Concepts and Practices of Darstellung in Philosophy, Chemistry and Painting around 1800

Around 1800, the concept of "Darstellung" was introduced by Kant into the terminology of philosophy and was soon widely used and heatedly disputed in German Idealism and beyond. The history of this concept is not written and its systematical importance therefore rarely acknowledged. This research project explores the development of the concept from Kant to Hegel and aims at substantiating three hypotheses. The first hypothesis is that the concept of "Darstellung" has to be differentiated from 'representation'. The theory of representation of the Enlightenment was based on a concept of ideas and their preferably transparent communication through signs. In contrast, the concept of "Darstellung" brings into focus the complex processes, procedures and practices of "Darstellen" by which we can experience the general in the singular in an inherently vivid and reflexive way. With the new paradigm of "Darstellung", the world should not be represented and signified any more, but it had to be the object and even the subject of inherently reflexive and vivid processes of "Darstellung".

The second hypothesis is that the development of the concept of "Darstellung" is essentially linked to the philosophical confrontation with practices of ›Darstellung‹ in the sciences as well as in the arts. Already Kant introduces the concept with reference to the geometric practice of construction, but soon the concept of "Darstellung" will be linked with experimental practices in the natural sciences and especially in the evolving field of chemistry. Hegel’s concept of "spekulative Darstellung" is already connected to his criticism of mathematics and substantiates the speculative realism of concepts by a specific understanding of the chemical "Darstellung" of specific elements and compounds. Thus, we want to show how one of the most crucial terms in the numerous disputes about the self-conception of philosophy around 1800 is not only motivated by internal arguments, but also by the confrontation with evolving practices in the natural sciences. The project furthermore includes aesthetical debates on painting, because the arts—just as the sciences—are an important reference point for philosophy’s self-conception.

The third hypothesis is systematic and relates to contemporary debates on representation in the sciences and the arts. When today we discuss representation not as based on structural sign systems, but as a part of specific practices, we very often conceive representation as a concrete process and take also into consideration the artifacts involved. Obviously, these approaches resonate with the systematic interests linked to the concept of "Darstellung" which is why German texts today often benefit from the semantics of the word established around 1800. Because this historical resonance is not known, its elucidation promises to enhance our ongoing debates about representational practices and especially about the realism or constructivism of representation.

Participants:
PD Dr. Arno Schubbach
Prof. Dr. Michael Hampe
Jelscha Schmid

Literature:

Brady Bowman, (Hg.), Darstellung und Erkenntnis. Beiträge zur Rolle nichtpropositionaler Erkenntnisformen in der deutschen Philosophie und Literatur nach Kant, Paderborn 2007.
Thomas Sören Hoffmann, „Darstellung des Begriffs“. Zu einem Grundmotiv neueren Philosophierens im Ausgang von Kant, in: Kant als Bezugspunkt philosophischen Denkens. Festschrift für Peter Baumanns zum 75. Geburtstag, hg. von Hubertus Busche und Anton Schmitt, Würzburg 2010, 101-116.
Winfried Menninghaus, „Darstellung“. Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstocks Eröffnung eines neuen Paradigmas, in: Christiaan L. Hart Nibbrig (Hg.), Was heißt „Darstellen“? Frankfurt a. M. 1994, 205-226.
Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, Räume der Darstellung, Kapitel aus ders., Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Eine Geschichte der Proteinsynthese im Reagenzglas, Frankfurt a. M. 2006, 126-140.
Arno Schubbach, Von den Gründen des Triangels bei Kant, in: Gottfried Boehm und Matteo Burioni (Hrsg.), Der Grund. Das Feld des Sichtbaren. München 2012, 361-386.
Arno Schubbach, Kants Konzeption der geometrischen Darstellung. Zum mathematischen Gebrauch der Anschauung, to apear in 2016/17 in den Kant-Studien.

external pageThis Project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation.