Search results for ""author helmut müller-sievers""

The genealogy and function of epigenesis—the theory that organisms generate themselves under the guidance of a formative drive—provides a unique means of understanding the profound changes in philosophy, philosophy of language, and literature at the turn of the nineteenth century. The book begins by describing how and why epigenesis came to replace the reigning model of biological origination, preformation—the theory that all organisms were preformed at the creation of the world. Contemporary with these developments, Kant used the figures of epigenesis and self-formation to illustrate his concepts of the origin of the categories, the possible success of practical reason, and the validity of aesthetic and teleological judgments. The author shows how Kant's figurative use of self-generation was turned into an indispensable determination by Fichte and his successors: philosophical knowledge can claim absolute certainty only if it can prove that it generates itself in logically accountable procedures. This self-generating philosophy—also known as Idealism—was in turn accompanied by a revaluation of the origin of language, notably by Herder and by Humboldt, who attempted to formulate self-generation as the philosophical foundation for a future Science of Language. The book concludes by demonstrating that the biological, philosophical, and linguistic problematic of self-generation is at the heart of Goethe's novel Elective Affinities and Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro.

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Western culture has been marked by deep divisions between action and contemplation, intervention and passivity, decisiveness and withdrawal. Conceived as radical opposites, these terms structure the history of religion, philosophy and political theory, and have left their imprint on the most intimate processes of individual decision-making and geo-political strategies. But Joseph Vogl argues for a third way: a mode of thought that doesn’t insist on these divisive either/ors. Neither an active refusal to engage with the world nor a consistent strategy of resistance, tarrying, as defined by Vogl, defers, multiplies and suspends the strictures of decision-making. Vogl’s readings of texts by Freud, Schiller, Sophocles, Musil and Kafka provide rich examples of how to resist the binary of activity and passivity through tarrying. The first extended analysis of tarrying as a mode of subversion, this book presents provocative new readings of major works of world literature and thought.

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St. Matthew Passion is Hans Blumenberg's sustained and devastating meditation on Jesus's anguished cry on the cross, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" Why did this abandonment happen, what does it mean within the logic of the Gospels, how have believers and nonbelievers understood it, and how does it live on in art? With rare philological acuity and vast historical learning, Blumenberg unfolds context upon context in which this cry has reverberated, from early Christian apologetics and heretics to twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Blumenberg's guide through this unending story of divine abandonment is Johann Sebastian Bach's monumental Matthäuspassion, the parabolic mirror that bundled eighteen hundred years of reflection on the fate of the crucified and the only available medium that allows us post-Christian listeners to feel the anguish of those who witnessed the events of the Passion. With interspersed references to writers such as Goethe, Rilke, Kafka, Freud, and Benjamin, Blumenberg gathers evidence to raise the singular question that, in his view, Christian theology has not been able to answer: How can an omnipotent God be so offended by his creatures that he must sacrifice and abandon his own Son?

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