaborates and defends the claim according to which philosophical hermeneutics can be understood as a philosophy of human finitude. In its different versions from Dilthey to Vattimo, philosophical hermeneutics explores human finitude as the prime condition for our worldly engagements and entitlements in all its aspects. The chapter deals with finitude regarding the limits of our knowledge and the opaqueness of our mortal existence, elaborating on the event character of historical understanding and experience. Heidegger relates finitude to the understanding of Being, claiming that we have to understand this joint as the event that originates Dasein and hence indicates the essence of man.

This article applies Waldenfels’ responsive phenomenology to the field of history. It suggests interpreting historical experience along the lines of the logic of pathos and response. Using Husserl’s introductory chapter of The Crisis of the European Sciences and his autobiographical remarks as a case study, the article outlines a concept of diachronic responsiveness, which provides a phenomenological understanding of historical phenomena such as legacy, inheritance or witnessing. In particular, it analyses the temporal deferment lying at the heart of our notion of legacy, which Waldenfels captures as ‘diastasis’. Assuming that the human being must be understood as the ‘responsive being’ (Waldenfels), the article provides means to grasp the implications of this claim for our understanding of the concept of historical experience in contrast to approaches relying on hermeneutics or narrativity.

World-leading anthropologists and philosophers pursue the perplexing question fundamental to both disciplines: What is it to think of ourselves as human? A common theme is the open-ended and context-dependent nature of our notion of the human, one upshot of which is that perplexities over that notion can only be dealt with in a piecemeal fashion, and in relation to concrete real-life circumstances. Philosophical anthropology, understood as the exploration of such perplexities, will thus be both recognizably philosophical in character and inextricably bound up with anthropological fieldwork. The volume is put together accordingly: Precisely by mixing ostensibly philosophical papers with papers that engage in close anthropological study of concrete issues, it is meant to reflect the vital tie between these two aspects of the overall philosophical-anthropological enterprise. The collection will be of great interest to philosophers and anthropologists alike, and essential reading for anyone interested in the interconnections between the two disciplines.

The paper defends the view that ‘philosophical anthropology’ denotes a discourse in philosophy that deals with a subject matter - the human being and the question of its ‘nature’ - that is different in kind from all other subjects. Reminding Raimundus Lullus, F.J.W. Schelling and Helmuth Plessner, this claim and its ontological as well as epistemological implications are outlined, arguing that we are in need of an existential approach in order to live up to the philosophical task implied. Bernhard Waldenfels′ recent phenomenology of otherness and alterity, centered on the concept of responsiveness, is brought into play, defending the claim that humans are responsive beings. This approach delivers a new paradigm to deal with the human in philosophical anthropology, qualifying hermeneutic as well as pragmatist approaches in philosophy as well as in recent ethnography towards a responsivist model of human existence and agency.