„Ein Unbekanntes ist nur der Geschmack“. Zu Levin Ludwig Schückings literatursoziologischem Ansatz

The article reconstructs Levin Ludwig Schücking’s History of Taste as a method of writing literary history. Moreover, it lays out, for the first time, the cultural and literary-political dimensions of his approach by considering the context of the history of literary studies comprehensively. The article demonstrates how Schücking refers to sociology in a twofold manner: as a way of scholarly thinking that is related to certain methodological techniques, and as a way to overcome the “crisis of modernity” manifested in the rift between authors and readers in literary life.

SPIRITUAL AND VALUE ASPECTS OF THE GLOBAL CRISIS OF MODERNITY

Crises in one way or another accompany the development of mankind throughout its history. But the current global crisis is fundamentally different from the previous ones. Its difference is that it is integral, multidimensional, deep and has at its core the oblivion of the spiritual essence of a person. All forms of modern human activity bear the stamp of this oblivion – the spiritual content of any human activity today is minimal and tends to disappear completely. The loss of spirituality, and recently the conscious refusal of a person from his spiritual essence, lies at the basis of the modern global crisis. In turn, the rejection of the spiritual essence by man was the result of the loss of the unity of man and God, which is a moral crime on the part of man. Man has despised the commandments given to him by God, forgetting that the commandments are not only moral maxims, but also the laws of existence, and their fulfillment connects a person with God on an ontological level. Therefore, the current crisis is truly global and eschatological. Overcoming this crisis, getting out of it is possible only on the ways of recreating a person's spiritual essence, on which the future of society and the positive historical perspective of humanity depend.

Research and Scientific Advice in the Second Modernity: Technology Assessment, Responsible Research and Innovation, and Sustainability Research

The scientific and technological advance has been a major driving force of modernization for centuries. However, the 20th century was full of indications and diagnoses of a deep crisis of modernity. Currently, debates on limits to growth, pollution, and climate change indicate the serious and threatening lack of sustainability of the so-called ‘first modernity’. This crisis of modernity has motivated scholars to develop concepts of modernizing modernity, with the approach of a ‘reflexive modernization’ to reach a ‘second modernity’ being prominent. In this paper, Technology Assessment (TA), Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI), and Sustainability Research (SR) are regarded as manifestations of this reflexive modernization in the field of problem-oriented and transformative research. The paper aims to (a) unfold the hypothesis regarding TA, RRI, and SR as scientific approaches within reflexive modernization, (b) clarify the respective meaning of ‘reflexive’ in these approaches, (c) identify commonalities as well as differences between the three approaches, and (d) draw conclusions for the relation and further development of TA, RRI, and SR.

Melville's Wisdom

This book explores the manner in which Herman Melville responds to the spiritual crisis of modernity by using the language of the biblical Old Testament wisdom books to moderate contemporary discourses on religion, skepticism, and literature. Melville’s work is an example of how romantic literature fills the interpretive lacuna left by contemporary theology. This book argues that attending to Melville’s engagement with the wisdom books (Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes) can help us understand a paradox at the heart of American modernity: the simultaneous displacement and affirmation of biblical language and religious culture. In wisdom, which addresses questions of theology, radical skepticism, and the nature of evil, Melville finds an ethos of critical inquiry that allows him to embrace the acumen of modern analytical techniques such as higher biblical criticism, while salvaging simultaneously the spiritual authority of biblical language. Wisdom for Melville constitutes both object and analytical framework in this balancing act. Melville’s Wisdom joins other works of postsecular literary studies in challenging its own discipline’s constitutive secularization narrative by rethinking modern, putatively secular cultural formations in terms of their reciprocity with religious concepts and texts. The book foregrounds Melville’s sustained, career-spanning concern with biblical wisdom, its formal properties, and its knowledge-creating potential. By excavating this project from Melville’s oeuvre, Melville’s Wisdom shows how he seeks to avoid the spiritually corrosive effects of suspicious reading while celebrating truth-seeking over subversive iniquity.

With and Beyond Epistemologies from the South: Ontological Epistemology of Participation, Multi-topial Hermeneutics and the Calling of Planetary Realisations

Our contemporary moment is a moment of crisis of epistemology as a part of the wider and deeper crisis of modernity and the human condition. The crisis of epistemology emerges from the limits of the epistemic as it is tied to epistemology of procedural certainty and closure. The crisis of epistemology also reflects the limits of epistemology closed within the Euro-American universe of discourse. It is in this context that the present essay discusses Boaventura de Sousa Santos’ Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide. It also discusses some of the limits of de Sousa Santos’ alternatives especially his lack of cultivation of the ontological in his exploration of epistemological alternatives beyond the Eurocentric canons. It then explores the pathways of ontological epistemology of participation which brings epistemic and ontological works and meditations together in transformative and cross-cultural ways. This helps us in going beyond both the limits of the primacy of epistemology in modernity as well as Eurocentrism. It also explores pathways of a new hermeneutics which involves walking and meditating across multiple topoi of cultures and traditions of thinking and reflections which is called multi- topial hermeneutics in this study. This involves foot-walking and foot-meditative interpretation across multiple cultures and traditions of the world which help us go beyond ethnocentrism and eurocentrism and cultivate conversations and realisations across borders what the essay calls planetary realisations.

Islands of (in)security in the Anthropocene

In this response, I think through some implications of Chandler and Pugh’s typology of relational ontologies and onto-epistemologies for how we might engage the question of security in the Anthropocene. In doing so, I highlight how their poetic treatment of islands challenges relational thought on the Anthropocene to confront its own embodied and contextual limitations. I suggest here that taking island poetics seriously brings into focus latent desires for security against indeterminacies that the problematic of the Anthropocene—the crisis of modernity—introduces.

Conclusion

This study has explored how Barth and Bonhoeffer provide resources for a chastened defense of the politics of liberal modernity. This chastened defense acknowledges the tensions inherent in modern politics, including the potential for violence and terror in the utopian strand of modern thought. For Barth and Bonhoeffer, a theological account of history liberates politics from salvation history. These theologians saw the hopes of the modern age shipwrecked during their lifetimes. Yet even in the midst of this crisis, they sought neither the retrieval of a premodern synthesis, nor the supersession of modern politics by some postmodern alternative. The goal of this study has been to show how Barth and Bonhoeffer responded to the crisis of modernity in their own historical context, avoiding despair as well as the temptations of political utopia.