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donate Summary for Merkur 06/2009
The June issue (Number 721) will please the aesthetically educated: Armin Schreiber on artistic experience, with particular attention to neurobiological research. Friedrich Pohlmann on creative inspiration: how art is made. The issue's theme is rounded out with Wolfgang Ullrich's aesthetics column, in which Andreas Gursky takes a beating, and John Derbyshire's review of the curious book The Art Instinct.
From books to e-books? Much more interesting than this fearful question so standard in the pages of the feuilleton is to think about not only modes of distribution but also the acts of writing and actually reading literature since, according to Michel Chaoulis's argument, we are actually already in a post-Gutenberg era. Paul A. Cantor explains to the educated among TV haters what's happened (under their noses) over the last twenty years.
Hennric Jokeit and Ewa Hess argue that the neurosciences will become the twenty-first century's leading science and therefore will properly remodel capitalism. Wolfgang Marx takes us another step forward in his small journey through the psychology of the conscience; deception as a principle of economic politics is the topic of Karen Horn's economy column; and Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann explains that Reinhart Koselleck has invented not only the "Sattelzeit" but also the science of history (with which one might even be able to predict the future).
And last but not least: Karl Heinz Bohrer's new reading of the Philosophical Discourse of Modernity – also an homage to Jürgen Habermas's eightieth birthday.
Hennric Jokeit and Ewa Hess
Neurocapitalism
Neuroscience's self-confident performance suggests that it will become the twenty-first century's leading science. At the foundation of this claim is the maxim that neurons' laws of activity and the way they are organised in the brain determine all human behaviour.
Are we currently witnessing "neurocapitalism" replacing the twentieth century's capitalism of affluence? Watching the neurosciences and the pharmaceutical industry actually create a self-optimizing "new man"?
Though the ability to exert influence on the genetic level lies far in the future, the possibility to temporarily influence the neurological level in many spheres has become a reality – and big business: the US alone makes 16 billion dollars in profits on antidepressants and neuroleptics.
Published 2009-06-02
Original in German
© Merkur
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