Christiane Voss: Anti-Kitsch or: An Attempt to Resonate with Motifs from Schelling's Natural Philosophy Today
Wednesday | June 18, 2025 | 9:45-10:30
Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar
Abstract:
Questions about the functioning, purpose and accessibility of nature have been more or less completely banished from the humanities in the wake of the European Enlightenment and functionally differentiated modernity. Since the 20th century at the latest, philosophies of technology and media have taught us that nature does not exist. Environments and infrastructures that have always been technically engineered have replaced the "old nature". While Marx and Engels considered adaptation to machine parks, factories and automatons in the industrial age to be alienation from human nature, today, in the age of global turbo-capitalism and widespread digitalization, the technical penetration of our living environments and the corresponding forms of self-perception and perception of others have become so ubiquitous and absolute, that a hiatus between authenticity and alienation no longer applies. However, there lingers a latent philosophical unease about the abstract negation of nature. So how can one think philosophically today about such things as the origin and connection of thought and being, or about the relationship between infinity and finitude for life-forms, without slipping into either metaphysically unfounded speculations in a pre-Kantian way, or into smooth kitsch? The short lecture will look back at one of the last great nature philosophy-projects of the 19th century, that of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. The aim is not to defend his (failed) philosophy of identity as a whole once again. Rather, the aim is to look for thought-figures in a heuristic and playful way that could possibly take on a productive critical function for today questions. References to Warwick Mules book "With nature" figure as an important background-reference as well, as the "phenomenology of kitsch" of the german philosopher Ludwig Giesz.