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Wolfgang Schirmacher (born 1944) has taught philosophy at the University of Hamburg, is a former Core Faculty Member of the Media Studies Graduate Program, New School for Social Research, and Director of International Relations, Philosophy and Technology Studies Center, Polytechnic University, New York. He is the editor of Schopenhauer-Studien, and the editor of Schopenhauer for New York Studies in Media Philosophy. He is an internationally active philosopher of technology with emphasis on media, gene technology, and neuroscience, president of the International Schopenhauer Association, and chair of the Artificial Life Group.
Rogue philosopher, and enigmatic and inspirational professor, Schirmacher
is dean of the Master and Doctoral Programs in
Media and Communication at the European Graduate School, a unique concept
in university-level education. Founded by the non-profit European
Foundation of Interdisciplinary Studies (EGIS), with the guidance of Jean-Francois Lyotard, in 1994, EGS is a carefully designed mix of Internet-
based learning and intensive summer residencies for active and professional
international students. The EGS Media and Communications program aims at
creative breakthroughs and theoretical paradigm shifts in art, media,
communications, film, internet, web and cyberspace studies from a cross-
disciplinary perspective. The EGS programs focus is on philosophy as
applied to media and communication. Schirmacher states: Philosophy, in its
genuine sense as a bold and creative questioning of the world, guides our
approach. Theory and practice are given equal importance in the program,
and the faculty members reflect this cross-disciplinary approach, as they
are considered philosophers in their fields as filmmakers, academics,
artists and media professionals. Schirmacher believes that every new
thinker is in a position to change the nature of philosophy.
Inspired by a diverse collection of post-Kantian, post-Hegelian
philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Marx, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger,
Adorno, Merleau-Ponty, Bataille, Arendt, Deleuze, Derrida, and Lyotard,
Schirmacher announces the conviction of Modern Technology for first-degree
murder of the body. As his mentors do, Schirmacher considers the body as
our place of resistance, and its growing influence coincides with the
growing threat technological progress seems to make to the bodily sphere.
What Schirmacher calls homo generator is a realization of the hope and
the angst of the philosophers after Hegel: a Dasein beyond metaphysics, a
human being which needs no Being, no certainty, no truth. Modern
technology is its ambiguous birthplace. Rather than considering homo
generator a narrative of progress, technological triumph over nature, or
movement to a higher form of living, he describes homo generator as having
to face with courage his or her own mortality (complemented by natality) in
the climate of ecocide. Homo generator begins to fulfill the artificial
existence of humanity, and takes the form of the media artist, as generator
of human reality and his/her responsibility for tomorrow's artificial
world. Unlike other descriptions of humanity, homo generator addresses our
ability to produce new forms of life and determine the biological, as well
as the spiritual, future of the earth. Homo generator is in a position to
tailor-make evolution, both in gene technology and in media technology.
A phenomenologist at heart, Schirmacher states that homo generator's body
politics claims aesthetic perception as the basis of comprehension and
interaction. Homo generator is a concrete beginning, unique but not
original, self care without egoism. He brings attention to our postmodern
technology that has abandoned the question of control. The body politics of
homo generator states that we are jokes in the universe that will die only
with our deaths. We are the artificial beings among all others, our bodies
are artifacts by nature.
In a paper presented at the International Congress for Phenomenology,
Frankfurt, in 1985, and printed in Analecta Husserliana XXII, 1987, titled
The Faces of Compassion: Toward a Post-Metaphysical Ethics, Schirmacher
asks what shape morality will take in the search for an effective ethics
for the technological age. He cites Arthur Schopenhauers and Albert
Schweitzers ethics of practical compassion, renewed as a "Humanism of the
Other" by what Emmanuel Levinas claims is the "hopeless compassion with all
beings" which proves to be moral in the ecological and human crisis.
Schirmacher asks in what way compassion shows itself in our life-world and
how we can perceive the decisive characteristics of compassion without
prior value judgment. In being the artificial ones we are the open,
undetermined ones. Intuitive knowledge knows nothing, and compassion knows
no law. He indicates that justified individuality, which practices
compassion, is missing in Schopenhauer's model of ethics of compassion, and
claims that compassion as a way of living will become tangible for us only
when it has been bent back into an active sensitization
Sensitizing means
to develop all senses (the few trained, the numerous untrained [senses]) in
a creative process and to do it without fear, without order, without
foreknowledge. He refers to compassion as an intuitive language: faint,
yet impossible to ignore.
In a paper presented at the XVIIth World Congress of Philosophy in Montreal
1983, and printed in Social Science Information 23, 3 (1984), titled The
End of Metaphysics What Does This Mean? Schirmacher addresses
Heideggers reduction of the problem of modernity to the notion of the end
of metaphysics. He claims that we are the literal proof of this end, or
death, seen in the process of the extinction of the human species. It has
become clear, he says, that we are far from being what we imagined we were
in our metaphysics. He refers to the modern period as the last phase of
Western metaphysics, which is today dominant throughout the world in its
final form of scientific and technical rationality, and post-modernism as
the expression of the expected break with metaphysics at its definitive
end, after which there will be no new beginning. The end of metaphysics
means that the life-long project of the human species has become, in its
historical development, a suicidal enterprise. If we proceed along the way
of metaphysics no human beings or objects will survive, leaving only
artifacts. Schirmacher claims that a radical change is required for the
human species to survive, and if we want to prevent our destruction, we
must learn a "bodily" language which precedes the division into subject
and object, and admit the individual to a successful enterprise which needs
no planning.
Schirmacher continues his discussion of the postmodern world by stating
that being has become cloning, and that the meaning of cloning has little
to do with the scientific-technological act. Humanity protects its
virtuality, its principally undefined status, by cloning with media the
many ways in which a human being exists. He looks to Lyotards Just Gaming
to support his position that the postmodern decision is about becoming a
player rather than a spectator in the activity of cloning humans in order
to allow for a good life. In the spirit of the new name of humanity: homo-
generator, with openness as our existential taste and co-evolutionary
power as our design, what we clone is exactly this attitude of open
generating and never a mere copy of anything.
Schirmacher claims that humans are alone and fully responsible for
artificial life, which is our only life. By cloning freely with media and
designing a life-world in between natality and mortality, we fail to pay
attention to the artificial life we generate. His advice is that we must
become more experienced in perceiving our imperceptible actions of true
humanity. The art of living: enjoying life without knowing why, living
happily without expectations and acting without believing in the principles
of our action, is rooted in judgment and prudence instead of concepts.
Cloning humans with media works to distract our attention from this ethical
art of living. In media we simulate humanity to the point of not
recognizing ourselves anymore, and this life-consuming activity helps us to
stay clear of authentic humanity. In ethical life humanity fulfills itself,
of which we are vaguely aware and which we need to forget at once.
Schirmacher writes that to work toward this forgetting is media's strongest
claim.
Selected books
(editor with Sven Nebelung): German Essays On Psychology. The German
Library 62. The Continuum International Publishing Group. New York, London,
November 2000, 330 pages, Hardcover, ISBN 0826412378.
(editor): German 20th Century Philosophy: The Frankfurt School. The German
Library 78. The Continuum International Publishing Group. New York, London,
February 2000, 324 pages, Hardcover, ISBN 0826409660.
(editor): German Socialist Philosophy: Feuerbach, Marx, Engels. The German
Library 40. The Continuum International Publishing Group. New York, London,
December 1996, Hardcover, ISBN 082640748X.
(editor): German Essays On Science In The 20th Century. The German Library
82. The Continuum International Publishing Group. New York, London, October
1996, 314 pages, Hardcover, ISBN 0826407463.
(editor): German Essays On Science In The 19th Century. The German Library
36. The Continuum International Publishing Group. New York, London,
September 1996, 330 pages, Hardcover, ISBN 0826407447.
(editor): Ethik und Vernunft: Schopenhauer in unserer Zeit. Schopenhauer-
Studien 5. Passagen Verlag. Vienna, 1995, 387 pages, Paperback, ISBN 3851650239.
(editor): Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer: Philosophical Writings. The
German Library 27. The Continuum International Publishing Group. New York,
London, July 1994, 300 pages, Paperback, ISBN 0826407293.
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche Und Die Kunst. Schopenhauer-Studien 4. Passagen
Verlag. Vienna, 1992, 400 pages.
(Editor with Jacques Poulain), Arno Münster (Translation). Penser après
Heidegger. La Philosophie en commun. L'Harmattan. Paris, 1992, 360 pages,
Paperback (Broché), ISBN 2738410642.
Ereignis Technik. Passagen Philosophie 33. Passagen Verlag. Vienna, 1990,
245 pages, Paperback, ISBN 390076736X.
Schopenhauer In Der Postmoderne. Schopenhauer-Studien 3. Passagen Verlag.
Vienna, 1989, 400 pages.
(editor): Zeitkritik Nach Heidegger. Reihe Philosophie 9. Die blaue Eule.
Essen, 1988, 240 pages.
Schopenhauer Aktualität: Ein Philosoph wird neu gelesen. Schopenhauer-
Studien 1/2. Passagen Verlag. Vienna, 1988, 400 pages.
Schopenhauer. Insel-Almanach 1985. Insel. Frankfurt, 1985, 249 pages,
Paperback, ISBN 345814188X.
Schopenhauer Und Nietzsche. Schopenhauer-Jahrbuch 1984. W.Kramer.
Frankfurt, 1984, 326 pages.
Zeit Der Ernte: Studien zum Stand der Schopenhauer-Forschung. Frommann-
Holzboog. Stuttgart, 1983, 447 pages.
Technik und Gelassenheit. Zeitkritik nach Heidegger. Fermenta philosophica.
Alber Freiburg. München, 1983, 274 pages. Hiroshi Kojima (Partial
Translation). Niigata University Press. Niigata, 1986.
Ereignis Technik: Heidegger und die Frage nach der Technik. Dissertation.
Hamburg, 1980, 310 pages.
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