Hans Ruin

Bereits bevor die Forschung wissenschaftliche und philologische Ansätze etablierte, stieg Nietzsches Philosophie zu einem der wichtigsten kulturellen Phänomene des Jahrhunderts auf. Wichtige internationale Forscher*innen zeigen die Wirkung von Nietzsches Philosophie und Kulturkritik auf die Hauptfiguren der Geistes- und Sozialwissenschaften und auf die künstlichen und kulturellen Avantgarden und Sozialbewegungen zwischen den 1890er und den 1930er Jahren auf. Der Überblick über die damalige weltweite Verbreitung von Nietzsches illustriert, was an diesen vielfältigen und reichhaltigen Zugängen zu Nietzsches Denken originell, gültig und potenziell produktiv war, identifiziert aber auch die Quellen der bis heute andauernden Vorurteile gegenüber Nietzsches Philosophie. Er ist somit ein unverzichtbarer Bestandteil für die Nietzscheforschung in Philosophie, Kultur-, Sozial- und Literaturwissenschaften.

In his dissertation on Hegel’s conception of the State (1920), Franz Rosenzweig highlighted the role of Christianity in Hegel’s conception of the emergence of the universal. In is subsequent magnum opus, Der Stern der Erlösung (1921), a corner-stone in the history of modern Jewish thought, he is driven by the aspiration to rethink the relation between Christianity and Judaism, and to re-inscribe the Jewish historical experience into the history of world spirit. Thus he approaches the problem of the universal from a standpoint that involves a rethinking of the theological underpinning of Hegel’s system. The article explores how this is carried out through a new sense of time and temporality, epitomized through his repeated references to the temporality of the Augenblick, the “moment”. Taking his cue from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, he transforms this key concept from its Christian and existential significance, to designate a particular Jewish experience, of confessional life in exile, as a theological politics beyond the state, and even beyond history in its standard chronological sense.

The emergence of Memory studies as a growing trans-disciplinary field within the human and social sciences is part of a larger orientation in the last four decades toward the exploration of how the past is experienced and enacted by individuals and groups. However, approaching this general theme through the specific term of “memory” is not obvious. In order to bring out the often neglected philosophical dimension of contemporary memory studies, the article seeks to situate the phenomenon of memory within a larger theoretical context. Through the lens of Husserlian phenomenology and its hermeneutic and deconstructive legacy, and also of Bergson’s life-philosophy, it focuses on three fundamental aspects of memory: as the privileged sense of time, as the site of the experience of embodied selfhood, and as a locus for the interior/exterior distinction. Warning against the reification of memory in the service of disciplinary consistency, it argues for its place at the heart of a hermeneutic-deconstructive philosophy of temporality and historicity.

Handbuch Philosophie is a series edited by Elisabeth Ströker and Wolfgang Wieland, the purpose of which is to present various fields and themes in contemporary thought. The author of the present work, who teaches philosophy in Erlangen and Heidelberg, has previously published two books in the history and theory of interpretation. The study is divided into two parts: the first adopts a systematic approach to its theme; the second develops a historical perspective. Using the Gadamerian term "philosophical hermeneutics," the author wishes to summarize three different fields or levels of questioning: the interpretation of texts, the understanding of human deeds and actions in general, and the idea of understanding as an ontological determination of man. The first level relates to the traditional art of hermeneutics as developed within theology and jurisprudence and, eventually, philology; the second refers primarily to the work of Dilthey and to different modern theories of human action and behavior; the third, finally, concerns the ontological turn that hermeneutics undergoes in Heidegger and Gadamer. Thus, "philosophical hermeneutics" is not the designation of a clearly delimited discipline, but the rather arbitrary name for a conglomerate of thinkers, questions, and disciplines which could be said to converge around the problem of human understanding. Ineichen's study is a handbook intended to serve as an introduction to this amorphous field. Despite its basically pedagogical intention, however, it is guided throughout by a highly critical spirit.

As a first step in a discussion of memory and philosophical hermeneutics, the chapter briefly surveys the ambiguity of the concept of memory itself. If hermeneutics has traditionally understood itself as primarily preoccupied with meaning, understanding, communication, and tradition, the phenomenon of memory in the more restricted Aristotelian, psychological sense could seem to be of lesser interest, as an auxiliary cognitive function. If we focus on its relation to subjectivity, time, and history, it appears very differently. If we look at the hermeneutic literature, the inner tension in the concept and phenomenon of memory is illustrated very clearly in a survey from Gadamer to Ricoeur. Finally, the chapter points to one of the most recent contributions to philosophical hermeneutics, where the impact of the mnemonic dimension of Gadamer's thinking is also brought to the fore in a very promising way.

The preoccupation with the "historicity" of thought and existence is central to thehermeneutic-phenomenological branch of modern philosophy. Its foremostrepresentative is Martin Heidegger, who in his main work Sein und Zeit (1927)developed a theory of historicity, according to which human beings not only exist inhistory, but are themselves historical. In subsequent writings Heidegger argued thatnot only man, but also truth and being, must be understood "historically" in aparticular sense. The meaning and the impHcations of Heidegger's "historicization" ofphilosophy are here analyzed along two parallel tracks: as a theory of the conditions ofphilosophical understanding; second, as an incentive to new ways of respondingphilosophically to these conditions. The study focuses on the sense of belongingwhich Heidegger assigns to historicity, as a dialogical relation to an enigmatic originthat cannot be exhaustively articulated, but to which understanding must neverthelessrespond in repetition and critique. The idea of the "hermeneutic situation," and what itmeans to occupy such a situation, is shown to be central in this regard. Heidegger's"historicization" of the philosophical territory is inte reted as an exemplary attempt topreserve philosophy as a quest for "origins" in the explicit recognition of theinterminable historical mediation of thinking. His approach leads to a criticalquestioning of fundamental philosophical distinctions, such as the temporal and theeternal, the absolute and the relative, subject and object, and of truth as correspondence.Eventually he is led to question the ability of language to express thehistoricity of thought and of being, which can only be indicated by means of conceptssuch as "moment" (Augenblick) and "event" (Ereignis). In seven chapters the themeof historicity is explored from different angles, which together provide a guide toHeidegger's path from a philosophy of life to a thinking of being in the "otherbeginning." The study covers the full range of his writings, but it emphasizes thedevelopment from the earliest lectures, over Sein und Zeit, to the second major work,Beiträge zur Philosophie (1938, published posthumously in 1989)

This review essay brings together five books on various aspects of Nietzsche’s thinking and writing from the last four years, from different cultural and political contexts, but also spanning a wide methodological range. The general question of how to orient ourselves in Nietzsche-scholarship is inspired by the title of Werner Stegmaier’s book which invites the reader to compare Nietzsche and Niklas Luhmann. It also invites us to contemplate the more general question of how to bring Nietzsche’s thinking into a dialogue with the human and social sciences. A central question concerns the temporality of Nietzsche’s thinking: is Nietzsche’s thinking a thing of the past that primarily necessitates a historical interpretation, or can it still open up ways toward the future. As this review highlights, many contemporary readers of Nietzsche continue to see themselves as working to “save” his texts from fateful misinterpretations. The last part of the review focuses on the new textual, or “poesiological” approach and the importance of seeing Nietzsche not primarily as someone professing a doctrine, but as the creator of uniquely multilayered texts.

The article explores the topic of Gelassenheit (releasement) in Heidegger, through the lense of the ambiguous role of Christian mysticism in general and Eckhart in particular in and for his thinking. In an analysis of how mysticism appears in his early lectures on religion, it explains why he is critical of this concept and of how it is commonly understood. It also gives reasons for why we too should be cautious in using it to describe his position in his later writings where he explicitly reconnects to themes and concepts from Eckhart. The text provides a critical rehearsal of Eckhart's understanding of both “Abgeschiedenheit” (detachment) and "Gelassenheit" and how Heidegger relates to it both in his early lectures and in his later essays. Ultimately it outlines a phenomenological understanding of what is commonly referred to as a “mystical” comportment more along the lines of a heightened openness and awareness, in Heidegger’s words as a “releasement toward things and an openness to the secret”. Thus, instead of seeing Heidegger’s later writings as a sort of crypto-mysticism, the text seeks to show how his critical appropriation of Eckhart explicitly points beyond a standard dichotomy between the rational and the mystical, in an effort to develop a comportment of thinking than can respond to the demand of modern technological predicament.