The Liberating Power of Symbols E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 204

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

In this new collection of lectures and essays Jurgen Habermas engages with a wide range of figures in twentieth-century thought. The book displays once again his ability to capture the essence of a thinker's work, his feeling for the texture of intellectual traditions and his outstanding powers of critical assessment. Habermas has described these essays as 'fragments of a history of contemporary philosophy'. The volume includes explorations of the work of Ernst Cassirer, Karl Jaspers and Gershom Scholem, as well as reponses to friends and colleagues such as Michael Thuenissen, Karl-Otto Apel and the writer and film-maker Alexander Kluge. It also includes pieces on the Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright and the theologian Johann Baptist Metz. This new volume will be an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Habermas and twentieth-century philosophy.

Leseprobe

Copyright © this translation Polity Press 2001. First published inGermany as Vom sinnlichen Eindruck zum symbolischen Ausdruck© Suhrkamp Verlag 1997.

First published in 2001 by Polity Pressin association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd

Editorial office:Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Marketing and production:Blackwell Publishers Ltd108 Cowley RoadOxford OX4 1JF, UK

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

ISBN 0–7456–2088–4ISBN 0–7456–2552–5 (pbk)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Contents

Preface

1 The Liberating Power of Symbols

I

II

III

Notes

2 The Conflict of Beliefs

I

II

III

IV

V

Notes

3 Between Traditions

4 Tracing the Other of History in History

Notes

5 A Master Builder with Hermeneutic Tact

I

II

III

IV

Notes

6 Israel or Athens: Where does Anamnestic Reason Belong?

Notes

7 Communicative Freedom and Negative Theology

I

II

III

IV

V

Notes

8 The Useful Mole who Ruins the Beautiful Lawn

I

II

III

IV

V

VI

VII

Sources

Index

Preface

This volume brings together essays and speeches which were written for various occasions. But the themes I addressed as these different opportunities arose may be of more general interest.

In comparison with other philosophers of their generation, the works of Ernst Cassirer and Karl Jaspers have not yet found the echo amongst younger thinkers which they deserve. In the first two chapters I investigate the underlying concerns which gave rise to their philosophies as a whole, with the aim of bringing out the contemporary relevance of their thought. By contrast, memories of the spontaneity of the great story-teller Gershom Scholem are still so vivid that only now are his writings beginning to emerge from the shadow of his unique personality. The central motif of his thinking is closely intertwined with the shimmering figure of the false prophet Sabbatai evi.

In the remaining essays, I engage with friends and colleagues. Here, too, my conversations are more with the work than with the individual. They can be read as fragments of a history of contemporary philosophy. Alexander Kluge, the great theorizer among writers and film-makers, will forgive me for including him with philosophers, and even theologians.

J.H.Starnberg, March 1996

1

The Liberating Power of Symbols

Ernst Cassirer’s Humanistic Legacy and the Warburg Library

This lecture was delivered on 20 April 1995 at the University of Hamburg. The dual occasion was the dedication of the restored Warburg Library building, and the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Ernst Cassirer (who died in New York on 13 April 1945).

For John Michael Krois, to whose admonition I shall seek to respond

I

When the University of Hamburg was founded after the First World War, Aby Warburg was able to carry out the plan he had long cherished of making his private library accessible to the public. The library became the focal point of an institute for interdisciplinary research in the human and cultural sciences, where students and visitors were able to work, and where university seminars and public lectures were held. For a small circle of scholars concerned with the study of religion it became an ‘organon of humanistic research’, as Cassirer was later to put it. In fact, Ernst Cassirer was one of the first to give a lecture there. The following entry can be found in the annual report of the Warburg Library for 1921, written by Fritz Saxl:

Professors Cassirer, Reinhardt, Ritter, Wolff, Junker, and Dr. Panofsky, are now constant users and patrons of the Library. It has even transpired that Prof. Cassirer, in a lecture to the Hamburg Society for the Study of Religion (of which Prof. Warburg was a founder), has taken up ideas which were earlier quite foreign to him, but which he found himself developing as a result of his use of the Library. Prof. Cassirer intends to expand on these ideas in a major work.