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SFB 804:  Transcendence and Common Sense

Subject Area Humanities
Social and Behavioural Sciences
Term from 2009 to 2014
Project identifier Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 56072087
 
With a renewed interest in religion, the arts and humanities as well as the social and cultural sciences have entered a lively discussion on the role of religion as a force for stabilising social orders. At the same time, the socio-moral foundations of modern societies have been the subject of academic debate. The Collaborative Research Centre adopts both strands of the discussion, but turns them into a systematic enquiry through the conceptual linkage of "transcendence" and "public spirit" as the discursive and practical resources of social and political orders.
"Transcendence" refers to such discourses and practices that uphold social and political orders by recourse to the construction of the “intangible”. The concept of transcendence can therefore not be reduced to Christian religion, monotheism or matters of religion generally. The Collaborative Research Centre particularly addresses such forms of "transcendence" not categorised as part of the field of religion (e.g. "civil religion", provenance and origin stories, a scientistic faith in progress, "art-as-religion"). "Public spirit" means a process of generating and maintaining meaning including two dimensions: an individual's sense for social meaning and a sense shared by individual members of a community. Both dimensions provide for a common framework for action and behaviour.
The analytical categories of transcendence and public spirit allow for new perspectives on the fundamental question of which premises, conditions and resources enable the constitution and stability of social and political orders: how important are transcendences for mobilising a community's resources for action? Do claims of public spirit themselves have transcendent status? Subject of analysis will be if and how discourses and practices of transcendence create public spirit and if and how common frameworks of action and behaviour rely on the structural support of transcendences.
The resulting cross-relations, ambivalences and conflicts will be subjects of empirical and systematic examinations. Those will show how construction of transcendence and interpretation of transcendence interact with community ties and social integration. In case studies as well as in historic-comparative perspective, the individual projects examine forms of social and political order from antiquity to the present day - such as religious communities, urban neighborhoods, court societies, formation of national statehood, democratic, republican or totalitarian orders, as well as social and professional groups (artists, engineers, architects, nobles, scholars, clergy, politicians).
DFG Programme Collaborative Research Centres
International Connection Italy

Completed projects

Applicant Institution Technische Universität Dresden
 
 

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