Heritage ahead – Michael Landmann’s anthropology and its critical potential for shaping democracy’s challenges of virtualizing culture and fatalizing nature

Resumo

Based on the reflections of Michael Landmann (1913-1984), this text attempts to show the connection between cultural heritage and democratic culture as a dialectical relationship. Landmann understands humans as living beings who develop their forms of life and interpretation in creative exchange with cultural traditions. Cultural heritage is understood as a factual stock that pre-shapes individuals and as the starting point for a creative transformation of this stock by the individual. Under this condition, awareness of one’s (own) cultural character is the condition for developing political judgement as a person through mental detachment and in dialogue with other persons and cultural contexts, and for keeping one’s mind open to irritation. Insofar as democratic culture is itself a cultural heritage whose existence remains linked to enabling conditions, the politically and ethically urgente question arises, how the current challenges of digitalization and sustainability can be democratically shaped. Based on Landmann’s reflections on the mental ontogenesis of the individual and on the ecological responsibility of human beings, general points of reference are gained for this. With reference to digitalization, this raises the question of the conditions for the possibility of differentiating judgement and self-education in digital, tendentially unifying communication formats. With regard to sustainability, the challenge is to develop collective interpretations of the self and the world in which – as the flip side of fatalistic humility – the creative potential of human beings is taken into account and remains open. For both, a democratic culture of speaking and listening forms the framework in which dialogical encounter can occur and be shaped as a pluralogue with the inclusion of absent cultural actors and referents of non-human nature.