Para uma ética da humanidade: um estudo sobre filosofia prática na obra de Gerd Bornheim

Abstract

Our aim in this master's thesis is to answer the question of whether an original philosophical ethics can be seized in Gerd Bornheim's work. We built this research into three basic steps. Firstly, we try to present the elements of philosophical ethics as understood and developed by the author. Then, we seek to identify the possible intuitions, ideas and concepts of philosophical ethics problematized by him. Finally, we intend to discuss the categories presented and identified by taking as reference the main concepts carried out by Gerd Bornheim, in order to critically synthesize the elements of philosophical ethics present in his work, to comprehend whether there is any possible originality there. Therefore, we direct our efforts as follows: after a brief introduction, we present, in the first two sections, respectively, "The bourgeois drama" and "Ethics as a problem", our attempt to comply with the first two steps postulated for this study. In the following section, entitled "Totalizing difference", we intend to develop the third of the steps mentioned above, and thus build a possible answer to the problem posed for this research. Finally, in our concluding remarks, we bring an overview of the study pointing out some key highlights. From philosophical ethics, Gerd Bornheim treats less as the search for a founded normativity, than as the human being's experiential education process towards its responsibility. In short, it is the human being formation process for gregarious life that originates, precisely, in the experience of its own contradictions, and takes place through the singular game between the theoretical and practical dimensions of its own being, that is, it emanates from the sense of own human condition. And this is precisely why we argue for an "ethics of humanity": the meaning of the concept of humanity, here, therefore, is far beyond than a universal sign under which the whole set of particular human individuals is referred. It would be such an ethics that it would ontologically turn possible the reconciliation of the original split that occurred in the Neolithic revolution, namely, between both ontological dimensions of human being, that of the rational animal and that of the political animal, thus how they reconciled in the paths of the industrial revolution, both theoretical and practical dimensions of the rational animal? Thus, the bases by which the relationships between the individual and the norm are established would be reconfigured, coextensive as they are to all human experience, either by the new understanding of the concept of the individual, or by the new meaning that normativity could capture in the institution of the responsible agency by invention and situational immersion? How are these problems related to the modernity's deadlock and the crisis of the bourgeois project? What do they have to do with the perplexity of both contemporary individual and the crisis of the groundworks of normativity? And, to what extent they based on the comprehension of the sense and the recognition of the alterity? Such are our issues. [resumo fornecido pelo autor]