Andreas Dorschel

In the process of making bedsteads, Plato claimed, makers look towards the ‘idea’ of the bed. But what is that idea? Two candidates come to mind: shape and purpose. The fact that we identify objects of very different shape, not even involving a bedstead, as beds seems to render purpose conceptually superior. But, then, what is a bed’s purpose? An obvious response appears tobe: lying down and sleeping. Yet, first, beds are not needed for that. Secondly, precisely when a bed is slept on, it is not perceived as a design object. Thirdly, beds constitute a kind of existential furniture, associated with giving birth, making love, suffering illness and dying. All such issues humans really care about, however, are strikingly indifferent towards the design of beds. As elsewhere, the maxim that form follows function fails. Design thinking might rather make headway when beds are conceived of as peculiar spaces within spaces.

In design theory, moral categories have traditionally been used in favour of objectivity and soberness to oppose designers' aesthetic narcissism. This use of moral concepts is directed at the individual design object. The situation gets more complicated, however, as soon as the totality (or a large number) of objects of a certain type raises problems which could not have been predicted from features of the individual object as such. The essay attempts to clarify how ethical concepts could be relevant to dealing with such complications.

In his social theory, Max Weber (1864 – 1920) attempts to identify patterns that have distinguished Western rationality. Music, he argues, is one of the domains that exhibit such structures. As a specific instance, Weber cites counterpoint as developed in 15th century Europe and – so he claims – culminating in Bach’s music. “No other epoch and culture possesses it”, Weber asserts. Counterpoint’s rationality is meant to manifest itself in rules; yet Weber’s approach lacks an analysis of such rules. Remarkably, 18th century music theory brought the social meaning of counterpoint to the fore more sharply than did Weber’s sociology of music.

Arnold Gehlen's attempt to give anthropological grounds for morality stems from Kant's idea that being freed from the compulsion of instinct left human beings in need of compensation for the loss of the practical guidance which instinct had hitherto provided. Whereas Kant thought this compensation was to found only in reasoned morality, Gehlen would argue that morality provides recompense by becoming a quasi-instinct that functions without reflection and that needs to be bred into human beings. The author maintains that in comparing animals and human beings. Gehlen posits will as a deficient instinct as deficient will; because each side is characterized as the negative of the other, Gehlen's starting point fails to meet the conditions for a valid comparison.

We judge actions to be rational if means are adequate to ends. In modern societies, innumerable actions are interconnected into complex systems. Does rationality, then, become a feature of systems? If so, it will not do to view means in the light of ends, Niklas Luhmann maintained. In ‘The Concept of Purpose and Systems Rationality’ (‘Zweckbegriff und Systemrationalität’) (1968), he defined the rationality of systems as their capacity to reduce complexity (“Reduktion von Komplexität”); in his later work, Luhmann elaborated and partly transformed that account. Dorschel and Kettner put his views under scrutiny.

In his writings, Richard Wagner imagines art as something natural. This paradox was only befitting for Wagner’s contradictory historical stance: that of an eminently modern artist loathing the modern world. For him, nature served as a yardstick apt to find the modern world deficient on all counts. But how can something ahistorical, nature, be used to judge a historical phenomenon, modernity? To arrive at the verdict Wagner was keen on, he had to fill his concept of nature with historical content attributed to myth.

Intentionality is a key feature of emotions; we understand them as directed towards objects. Intentional objects need not be real objects. Furthermore, objects of emotions can be distinguished from their causes. At the same time, objects and causes may be related, and, for some emotions, have to be related if the emotions are to count as warranted. Psychoanalysis and comparable cures tend to ignore these relationships. That does not necessarily preclude therapeutic success. Yet being based on said ignorance renders such accounts less than reasonable.

Within the European history of ideas, at least three conceptions of metamorphosis can be distinguished. First, as celebrated in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, there is the vision of an open-ended flux of shapes in all directions, potentially with the ambiguous result of wavering identity. Secondly, at the centre of the synoptic gospels Jesus’s transfiguration is presented as a luminous elevation, rendering his true nature unambiguous. Thirdly, alchemy conceives of metamorphosis as contingent upon a meeting of polarities. The distinction is fit to disclose crucial aspects of works of art, particularly of musical compositions.