By way of introduction: Gernot Böhme, Philosopher

Gernot Böhme (born 1937, Dessau, Germany) - German philosopher

Böhme was Professor of Philosophy at Darmstadt Technical University and has risen to prominence through his work in aesthetics, the philosophy of nature, the philosophy of embodiment, the philosophy of technology and his conception of practical philosophy as a capacity for dealing with the exigencies of life. He has become known beyond specialist cricles too, with interviews and articles for newspapers and magazines, as well as numerous publications on Plato, Kant and Goethe. Böhme's essential concerns are to preserve both human values and the natural world under the conditions of a technological civilisation.


Classical Philosophy, Ethics


Philosophical practice for Böhme means the necessity of formulating questions about life and the elaboration of an art of living. It is connected at the same time with the work of the self on the self. Modern academic philosophy refuses this philosophical tradition which derives from the classical world. Philosophy however is not just a form of methodical knowledge related to science, as it is practised within universities. It is simultaneously the wisdom of the world and a form of life. In speaking of philosophy as a form of life, our concern is as it were with cultivating ourselves as human beings, following in the footsteps of Socrates and the world of antiquity. Philosophy considered as the wisdom of the world draws on Kant, who defined it as the type of philosophy that deals with what is of interest to each and every human being. Today the concern is particularly with questions of social significance. Socrates, as a type, represents an anthropological condition distinguished above all through conscious thought. Böheme's conception implies sensitivity towards what is part of one's own existence that is not part of the self (c.f. the Socratic daimonion). Care of the self does not entail that The Other is denied a sense of self. According to Böhme, in dealings with the irrational components of the self, the task of ethics is to develop forms that allow those components to appear necessary, useful and amenable to control. Böhme has become prominent in Kant scholarship through Das Andere der Vernunft (The Other of Reason), a book published with his brother, Hartmut Böhme. The work presents a critical view of modernity, influenced by psychoanalysis. For Böhme, Kant's epistemology turns out to be a theory of alienated knowledge - it articulates an ideal of the autonomous rational individual, who represents a sort of hard-won strategy of self-mastery. Böhme, by contrast, speaks up for "the other of reason", thus especially for the world of nature, the body, imagination, desire and the emotions. In this connection he has put forward a new interpretation of The Critique of Judgment - the beautiful as atmosphere - and a reconstruction of the metaphysical first principles of natural science. Böhme is critical of the Kantian concept of becoming human through education.


Aesthetics as Aisthetics


Böhme is concerned to thematically extend philosophical aesthetics. He conceives aesthetics as aisthetics, that is as a general theory of perception. The concepts of design, nature and art form the centrepoint of his reflections. The task of aesthetics is not to be a mere medium for the transmission of modern art. An exlusively intellectualistic interpretation of works of art is rejected. Aesthetics also has to take up the theme of human beings' new relationship to a natural world increasingly shaped by their action. Moods and affects play a particular role in aesthetics. What Böhme calls "atmosphere" is the primary reality aesthetics has to deal with. It relates to moods and their spatial carriers - which are essentially what the beholder of a work of art and what he or she perceives have in common. By perception, Boehme understands a mode of bodily presence - with an emphasis on emotional components. Perception for him is primarily the sensation of a presence or, alternatively, a certain atmosophere. Atmosphere belongs neither in the sphere of the object nor in that of the subject; rather it is a co-presence that exists within the terms of the subject/object division. Atmophere is only differentiated retrospectively into a polar relation between "me" and the thing I perceive, thus taking on the fixed duality of subject and object:


"In perceiving an atmosphere I sense what sort of environment I find myself in. The perception thus has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the environment which radiates a certain quality of mood, on the other hand - me, participating in this mood through my very situatedness and thereby becoming aware where I now am . . . To put it the other way round, atmospheres are the very forms in which things and environments present themselves."


An atmosphere flows out into a space in a far from definite way. We can only follow up its traces to the extent that we have direct experience of it. We have to open ourselves up to it, be affectively influenced by it, affected in both senses of the word. Thus for example a certain cheerful or oppressive mood can prevail in a space. But this is not something subjective. The atmosphere is something we have an immediate experience of as quasi-objectively exterior to us. What is designated as atmospheric here is a condition common to the perceiving individual and his/her environment. We have an immediate experience of "atmospheric phenomena" as free-floating qualities, like energy in the bodily or emotional sense or the partly personified forces of nature. Böhme differentiates between the different characteristics of atmospheres. He counts wealth, power and elegance among social characteristics. Warmth, coldness and brightness are among the so-called synaesthetic characteristics. Tension or tranquility are examples of communicative atmospheric qualities. Atmospheric impressions created through movement can be, among other things, oppressive, uplifting, agitating. There are also moods in the narrower sense, such for example as the sense of scene created by an english garden. In perception, the individual doesn't just sense the presence of something external, he or she has a bodily sense of it - in the process sensing him/herself too. Material things arise out of this sensitivity to the atmospheric through processes of defense, differentiation and restriction. Perceiving them is a dynamic process, because they themselves produce atmospheres and hence our sense of situatedness. What distinguishes things is their spatially fixed place, their corporeality, their identity, the way they function as potential condensation points for qualities perceived atmospherically. It is the perception of things that first constitutes the subject-object relationship. We experience them as factually existing in an objective world beyond the subject as defined by this relationship.


Anthropology and Philosophy of Embodiment

Under the title Anthropolgie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View), Böhme presents what he thinks self-knowledge can allow human beings to make of themselves. The human sciences of the twentieth century provide the intellectual backdrop here. In an increasingly technified civilisation, humanity in the sense of humane values can only be preserved in defiance of the main technological current of culture - a view which also marks Böhme's philosophy of embodiment. In Leibsein als Aufgabe (The Task of Embodiment), Böhme shows that the body is no longer simply a given; human beings in technologically advanced civilisation increasingly understand and treat themselves and their bodies as raw physical material.

The body is here that "part of nature we ourselves are." The body (Leib) is our own nature as it is given in our experience of ourselves; the material body (Körper), by contrast, is our own nature as it is given in others' experience. Experience of ourselves is something we have to seek out anew in the form of particular practices so that we can build up a consciousness of ourselves that is based on the "susceptible givens of the self." Since our sense of our susceptibility is something we are least able to evade in negative experiences, pain moves to the centre of Böhme's anthropology. He speaks of a "birth of the subject out of pain." According to Böhme, an existential familiarity with our own body is the only possible basis for the decisions today required of human beings undergoing medical treatment if they are to remain autonomous agents.

Philosophy of Technology, Science and Time

In the 1970's, in the course of work at the Starnberg Max Planck Institute with Wolfgang van den Daele and Wolfgang Krohn, Böhme proposed the thesis of scientific finalisation, sparking broad public debate. The ambiguity of the theory’s name - the Latin finis means both aim and endpoint - led to hefty criticism, above all from the members of the Bund Freiheit der Wissenschaft (Association for Scientific Freedom), who assumed that Böhme and his associates were looking to limit the autonomy of science. In fact, the theory of scientific finalisation puts forward a three-phase model of scientific development; it relates to Thomas Kuhn's theory of scientific paradigms and aims to encourage specifically scientific understanding of the application of science in society. After a phase of trial and error, a scientific discipline enters a paradigmatic phase that finally leads to the formulation of a mature theory. A third phase follows, that of differentiation, driven by interest in applications. The finalisation thesis has been substantiated by numerous case studies.

Böhme has pursued his work on the subject with an examination of ecology as a normative orientation in the natural sciences, later elaborating it into a critical theory of technological development. Here one of his main points of reference is Max Horkheimer's notion of "interest in rational conditions."

As a theoretician of science, Böhme has published work on the formation of quantitative concepts and procedures of measurement. On this score, he differentiates an epistemological step, viz. the conceptual organisation of the phenomenal field, from a step involving scientific theorisation proper, viz. mathematical representation of phenomena. With the sociologist of science Nico Stehr, Böhme also coined the notion of knowledge society (Wissensgesellschaft) in 1985. He had already made his entrée into the philosophy of time with his doctoral and professorial theses, approaching the topic both from a historical and systematic point of view. On the whole, he rejects any move to understand time primarily as an objectively real parameter, against which he sets the experience of time as duration and the ordering function of time as a rhythmic arrrangement of existence, for example in divisions of lived time into seasons or parts of the day. Böhme has introduced a fundamental new dichotomy - time as a medium of representation and as the form of living existence, as opposed to the dual conception of time dominant in analytic philosophy which tends to interpret it either as a series of positions arranged according to past, present and future or according to temporal priority (before and after). Time, in short, is the very form of living existence for Böhme - that which we have an immediate lived experience of. What we are itself extends temporally – not unlike a musical melody.

Declaration of Dissent

Böhme took a strong moral position on the social use of science in the face of scientific participation in the arms industry, especially in the course of the arms race that characterized the warmer phases of the Cold War and in response to NATO's so-called Double Resolution of December 1979. His guiding principle was that the individual has to begin by changing himself and his own practice if he wants to bring about social change. In 1984, he played a leading role in developing the Darmstadt Declaration of Dissent. The so-called Verweigerungsformel (literally a “statement of abstention”) was intended to moral engagement with the moral implications of science binding across broad scientific circles and to move a wider public to action:

"I hereby declare that I will not participate in the development of weapons as part of my work as a scientist or technical specialist and instead strive to make known any contribution to military development made by my field and counteract the use of scientific knowledge for military purposes." (Darmstadt Declaration of Dissent)

The declaration was devised by the Darmstadt Disarmament Initiative and was signed by around 130 scientists and technicians. Its intention was to apply moral pressure to individual scientists active in military research and to deprive the military escalation that so perturbed Böhme of all intellectual bases of support. Böhme himself was the first signatory to the Declaration.

Böhme as Social Philosopher - A Recent Title: Invasive Technisierung: Techikphilosophie und Technikkritik (Invasive Technification: Technology - A Critical Philosophy)

"Technology has extended its reach to the human body - not just in the literal sense, through implants, transplants and technological substitutes for biological organs, but in a more figurative sense too - technological infrastructure and the institutions of a technified society today determine what perception is, what communication is and what forms of social life are possible. A fundamental new conception of technology is thus required. Technology can no longer be seen simply as a means of efficiently attaining pre-established ends. Rather, it needs to be seen as a total structure, a dispositif - something which makes some forms of human action and human relationship possible, while limiting the possibilities of others. The philosophy of technology contained in Böhme's study of technification immediately implies a critique of technology. The human/robot of a possible future envisaged by science-fiction writers, a hybrid of technical and organic parts, would on this view not be Nietzsche's Übermensch, but in fact what Nietzsche anticipated under the heading of his "last man". Invasive Technification is thus about the preservation of humanity and humane values under the challenging conditions of technically advanced civilisation."


Loosely from the German of the great wikipedia behemoth by CS