“Regaining the other of reason for man’s self-understanding has been my work for the last 30 years.” This is how the philosopher Gernot Böhme described his research in retrospect in the 2012 study “I-Self”. According to Böhme, this “other of reason” was “in terms of content, nature, the human body, imagination, desire, feelings”. In fact, the insight that a merely reason-centered philosophy could only behave towards this other in the mode of devaluation was much older. In 1972 Böhme wrote an essay on the Kiel philosopher Hermann Schmitz and his book on the “Gefühlsraum”, which Böhme felt was a great “liberation” from school philosophy.
But before the qualified physicist could devote himself to the “Other of Reason”, he submitted two masterful dissertations that dealt with tenses and the relationship between time and number in antiquity and in Leibniz and Kant from a scientific-historical point of view. Almost incidentally, a number of studies were published that dealt with the influence of science on the social order and of which above all the joint work on the consequences of “scientific progress” from 1978 is worth reading again today. During these years, Böhme developed an impressive capacity for co-authorship, which, in addition to numerous colleagues, also included his brother, the cultural scientist Hartmut Böhme, his wife, the gender and Islam researcher Farideh Akashe-Böhme, who died in 2005, and last year his daughter Rebecca Boehme, a neuroscientist, included.
“Recognition occurs where someone succeeds in touching with the soul the nature of the individual being, in what it is.”
Böhme’s ability to share thoughts was an expression of the “otherness of reason”, because in the closeness that arises when reflecting together, the world, nature and I are placed in a different atmosphere.
“Atmosphere” became the central concept with the help of which Böhme tried to programmatically define nature, the body, imagination, desires and feelings in the following decades. “You have to feel an atmosphere. That requires a physical presence, whether you have to visit a landscape or a room or expose yourself to the radiation of a work of art. You can feel the atmosphere in your state of mind, namely as a tendency, in a specific way mood.”
The movements can serve as a leitmotif through a large part of Böhme’s impressive work and at the same time one would only have walked a part of his “work”. Because he also published important books on Kant, on the history of science and on the loss of physicality in the affluent society, always entirely on his own account.
In the traditions of architecture, aesthetics, politics or sociology, Böhme followed such complex interactions between an independently developed tradition and the only half-conscious phenomenon called man, always curious about how the respective present reacts to what it creates. “Recognition occurs where someone succeeds in touching with the soul the nature of the individual being, in what it is.” In 2000, Böhme concluded his great book of Plato with this quote from the “State”. Since 1977, Böhme has been reflecting on this touch and its own atmosphere in an impressive way at the TU Darmstadt and often abroad.
The eminent philosopher Gernot Böhme suddenly died last Thursday, shortly after his 85th birthday.