Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich: Filosofie rozšířeného komunitarismu

• Authors: Vlastimil Hála

Title variants

EN

Klaus Michael Meyer-Abich: The philosophy of a widened communitarianism

• Languages of publication: CS

Abstracts

EN

The central thought of K. M. Meyer-Abich is his conception of nature as a community not only of all living beings, but also of the “elements” constituting nature, and of “artefacts”. Instead of the environment (“Umwelt”) the author thus speaks of “the world as a community (“Mitwelt”)”. Meyer-Abich characterises his conception not as (merely) biocentric but rather as “physiocentric”. He uses the title of one of the key approaches in moral and political philosophy: communitarianism. He therefore talks of a “widened communitarianism” – that is of a communitarianism broadened to include nature and everything which is involved in it. This conception has consequences for Meyer-Abich‘s understanding of the relation between nature and culture: nature is in some way “extended” in culture and there is no clear dividing-line between the two. The author of the article takes a critical view, above all, to Meyer-Abich’s underestimation of the qualitative difference of the way of being of man and other forms of life (especially animals), which leads to the neglect of the essentially human standing in nature (which H. Plessner, for example, has described as “excentric positionality”). This is not only the condition for the possibility of the creation of a culture as a specifically human phenomenon, but also, above all, the condition for the treatment of nature itself as a whole. Meyer-Abich’s ideal of transforming man from an interplane­tary conqueror into a being grounded on the Earth (“Sesshaftigkeit”), is something that the author takes to be thoroughly noble, but nevertheless illusory.

Discipline

• PHILOSOPHY: PHILOSOPHY

• Publisher: Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Filosofický časopis (Philosophical Journal)
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 55
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 209-228
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Vlastimil Hála

• Filosofický časopis, redakce, Filosofický ústav AV ČR, v.v.i., Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic