5979895842

Just like Dionysus in the Orphic Zagreus myth, Caesar is predestined to soldy rule the world, yel he meets violent opposition and dies a death thal can bc compared to sparagmos.

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Manfred Frank (Kberhard Karls Universitat Tiibingen)

Front ‘Fichtes Original Insight to a Modę ratę Defense of ‘Self-representationalism

50 ycars ago, Dieter Hcnrieh wrote an influential little text on ,Fichte’s Original Insight*. Seldoni has so much food for thought been put in a nutshell. The essay bearing so unremarkable a title, delivers a diagnosis on why three hundred years of penetrating thought about the intemal slructurc of subjectivity have ended up so fruitlcssly. Hcnrieh’s point was: Self-consciousncss cannot be described as the result of a higher-order act bending back upon a first-order one; given that „what reflection Finds, must already have been there before** (Novalis). Whereas Henrich's discovery had sonie influence in German speaking countries (and was dubbed the .Heidelberg School'), it remained nearly unnoticed in the anglophone (and now dominant) philosophical world. This begins to change now once a recent view on (self-)consciousness, called ’sclf-reprcscntationalism’, begins to dcvclop and to discover its Heidelberg roots.

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Erie Gans (lJnivesity of California Eos Angeles)

The Communal-Individual Suhject [Generative Athropology]

The current European identity crisis makes us realize in retrospect that the postmodem “death of the subject” was a reflection on the piane of individual self-consciousness of the weakened sense of national identity in postwar Europę. This suggests that the European super-state was less a stage on the way to a truły global community than a banding-together of cultures no longer strong enough to stand on their own.

Gcnerative Anthropology sceks to found human self-reflcction on an originary hypothesis that explains how humanity might plausibly have emerged in a scenie event whose traces we observe in our scenes of language. art. and ritual. Language. like the other elements of culture, can be understood only as inextricably both individual and col!ective. In our hypothesis. humans came to share representations in order to defer the potential for violence of a mimetic intelligence that had outgrown the pecking-order hierarchy of animal societies.

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