Search results for: Gernot Böhme

Items from 1 to 9 out of 9 results

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Self-Cultivation According to Immanuel Kant

Gernot Böhme

Dialogue and Universalism > 2018 > 4 > 95-108

The author reflects on the anthropological role of the “self-cultivation” category in the philosophical system of Immanuel Kant, for whom self-cultivation stood as the central idea of the Enlightenment. Kant believed that it was man alone who created himself to a rational being, that his rationality was not a granted good but something he had to mature to by way of multiple disciplinary (the reduction...

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Light and Space. On the Phenomenology of Light

Gernot Böhme

Dialogue and Universalism > 2014 > 4 > 62-73

As its subtitle suggests, the essay is a phenomenological account of the diverse ways in which light can be experienced by the senses. Gernot Böhme divides these experienc-es into two types depending on whether they concern the relation between light and space (the categories “light-cleared space,” “lightspace,” “lights in space”) or between light and objects (“things in light,” “light upon things”)...

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What Kind of Society Do We Want to Live in?

Gernot Böhme

Dialogue and Universalism > 2014 > 4 > 11-20

The author asks about the conceptual tools which would enable a critique of contem-porary capitalism without falling back to Utopianism and its historically-discredited theses. With the help of paired categories like community–society, human dignity–self-awareness, need–desire, Gernot Böhme portrays the deficiencies of contemporary Western social reality, e.g. the steadily exhausting reserves of the...

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Meditation as ahe Exploration of Forms of Consciousness

Gernot Böhme

Dialogue and Universalism > 2014 > 4 > 21-31

Gernot Böhme defines meditation as achieving specific states of consciousness by concentration and “switching off” the attention usually paid to diverse areas of everyday life. Böhme goes on to discuss what he considers to be the main meditation-generated forms of consciousness, like non-intentional consciousness, empty consciousness (a stand-by state in anticipation of contentual fulfillment), consciousness...

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Being Human Well. A Proto-Ethic

Gernot Böhme

Dialogue and Universalism > 2014 > 4 > 32-43

Gernot Böhme discusses the nature of moral good in the light of what he calls proto-ethics, considering how to be human “well.” Here the predicate “good” takes on an adverbial and not an adjectival form, and Böhme refers to the Aristotelian distinction between praxis and poiesis to show that today's activistic civilisation with its emphasis on achievement as the effect of activity (poiesis) has deprived...

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The Voice in Bodily Space

Gernot Böhme

Dialogue and Universalism > 2014 > 4 > 54-61

In the paper Gernot Böhme considers the spatial aspects of the perception of sound, especially the human voice, which he sees not as a verbal bearer of meaning but the expression of “the speaker’s atmospheric presence.” The voice lends the communication space emotional colour and the atmospheres it creates envelop the communication partners by way of resonance. The author sets the signatures concept...

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My Body—My Lived Body

Gernot Böhme

Dialogue and Universalism > 2014 > 4 > 44-53

In this essay about the philosophy of human corporeality Böhme asks about the sense of the I—body relation. He enters a polemic with Hegel, who wrote about the self- appropriation of the own body in acts of will, and points to passive acts of bodily sensing like experiencing pain or fear as that which builds an awareness of the own body’s “mineness.” Böhme calls this awareness affected self-givenness,...