Natur

The aim of this paper is to discuss the contribution of Hegel’s dialectic to the current debate about man’s relationship to nature in the philosophy of culture. My focus is on the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus that Hegel uses in some crucial passages describing the transition from nature to spirit as a dialectical and reciprocal translation. Especially, I will examine the interplay between body, sign and artwork in Hegel’s anthropology and aesthetics.

If we call something ‘natural’ that occurs by itself without human intervention, and if cultural philosophy is interested precisely in what depends on human poiesis (production), praxis (action) and synthesis (conceptualization), then cultural philosophy refers ex negativo to the other of human intervention in the world. In this specific sense cultural philosophy can be understood as a negative philosophy of nature and is important for any kind of positive philosophy of nature insofar as it provokes natural facts to show themselves in human poiesis, praxis and synthesis.

What evokes the feeling of the sublime is a controversial question. If nature is considered sublime, one presupposes the impression of its unbroken power. Industrial society has an ambivalent relationship to this: it is sought and destroyed. For the most the aesthetics of nature is seen only as an 18th century issue. But the term leads to central problems of philosophy. Even if the concept of sublimity became problematic, the feeling of nature might still be a part of our culture until the present.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the contribution of Hegel’s dialectic to the current debate about man’s relationship to nature in the philosophy of culture. My focus is on the rhetorical figure of the chiasmus that Hegel uses in some crucial passages describing the transition from nature to spirit as a dialectical and reciprocal translation. Especially, I will examine the interplay between body, sign and artwork in Hegel’s anthropology and aesthetics.

What we know today as philosophy of culture has its very disparate beginnings in the reflections on language, which plays a significant role both as a marker of difference in the human form of life (natura altera) and as a central medium of cultivation (individual, people/nation, humanity). Here we encounter an ostensibly naturalistic a culturalistic use of the term nature in the theories of Humboldt and Hegel. The lines of this ambiguity converge with Ernst Cassirer.

Debates on Nietzsche’s naturalism usually posit nature and culture as competing principles to understand the contingent genesis of humanity. In contrast to this polarizing tendency, I argue that Nietzsche focuses on the cultural characteristics of humanity because of his naturalistic framework. Moreover, I submit that Nietzsche’s conceptualization of the entanglement of nature and culture contains important insights for critically understanding the challenges of the Anthropocene today.

The Philosophy of Culture lacks instruments to deal with nature’s becoming a concept defined by political and social interventions in the era of Technoscience. The following article builds a bridge between Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophy of Culture and approaches capable of criticizing the era of Technoscience and the concept of nature therein, such as that developed by Donna Haraway. The Philosophy of Culture, as a situated knowledge, then becomes a form of critique.