Page 191 - Contribution To Phenomenology

184 ULLRICH MELLE

of civilization has been a never-ending story of barbaric atrocities, of
violence, aggression and oppression, of equally large-scale misery and
desperation. We are strongly reminded these days of this dark side of the
way of civilization when the 500th anniversary of what from a Eurocentric
point of view is called "the discovery of America" is celebrated. What,
without doubt, was proof of the organizational, technological and even
spiritual power of European civilization is at the same time one of the
darkest pages in human history. The Europeanization of the world, which
is, in effect, the modern age, begins with the annihilation of about 100
million native Americans and the enslavement of close to 20 million
Africans which were brought as slaves from Central and Western Africa
to America.
Bahro, who is strongly influenced by Mumford, has argued in his book
Die Logik der Rettung (The Logic of Deliverance) that the whole evolution
of humankind from its very beginning is characterized by an exterministic
tendency, a logic of self-destruction, as he calk it. If one begins to pay
more systematic attention to the dark side of human civilization during
its history, this thesis becomes credible. For Bahro, however, this
exterministic impulse reaches back into the emergence of the specifically
human life-form, when the arrow of cultural evolution began to diverge
from the arrow of biological evolution. According to Bahro, cultural
evolution from its germinating beginnings was built on a strategy of
arming, conquering, exploiting and safeguarding. The peaceful living
together of the pre-civilized primitives with each other and with nature
is a myth for Bahro.
The German philosopher Odo Marquard has shown that the notion
of compensation is a key concept in modern philosophical anthropology.^^
The human being is homo compensator: a ''MUngelwesen'' (a being
defined by its defects), a ''DefektflUchtef (one who runs away from
her/his defects), a "dilettante of life," the "retarded Uving being" that has
to find surrogate solutions to compensate for her/his vital defects. This
anthropological concept of compensation plays a vital role in Bahro's
reconstruction of the logic of self-destruction. Tormented by dread from
a chaotic inner life of uncontrollable impulses and hallucinatory visions
as well as from an overpowering and threatening outside world, the

^^ See Odo Marquard, "Homo compensator," in Philosophische Anthropologie.
Arheitsbucher 7. Diskurs: Mensch, Willi Oelmuller, Ruth Dolle-OelmuUer, Carl
Friedrich Geyer (eds.) (Ferdinand SchGningh: Paderborn, 1985), 317-330.