Topic / Program

Self-understanding belongs to human beings. Both the biblical story of creation and the oracle of Delphi are testaments to the fact that human beings understand themselves as creatures that can ask questions concerning themselves, and moreover that must do so, i.e. as creatures for whom it is a task to know oneself. The most important and noble object for human study is thus the human being itself, according to Pascal, Montaigne, Rousseau, Herder and countless others in a long intellectual tradition. Hence Heidegger explains self-understanding as belonging to the determination of the human, as that being "for which, in its Being, that Being is an issue". Philosophy is itself a product of the search for the determination of human being; the essence of human beings is that which philosophy properly searches for, says Socrates in the Theaetetus, and, for centuries, European philosophy has explored ways of pursuing this task. Indeed, whether philosophy poses questions of knowledge, action or infinity, according to Kant, these are in the end all questions about human being.

This understanding of human beings has of course also proved decisive for 20th-century philosophy in many respects. Plessner's and Gehlen's philosophical anthropology are explicitly concerned with the human being and its peculiarly ex-centric, dangerously unstable position in nature. Likewise Sartre's existentialism locates human existence in a tragic divide between thrownness and a compulsion to create oneself. Each of these strands of philosophy, in its own way, stretches to its utmost limit the ancient topos of the human being as the creature that not only must know itself, but also must create itself. But in many other debates as well it is the human being that in the end we find ourselves to be examining: One may think of Cassirer's philosophy of culture, which defines the human being as the creator of symbolically mediated worlds (animal symbolicum); Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological investigations; and Wittgenstein's groundbreaking reflections on the zoon logon echon as the animal which only as a participant in social practices is able to come to the very language upon which it bases its claim to particularity. Behind such prominent questions of existence, culture, language, practice and body the fourth, last question of Kant crops up.

On the other hand this question has also been problematized in the twentieth century in unprecedented ways. In contrast to the philosophical motif of active human self-understanding Lévinas insists that the human being is called by the Other into posing the question concerning itself and and that one cannot on one's own pose this question to oneself. Derrida has frequently referred to the implicit claim to domination in the question of the human being and to the implicit hierarchy expressed therein between human beings and animals. Foucault dissected the human being as a historical effect of specific discursive formations and asked whether one should not rather "give up thinking of man". Philosophy has always dreamed of trading poor, mortal Adam for a new "Übermensch". These tendencies recur today in biologistic and technophilic discourses that interpret self-abolition as the true self-creation of human beings, and that interpret post-humanism or anti-humanism as the fulfillment of humanism.

And yet it seems as though we cannot get rid of the human being so easily. In the last lines of Les mots et les choses, Foucault confidently proposed his famous wager "that man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea", but it seems that the face in the sand is still here with us. It is thus time to pose the Kantian question once again: What is the human being? This question is a part of the self-understanding of philosophy as well. As such it will continue the tradition of the International French-German Philosophy Colloquium. We invite considerations of the human being from all philosophical perspectives, as well as discussions of reasons why the question of the human being continues or does not continue to be an important question.


Program

Program as PDF-Download


Lundi, 14 juillet 2003

Der Status philosophischer Anthropologie heute
Christophe Laudou (Madrid): Anthropologie versus Ontologie
Jo-Jo Koo (Montreal): The Possibility of Philosophical Anthropology
Christian Lavagno (Osnabrück/Bremen): Der Mensch am Abgrund

Le visage dans le sable: Der Mensch nach Foucault
Arnaud Pelletier (Calais/Paris): Peut-il y avoir une grammaire de l'homme?
Jérôme Lèbre (Paris): Comment l'homme se caractérise. Les devenirs de l'anthropologie kantienne, entre Hegel et Foucault


Mardi, 15 juillet 2003

Elemente für einen Begriff des Menschen I: Relationalität und Aspektsehen
Werner Kogge (Berlin): Als Mensch sehen: Aspektwechsel und die Frage nach dem Menschen
Lyubov Bugaeva (Petersburg/Salzburg) / John Ryder (New York): Homo Relationales

Elemente für einen Begriff des Menschen II:
Benda Hofmeyr (Pretoria/Nijmegen): Self-created or Other-invoked? Foucault and Lévinas on What We Are
David Rose (Manchester): Vico, Heidegger and the Ontological Difference between the Human as Subject and the Human as Social Existence


Mercredi, 16 juillet 2003

Elemente für einen Begriff des Menschen III: Leib und Seele
Alain Beaulieu (Montréal): La redéfinition de l'homme par l'étude du corps vivant à partir de Nietzsche et Husserl
Olga Spharaga (Minsk): Leiblichkeit. Zwischen authentischem und sozialem Menschen
Georg W. Bertram (Hildesheim): Anthropologie der zweiten Natur

Après-midi libre


Jeudi, 17 juillet 2003

Elemente für einen Begriff des Menschen IV: Handeln, Freiheit und Schuld
Katrin Meyer (St. Gallen): "Gemischtes Handeln": Aristoteles, Arendt, Foucault
Elizabeth Butterfield (Atlanta): Sartre's Project of Reconceptualizing Human Being in his Later Marxist-Existentialist Works
Dirk Westerkamp (Braunschweig/Berlin): Der Mensch ist seine eigene Schuld (Schelling)

Elemente für einen Begriff des Menschen V: Scham und Langeweile
Birgit Griesecke (Berlin): Das Wesen, das verstummt: Scham, Schmerz, Sprachlosigkeit
Julia Ponzio (Bari): The Boredom of Present as Fundamental Characteristic of Human Being


Vendredi, 18 juillet 2003

Ausblicke: Die Zukunft des Menschen
Raphael Ntambue (Passac): L'anthropologie philosophique dans les sillages de la révolution numérique
Luiza Palanciuc (Bucuresti/Paris): Habeas corpus. De l'homme intermittent et autres absences
Stefan Deines (Gießen): Zwischen Humanismus und Antihumanismus. Zu einer kritischen Theorie nach Adorno, Foucault und Butler

Abschlussdiskussion