Conference
05 Jul 2024 – 06 Jul 2024

The Absolute Idealism of Reception

Venue: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Eberhard-Lämmert-Saal, entrance Meierottostr. 8, 10719 Berlin
Organized by Patrick Eiden-Offe (ZfL), Thomas Khurana (University of Potsdam/Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy)

“Reception is artistic, production bureaucratic.”
(Rainald Goetz, Absolute Idealism)

Contemporary thought has seen a remarkable renaissance of “absolute idealism.” While absolute idealism was considered for many years as an obscure and misguided philosophical attitude of the past, marked by exaggerated self-confidence and an empty form self-complacency, it has become again a term of affirmative self-identification. Authors that identify as absolute idealists suggest it defines a superior standpoint that allows us to overcome the endless battles between realism and idealism and finally get the relation of mind and world, self-knowledge and knowledge of nature right.

In developing this stance, the focus of the discussion has clearly been on the importance of the boundless spontaneity, activity, and productivity of the mind. At this conference, we want to explore the idea that this may yield a misguided notion of absolute idealism, nothing more than a hyperbolic form of subjective idealism. Absolute idealism, if there is such a thing, can only become available to us by developing a deeper conception of the mind’s receptivity and its exposure to exteriority and alterity. If there is to be absolute idealism, that is, it must be one of receptivity.

There are many ways to conceive of this receptivity and many ways to approach its significance, from German Idealism and Romanticism to Phenomenology and Critical Theory, from Metaphysics and Epistemology to Aesthetics and Social Philosophy. The conference aims to bring together a variety of these approaches to raise the open question as to whether exploring its receptive side allows us to develop a deeper, more convincing form of absolute idealism, or rather forces us to go beyond absolute idealism after all.

A collaboration between the Center for Post-Kantian Philosophy and the ZfL.

To get access to the two texts we’ll be discussing in the evening session of July 5, 2024, please write to info@cpkp.net.

 

Fig. above: Rainald Goetz during his Mosse Lecture at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2012, © Niels Leiser.

Program

Friday, 5 Jul 2024

10.00
Thomas Khurana: Absoluter Idealismus der Rezeption: Eine Einleitung

10.15
Lara Ostaric: Spontaneity and Receptivity in Schelling’s and Schopenhauer’s Conception of Creative Agency

11.45
Alexey Weißmüller: »Das absolut-Concrete, die Nacht des Selbst«: Bemerkungen zu Hegel und dem Schacht

14.30
Birgit Sandkaulen: Die absolute Reflexion und ihre Kritik in drei Modellen

16.00
Ästhetischer Idealismus und ästhetischer Materialismus
A conversation between Christoph Menke and David Wellbery, moderated by Thomas Khurana; on the basis of two texts:

  • Wellbery, Goethes »Iphigenie auf Tauris«. Ein Beitrag zur morphologischen Hermeneutik
  • Menke, Die Freiheit des Denkens. Kritik des Idealismus

 

Saturday, 6 Jul 2024

10.00
Patrick Eiden-Offe: Wenn von länger schon vergessenen Gegenständen phasenweise eine neue Faszination ausgeht: Erinnerung an den Hegel-Marxismus

11.30
Stefani Engelstein: Excitability, Love, and the Fortuity of Flaws in the Absolute around 1800

14.30
Eli Friedlander: Receptivity at the Heart of Language. Benjamin’s Idealism

16.15
Sebastian Rödl: Passive Passivität