Incommensurability and incomprehensibility

The aim is to identify and compare patterns and strategies of different disciplines in dealing with texts and images that are considered incomprehensible. Using specific case studies from the history of literature, art and philosophy, the occurrence of incommensurability as a core problem for theories of understanding and hermeneutic approaches to interpretation will be identified and its consequences unfolded.

Not everything that is incomprehensible must remain incomprehensible, but there are also cases of fundamental non-understanding as a result of incommensurable presuppositions. Incommensurability is not simply a misunderstanding that occurs due to external obstacles, a lack of attention and missing or wrong information and can therefore be easily corrected. Rather, incommensurability refers to the incompatibility of discourses, cultural perceptions, scientific paradigms, legal systems, styles of thought, aesthetic forms, translations or grammatical structures. Incommensurability results in a categorically conditioned incomprehensibility that causes even intensive efforts at understanding to fail. Therefore, methods have always been developed in all disciplines to mitigate, ward off or circumnavigate this provocation, which in turn are revealing in terms of understanding comprehension, for example when "unspeakability" is declared a topos or the "untranslatability", mysteriousness or "opacity" of texts is asserted as a structural property or even as the actual meaning.

Incommensurability has accordingly been a guiding and contentious concept in the philosophy of science, in poetics and aesthetics from Romanticism to Modernism (from Schlegel via Nietzsche and Borchardt to Adorno), in translation theory and in the field of interculturality.

The research group organises one workshop per semester. In these workshops, firstly, the different criteria are to be determined according to which the various disciplines determine phenomena and discourses as incommensurable with given premises. Secondly, it is to be examined which strategies and methods have been developed in each case to react to incomprehensibility. Thus, not only classical examples of incommensurability (e.g. an enigmatic Kafka text, a cryptic painting such as Giorgione's La Tempesta, a dark Hegel text, the Voynich manuscript) are to be examined, but primarily the setting of the usual reactions is to be recorded and typologised across disciplines.