The Philosophicum Lech attracts the adventure of thinking – Diepresse.com
The high alpine denk meeting in September is the « praise of the unavailable » with the topic of « adventure ». The curiosity of it was awakened in Vienna on Thursday.
« Imagine the two of them have an affair! » Something like that is often gossiped. But why is such amorous escapades called an « adventure », even if nobody swings with lianas about gorges? Because it disturbs the usual order, shouts and the participants jeopardize their collateral. They get involved in something that you cannot control and plan that happens to you. Philosophizing, thinking without the railing of empirical facts, can and should be such a risk. The Philosophicum Lech therefore also wants to break open: After the « disorder » as « sand in the gear » in the previous year, the Vorarlberg thinking workshop this year takes the « adventure » from September 23 to 28, with the « praise of unavailability ».
Barbara Bleisch, now for the second time co-head of the symposium together with co-founder Konrad Paul Liessmann, sparked curiosity on this topic on Thursday evening in Vienna when the anthology was presented. With boring questions: Is that still possible, regardless of loss of life, in our managed society with their fully casualty? Do we want that, do we dare? Hardly. It says: who dares wins. So what do we lose if we always play it safe?
Afterwards Liessmann and Köhlmeier wondered: What is the true adventure of our time? Your suggestion: the discovery of space. Writer Köhlmeier told the story of the US astronaut John Glenn, who first circled the earth three times in 1962 and then hurried to the place of his childhood because of the homesickness to lie down in the meadow on a stream. Philosopher Liessmann disturbed this romantic idea by remembering Günther Anders. In « The Blick from the Moon », his Viennese colleague analyzed in 1969 that an astronaut was not an adventurer: squeezed into his capsule, defined by the floor station and computer, he remains unfree, reduced to part of the machine.
And yet, said Liessmann, a trip to Mars could be the « only possible absolute adventure » today because it is (still) a one-way ticket. Anyone who steps them up, « loses the earth as a point of reference », will be able to communicate with us, and only the « added value » of their adventure comes from the experienced experiences. The participants in the Philosophicum are looking forward to the added value to break into the unknown of a thinker adventure – some places are still free.
