Criticism of ‘the West’ and of ‘Western civilization’ in Germany in the early 20th century is generally most familiar today as a conservative force of the age. It is well-known that at the outbreak of war in August 1914 a longstanding German complex of resentment of the Western European powers exploded in a call to arms. Yet it needs to be stressed that not all prominent German bourgeois writers endorsed a wholly militant reading of the motif of German national-cultural ‘protest (...) at the West’. By 1918 an array of voices could come to discern another kind of salient work of contention that refused apology for any kind of violent Kulturkrieg. The thesis defended in this article is that in sophisticated humanistic writing of the era, a German mood of antagonism with the West represents not a regressive ideology but the productive and intelligent outcome of a longstanding preeminence of philosophical questioning in German academic life since the later 19th century about European world pictures and their claims to universal validity on the stage of world history. A range of statements are shown here to anticipate debates of the present day about ‘late’, ‘reflexive’ or ‘post-Eurocentric’ conditions of Western modernity. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialtheorie und Philosophie Jahrgang: 2 Heft: 2 Seiten: 371-400.

Max Weber famously diagnosed both an excess and a subordination of meaning in modernity when he coined the term disenchantment next to the fragmentation and irreconcilability of value spheres. Unlike Weber, however, who sought to keep the ideological and the rationalist sides of the modern divide together, his immediate followers capitalized either on his decisionism (i.e. Carl Schmitt) or on his universalism (i.e. Jürgen Habermas). In an attempt to develop a constructive perspective on the question of how we can conceive (...) of irreconcilable values within a larger normative horizon, this article introduces Karl Jaspers’s interpretation and refinement of Weber’s work. Most fundamentally, Jaspers’s existentialist philosophy of communication sought to turn Weber’s warring gods into a source of solidarity rather than divisiveness. I argue that Jaspers did so in rooting human freedom not in the decision or the law but in an experiential uncertainty and the knowledge not to know. The article closes with a discussion of some practical and theoretical implications of Jaspers’s thought for our understanding of diversity in unity in post-truth times. (shrink)

In this article I propose a theological reflection on the philosophical assumptions behind the idea that intelligent machine can be governed through ethical protocols, which may apply either to the people who develop the machines or to the machines themselves, or both. This idea is particularly relevant in the case of machines’ extreme wrongdoing, a wrongdoing that becomes an existential risk for humankind. I call this extreme wrong-doing, ‘evil.’ Thus, this article is a theological account on the philosophical assumptions behind (...) the possibility of evil machines, machines that can create an existential risk for humankind, and the ethical remedies that limit that risk. After discussing these assumptions, I argue for the ineffectiveness of these ethical remedies to prevent the possibility of evil machines. The article is an application of Romano Guardini’s thought on technology to evil machines. (shrink)

This text is a part of my dissertation titled “Vilém Flusser in Brasilien. Eine Anthropophagie des Geistes”. It takes up Rainer Guldin’s reflections on Flusser’s Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert. Versuch einer subjektiven Synthese, a Flusser text which must be regarded as the foundation of his thinking and further writing. Flusser’s epochal title points to historicity. However, Flusser does not pursue an objective approach to history. He undertakes an anthropological introspection of the human being, considering its ‘products’, such as culture, language, philosophy, (...) science, and religion. I draw philosophical and historical connections to two existentialist thinkers: Karl Jaspers and Gustavo Corção, both mentioned as ‘authorities’ by Flusser in a letter to Ernesto Grassi. In the last part of my article, I relate Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert to Flusser’s famous essay on Brazil: Brasilien oder die Suche nach dem neuen Menschen. There, Flusser is not only influenced by Hegel’s dichotomy of history and non-history, but also by notions from both Grassi’s and Keyserling’s Südamerikanische Meditationen. These ‘traditional’ notions are not uncritically adopted but “anthropophagically” converted into new Brazilian ideas. (shrink)