Subproject N of the SFB 804 (2009-2014)
CONSTRUCTIONS OF TRANSCENDENCE AND COMMON SENSE IN TECHNOLOGY AND THEOLOGY
SUBPROJECT N OF SFB 804 (JULY 2009-JUNE 2014)
The sub-project investigates how modern technology refers to the overcoming of unavailabilities in the process of its social implementation and, conversely, how theology reacts directly or indirectly to technical modernity in its designs of transcendence. The sub-project examines three technological discourses of the 20th century under the guiding question of how such transcendences are used to create a sense of community.
The project assumes that technology and theology compete for the sovereignty of interpretation over world views and their action-guiding potencies, i.e. for a sense of community, through claims of transcendence. At the same time, however, this reveals the common horizon of Western technology and theology as work on the unavailable. Constructions of transcendence become particularly visible precisely when technology shifts the boundary between the available and the unavailable. This has consequences both for the social order and for the place of the human being in this order. For this reason, the content and forms of transcendence references and their relationship to the sense of community and the individual must be determined.
The sub-project analyzes three paradigmatic discourses on technology in the 20th century: Industrial technology, nuclear technology and biotechnology. Firstly, it looks at the debate on the social and cultural significance of technology in the 1920s and 1930s, which was triggered by the so-called second industrialization. Since then, it has determined the perception of technology in wide circles of Christianity under the suspicion that the technical availability of man and the world makes technology itself unavailable, while violating the unavailability of the sacred. The other two areas deal with the debates surrounding nuclear technology and biotechnology. These technologies are regarded as the conquests of the unavailable par excellence.
A comprehensive and differentiated picture of the relationship between transcendence and the common good in technology and theology will emerge from the synopsis of these areas, which historically and systematically represent the intersections of the discourse on technology in the 20th century. The aim of the sub-project is to explore the reciprocal transformation processes that prove technology and religion to be permanently interrelated horizons of interpretation in modernity.
PRINCIPAL INVESTIGATOR
Prof. Dr. Christian Schwarke
EMPLOYEES
Dr. phil. Peggy Renger-Berka
Katharina Neumeister, M.A.
as well as Anne Katrin Lemmel and Hermann Diebel as substitutes during parental leave