If it can be understood that the human beings, the environment, and the perceived nature are grasped only by the human scales and touched by the human means, it is reasonable to assign an important task of an unimpeded construction of the human life t ...
If it can be understood that the human beings, the environment, and the perceived nature are grasped only by the human scales and touched by the human means, it is reasonable to assign an important task of an unimpeded construction of the human life to the humanities that thematize the understanding of the world and the self-reflection of the man, and on the same context one can invest the literature with a task to grope for a new paradigm for the understanding of the human life that is based on the empirical scientific anthropology.
This kind of critical mind had existed already in the german enlightenment at the end of the 18th century and in the realism and the naturalism at the end of 19th and in the beginning of 20th century. Due to the formation of the integrated horizon of the anthropology, the natural philosophy, and the biology, which was brought about by conjoining of the anthropology and the natural sciences in 18th century, the spiritualized nature concept that embodied the totality as the unification of the subject and the object in the beginning of 19th century was substituted to the naturalized spirit, and also the idealist nature concept to the biological life concept. From the time the nature became the target of the whole senses, and also the man was understood as the matter of the senses which is not concerned with the body that is always connected to the soul, but with the flesh as the organism. The spiritualized nature as the holistic totality in 18th century was changed in 19th century to the nature that embraces the matter, the life, and the senses.
In 19th century it was established a representative anthropological methode, which had the basic premise that the human being is the psychophysical double being based on the commercium mentis et corporis. The psychophysics that was found by Gustav Fechner is the theoretical project which is supposed to explicate quantitatively the situation in which the psychic as the aggregate of mind and soul and the physical as the aggregate of body, flesh, and matter get involved in the functionally interdependant relationship and are connected with each other.
As a branch of the psychophysics the experimental aesthetics performs on the basis of the identity of the psychic and the physical to examine the quantitative relations between the irritability and the sensibility or between the external, somatic stimuli and the internal, psychic consequences. On the bedrock of this anthropological aesthetics is located the possibility condition of the interwoven connection between the individual sciences which are related with each other without any hierarchy, and along with this a conception of ‘liminality’ was preoccupied that as a methodological principle implies ‘borderline, threshold, transition space’.
In the period of transition from the idea of the whole man in 18th century to the idea of whole nature in 19th century the various modalities as the literary embodiment of the empirical anthropology came into sight. The literary anthropology that could be representatively perceived in the works of Frank Wedekind and Arthur Schnitzler intended to signify ‘the impulse’ oder ‘the will’ that has the connotations of ‘wild nature’, ‘the divine’, and ‘heart of the world’. ‘Lulu’ and ‘Frühlings Erwachen’ of Wedekind and ‘Reigen’ of Schnitzler would expose the biological life or the wild aspects of the life. The parole ‘wild nature’ which was consolidated in Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, and Bertolt Brecht could be refined by Thomas Mann as ‘le corps, l’amour, la mort’, which came into practise as the core components of the literary anthropology at the end of 19th century and in the beginning of the 20th century.