Jörg Volbers

Die sprachliche und soziale Natur der Erkenntnis ist eine Grundeinsicht der Moderne. Doch welchen Spielraum lässt sie noch der Kritik, der distanzierten Prüfung der eigenen Sprache und Lebensform? Vor dem Hintergrund des Werkes Stanley Cavells fragt dieses Buch nach dem Verhältnis von Lebensform und Selbsterkenntnis. In ungewohnter Weise liest es Wittgenstein und Foucault als komplementäre Antwortstrategien auf dieses Grundproblem: Philosophie muss als eine "Arbeit an sich", als körperliche "Selbsttechnik" verstanden werden. Nicht ethische Programmatik, so kann gezeigt werden, sondern systematische Konsequenz führt zu einer Engführung von Philosophie und Lebenspraxis.

Die sprachliche und soziale Natur der Erkenntnis ist eine Grundeinsicht der Moderne. Doch welchen Spielraum lässt sie noch der Kritik, der distanzierten Prüfung der eigenen Sprache und Lebensform? Vor dem Hintergrund des Werkes Stanley Cavells fragt dieses Buch nach dem Verhältnis von Lebensform und Selbsterkenntnis. In ungewohnter Weise liest es Wittgenstein und Foucault als komplementäre Antwortstrategien auf dieses Grundproblem: Philosophie muss als eine "Arbeit an sich", als körperliche "Selbsttechnik" verstanden werden. Nicht ethische Programmatik, so kann gezeigt werden, sondern systematische Konsequenz führt zu einer Engführung von Philosophie und Lebenspraxis.

The article presents Dewey’s own understanding of rationality by reconstructing his criticism of idealism. For Dewey, idealism is an important and valuable expression of the modern idea that both knowledge and values are historical products of human self-determination. Thus, it rightly defends the power of thought against the uncritical claims of mere religious and social authority. Yet idealism, Dewey claims, still misconceives that human power by ultimately treating it as a merely intellectual power, thus following the philosophical tradition. For Dewey, however, human thought and reasoning have to be understood in a much broader way. Dewey decenters thought by arguing that it is a natural, dependent and essentially temporal process, in which the intellectual elements only play a subordinate role. Thought, he claims, does not only have a history; furthermore, thinking only matters to human beings precisely because it is open to reflective change. Dewey’s position, thus, can be seen as an attempt to preserve the existential importance of philosophical self-reflection by binding thought to history and change in a radical way.

In French post-structuralism, »decentering« signifies the criticism of any metaphysical »centre« which is supposed to reign the development and the logic of discourse, and hence of thinking. In particular, anthropology and the recourse to humanism were suspected to miss the plurality and the self-differing nature of discursive practices. This article presents Dewey’s philosophy as an alternative to this criticism. Dewey is comparably sceptical of any attempt to treat the human being as a metaphysical essence. Nevertheless, he develops an explicit humanism which defends the central values of freedom, openness, and growth. This paradoxical humanism is rendered possible by developing a concept of nature, and the human being, which,decenters‘ the specific human capacities by consequently treating them as an integral part of nature.

Throughout its history, analytic philosophy has established a decidedly anti-rhetoric self-understanding. Yet the historical development of analytic philosophy, leading from Russell to Quine and Davidson, successively puts this anti-rhetorical ideals in question. Even though the rhetorics of clarity and objectivity remain, the discussions of post-analytic philosophy focus more and more an an understanding of language which is forced to acknowledge its irreducible practical and situational aspects. Analytical philosophy, then, should be seen as a decidedly anti-rhetoric tradition which tries to keep up the spirit of scientific enlightenment in times of growing skepticism -- and which is driven, by the very force of clarity and a better understanding, to develop a picture of language which undermines this ideal at least in some aspects.

Die moderne Philosophie steht im Schatten des Skeptizismus: Alle Wissensansprüche scheinen fallibel, alle Theorien nur vorläufig, alle Gewissheiten nur temporär zu sein. In dieser gespannten Situation ist die Versuchung groß, das Wesen des vernünftigen Denkens in der Form zu suchen. Vernunft gilt dann als ein allgemeines Vermögen, das bei wechselnden Inhalten seine kritische Kompetenz bewahrt. Doch solche Formalismen müssen scheitern: Wer Erfahrung nur als «Wahrnehmung» oder «Gehalt» adressiert, übergeht die dynamische und überschreitende Natur alles Erfahrens, ohne die Denken und Wissen nicht zu haben sind. In dieser Studie wird gezeigt, dass der Pragmatismus von Peirce und Dewey als eine Philosophie der Erfahrung gelesen werden muss, die eine effektive Kritik der formalen Vernunft formuliert. Dabei bettet sie diese Philosophie in den weiteren Kontext der philosophischen Diskussion des 20. Jahrhunderts ein, in dem der Logische Empirismus und die postanalytische Philosophie auf die dynamische Natur des Wissens reflektieren. Die Frage nach der Erfahrung, so zeigt sich, ist selbst eine Reflexion auf die geschichtliche Erfahrung einer kontingenten Moderne.

Even though both Dewey and Wittgenstein have been rightly classified as both being ‘pragmatist’ thinkers in a broad sense, they stand in stark contrast with respect to their writing style and their general attitude towards the future of western civilization. This article reflects these differences and traces them back to their diverging conceptions of knowledge. Dewey criticizes the philosophical tradition for erecting an artificial barrier between theory and practice, but he retains the traditional high esteem for knowledge by re-describing it as practical inquiry. Consequently, all practically acquired beliefs and certainties are either justified or a potential subject-matter for further inquiries. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, shows the limitation of the very idea of knowledge by pointing to the knowing subject’s fragile relation to its own lived practices. He claims that there are practically acquired beliefs and certainties which are out of reach for the inquiring subject. Thus, the seemingly superficial divergence in style and method shows to be grounded in far-reaching philosophical differences.

Das »Performative« ist in den vergangenen Jahren zu einer festen Größe im Theorierepertoire der Geisteswissenschaften geworden. Seine nachgerade ubiquitäre Verwendung verdankt sich dabei vielfach einem wenig präzisen Verständnis, das – teilweise gegenstrebige – Aspekte von Performanz, Wirklichkeitskonstitution, Emergenz und Präsenzeffekten verbindet. Dieser Band zieht eine kritische Bilanz, ohne dabei ein bestimmtes Verständnis zu verabsolutieren. Die Beiträge bereiten das aktuelle Theoriefeld erstmals so auf, dass es einem breiteren, interdisziplinären Leserkreis zugänglich wird.

The so-called ›resolute‹ reading of Wittgenstein, most notably represented by Cora Diamond and James Conant, claims that the text of the Tractatus does not convey a philosophical thesis. In engaging with the text and its literary form, the reader is supposed to cultivate an experience which will eventually allow her to confront (moral) reality without any obstructing philosophical abstractions. The article argues that this under- standing of the text implicitly rests on the traditional and highly problem- atic distinction between rhetoric and ›serious‹ speech, between a use of language which describes facts and one which elicits experiences. By re- constructing the alleged effect of a ›resolute‹ reading of the Tractatus with the help of Iser’s theory of literary experience, it is shown that the ›real- ism‹ that the resolute readers argue for can have no substance at all.

Dewey’s pragmatism and John McDowell’s philosophy of language share central concerns. They defend a naturalistic vision of the mind (“second nature”) and rely on the concept of experience in order to articulate the contact between mind and world. They differ, though, in their understanding of how the human mind can relate spontaneously to itself and to the world. McDowell links this freedom exclusively to language with the consequence of detaching it from any reflexive determination, turning it into an abstract given. Dewey, by contrast, develops a practice-oriented understanding of freedom and understanding as an essentially precarious cultural form. This allows him to incorporate the reflexive dimension of mental operations, of which McDowell takes no account: It makes a practical difference how the human being conceives its own nature and its own mind.

Die sprachliche und soziale Natur der Erkenntnis ist eine Grundeinsicht der Moderne. Doch welchen Spielraum lässt sie noch der Kritik, der distanzierten Prüfung der eigenen Sprache und Lebensform? Vor dem Hintergrund des Werkes Stanley Cavells fragt dieses Buch nach dem Verhältnis von Lebensform und Selbsterkenntnis. In ungewohnter Weise liest es Wittgenstein und Foucault als komplementäre Antwortstrategien auf dieses Grundproblem: Philosophie muss als eine »Arbeit an sich« (Wittgenstein), als körperliche »Selbsttechnik« (Foucault) verstanden werden. Nicht ethische Programmatik, so kann gezeigt werden, sondern systematische Konsequenz führt zu einer Engführung von Philosophie und Lebenspraxis.

In identifying rationality as belonging to our 'second nature', McDowell’s specific form of naturalism aims at reconciling the reflecting subject with the world. The detailed exposition of this idea in 'Mind and World', however, operates with two conflicting claims. While arguing for the bodily nature of subjectivity and thus disagreeing fundamentally with Kant’s transcendental conception of reason, McDowell still retains the central Kantian claim that thinking is an autonomous and self-standing capacity. The article argues that the bodily nature of subjectivity (even within the framework of a ‚relaxed‘ naturalism) does not allow for the strong Kantian idea of autonomy. Taking McDowell’s revision of Kant’s transcendental framework to its conclusion requires to go beyond the concept of innate rational capacities. Rather, thinking should be seen as being operative in material practices.

The core idea of 'becoming major', as it can be found in Kant's famous essay about the Enlightenment, is the concept of self-legislation or self-governance. Minority is described as a state of dependency on some heteronomous guidance (i.e. church, doctor, or the state), whereas majority is defined by Kant as the ability to guide oneself, using one's own understanding ('Verstand'). These definitions display a deep affinity to central concepts of Kant's philosophy: the autonomy of rational ethics, as it is defended in the second Critique, and the copernican revolution in epistemology, which is the topic of the first Critique. Picking up on these similarities, the text isolates some of the essential conditions for Kant's understanding of an enlightened state of majority. Kant's theoretical works spell out conceptual preconditions for his radical account of self-guidance and gives it a more detailed form. This allows to articulate some of the historical assumptions and theoretical implications of majority which we might have lost out of sight in a time where 'self-management' is a ubiquitous demand.

The concept of “site” is at the center of current debates in theories of social practices as well as in cultural anthropology. It is unclear, however, how to assess the associated methodological assumption that overriding social structures or cultural formations can manifest themselves in sites. The article draws on the conception of social practices and introduces the notion of “publicness” in order to explicate how and why sociality and social structures can be accessed through “siting”. Sites as well as social practices, it is claimed, have to be conceptualized as essentially public and thus principally observable phenomena. This assumption of publicness implicit to both site ontology and theories of social practices is unfolded on the basis of a praxeological reformulation of the paradigm of joint attention elaborated in developmental psychology. To avoid presentist misinterpretations, we then conceptualize sociality as chains of practices across time and space, drawing on the works of Theodore Schatzki, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Anthony Giddens and Bruno Latour. The public carriers of practices (artifacts, symbols, media, bodies) and the translocal structures they establish acquire particular significance in these approaches. In a further step, we present some methodological consequences of the “publicness assumption” and support our arguments by referring to Pierre Bourdieu's study on Distinction