The most representative studies about the George Circle in the last fifteen years showed a growing interest in the poet’s influence on the scientific activity of his disciples. Many of them pointed out that they operated on a common foundation of guiding principles, values and beliefs while regarding a wide range of academic disciplines in which they emerged. These disciplines ranged from philology, historiography and philosophy to art history, musicology and even sociology and economics. The aim of this research is to identify the epistemological presuppositions and to describe the theoretical postulates which legitimate and simultaneously delimit this scientific practice, assuming that the scholarly production of the circle is subject to a paradigm that is quite coherent. Indeed, such a paradigm reflects a strong authoritative and ideologically conditioned point of view. Nevertheless, rather than demonize it as a fruit of a kind of “aesthetic fundamentalism” or “antimodernism”, the Georgean doctrine is conceived in this context as a product of a holistic worldview. This worldview provides George’s scholars orientation in the burning cultural debates of the time about the crisis of science and civilization. In this respect, the protagonists of this survey are not merely considered as scholars with an outstanding methodological background, but as science theoreticians - namely as those for whom science represents an object of reflection and critique both as a social institution and as a system of asseveration and verification of knowledge. Hence, this survey describes the evolution of a discourse about science by means of the analysis of its crucial points. The Georgean credo is seen as an alternative scientific paradigm that openly challenges legitimacies and conventions supported by positivism. The first chapter is preliminary. It outlines the scientific-historical context, in which the leitmotifs of the Georgean science critique develop. The intellectual and artistic society’s claims about a “crisis” of science and civilization are em-bedded in the wide discursive framework of a crisis of the basic structures of scientific culture within fin-de-siècle Germany. Nietzsche’s critique of civilization anticipates all of the most important themes and questions, so that the topoi of his thought - such as his philosophy of the body and the Will to Power - are considered paradigmatic for this discourse. Moreover, in the eyes of many other scholars and scientists, the general idea of a crisis of science leads to a loss of credibility in its cognitive structures. The Newtonian perspective on the physical world is often overthrown by a new-romantic view of life and nature, which is to be observed at the time in Germany in some scientific trends such as popular biology and the philosophy of perception. As the philosopher Georg Simmel stated in a provocative remark, the contemporary philosophical and scientific culture should get “back to Goethe” and his artistic and morphological view of nature. Despite the well known opinion that bridging art and science is impossible (“Von mir aus führt kein Weg zur Wissenschaft”), the historical figure of Stefan George became the centre of a literary and philosophical movement destined to leave a mark in the debate about the modernization and target values of science in the 1920s. At around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of young writers and scholars sharing his beliefs grows up and elects him as their master. George therefore becomes aware of the necessity of making compromises between art and science, or rather between art and scholarship, which is, among other things, the reason for his gradual shift from the autotelic poetics of impression (“Stimmung”) - the so-called “soft aestheticism” - to the gnomic style of the last collections, a form of “hard aestheticism”. George’s poetics can therefore be seen as the epistemological ground of the scholarly activity of his disciples. This process must be considered as a mutual one that is forwarded by the poet himself in order to promote the reception of his work within the cultural élite (“Bildungsbürgertum”) as well as by his disciples, as his personal teaching fulfils a need for a strong moral and spiritual guide. This is to be considered as being widespread in their generation. The second chapter describes these synergies. George’s disciples identify themselves with his poetical values and thoughts and look at him as a living ex-ample of wisdom. They oppose his vision of nature and man as a whole to the modern fragmentation of knowledge, as it results from the dualistic split between reason and emotion, or rather between spirit and matter. In light of these facts, it is clear that the George Circle builds a cultural movement in which elements of a peculiar literary tradition going from Plato to Nietzsche, from Dante to Goethe, Hölderlin and Jean Paul are revisited through the eyes of George’s poetics and are thereby recast in the cultural discourse as a new form of anti-scientific knowledge through ideas, intuition and poetic form. Moving from these presuppositions, the third chapter analyses the philoso-phical background of the Georgean movement. Two of the circle’s important achievements include the discovery of Henri Bergson’s theory of intuition and “creative evolution” as well as the rediscovery of Plato’s idea as being the aes-thetic, political and hermeneutical basis of human knowledge. Due to this innovative approach to platonic philosophy, the George Circle sides against the so-called Neo-Kantian philosophers, which simultaneously attempt a logical in-terpretation of Platonism and, moreover, a new moral and epistemological foundation of science from a traditional logical-systematic point of view. With regard to the logocentric categories and the dualism between fact and validity of the Neo-Kantian philosophy of science, the circle opposes its ontological per-spective in the form of a strong realism, which Edith Landmann defined as being “transcendent”. The Georgean movement already showed a tendency to shift from aesthetics to ontological positions in the Blätter für die Kunst. In particular, this trend is to be observed in the contributions of Ludwig Klages. Following his interpretation of the world as a living cosmos, he considers the aesthetic subject as a micro-cosmos in the whole of nature - that is to say, as a direct expression of its life-shaping power. Thus, aesthetic creativity becomes a metaphysical principle of a universal “shaping force” through which the classical elements of poetics acquire an ontological status. His short book on George’s poetry carries on this line of thought and simultaneously paves the way for the reception of Bergson’s philosophy of life within the circle. Nevertheless, vitalistic elements are in fact strained by the preponderance of a sort of neo-platonic idealism on the one hand and by the strong Georgean conception of form as “Gestalt” on the other. Moreover, rather than adhering to Bergson’s idea of the copresence in man of an extended body and an unextended soul, the conception of the body as “Leib” confirms the Greek ideal of man as a psychosomatic whole. Rediscovering Plato means rediscovering dialectic as the way to both know things as a whole and to understand each other as human beings through a process of hermeneutical penetration. In addition to these aspects, the platonic educational myth of the dialogues as based on concepts such as psychagogy, pederastic love and mutual respect between a master and disciples acquires a paradigm value within the circle, even influencing it in its self-representations as a scholarly community beyond the contingency of modernity. In any case, the utopian character of the Georgean representation of Platonism is evident. The fourth chapter begins the proper and focussed discussion of the epis-temological program of the George Circle, as it is promulgated through the Jahrbücher für die geistige Bewegung, the theoretical forum of the Georgean school. In this context, these very first publications intend to raise burning questions about the arbitrary representation of the world of modern sciences. The loss of contact with life due to the rushing development of technologies in the late nineteenth century is pointed out. Challenging the positivistic idea of history as a teleological linear progress towards welfare and civilization, they provide an outlook of history which takes its recursive and cyclic nature into consideration. For the Georgeans, human history knows neither an absolute state nor an indefinite progress, but rather energetic centres of culture destined to periodically expand and implode like living organisms. George’s disciples endeavour to relativise the adialectic presumption of sci-entific conceptuality by overcoming it through the dialectic between “shaping” and “ordering power”. On this ground, intuition and inspiration (the moment of the “Kairos”) become the main instruments to understand reality. Moreover, through the distinction between “essence” and “relation”, scientific conceptual constructions lose their validity as an undisputable means of knowledge. If un-derstanding life through experience means experiencing it as a whole, the scientific conceptual segmentation can by no means give a truthful account of reality as such. This is just the deep sense of the hermeneutical practice of the “Erlebnis” as the functional totality of the intellectual and the emotional compo-nents of the human mind, clearly taken from Dilthey’s psychology of comprehension. It is on this basis that the neo-romantic and neo-platonic idea of a universe unified by Eros as its shaping power takes root within the George Circle. The nucleus of this conception that considers living reality as a creation of the human mind is found in a peculiar development of the Gestalt theory; it characterises the circle and so has to be considered as being separate from the mainstream tradition of German Gestalt psychology from around 1900. In fact, the history of the Gestalt concept exists in a broader cultural context including not only theoreticians like Ehrenfels or Wertheimer, but also great philosophers of nature and artists like Herder, Goethe and Carus. Thus, the fifth chapter deals with the definition of the Gestalt concept with regard to his evolution within modern German Classicism until the threshold of the 20th century, in order to understand its usage within the George Circle. In their opinion, Gestalt represents the form-shaping organic principle of every essence. Following this postulate, anything which is more than the sum of its parts and which simultaneously overdetermines its parts must be considered as a totality. Though George does not use it within his poems specifically, this term plays a very important role within his poetics because it indicates the very magical moment of recollection of life into the artistic form of the poem and, together, underlines the mythopoetic function of poetry per se. Thereafter, the proper philosophical and methodological systematization of the Georgean Ge-stalt theory is actually carried out by his disciples in the most consequent and dogmatic manner by Friedrich Wolters in a homonymous essay in the Jahrbücher. The holistic aspects of this theory, such as the recurring images and metaphors trying to define the “Gestalt” in the writings of the George Circle are given consideration, as well as some epistemological implications of this view concerning Giambattista Vico’s hermeneutical statement “verum ipsum factum”. With reference to these assumptions that are distilled from numerous pro-grammatic assertions, the following chapter describes the specific devices of the philology of the circle. The “Erlebnis” of the poet’s world and the unifying craft of interest as “inter-esse” are considered to be the initial point of an understand-ing process whose intrinsically hermeneutic function allows the interpreter and the interpreted to meet each other within a common cultural horizon. The Georgeans thus anticipate – and together revisit – some important items of the great German tradition of hermeneutics. Such a perspective on historical factic-ity within the so-called Gestalt-books, proceeds from literary analysis and interpretation rather than from data accumulation. Therefore, the bio-bibliographical interest yields to the celebration of the genius as a “Gestalt” that is always on the borderline between formalism and charismatic personalism. Some of George’s disciples like Gundolf, Bertram and Kantorowicz are conscious of the work of shaping the influence of great men within history and of the fact that their influence mirrors the shape of legend or myth in literary sources. For this reason, historical truth is to be found in the quality of representation and view (“Schau”) of the historian, and not in the quantity of details in order to support his arbitrary hypotheses. The historiography of the George Circle therefore becomes as self-referential as a work of art. Hence, the Georgean approach to history arouses the suspicions of the scientific community, whose critical statements are analysed at the end of the chapter as a result of a reaction against the operative closure of the Georgean research. The seventh chapter deals with the debate about Max Weber’s theory of sci-entific objectivity and his speech on Science as a Vocation, which arose within the circle around 1920. Despite pronounced internal antagonisms, common guide-lines are delineated among the Georgean reactions to Weber’s controversial writing. At the beginning of the 20s, the failure of a programmatic unity be-comes noticeable, since it lacks a feedback response from the centre in many cases. In the wake of the main opinions of the Jahrbücher, the Georgeans support a conception of science as education to the values of life and spirit (“Bildung”), abandoning an idea of scientific knowledge as self-referential conceptual structure. Relating to the Weberian claim for objectivity of judgement, the problem of science ethics and morality is tackled by George’s followers from different angles. The pamphlet The Vocation of Science, written by Erich von Kahler, demol-ishes the Weberian theory of science, piece after piece. This text, built upon Friedrich Gundolf’s writings and theories, is based on the conviction that human knowledge must not be an abstract system because it is regarded as a historical phenomenon, and that human progress is not linear, but broken. Through this negative perspective, von Kahler’s model of scientific evolution underscores the alterity of the various moments of the history of knowledge. Thus, in the style of Goethe’s theory of the “Urbilder”, the scholar comes back to a morphological and anti-causal point of view. To him, science means knowledge of organic essences and their conditional factors. Furthermore, he gives an outline of the method that his “new science”, which is grounded on the primacy of the community over the individual and of the moment of the representation over the moment of the research, ought to follow. The final chapter considers Edith Landmann’s philosophy of knowledge. Despite her marginality in the philosophical debates of the early 20s, she plays a fundamental role within the George Circle because she develops the Georgean discourse to a systematic psychology of perception and knowledge as transcen-dence, in which she makes no mystery of taking her cue from her relationship with the poet. Her main work, The Transcendence of Knowledge, revives this ob-solete term coming from Scholasticism in 20th century philosophy, anticipating some fundamental issues of Existentialism. Supporting a “transcendent realism”, Landmann looks at transcendence as a function of the holistic structure of the human mind. Thus, to transcend is seen as a natural process regarding the human being as a whole, as if it were plunged within the reality that surrounds him. So, in this model the intellectual features of mind are as important and as veridicious as the sensual ones because knowing the objective world is considered the fruit of the needs of a complex but unitary organism. As far as knowledge is able to afford the totality, in Landmann’s opinion, by its very nature, the highest form of understanding will be a form of total knowledge (“Gesamterkenntnis”) resulting from the synthesis of all partial moments of perception and evaluation (“Teilerkenntnis”). The chapter and the book end with a consideration about the epistemologi-cal contraposition between faith and certainty in Landmann’s philosophy, through which both the most reactionary and the most innovative elements of the Georgean theory of knowledge are brought to light. Landmann’s gnoseology eventually remains anchored to the charismatic values of the great man, but she simultaneously anticipates some central issues of holism.

Gesamterkennen Zur Wissenschaftskritik und Gestalttheorie im George-Kreis

ROSSI, FRANCESCO
2011-01-01

Abstract

The most representative studies about the George Circle in the last fifteen years showed a growing interest in the poet’s influence on the scientific activity of his disciples. Many of them pointed out that they operated on a common foundation of guiding principles, values and beliefs while regarding a wide range of academic disciplines in which they emerged. These disciplines ranged from philology, historiography and philosophy to art history, musicology and even sociology and economics. The aim of this research is to identify the epistemological presuppositions and to describe the theoretical postulates which legitimate and simultaneously delimit this scientific practice, assuming that the scholarly production of the circle is subject to a paradigm that is quite coherent. Indeed, such a paradigm reflects a strong authoritative and ideologically conditioned point of view. Nevertheless, rather than demonize it as a fruit of a kind of “aesthetic fundamentalism” or “antimodernism”, the Georgean doctrine is conceived in this context as a product of a holistic worldview. This worldview provides George’s scholars orientation in the burning cultural debates of the time about the crisis of science and civilization. In this respect, the protagonists of this survey are not merely considered as scholars with an outstanding methodological background, but as science theoreticians - namely as those for whom science represents an object of reflection and critique both as a social institution and as a system of asseveration and verification of knowledge. Hence, this survey describes the evolution of a discourse about science by means of the analysis of its crucial points. The Georgean credo is seen as an alternative scientific paradigm that openly challenges legitimacies and conventions supported by positivism. The first chapter is preliminary. It outlines the scientific-historical context, in which the leitmotifs of the Georgean science critique develop. The intellectual and artistic society’s claims about a “crisis” of science and civilization are em-bedded in the wide discursive framework of a crisis of the basic structures of scientific culture within fin-de-siècle Germany. Nietzsche’s critique of civilization anticipates all of the most important themes and questions, so that the topoi of his thought - such as his philosophy of the body and the Will to Power - are considered paradigmatic for this discourse. Moreover, in the eyes of many other scholars and scientists, the general idea of a crisis of science leads to a loss of credibility in its cognitive structures. The Newtonian perspective on the physical world is often overthrown by a new-romantic view of life and nature, which is to be observed at the time in Germany in some scientific trends such as popular biology and the philosophy of perception. As the philosopher Georg Simmel stated in a provocative remark, the contemporary philosophical and scientific culture should get “back to Goethe” and his artistic and morphological view of nature. Despite the well known opinion that bridging art and science is impossible (“Von mir aus führt kein Weg zur Wissenschaft”), the historical figure of Stefan George became the centre of a literary and philosophical movement destined to leave a mark in the debate about the modernization and target values of science in the 1920s. At around the turn of the twentieth century, a group of young writers and scholars sharing his beliefs grows up and elects him as their master. George therefore becomes aware of the necessity of making compromises between art and science, or rather between art and scholarship, which is, among other things, the reason for his gradual shift from the autotelic poetics of impression (“Stimmung”) - the so-called “soft aestheticism” - to the gnomic style of the last collections, a form of “hard aestheticism”. George’s poetics can therefore be seen as the epistemological ground of the scholarly activity of his disciples. This process must be considered as a mutual one that is forwarded by the poet himself in order to promote the reception of his work within the cultural élite (“Bildungsbürgertum”) as well as by his disciples, as his personal teaching fulfils a need for a strong moral and spiritual guide. This is to be considered as being widespread in their generation. The second chapter describes these synergies. George’s disciples identify themselves with his poetical values and thoughts and look at him as a living ex-ample of wisdom. They oppose his vision of nature and man as a whole to the modern fragmentation of knowledge, as it results from the dualistic split between reason and emotion, or rather between spirit and matter. In light of these facts, it is clear that the George Circle builds a cultural movement in which elements of a peculiar literary tradition going from Plato to Nietzsche, from Dante to Goethe, Hölderlin and Jean Paul are revisited through the eyes of George’s poetics and are thereby recast in the cultural discourse as a new form of anti-scientific knowledge through ideas, intuition and poetic form. Moving from these presuppositions, the third chapter analyses the philoso-phical background of the Georgean movement. Two of the circle’s important achievements include the discovery of Henri Bergson’s theory of intuition and “creative evolution” as well as the rediscovery of Plato’s idea as being the aes-thetic, political and hermeneutical basis of human knowledge. Due to this innovative approach to platonic philosophy, the George Circle sides against the so-called Neo-Kantian philosophers, which simultaneously attempt a logical in-terpretation of Platonism and, moreover, a new moral and epistemological foundation of science from a traditional logical-systematic point of view. With regard to the logocentric categories and the dualism between fact and validity of the Neo-Kantian philosophy of science, the circle opposes its ontological per-spective in the form of a strong realism, which Edith Landmann defined as being “transcendent”. The Georgean movement already showed a tendency to shift from aesthetics to ontological positions in the Blätter für die Kunst. In particular, this trend is to be observed in the contributions of Ludwig Klages. Following his interpretation of the world as a living cosmos, he considers the aesthetic subject as a micro-cosmos in the whole of nature - that is to say, as a direct expression of its life-shaping power. Thus, aesthetic creativity becomes a metaphysical principle of a universal “shaping force” through which the classical elements of poetics acquire an ontological status. His short book on George’s poetry carries on this line of thought and simultaneously paves the way for the reception of Bergson’s philosophy of life within the circle. Nevertheless, vitalistic elements are in fact strained by the preponderance of a sort of neo-platonic idealism on the one hand and by the strong Georgean conception of form as “Gestalt” on the other. Moreover, rather than adhering to Bergson’s idea of the copresence in man of an extended body and an unextended soul, the conception of the body as “Leib” confirms the Greek ideal of man as a psychosomatic whole. Rediscovering Plato means rediscovering dialectic as the way to both know things as a whole and to understand each other as human beings through a process of hermeneutical penetration. In addition to these aspects, the platonic educational myth of the dialogues as based on concepts such as psychagogy, pederastic love and mutual respect between a master and disciples acquires a paradigm value within the circle, even influencing it in its self-representations as a scholarly community beyond the contingency of modernity. In any case, the utopian character of the Georgean representation of Platonism is evident. The fourth chapter begins the proper and focussed discussion of the epis-temological program of the George Circle, as it is promulgated through the Jahrbücher für die geistige Bewegung, the theoretical forum of the Georgean school. In this context, these very first publications intend to raise burning questions about the arbitrary representation of the world of modern sciences. The loss of contact with life due to the rushing development of technologies in the late nineteenth century is pointed out. Challenging the positivistic idea of history as a teleological linear progress towards welfare and civilization, they provide an outlook of history which takes its recursive and cyclic nature into consideration. For the Georgeans, human history knows neither an absolute state nor an indefinite progress, but rather energetic centres of culture destined to periodically expand and implode like living organisms. George’s disciples endeavour to relativise the adialectic presumption of sci-entific conceptuality by overcoming it through the dialectic between “shaping” and “ordering power”. On this ground, intuition and inspiration (the moment of the “Kairos”) become the main instruments to understand reality. Moreover, through the distinction between “essence” and “relation”, scientific conceptual constructions lose their validity as an undisputable means of knowledge. If un-derstanding life through experience means experiencing it as a whole, the scientific conceptual segmentation can by no means give a truthful account of reality as such. This is just the deep sense of the hermeneutical practice of the “Erlebnis” as the functional totality of the intellectual and the emotional compo-nents of the human mind, clearly taken from Dilthey’s psychology of comprehension. It is on this basis that the neo-romantic and neo-platonic idea of a universe unified by Eros as its shaping power takes root within the George Circle. The nucleus of this conception that considers living reality as a creation of the human mind is found in a peculiar development of the Gestalt theory; it characterises the circle and so has to be considered as being separate from the mainstream tradition of German Gestalt psychology from around 1900. In fact, the history of the Gestalt concept exists in a broader cultural context including not only theoreticians like Ehrenfels or Wertheimer, but also great philosophers of nature and artists like Herder, Goethe and Carus. Thus, the fifth chapter deals with the definition of the Gestalt concept with regard to his evolution within modern German Classicism until the threshold of the 20th century, in order to understand its usage within the George Circle. In their opinion, Gestalt represents the form-shaping organic principle of every essence. Following this postulate, anything which is more than the sum of its parts and which simultaneously overdetermines its parts must be considered as a totality. Though George does not use it within his poems specifically, this term plays a very important role within his poetics because it indicates the very magical moment of recollection of life into the artistic form of the poem and, together, underlines the mythopoetic function of poetry per se. Thereafter, the proper philosophical and methodological systematization of the Georgean Ge-stalt theory is actually carried out by his disciples in the most consequent and dogmatic manner by Friedrich Wolters in a homonymous essay in the Jahrbücher. The holistic aspects of this theory, such as the recurring images and metaphors trying to define the “Gestalt” in the writings of the George Circle are given consideration, as well as some epistemological implications of this view concerning Giambattista Vico’s hermeneutical statement “verum ipsum factum”. With reference to these assumptions that are distilled from numerous pro-grammatic assertions, the following chapter describes the specific devices of the philology of the circle. The “Erlebnis” of the poet’s world and the unifying craft of interest as “inter-esse” are considered to be the initial point of an understand-ing process whose intrinsically hermeneutic function allows the interpreter and the interpreted to meet each other within a common cultural horizon. The Georgeans thus anticipate – and together revisit – some important items of the great German tradition of hermeneutics. Such a perspective on historical factic-ity within the so-called Gestalt-books, proceeds from literary analysis and interpretation rather than from data accumulation. Therefore, the bio-bibliographical interest yields to the celebration of the genius as a “Gestalt” that is always on the borderline between formalism and charismatic personalism. Some of George’s disciples like Gundolf, Bertram and Kantorowicz are conscious of the work of shaping the influence of great men within history and of the fact that their influence mirrors the shape of legend or myth in literary sources. For this reason, historical truth is to be found in the quality of representation and view (“Schau”) of the historian, and not in the quantity of details in order to support his arbitrary hypotheses. The historiography of the George Circle therefore becomes as self-referential as a work of art. Hence, the Georgean approach to history arouses the suspicions of the scientific community, whose critical statements are analysed at the end of the chapter as a result of a reaction against the operative closure of the Georgean research. The seventh chapter deals with the debate about Max Weber’s theory of sci-entific objectivity and his speech on Science as a Vocation, which arose within the circle around 1920. Despite pronounced internal antagonisms, common guide-lines are delineated among the Georgean reactions to Weber’s controversial writing. At the beginning of the 20s, the failure of a programmatic unity be-comes noticeable, since it lacks a feedback response from the centre in many cases. In the wake of the main opinions of the Jahrbücher, the Georgeans support a conception of science as education to the values of life and spirit (“Bildung”), abandoning an idea of scientific knowledge as self-referential conceptual structure. Relating to the Weberian claim for objectivity of judgement, the problem of science ethics and morality is tackled by George’s followers from different angles. The pamphlet The Vocation of Science, written by Erich von Kahler, demol-ishes the Weberian theory of science, piece after piece. This text, built upon Friedrich Gundolf’s writings and theories, is based on the conviction that human knowledge must not be an abstract system because it is regarded as a historical phenomenon, and that human progress is not linear, but broken. Through this negative perspective, von Kahler’s model of scientific evolution underscores the alterity of the various moments of the history of knowledge. Thus, in the style of Goethe’s theory of the “Urbilder”, the scholar comes back to a morphological and anti-causal point of view. To him, science means knowledge of organic essences and their conditional factors. Furthermore, he gives an outline of the method that his “new science”, which is grounded on the primacy of the community over the individual and of the moment of the representation over the moment of the research, ought to follow. The final chapter considers Edith Landmann’s philosophy of knowledge. Despite her marginality in the philosophical debates of the early 20s, she plays a fundamental role within the George Circle because she develops the Georgean discourse to a systematic psychology of perception and knowledge as transcen-dence, in which she makes no mystery of taking her cue from her relationship with the poet. Her main work, The Transcendence of Knowledge, revives this ob-solete term coming from Scholasticism in 20th century philosophy, anticipating some fundamental issues of Existentialism. Supporting a “transcendent realism”, Landmann looks at transcendence as a function of the holistic structure of the human mind. Thus, to transcend is seen as a natural process regarding the human being as a whole, as if it were plunged within the reality that surrounds him. So, in this model the intellectual features of mind are as important and as veridicious as the sensual ones because knowing the objective world is considered the fruit of the needs of a complex but unitary organism. As far as knowledge is able to afford the totality, in Landmann’s opinion, by its very nature, the highest form of understanding will be a form of total knowledge (“Gesamterkenntnis”) resulting from the synthesis of all partial moments of perception and evaluation (“Teilerkenntnis”). The chapter and the book end with a consideration about the epistemologi-cal contraposition between faith and certainty in Landmann’s philosophy, through which both the most reactionary and the most innovative elements of the Georgean theory of knowledge are brought to light. Landmann’s gnoseology eventually remains anchored to the charismatic values of the great man, but she simultaneously anticipates some central issues of holism.
2011
Rossi, Francesco
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11568/145768
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