Detlev Quintern

Based on Aristotelianism, philosophies in Islam, Christianity, Judaism, and traditional phenomenology, Martin Heidegger and late Max Scheler, shared a conceptual understanding of the soul. The plant’s soul – a worldly stage of the individualization of universal creativity - unfolds via the animal towards the human and beyond. The Phenomenology of Life philosophy (Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka) enmeshed the ontopoiesis of the vegetative beingness into the unity-of-everything-there-is-alive, thereby overcoming the discommunicative hierarchization of the soul. An eco-cosmological following of „the plant’s“ ontopoiesis will have to base its understanding not only on the communicative creativity of „the plant“ but on its inseparable interwovenness into the web of life, thereby also taking into consideration newest botanical studies which brought to light insights into so far unknown „intelligence“ of plants.

The acculturalization of humanities from the late 1980ies onwards led not only to imagined different worlds (e.g. West / Islam), postmodernity overshadowed also common grounds of world`s philosophies. Christianity and Islam share far more than what might separate them, and we find Islam in „the West “as Christianity „in the East“. The Logos of Life Philosophy as developed by Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (1923-2014) strives towards deciphering the deep layers of philosophy and its common grounds. Tracing back to Gnostic, Platonic (neo-platonic) and Islamic shaped philosophies - Ikhwan as-Safa will serve as an example - the Logos of Life / Aql Al-Kulli (universal reason) will be historicized in the following while introducing approaches towards a New Enlightenment (A.-T. Tymieniecka) as an alternative to the current crisis in meta-sciences