Abstract
German philosophy in the second half of the 20th century has been affected by historical events that are regularly evoked in order to emphasize the necessity for renewed ethical reflection. These events include—no less than the atrocities of the World War II and the Shoah—the development of technology, and above all, nuclear technology. In this light, one must mention, among others, the writings of Martin Heidegger, especially his The Question Concerning Technology,1 the engagement of Karl Jaspers, and later of Ernst Tugendhat as well as others concerned with the danger of nuclear weapons. The installation in the mid-1980s of Pershing II missiles in West Germany provoked the political engagement of many “professional philosophers.” Several phenomenologists, from Antonio Aguirre to Bernhard Waldenfels, clearly and on good grounds protested the installation in the “Declaration of German Philosophers on the Stationing of Missiles.”
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References
Martin Heidegger, “Die Frage nach der Technik,” in his Vorträge und Aufsätze (Pfullingen: Günther Neske, 1954), 9–40; “The Question Concerning Technology,”in his The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 3-35.
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On responsibility as a principle of justification, cf. also Elmar Holenstein, Menschliches Selbstverständnis. Ichbewußtsein, inter subjektive Verantwortung, interkul-terelle Verständigung (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985).
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E.g., Peter Kiwitz, Lebenswelt und Lebenskunst. Perspektiven einer kritischen Theorie des sozialen Lebens (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1986); the series entitled Übergänge, created in 1983 with Fink by Richard Grathoff and Bernhard Waidenfels, is explicitely devoted to the publication of texts and essays concerning action, language, and the lifeworld.
E.g., Ulf Matthiesen, Das Dickicht der Lebenswelt und die Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1983); Bernhard Waidenfels, “Rationalisierung der Lebenswelt—ein Projekt. Kritische Überlegungen zu Habermas’ Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns,” in his In den Netzen der Lebenswelt (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985), 94-119.
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Cf. also Werner Marx, Heidegger und die Tradition (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1961); Heidegger and the Tradition, trans. Theodore Kisiel and Murray Greene (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971).
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It is, however, noteworthy that the name of Karl Jaspers is hardly mentioned in recent philosophical discussions in Germany and that some subjects, e.g., authority and exception, that he had himself taken over from Kierkegaard disappeared completely from philosophical discourse along with him. This occurred despite the fact that he had a decisive influence on the thinking, among others, of Hannah Arendt through his development of such concepts or with his partition of practice into the arbeitendem, einrichtendem, handelndem, und wissenschaftlichem Denken. Cf. Karl Jaspers, Von der Wahrheit (Munich: Piper, 1947).
Cf. especially Bernhard Waidenfels, Antwortregister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1994), where Waidenfels presents the various aspects of his philosophy of responsiveness.
Bernhard Waidenfels, “Ethische und pragmatische Dimension der Praxis,” in his Der Spielraum des Verhaltens (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 269.
Bernhard Waldenfels, “Grenzen der Legitimierung und die Frage nach der Gewalt.” in his Der Stachel des Fremden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), 112; cf. “Limits of Legitimation and the Question of Violence” in Justice, Law, and Violence, ed. James B. Brady and Newton Garver (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991), 105.
Bernhard Waldenfels, Ordnung im Zwielicht (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 108; Order in the Twilight, trans. David J. Parent (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1996), 67.
Bernhard Waidenfels, “Der blinde Fleck der Moral: Überlegungen im Anschluß an Nietzsches Genealogie der Moral,” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 47 (1993), 507.
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Delhom, P. (2002). Recent Phenomenological Ethics in Germany. In: Phenomenological Approaches to Moral Philosophy. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 47. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9924-5_27
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