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Table of contents
No. 14 - Volume 10 (2022)
Holistic Knowledge
Edited by Sophie Witt
Sophie Witt: Einleitung: Ganzheitswissen?.
To the article …
Perspectives
Lea Bühlmann: Das Nachleben von Körperwissen.
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The paper focuses on two fundamental concepts of 20th century life sciences: Homeostasis and Umwelt. Both concepts describe the reciprocal relationship between organisms and their surroundings and are based on a holistic conception of the body. The paper examines on the one hand the linkage of past, present, and future knowledge of the body in both concepts starting from Aby Warburg’s time model of Nachleben. On the other hand, the historicity of knowledge is reflected by confronting Warburg’s Nachleben with Georges Canguilhem’s history of concepts. Finally, the historical analysis of the two concepts reveals the conditions of possibility for a linkage of the two concepts in the 1970s and thus contributes to the history of holistic body knowledge.
Leander Diener: Naturvergessenheit. Erinnerung an die verlorene Ganzheit des Menschen im 18. Jahrhundert.
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This paper follows the narrative of humanity's forgetfulness of nature (Naturvergessenheit) and its consequences. Max Horkheimer’s and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment serves as a starting and end point for a reflection on historical constellations of body concepts, human societies, and nature. These body concepts have been negotiated as nervous bodies since the 18th century and have repeatedly put a lost wholeness (Ganzheit) up for debate. Although no relief was found for the almost pathological desire for wholeness, the negotiations helped to verbalize something which has recurred since the Enlightenment: a dialectical desire for reconciliation and an ongoing emancipatory attempt to remember one's own nature.
Patrick Hohlweck: Die „ganze Person“: Adam Bernds Eigene Lebens=Beschreibung.
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The essay examines the depiction of mind-body interactions and concomitant notions of wholeness in Adam Bernd’s Eigene Lebens=Beschreibung from 1738 as well as its sequels from 1742 and 1745. Rather than understanding Bernd’s painstaking protocol of physical ailments and associated mental afflictions as a mere precursor to the anthropological – and, concurrently, literary – ideal type of the “whole human” which comes to dominate discourses around 1800, the essay situates Bernd’s work within the various spiritual, social, and medical disciplinary regimes which register human life in the first half of the 18th century. Among the often contradictory conceptions of unity produced in each of these domains of knowledge, the juridical and philosophical concept of “personhood” is identified as both an organizational tool and the telos of Bernd’s project.
Analysis
Carsten Zelle: ‚Ganzheitswissen‘ in der Diätetik um 1750, 1800 und 1850.
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The article is in the research context of a literary anthropology of the ‘whole human being’. Examples of three relevant works by Friedrich Hoffmann (1660-1742), Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland (1762-1836) and Ernst Freiherr von Feuchtersleben (1806-1849) verify the relevance of dietetic (‘Lebensordnung’) and its holistic knowledge for the change of affect economy and subject constitution during the threshold of the ‘Sattelzeit’ (1750/1850). The ‘holistic knowledge’ inherent in the diet not only shapes literature as a relevant thematic context, but also functions in this discourse itself as an instrument of a soul-diet aesthetic of impact that aims to stimulate senses and affects to temperate them properly. Literature as shown in scenes by Theodor Johann Quistorp (1722-1776), Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) und Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) becomes a dietetic.
Caroline Welsh: Resonanz und Stimmung in ganzheitlichen Anthropologien der Aufklärung und Gegenwart.
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In contemporary theories of embodiment, resonance is used frequently to emphasize the complex interdependencies between body, mind and environment. A closer look at scientific, philosophical, and aesthetic theory of the enlightenment shows that resonance as a metaphor and figure of thought, describing increasingly complex phenomena of interaction and interdependencies, was already popular in cognitive theory (Hartley), psychology (Sulzer), psychiatry (Reil) and aesthetic theory (Webb, Schiller, Kant) in the 18th Century. In Germany, the concept of resonance becomes highly productive around 1800 when it is combined with “Stimmung” (tuning) as its precondition. The paper traces epistemologically significant transformations of the two closely linked figures within holistic anthropologies, challenging dualistic notions of body and mind since the enlightenment. After an overview of these figures during the Enlightenment, it concentrates on Jacob von Uexküll’s use of “Stimmung” in his physiological explanation of Kant’s teleological causality of living organisms in the middle of the 20th Century, which paves the way for their introduction into contemporary theories of embodiment and enactivism. The epistemological potential of these figures is illustrated in an analysis of Thomas Fuchs’ phenomenological theory of embodied anthropology, distinguishing clearly between a mechanical view of the body and the embodied experience of living organisms.
Antonia Eder: Müdigkeit. Allzumenschliches in Anthropologie, Philosophie und Literatur des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert.
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Tiredness is a topic in philosophical, economic, mechanical, physiological, but above all (as Fatigue) in psychiatric contexts. In research, tiredness has traditionally been associated with a critique of biopolitics and meritocracy since industrialisation, but it was already preoccupying the 17th and 18th centuries. At the meantime, however, tiredness is also a place of letting go, a very special art of taking time out. The relationship of tiredness to time and work, the mind and the body, the artistic ground and the mental abyss is decisively questioned in my contribution with regard to the cultural-historical dimensions in discourses of anthropology, philosophy and literature of the 18th century and their prehistory in the 17th century, whereby literature is repeatedly brought into view. For it is precisely tiredness, according to the thesis I present here, that forms a specifically aisthetic site that harbours the potential and creative condition of possibility for an aesthetics of its very own.
Matthias Dreyer: Beobachte das Stolpern – Ein pädagogisches Denkbild zwischen Bauhaus und Benjamin.
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Stumbling has been a proven means of art at least since Charlie Chaplin at the start of the twentieth century. In modernist discourse, however, it has not been adequately reflected on, either as a bodily practice or as a methodological principle. Symptomatic here is Henri Bergson's negative understanding of stumbling as an interruption in the adaption to the living. In contrast, the present investigation traces the motif of stumbling in the art pedagogy of the 1920s. Here it appears as a Denkbild (thought-image) of the aesthetic and of the latter’s education and learning processes, which allow other, new ways of living to emerge. The focus is on László Moholy-Nagy’s texts on art education at the Bauhaus, Heinrich Jacoby’s music-pedagogical conception of another kind of listening, and Walter Benjamin’s “Program for a Proletarian Children's Theater.” In these texts and
practices from the 1920s, stumbling comes into its own as a moment of reflection of a self-beholding modernity, while also becoming readable as an example of a different philosophy of life, one that welcomes failure as a productive force for the living.
practices from the 1920s, stumbling comes into its own as a moment of reflection of a self-beholding modernity, while also becoming readable as an example of a different philosophy of life, one that welcomes failure as a productive force for the living.
Sophie Witt: Neuauflagen alter Affinitäten, oder Psychotherapie an der Charité (ab 1957): Neurosen, Künste, Ausdruckskörper.
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In the context of medicine, ‘wholeness’ recalls different things: of course, the relationship between body and soul, or soma, psyche and environment, depending on the historical context and different terminologies. But holism is also playing a role in the self-understanding of a medicine or psychiatry that strives for the ‘whole’ by incorporating questions, methods, and perspectives from the humanities and the arts. Although holistic
medicine existed before the 18th century, this claim of a ‘bio-psycho-social epistemology’ dates from the 18th century and its so-called ‘anthropological turn’; and it reemerges in psychosomatic medicine in the 20th century. This article focuses on the psychiatry of the Berlin Charité under the direction of Karl Leonhard (from 1957): In contrast to the official Pavlovian-oriented GDR psychosomatics, Leonhard had a great affinity for the arts and
paid special attention to the diagnostic potential of bodily expressive phenomena with explicit recourse to the acting theory and theories of psychotechnics of the 1920s. On the one hand, the article traces the hope for a quasi ‘holistic’ transgression of one’s own scientific, disciplinary boundaries. And, on the other hand, it shows how the claim to wholeness and the aporias of knowledge are related to each other.
medicine existed before the 18th century, this claim of a ‘bio-psycho-social epistemology’ dates from the 18th century and its so-called ‘anthropological turn’; and it reemerges in psychosomatic medicine in the 20th century. This article focuses on the psychiatry of the Berlin Charité under the direction of Karl Leonhard (from 1957): In contrast to the official Pavlovian-oriented GDR psychosomatics, Leonhard had a great affinity for the arts and
paid special attention to the diagnostic potential of bodily expressive phenomena with explicit recourse to the acting theory and theories of psychotechnics of the 1920s. On the one hand, the article traces the hope for a quasi ‘holistic’ transgression of one’s own scientific, disciplinary boundaries. And, on the other hand, it shows how the claim to wholeness and the aporias of knowledge are related to each other.