[Anlässlich meiner Ernennung hat Benedikt Reuse für die FernUniversität in Hagen ein Interview mit mir durchgeführt und daraus einen kurzen Abriss präsentiert. Hier ist sein Text:]

Martin Lenz ist neuer Professor für Theoretische Philosophie in Hagen. Unter anderem interessiert er sich dafür, wie wir Menschen Dinge verstehen – auch aus historischer Sicht.

Thomas Walter (li.), Geschäftsführer der Fakultät für Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften, und Rektorin Ada Pellert gratulierten Martin Lenz zur Ernennung.

„Vielleicht wird die Fernlehre das Modell der Zukunft sein“, überlegt Prof. Dr. Martin Lenz und erinnert an die Lage in der Corona-Pandemie zurück. Darüber nachzudenken, unter welchen Voraussetzungen Menschen lernen und verstehen, ist sein tägliches Handwerk. Als neuer Professor für das Lehrgebiet Theoretische Philosophie an der FernUniversität in Hagen sieht er die Lehre daher nicht nur als Berufung, sondern auch als spannenden Forschungsgegenstand: „Was verändert sich, wenn wir vor allem digital kommunizieren? Ich habe zum Beispiel beobachtet, dass sich in digitalen Lehrveranstaltungen ganz andere Studierende zu Wort melden.“ Für ihn ist klar: „Ich möchte bewusst digitale und nicht-digitale Formate ausprobieren, um vergleichen zu können.“ Bildungsgerechtigkeit ist ein wichtiges Thema für Martin Lenz. Entsprechend freut er sich auf das durchlässige Hagener Studiensystem: „Ich habe gehört, dass die FernUni eine wirklich interessante Studierendenschaft hat. Viele arbeiten schon beruflich und bringen eine sehr hohe intrinsische Motivation ins Fernstudium mit.“ Wegen der hohen Bereitschaft aufseiten der Lernenden ist Martin Lenz schon lange Fan von weiterführenden Bildungsangeboten – auch persönlich: „Schon als Schüler habe ich gerne VHS-Kurse besucht. Dort waren eben Leute, die sich wirklich für die Themen begeistern. Das ist einfach eine schöne Sache!“

Gerne zurück ins Ruhrgebiet

Als weiteren Pluspunkt sieht der Forscher die Lage der FernUniversität: „Mit Hagen kehre ich in die Nähe meiner geistigen Heimat zurück.“ Martin Lenz studierte in Bochum Philosophie, Linguistik und Neuere Deutsche Literaturwissenschaft und promovierte 2001. „Nach der Promotion war ich erstmal ein Jahr lang arbeitslos“, bekennt er – und spricht damit bewusst die teils prekären Verhältnisse im Wissenschaftsbetrieb an. „Dann hatte ich aber Glück, bin mit einem Antrag durchgekommen und konnte nach Cambridge gehen.“ Die Arbeit in Großbritannien öffnete dem Wissenschaftler viele Türen. „Erst dort habe ich verstanden, wie sehr Wissenschaft vom Netzwerken abhängt.“ Nach abgeschlossenem Forschungsprojekt, siedelte er wieder nach Deutschland über und habilitierte sich 2009 in Berlin. „Zum Glück bekam ich danach eine feste Stelle in Groningen.“ Hier forschte und lehrte er von 2012 bis 2024. „Eigentlich wollte ich mich danach gar nicht mehr woanders bewerben.“ Das änderte sich erst, als er die offene Stelle an der FernUniversität sah. „Die Professur klang sehr interessant, auch weil ich so meinen Schwerpunkt in der theoretischen Philosophie weiterverfolgen konnte.“

Herz fürs Unbekannte

Ein Fokus seiner Arbeit liegt auf mittelalterlicher und frühneuzeitlicher Philosophie. „Als ich angefangen habe zu studieren, dachte ich mir, mittelalterliche Philosophie ist so ziemlich das Langweiligste, das ich mir vorstellen kann“, verrät Lenz mit einem Schmunzeln. „Das Mittelalter erschien mir weit weg, seine Philosophie wenig attraktiv und schablonenhaft.“ Ein Urteil, das er mit der Zeit revidierte – vor allem, weil ihm sein Bochumer Mentor, der Philosophiehistoriker Kurt Flasch, die Vorzüge des Fachgebiets näherbrachte. „Heute komme ich immer wieder gerne auf diese Periode zurück, sie ist anregend zu studieren.“ Lenz zwinkert: „Und außerdem ist es doch leichter, über langweilige Dinge interessante Sachen zu sagen als umgekehrt.“ Wichtig ist ihm, auch abseits des philosophischen Kanons zu lesen und den unbekannten Werken Aufmerksamkeit zu schenken. Dahinter steht für ihn eine spannende wissenschaftspolitische Frage: „Man featurt ganz bestimmte Autoren, auf die man sich einschießt, sie ediert und alles von ihnen übersetzt – alles andere verstaubt in den Bibliotheken und wird nicht einmal in lesbares Latein übertragen. Warum eigentlich?“

Von der Philosophie zur Medizin

„Was mich zudem besonders interessiert ist die Verbindung von Philosophie und Medizin“, gibt Lenz einen näheren Einblick. Gesundheit und eine gute Lebensführung gingen schon in antiken Betrachtungen Hand in Hand. In diesem Sinne sei die Philosophie auch als Anleitung zum „guten Leben“ zu sehen. Doch aus medizinischer Sicht war der ganzheitliche, theoretische Blick auf die menschliche Existenz nicht immer hilfreich. „Wie kommt man raus aus der Idee, dass man immer gleich das Ganze erklären muss?“ Erst nach und nach habe die Wissenschaft dazugelernt und sei von philosophischen Betrachtungen über Gott und die Welt zu empirischen Ansätzen gekommen, die gezielt körperliche Reaktionen beobachten. „Spannenderweise entstand dieses methodische Umdenken auch in den Küchen“, erinnert der Forscher an einen frühen Experimentierraum. „Denn wo gekocht wird, geht es nun einmal um Leben und Tod.“

Verstehen besser verstehen

In Hagen hat Lenz nun die Chance, sein Lehrgebiet neu auszurichten. „Ich sehe Philosophie als eine Form von Teamarbeit. Es geht also nicht nur um meine Vision“, stellt der Forscher vorweg klar. „Was mich angeht, möchte ich mich verstärkt dem Phänomen des Verstehens zuwenden – auf drei Weisen.“ Erstens möchte er den „Zusammenbruch des Verstehens“ erforschen, unter anderem, indem er Konzepte von Wahnsinn und Normalität untersucht. Zweitens interessiert ihn die Frage nach der „Rationalität von Debatten“; hier zum Beispiel die oft gescheiterte Diskussionskultur auf Online-Plattformen. „Drittens möchte ich mehr über das Lesen erfahren. Wir lernen auf eine bestimmte Art zu lesen – und dabei kann auch einiges schief gehen“, erklärt Lenz. So wird im klassischen Deutschunterricht zum Beispiel ein bestimmtes Textverständnis abgefragt, abweichende Interpretationsmöglichkeiten kaum berücksichtigt. „Hier würde ich auch gerne mit lokalen Schulen zusammenarbeiten und das Ganze als praktisches Projekt angehen.“

Leidenschaftlicher Jazz-Musiker

Was begeistert den Philosophen abseits seiner wissenschaftlichen Arbeit? „Das ist schwer zu sagen – die Philosophie hat immer alles gerahmt“, lacht Lenz. Eine große Leidenschaft, die zweitweise sogar direkt mit der Wissenschaft konkurriert hat, verrät er dann doch: „Ich habe mich früher entscheiden müssen: Musik oder Philosophie. Die Frage ist inzwischen entschieden, aber ich mache noch immer viel Musik, vor allem Jazz.“ Das freie Musizieren mit Gitarre oder Klavier macht ihn glücklich – einen Schulterschluss zur Philosophie gibt es am Ende aber doch: „Das Nachdenken über Musikunterricht, über Improvisation und musikalische Interaktion, all das gibt mir auch sehr viel philosophisch.“

(Text und Foto: Benedikt Reuse)

Dear Students,

Please excuse me for addressing you via my blog, but I want to reach not just those of you whom I happen to know through my teaching, but also those whom I merely see in the streets and on news channels. Since I’m mainly based in the Netherlands and Germany, I’m mostly thinking of you as situated in these countries. Currently, there is (especially on social media) a lot of talk about the so-called pro-Palestine protests in which many of you seem to be involved. If you do or were to study philosophy, I would perhaps be teaching you or I even might have taught or might be going to teach you. Although I try to confine myself to teaching what I promise on the syllabus, I often use this blog for spill-overs of reflections on what I should be teaching or how I should go about it. And since it is common to reflect on current “issues”, I often thought – with some trepidation – about how I should respond if pertinent discussions or protests would reach my classes in some way or another. This has not really happened so far, but since I’m about to leave Groningen for Hagen while the protests are still going on, this time might be as good as any to share some thoughts with you. – On my teaching evaluations, I sometimes get the request to distinguish more clearly between “core issues” and “side issues”. OK, then: My main topic is responsibility. While we’re probably all fairly good at placing responsibility or blame on others, it’s harder to say what it means, for that other person or group, to take responsibility and what it means to take responsibility oneself. My core issue, then, is a question: What does it mean to take responsibility? Especially in the contexts of the current protests. But let me begin with some side issues perhaps.

My mother was a smoker. Not a heavy one, though. She even hid in the bathroom to smoke secretly. When my seven-year-old self asked her about that, she said that she didn’t want to be seen smoking by others. You might think that she did not want to be seen by her children in particular, but the reason she gave was that it was “unsuitable for women”. Such small exchanges had long-lasting echoes. One is that, unil roughly ten years ago, I have been a smoker myself. Was she responsible? Of course, my mother did not make me smoke and she even listed numerous reasons against it, but I felt, only half-consciously, for a long time that it was fine to smoke because my mother did it, too. I wouldn’t hold her responsible, but I also recognise that children learn by imitation and that what people with authority do seems to lend legitimacy to our own deeds and habits. So whom could I hold responsible for becoming a smoker? Well, at the end of the day I have only myself to blame. – I like this little example because it is at once simple and sufficiently muddled. We might argue that we shouldn’t be bad role models, as a matter of standards, but perhaps hiding behind a door (for the wrong reasons) is sometimes the best we can do. We might have very high standards, but we have very different histories and lots of imperfections. Being a free and responsible agent is not difficult because we might lack standards. It’s difficult because we’re muddled and mostly not alone. Going by moral standards alone, you can report on the deeds of your day as a chain of hypocrisies. Why don’t you do that then? I guess (1) because moral consistency cannot (always) be your top priority and (2) because there are (often) lots of other people to blame, too. (Interestingly, people for whom moral consistency is a priority mostly seem to focus on blaming others, but that’s for later.)

Faced with the protests, I feel, not like an omniscient narrator, but rather a bit like my mother might have felt: I try to hide behind a door (figuratively), try to say things that ring true, but perhaps not for the right reasons. Luckily, I’m not your parent.

But I am – or could be – your teacher. It’s this sense of priority that makes me write this. I’m not a friend or administrator or mere political citizen, I am a teacher. In this capacity, it’s my responsibility to be “open to dialogue”, as one of the sayings goes. I try to be, but the current situation makes that a bit more difficult. As noted, there are many pieces about the protests, good and bad. What hits home for me most is that, as a teacher, I have a duty of care towards all my students. What does this duty of care involve? It’s not easy to say. I have read many pieces by thoughtful colleagues. One of the strongest arguments comes from Eric Schliesser, who suggests that we might treat campus protests as “falling under academic freedom”. I really like this idea, not least because it emphasises the great educational potential that might outweigh all too quick calls for order. However, having seen footage of the recent vandalism in Amsterdam and of Jewish students being turned away under odious chants in Groningen, I fail to see this idea being put into practice, to put it mildly. What’s more, though, is that granting academic freedom or at least freedom of expression (these two are not the same) requires granting it to everyone involved. The moment one particular group shouts down or even intimidates others, you have the responsibility for ensuring respectful treatment of your fellow students. Especially as protesters or occupants, you have to take that responsibility. What I have seen happening, instead, is that protesters show solidarity with those supporting their particular cause. That’s low-hanging fruit indeed. But the point is to behave responsibly to your opponents. There is a battery of ethical arguments for that, but I’ve forgotten their names. What’s in a name, though?

In the light of attacks against protesters themselves, I have seen numerous discussions of open letters and missives supporting protesters. Especially among philosophers you will find intriguing and instructive hermeneutic moves about particular terms and legal responsibilities of administrators etc. I don’t know what precisely you think, but I’d probably feel great if I were to see a letter, signed by an enormous number of professors, who support my cause or at least support my right to protest. One such letter (in German) made many rounds because it said that students should be “under no circumstances … subjected to police power.” As you might imagine, the particular phrase I just quoted caused some upheaval. While calling the police should be a last resort, it should by no means be ruled out completely – for perhaps obvious reasons. What I find problematic are not so much the particular legal considerations, but the idea that actions of a particular group (i.e. of protesting students) should have no consequences. It is of course understandable that you should want to evade being punished. It is equally understandable that your teachers feel a duty of care to prevent you from being arrested by the police. The problem is that this duty of care must be extended to all students, but is in the current circumstances only extended to a particular group – a group that may well be seen as intimidating fellow students. The message that I see being conveyed (implicitly) to you is that you don’t have to take responsibility for your actions. That would mean overprotection.

However, maintaining social rules and enforcing them through the police, if need be, seems to emphasise the status quo. My insistence on social order can be met with the objection that I don’t just want people to behave nicely, but that I want to maintain, at any cost, the current powers. (It’s a stronger variant of what is known as the “tone argument”, if you like) That point sits uneasily with the fact that many of you take yourselves to protest against irresponsible agents and institutions. (Believe it or not: online, people even quoted Martin Luther King at me to make this point.) So if the status quo is taken to rest on irresponsible behaviour, how can I convince you by falling back on the status quo? – But I’m not asking you to maintain the status quo. I’m pointing out that, if you need to make your point by intimidating your fellow students or by behaving like a hooligan, you should, for the time being, have no place at a university. My point is not about order but about your responsibility to fellow humans around you. ­– Now, a common response to this charge is that the hooligan behaviour we could witness was coming from “outsiders” and that the actual protests were peaceful. That is a strange response: For if these vandalisms were indeed acts of outsiders, I would have expected at least equally visible attempts at prevention and vocal distancing from this kind of behaviour, rather than finger-pointing at others who supposedly started it. That is one way of what it could mean to take responsibility. And someone who cannot take as much responsibility is certainly not fit to organise a protest, let alone occupy part of a university. All of this goes back to the basic point of having to take responsibility for what you do – as much as you can – and especially on behalf of those who might get hurt. Remember, you cannot be morally consistent on all levels. No one expects that. But your priority should be to treat respectfully those around you, most of all your fellow students. The attempt to put the blame elsewhere, hide behind face coverings, avoid speaking to the press, let alone to opponents, is an avoidance of responsibility. In turn, I find attempts to justify such conduct infantilising at best.

Of course, the teachers’ duty of care should not just comprise all students but also allow for making mistakes. In this sense, we need to see the situation as an ongoing one where we all have to learn new things. Since most of the current protests are what is called “pro-Palestinian” and since this is perceived as the most vocal group, it is fairly clear that their voices are being heard most of the time as the loudest. What I find particularly alienating is that, while the situation is evolving, most of what I hear are repetitions of the same chants and insults over and over, often copied straight from earlier protests at US American universities. Apart from the lack of dialectic development, I also find it problematic that those of you who belong to the most vocal protesters don’t seem to be open to reflect on other voices. In the light of this stale situation, I found it particularly helpful to read this passage in a rather balanced piece by Naika Foroutan (in German):

“For the legitimacy of the protests, it would be central to include the trauma of October 7th and the need for protection of Jewish and Israeli students who feel threatened or unsafe on campus in the protest logic – before the next protests take place.”

I’d have more to add, but I think I’ve already taken too much of your attention. If you want to bring down my ramblings to three simple points they are the following: Don’t easily trust people who come with easy overviews and clear-cut definitions, let alone chants. We’re all in the process of learning. Take responsibility for your fellow students, whatever you make of their (supposed) convictions.

Take care!

All best wishes, Martin Lenz

When I studied philosophy at Bochum (Germany) in the early nineties, there seemed to be a ban on images in philosophy. My teacher Kurt Flasch, for instance, was even reluctant to use the blackboard.* To me, this seemed very strange at the time. I never asked him about it, but perhaps this “ban on images” goes back to one of his teachers, Max Horkheimer, who proposed the “Bilderverbot” as enabling a truly critical attitude to ideology. While a decidedly linguistic approach to philosophy is a crucial part of its history, I also think that it is owing to an underestimation of the senses and indeed experience as such. As I see it, the mere attempt to transform written thoughts into images or to combine these two media can afford a more holistic understanding of various issues. At the same time, our current practices are flooded by images and thus require a pertinent literacy. In what follows, I simply want to share my experience of teaching through images and close with a few thoughts non-linguistic media.

Introducing infographics. – Every now and then I have been trying to encourage students to make use of drawings, tables, graphs or other sorts of tools in their writing. We are obviously inclined to employ different styles of reasoning in keeping with our diverging talents or backgrounds. As Frege argued in his Begriffsschrift, we clearly see different aspects of thoughts when using different graphic representations of logical inferences. Following the encouraging advice of my Groningen colleague Benjamin Bewersdorf, I eventually took a random class in my course on Medieval Theories of Thinking by surpise: I wrote to my students a day before class asking them to bring coloured pencils, then handed out sheets of drawing paper and requested them to prepare infographics on the spot. I divided the students in three groups. One had to depict a conceptual distinction or problem, another had to depict a debate, and yet another had to depict a historical development. After chosing a topic, they had about thirty minutes to produce their work and then present (a) on the topic depicted and (b) on the experience afforded through the task. The outcomes were amazing.**

Three points struck me in particular:

• Having to do such work on the fly activates different people. – At least in my experience, there is often one particular group of students that runs much of the active discussions in the course. By contrast, this kind of task seems to highlight different talents and thus also different patterns of interaction, allowing otherwise quiet students to enter the stage and allowing new forms of collaboration.
• Using such media makes you reconsider what you (think you) know. – Having to illustrate a philosophical issue mercilessly brings out vague points or limits in our understanding. Not least presenting relations between items, concepts, interlocutors or even historical phases requires thinking through the way the relata are contrasted, for instance. At the same time, such presentations often afford an understanding of an issue in a flash of insight, rather than requiring you to move through sequential inferences.
• The previous two points yield a third one: a new experience. – Arguably, (philosophical) learning crucially depends on the kinds of experience we undergo when exposed to a problem. Experiencing the barriers and insights through transforming knowledge that is mainly linguistically available might allow connecting to your thoughts and those of others in a different way and anchor them more deeply.

Other media and other forms of philosophy. – Infographics make for an easy start. But I’d generally try and encourage students and colleagues to think about various media or art forms for inspiration. As my colleague Andrea Sangiacomo has shown, for instance, taking the term “meditation” seriously in Descartes’ Meditationes allows for an expanded understanding of what is at stake in this philosophy and indeed in much of the philosophical tradition (see here  and here). Likewise, he is now delving into forms of dance – especially contact improvisation – to explore related ways of philosophical understanding.

Imagistic literacy? – It is one thing to recognise how the “embodiment” of thought can be explored by transforming linguistic thought to other sense modalities. Another point of such transformation is to recognise, for instance, how images work and how they connect to and are interwoven with linguistic communication. While social media are littered with images and videos, there is little understanding how they affect and indeed transform our lives from private interaction to warfare. I will keep my thoughts on this for another occasion. Suffice it to say that the attempt of transforming linguistic thought into images does not only yield new experiences; it also exposes the logical limitations of images.   

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* Funnily enough, an introduction to philosophy based on infographics came out in 1991 (the DTV-Atlas Philosophie). But as you might imagine, it was much frowned upon and never used or carried openly back in the day.

** Depicted is some of the outcome from my 2022 course on What Is Thinking? Medieval Philosophy of Mind. I am very grateful to my students who did great work throughout the course. Special thanks to Sam Alma for pursuing an intriguing extended tutorial by combining an essay with infographics.