Hartmut Rosa: Being In and To the World – Landscape As an Answering ‘Other’

The lecture seeks to develop a new understanding of the modern conception of nature and landscape by arguing that in modern society, nature is experienced and conceptualized as a ‘sphere of resonance’. But more than this, there is a sense of resonance between people and their surrounding that goes well beyond the sphere of nature: The skin, the clothing, the car, the house, and the city we live in are perceived as sheltering and answering others that simultaneously protect us and allows to venture into the world beyond.

Human beings, the lecture argues from a Critical Theory Tradition, are characterized by the fact that they need more than just social recognition in order to develop a self: In order to avoid states and feelings of alienation, they need ‘resonance’, i.e. a two-way responsive relationship of being touched or moved by something external as well as being able to reach out and touch or move someone and something ‘out there’.

Now, of course, ‘God’ can serve as such an ‘other’ with which we can establish a resonant, or responsive, relationship. But in the modern age, religion is not the only sphere of resonance: Art and nature in particular are experienced as an ‘other’ that speaks in its own voice and finds ways to respond to our inner feelings as well as actions. The talk will discuss the manifold ideas and practices which are borne out of exactly this idea – and it will point out ways in which such an interpretation can contribute to our cultural understanding of the so-called ecological crisis.

The talk will be streamed for later viewing on our Youtube channel. You can already find the previous 6 talks there.

The Life Terrains lecture series is curated by sociologist and tenure track assistant professor, Nikolaj Schultz. More about the series.

Bio

Hartmut Rosa got his PhD from Humboldt University, Berlin in 1997. He is director of the Max-Weber-Center/Institute for advanced study at Erfurt University and Chair of Sociology and Social Theory at Friedrich Schiller University, Jena, Germany. He has been a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York from 2001-2006 and at the FMSH/EHESS in Paris.

In addition, he holds a honorary doctorate from the University of Humanistic Studies, Utrecht. He is a co-director of the annual international “Philosophy and the Social Sciences”-conference in Prague and for many years served as vice-president/secretary-general for the Research Committee 35 of the International Sociological Association (ISA). From 2008-2018, he co-edited the international journal Time&Society.

He received numerous awards, among them the Tractatus Award and the Paul Watzlawick Ehrenring (Austria), the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz-Preis and the Erich Fromm Preis (Germany) or the Annual Rob Rhoads Global Citizenship Education Award 2020 (UCLA). In 2021, he was selected as a distinguished senior scientist at the JQ Young Academy at Goethe University in Frankfurt. He also served as patron of La Nuit des Idées 2021 which was organized by the Institut Francais, Paris and held simultaneously in 42 countries. His papers and books have been translated into more than twenty five languages.

Among his most important publications are Alienation and Acceleration (2007), Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity (Columbia University Press, 2013), Resonance. A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World (Polity Press, 2019) and The Uncontrollability of the World (Polity Press 2020).