{"id":212,"date":"2026-02-14T16:28:23","date_gmt":"2026-02-14T16:28:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/?page_id=212"},"modified":"2026-02-16T09:52:00","modified_gmt":"2026-02-16T09:52:00","slug":"vita","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/vita\/","title":{"rendered":"Vita"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Vita<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Frankfurt School boy, originally from Bavaria; professor of philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory in M\u00fcnster, later in Amsterdam (UvA); meanwhile retired and a citizen of Berlin.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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My intellectual biography as a short story<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Born in 1954 (\u201eIt\u2019s a bad age for emotions\u201c, says Maria Braun in a film by Fassbinder, the house of the \u201aeconomic miracle\u2018 is exploding, the voice of the football reporter on the radio is cracking: \u201eIt\u2019s over! It\u2019s over! It\u2019s over! Germany is champion of the world!\u201c), I studied in Frankfurt\/Main, starting in the mid-70s (when Willy Brandt had resigned, the terrorism of the RAF reached its highest point, the Ecological Movement began to develop and Critical Theory appeared in the gesture of Rumpelstiltskin: breaking the attractive power of the commodity-society in trying to call its name). Having completed my MA thesis, I went to Paris for a year (the \u201ecapital of the 19th century\u201c, as Benjamin proclaimed, and now Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze and others were tempting, too, whereas in Germany Helmut Kohl had become Chancellor). A PhD in 1986 (the year of Chernobyl) with a work on Mimesis \u2013 Constellation of a Central Concept in Adorno<\/em>. Afterwards I was given the chance to go to Italy for two years (Pisa, Rome, Naples) as a research scholarship holder of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation (so much art, so much natural, i.e. cultural beauty and so much sun). After my return (the Berlin wall was coming down) I became an assistant teacher in the Philosophical Department of the University of Frankfurt, getting to know a lot of young colleagues and famous professors of philosophy from the US (like Richard Rorty and Martha Nussbaum), being guests of J\u00fcrgen Habermas \u2013 an extraordinary and stimulating intellectual atmosphere, a liberal space for philosophical discussion and friendship (similar to what Plato\u2019s Socrates must have had in mind). The postdoctorate procedure took place in 1994\/95 after having presented my manuscript Aesthetic Experience and Moral Judgement<\/em>. Shortly afterwards (and hard to believe), in Spring 1996 (Kohl still Chancellor in Germany), I was appointed Professor of Philosophy with a focus on aesthetics and theory of culture at the University of M\u00fcnster. M\u00fcnster is a small town with tens of thousands of students (and bicycles). In 1648 the end of the 30 Years War in Europe was proclaimed there. It is a nice town to stay in for a few days. So the time had come to write a book on modern heroism: The Impertinent Self. A Heroic History of Modernity<\/em>. It was published in the Summer of 2004, when the Amsterdam project slowly became reality. (And in Germany the short age of Joschka Fischer and a Chancellor called Gerhard Schr\u00f6der has faded away; in 2005 for the first time there is a female Chancellor. \u201eFor the times\u201c \u2013 Bob Dylan is on the road again \u2013 \u201ethey are a-changing\u201c. Only Woody Allen seems to remain the same.) In September 2007 I became Head of the Department at my new university, and I had to fulfil this task for five (long) years. But in between I enjoyed the English publication of my book on Modernity, a short stay at Tsinghua University Bejing and a Research Fellowship at the IKKM in Weimar. (The crises of, first, \u201cthe financial markets\u201d \u2013 the markets of the \u201cbankster\u201d \u2013 and, later, the Euro were spreading out since fall 2008 when the Investmentbank Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, and politicians were reacting with one huge official \u201crescue package\u201d or \u201cprotective shield\u201d after the other. The world is full of zero\u2019s and dead losses. And in between for the first time the U.S. Americans have voted for an Afro-American president: \u201cYes We Can\u201d). So the time had come to write a book on Trust in the World. A Philosophy of Film.<\/em> It came out in 2013 when I came back from a Research Fellowship in Bad Homburg\/ Frankfurt\/M., a lecture tour in California and New York, and another one in Brazil (while Angela Merkel was reelected as German Chancellor for the third time, and we finally had to learn that the Secret Services throughout the world are treating each one of us as a potential enemy, thus that they don\u2019t trust us). When the English version came out in December 2018, times in a certain way had changed again. For one year (2017\u20132018) I had to take over the task of the Head of the Department again, but this time happily under highly politicized conditions. For in 2015 \u2013 shortly before leaving for a Research Fellowship at the IFK in Vienna \u2013 the situation of permanent cuttings and increasing workload at my university had exploded and led to an occupation of the central building of the administration (or more precisely \u201cmanagement\u201d). For several weeks we almost had a \u201cfree university\u201d before the well-known \u201ctroubles of the plain\u201d came back (while in the area of big politics England, formerly known as Great Britain, chose to leave the European Union, right wing political movements and parties all over Europe gain power, and the US prove themselves to be more Divided than United States by electing a loudmouth and conman, notorious liar and gyp millionaire, machismo-autocrat and snivelling egomaniac, a typified clich\u00e9 of \u201cgood old\u201d white supremacy, the tv-version of a bad joke \u2013 as president; Leonard Cohen can\u2019t sing his \u201cbroken hallelujah\u201d any longer). Since the public arena was full of toxic emotions, but since democracy cannot be practiced without emotions, some more research on \u201cThe Art of Emotional Democracy\u201d seemed appropriate. Finally, in Oktober 2020 (the whole world being caught in the so-called \u201ccorona\u201d pandemic, and the decent candidate of the Democratic Party in the United States having finally relieved us from the daily lunacy \u2013 \u201cIrrsinn\u201d, \u201cirrer Sinn\u201d \u2013 of the preceding presidency \u2013 with its negative climax of the attack on the Capitol, an attack on democracy in one of the modern homelands of democracy) I received an official letter from my university telling me that I have reached the retiring age. Not that easy to realize for someone who grew up with folkrock- pop versions of \u201cForever Young\u201d \u2013 even when the Beatles had prepared me in a funny way to the banal situation \u201cWhen I\u2019m Sixty-Four\u201d. At the age of 66+ it was time for me.
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Vita Frankfurt School boy, originally from Bavaria; professor of philosophical aesthetics and cultural theory in M\u00fcnster, later in Amsterdam (UvA); meanwhile retired and a citizen of Berlin. My intellectual biography as a short story Born in 1954 (\u201eIt\u2019s a bad age for emotions\u201c, says Maria Braun in a film by Fassbinder, the house of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"no-title","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-212","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/212","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/212\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":315,"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/212\/revisions\/315"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/josef-fruechtl.eu\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}