Volume 64, Issue 4

This paper suggests an understanding of the concept of “Gewissen” (conscience) according to which Gewissen is best understood as a receptivity to moral principles that corresponds to certain moral feelings. In the first part of the paper this suggestion is spelled out and alternatives to it are discussed. As is shown in the second part, this suggestion goes back to the thought of Immanuel Kant, but it can be developed even if one does not follow Kant in his understanding of the categorical imperative as an a priori principle. However, if one does not follow Kant with respect to the status of the categorical imperative, there are some interesting consequences for our understanding of conscience and especially for our understanding of its relation to knowledge and certainty. These consequences are discussed in the third part of this paper.

This paper explores Hegel’s speculative identity thesis as presented in the Differenzschrift , the Phenomenology of Spirit , and the Science of Logic . I argue that speculative identity refers to the identity and non-identity of life and self-conscious cognition, a relation that establishes the constitutive importance of life for conceptual activity. Speculative identity thus entails that both self-consciousness and the Concept (der Begriff) are doubly constituted. I present this argument in three stages: first, through Hegel’s early critique of Fichte and his defense of the “objective subject-object” in the Differenzschrift; second, through the concept of experience (Erfahrung) developed in the Phenomenology; and finally, through a brief consideration of the Concept as presented in the Logic . Although there are significant developments that take place between Hegel’s early and mature presentations of speculative identity, I argue that there is a common thread that persists throughout, namely, the constitutive importance of life for the purposive self-determination of thought.

This article compares Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s foundation of the Frankfurt Critical Theory with Helmuth Plessner’s foundation of Philosophical Anthropology. While Horkheimer’s and Plessner’s paradigms are mutually incompatible, Adorno’s „negative dialectics“ and Plessner’s „negative anthropology“ (G. Gamm) can be seen as complementing one another. Jürgen Habermas at one point sketched a complementary relationship between his own publicly communicative theory of modern society and Plessner’s philosophy of nature and human expressivity, and though he then came to doubt this, he later reaffirmed it. Faced with the „life power“ in „high capitalism“ (Plessner), the ambitions for a public democracy in a pluralistic society have to be broadened from an argumentative focus (Habermas) to include the human condition and the expressive modes of our experience as essentially embodied persons. The article discusses some possible aspects of this complementarity under the title of a „critical anthropology“ (H. Schnädelbach).

This text is a discussion of Walter Benjamin’s speculation on a so called “mimetic faculty” as well as a critical position to the debate between Philosophical Anthropology and Critical Theory which can be considered as insufficient until now. Although Axel Honneth regards it as rather marginal, Benjamin’s approach is much more radical than his own paradigm of recognition – and this not only in anthropological respect but also with regard to the core of the problem: the reification and the domination of the form of commodity.

As a member of the Illuminati Order, Karl Leonhard Reinhold wrote an – hitherto unknown – expert report about an internal manuscript on “The development of the forces of our mind” in January 1785. The manuscript had outlined a materialist theory of sensations and a conception of the interplay of the drives of pleasure and self-preservation. Reinhold, being in his early Kantian phase, criticized the materialism of this theory. In his own development, however, Reinhold returned soon to the topic of the drive of pleasure (in his Über die Natur des Vergnügens , 1788/89), where he does not totally exclude the materialism of Helvetius, but includes his conception in a synthetic Kantian approach.