Volume 61, Issue 4

The article offers a comprehensive interpretation of Georg Lukács’s early “Dostoevsky-project”, the realization of which remained fragmentary. The project wanted to combine the vision of a utopian ethical world as pictured in Dostoevsky’s novels with historico-philosophical reflections on its historical possibility. Its theoretical premises included the acknowledgment of the solipsism of psychic life that could be overcome only by a direct contact between human souls. Lukács utilizes his Neokantian “philosophy of history of art” to describe the open possibility of the emergence of Seelenwirklichkeit . This idea of a “reality of souls” is bolstered by a mystical “second ethics”, the “Luciferian” version of which could lead to revolutionary action. However, due to the limitations of his methodological framework, Lukács failed to find an adequate mediation between revolutionary political action and historical reality.

The critical potential of Hannah Arendt’s thoughts is embedded in her concept of power which provides an as-yet disregarded but highly relevant approach for the analysis of contemporary political orders. Both the critical potential as well as the topicality of her thoughts are widely underestimated. This is primarily due to a distorted reading of her concept of power where it is seen as per se normative and non-repressive. In order to overcome this traditional and misleading interpretation, my paper reconstructs Arendt’s concept of power (I) and argues that her political thinking should be literally read as a critique of power. To illustrate this critical potential, the paper unfolds five dimensions of Arendt’s analysis of power: the political-participative (II), the socio-economic (III), the political-institutional and the ideological-critical (IV), and the ethical dimension (V).

This essay analyses the role of different forms of trust in the context of financial markets. It argues that rather than being caused by a lack of trust, the financial crisis of 2007 can be characterized by a shift from personal trust, with its normative and epistemic implications, towards too much “systemic trust”. Through a process of legalization and formalization, loans became standardized, and lenders relied not on the trustworthiness of borrowers, but on their legal claims and the ability of markets to evaluate these correctly. As recent research in social philosophy and legal studies shows, however, markets built on “systemic trust” run into paradoxes, both with regard to their epistemic features and with regard to their ability to deal with the fundamental uncertainty of the future. This fact raises serious questions about the epistemic control of complex market systems, and about the justice of institutional structures in which only some people’s or organization’s trust pays off, while other people’s trust is betrayed.

Wolfgang Harich wrote the document published below immediately after the workers’ uprising of 1953 which the proclamation of the “New Course” by the SED had been unable to prevent. For Harich, however, the “New Course” seemed retrospectively to confirm the orientation of the Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie . The document epitomises the two attitudes that were to shape the journal in the years to come: the desire for a free discourse based on Marxism on the one hand, the fear that this expectation could be illusory on the other.

When the Marxist Philosopher Ernst Bloch arrived in Eastern Germany in 1949, he was already 64 years old and not very well-known. Nonetheless he became one of the most important thinkers of the early GDR. A few years after his arrival, in the mid-50s, conflict between him and the communist leaders and their SED party escalated due to opposing views on the concept of freedom. There were further disagreements on the role of the subject in history and the (un-)importance of utopianism. Following the escalation he was politically and academically isolated, which led to his leaving the country in 1961. But his philosophy of hope was kept alive in the GDR, especially in oppositional circles. Thus one can find elements of his utopianism in works of dissidents such as Rudolf Bahro, Wolfgang Harich and Robert Havemann.

The dispute over the interpretation of logic was one of the most controversial issues in its time and characterized the emerging philosophy of the young GDR. The East German philosophers aimed at determining an acceptable understanding of Marxist logic linked to classical Marxist-Leninism and the conceptions of logic deriving from the German philosophy of idealism. But the official position of the SED clashed with the views of the academics involved. At the end of the day it was the independent academics with their interpretations who won through. This benign outcome was unique in the history of GDR philosophy.

In the context of giving this year’s Christian Wolff Lecture, Agnes Heller - looking back on her eventful life and the current political situation in Hungary - reflects on the relationship between philosophy and politics. The changes in her concept of freedom are closely related to her experience of various kinds of political oppression. However, Heller expresses wariness concerning the role of philosophical thought in politics, arguing that philosophy and politics are based on two distinct, incommensurate concepts of truth. She defends a pluralistic approach to truth against the allegation of relativism and subsequently characterizes philosophy as a unique form of storytelling. Heller shares with us her observations on philosophy under modern conditions and closes the interview with a very personal tale.