Wolfgang Schirmacher
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 programÃÂÃÂs focus is on philosophy as applied to media and communication. Schirmacher states: ÃÂÃÂPhilosophy, in its genuine sense as a bold and creative questioning of the world, guides our approach.ÃÂÃÂ 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 ÃÂÃÂhomo generatorÃÂÃÂ is a realization of the hope and the angst of the philosophers after Hegel: ÃÂÃÂa Dasein beyond metaphysics, a human being which needs no Being, no certainty, no truth.ÃÂÃÂ 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. ÃÂÃÂHomo generator is a concrete beginning, unique but not original, self care without egoism.ÃÂÃÂ 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. ÃÂÃÂWe are the artificial beings among all others, our bodies are artifacts by nature.ÃÂÃÂ
In a paper presented at the International Congress for Phenomenology, Frankfurt, in 1985, and printed in Analecta Husserliana XXII, 1987, titled ÃÂÃÂThe Faces of Compassion: Toward a Post-Metaphysical Ethics,ÃÂÃÂ Schirmacher asks what shape morality will take in the search for an effective ethics for the technological age. He cites Arthur SchopenhauerÃÂÃÂs and Albert SchweitzerÃÂÃÂs 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. ÃÂÃÂIn being the artificial ones we are the open, undetermined ones. Intuitive knowledge knows nothing, and compassion knows no law.ÃÂÃÂ He indicates that ÃÂÃÂjustified individuality,ÃÂÃÂ 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 ÃÂÃÂit has been bent back into an active sensitizationÃÂÃÂ 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.ÃÂÃÂ 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 ÃÂÃÂThe End of Metaphysics ÃÂÃÂ What Does This Mean?ÃÂÃÂ Schirmacher addresses HeideggerÃÂÃÂs 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 ÃÂÃÂlearn a "bodily" language which precedes the division into subject and object, and admit the individual to a successful enterprise which needs no planning.ÃÂÃÂ
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 LyotardÃÂÃÂs 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 ÃÂÃÂopenness as our existential taste and co-evolutionary power as our design,ÃÂÃÂ 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.