Dative Life

Dative Life

152 pages

Softcover

Genre: Philosophy, Essay, Nonfiction

Where is hold, where is attitude? What to hold on to? To one of the prevailing views, to the contradiction to the school opinions of philosophy, to one‘s own wavering judgment? Hannes Böhringer sticks to the rationality of language. For it is generous and bountiful. It grants freedom and gives support. It gives the subject, who has made himself the object, the direct object, the dative. The dative is existential. The ego no longer has to stiffen in its subjectivity, nor does it and does not lose itself in objectivity. The I finds itself indirectly in the dative: something has happened to it, encountered it, befallen it, occurred to it. "Language encloses me. I cannot escape it. But it leaves me free. I am inside and released outside into what is happening, into life. The given becomes an event. Outside is fresh air. The closer I get to the language, the closer it comes to me it comes to me, the more objects become events." The narrowness of everyday life opens up, we see the world around us more clearly when we learn to see it through Hannes Böhringer‘s eyes.

German title: Leben im Dativ
ISBN: 978-3-95757-954-6
Publisher: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
Publication date: 2021
Series: Fröhliche Wissenschaft Vol. 173

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Hannes Böhringer, born in 1948 in the Rhineland, was a professor of philosophy, most recently at the Kunsthochschule in Braunschweig. He has published on art, architecture, design and film. His publications include In Search of Simplicity. A Poetics, Hard Bank.Art Philosophy Architecture and Emergency Solution. Culture and Christianity.