Program Area Knowledge of Life

When modern territorial states began to take care of the life and death of their citizens, new methods such as statistics gave rise to biopolitics as a new knowledge of life. This knowledge organizes and determines Western societies to this day. Because politics, under pressure from the modern life sciences, have largely ceded its decision-making powers to the domain of the law, we are currently witnessing an unprecedented juridification of life. This juridification corresponds to a disenfranchisement of people from war and crisis regions as they are being reduced to their bare need for survival and deprived of any legal claims (currently: refugees).

However, there are other frontiers where knowledge of life massively interferes with life and its traditional understanding and ultimately changing both. New technologies have not only led to new ways of looking at life (as in the case of medical imaging), but also to new kinds of machines. As in the case of artificial intelligence, these are capable of acting independently and could therefore potentially be considered autonomous. Thus, the ever-unstable boundary between man and machine, the living and the non-living, is falling under increasing scrutiny. Additionally, the “hard” sciences, and especially the young neurosciences, are increasingly claiming interpretive sovereignty over those aspects of life that have traditionally been considered the province of the humanities.

We address this critical situation through interdisciplinary research on these different forms, and especially on the previous history of the knowledge of life. In the 18th century, various discourses—especially in aesthetics, early biology, and literature—led to the discovery of life and the living as a new subject in its own right, through a distinctive set of rules of observation. The discovery that all living things, in particular, are always more than the sum of their parts and that they unfold over time. It was only with the disciplinary differentiation during the 19th century that approaches of the life sciences separated from those of the humanities that analyzed life and its expressions with their own methods. In line with the pre- and multidisciplinary origins of the knowledge of life in the 18th century, we do not seek to overcome the history of this separation, but rather to reconstruct it by exploring its genesis and further development. We will pay particular attention to the forms in which the diverse knowledge of life has been transmitted since pre-modern times. Their diachronic analysis beyond the turning point of the Sattelzeit provides insights into a history of the knowledge of life that far exceeds a mere retelling of the development of disciplines.

Literature plays a particularly important role here. For centuries, one of the central concerns of philosophy and religion has been the question of how to live—or not to live. While literature has always been an often-idiosyncratic way of mediating philosophical and religious concerns, modernity saw the rise of both new disciplines on how to live, such as pedagogy, and of the emancipating arts around 1800, and first and foremost: literature. Since then, life and literature have been the preferred subjects of literature. Modern literature has also remained a form of knowledge of life and must be studied from this perspective.

Current Research Projects

Projects of this program area, completed or processed in the past

(selected, chronologically sorted by year of completion)