Current Research

The Team: Prof. Dr. Eberhard Rothfuß, MA. Lukas Pieroth, Dr. Thomas Dörfler 

The research project ANTHRO(TO)POS has its starting point in the observation that the prevailing understanding of space in human geography is insufficient to adequately capture the complex human-environment relationship or the "human-environment entanglement" (M. Scheler) and thus the everyday spatial experiences of human subjects in their physical-material as well as anthropological dimension. "The much-used phrase 'man has his environment' says nothing ontologically as long as this 'having' remains undefined. But what is meant by 'having the environment'?" (Sloterdijk, 2001, p. 398). In this context of human geography research, we would like to place the anthropological-physical (or: "natural-artificial") human condition at the center of the empirical, conceptual and theoretical perspective. By physical-material here we mean the mediated, reflexive and ex-centric position that results from the appropriated world through the cultural being human. In doing so, we rely on the thesis of accidental substantiality (H. Plessner), which necessarily arises as a concrete experience from man's 'interaction' with the (living) world and his peers (e.g. architecture, nature, others, etc.) and thus want to link philosophical anthropology, but also phenomenological thinking, to basic questions of human geography in a sustainable way and make it suitable for new research contexts (e.g. with physical geography and the didactics of geography).

Individual projects:

• Individuum est ineffabile & homo absconditus - How can anthropological phenomenological geographies be conceived in the 21st century? (Dissertation project - Lukas Pieroth, MA)
  
• Methodologies and methods for ANTHRO(TO)POS (habilitation project - Dr. Thomas Dörfler)
  
• ANTHRO(TO)POS - Foundations of a philosophical-anthropological human-environment geography (Prof. Dr. Eberhard Rothfuß)

This experience becomes substantial through the resistance of the world, i.e. through its own material (spatiality, substantiality, objectivity, organicity, etc.) and psycho-social existence (other presences). However, this relationship, this entanglement, is not to be thought of dichotomously, but rather in its own mutually related (nature) dialectic: no presence of other subjects without their physical-bodily matter and, above all, presence, no experience of nature without a subject.

"A discipline [...] that understands the human being in opposition to the world of objects misses the inner unity of the world to which the human being also belongs. It will open up a gulf between nature and spirit and subjectivize the specifically human way of being, which manifests itself in the creation of meaning as a synthetic achievement" (Holz, 2003, p. 74).

"Varieties of structuralism and constructivism overestimate the "mental dimension" (syntax, semiotics, difference, language, social construction, etc.). However, man does not only present himself as a "spiritual-moral-cultural" being, but also, and especially, as an "organic-sensual-natural" being. It is not possible to dissolve this dual-aspect way of life to one side or the other or to reduce one of these aspects to the other. Man lives in a psycho-physical conflict, the psycho-physical conflict is the center of human existence" (Plessner, 1928, p. 317).

"Man exists first and then creates his contingent being - man can be (almost) anything. "In a word, man must create his own being; by throwing himself into the world, suffering in it, struggling in it, he gradually defines himself; and the definition always remains open; one cannot say what a particular man is until he has died, or what humanity is until it has disappeared" (Sartre, 2016, p. 116).​                                             

This has far-reaching consequences for the cultural-social constructions with which humans settle on this planet: no construction without a (material, tangible, worldly) dimension of experience, no symbolic abstraction without a real-world background. These references, we believe, must be brought to the center of analysis above all in their pre-linguistic acquisition and not only after their linguistic culturalization, in order to recognize their bodily basis as the 'cause' of knowledge of the world: the body-body as the foundation of our knowledge of the world and its abstractions from it.

With this positioning, we hope to avoid some of the dead ends into which parts of human geography have 'maneuvered' themselves. On the one hand, this refers to the quasi-dogmatic - sometimes vulgar - (social) constructivist paradigm, according to which the world consists solely of the constructions and attributions of human actors - or, alternatively, discourses. This dogma ignores the fact that there is world acquisition beyond symbolization and discursivization, which has major consequences for geography in particular: Textbooks currently instruct us in this sense that there is no 'absolute' - optionally 'essential' - knowledge of the world, but only a relative, symbolically and culturally constructed one: some people like to see the world this way, others differently: the concept of contingency is hypostatized and overused.

However, beyond the banality that knowledge of the world is always perspectival, this position denies how, firstly, in the socio-cultural construction of the world, the objective is recognized (otherwise we could not communicate and act), namely in the typology of the object world (Husserl, MMP) as well as in the you-experience (Schütz) of the other, which leads, for example, to the recognition of object permanence (Piaget), without which no cognitive development of the human being would be possible. Another striking example is the fact that the ability to "construct" itself must first be learned in triadic interaction or that the ability to construct cannot itself be constructed again. The human being becomes an "I" (Martin Buber) through the "you" and cannot help but (initially) discover and experience an entire real world through joint learning - before intervening, acting and constructing in it. 

Secondly, the experience of the world as an experience of its dimensionality as well as its sociality is therefore based on certain fundamental human abilities, without which no cultural achievement as a 'superstructure' is possible: on the anthropological endowment of man (Plessner, Gehlen), which represents a biological condition sine qua non, but at the same time, through its cultural deficiency, forces the necessity of the social if man wants to build a way of life. 

One of our lines of argumentation is directed against these unilateralizations and their contradictions. We believe that it has therefore become necessary to enrich the discourse of human geography with new perspectives that can avoid such dead ends: (neo-)phenomenology and philosophical anthropology offer themselves, through their respective specific dialectical figures of thought and theory formation, not to drift into the binary absolutization of, for example, 'pure' cultural constructivism.

We would like to open up a double realist perspective in order to examine the spatial - space and its manifestations - in its dimensions of experience, which are both given to man and only possible: there is no space without man, and no man exists without space. This double realism is based on the fact that only dialectical and not superficial constructivist approaches can grasp the complexity of this relationship. What is realistic about this is, on the one hand, the view of man's natural endowment and the ontology of his surroundings, and, on the other, the reference to man with his only possible bodily and, based on this, cognitive adaptation of the world.  This is followed by the transformation of singular experience into culture (Dux 2001), which constitutes society. Singular experience, in turn, experiences the already objective aspects of the world as resistance, as well as the "generalized other" (Mead, Schütz), i.e. the social context of interpretation of the world excerpt that has already been dissolved in things, persons, concepts, etc.

This seemingly radical, but in fact rational step, following a catchy critique of prevailing theories, therefore implies basic theoretical work as well as the development of new or adapted methodologies for empirical work.