Imaginary Human Rights

Beschreibung

What truly grounds human rights? Neither God. Nor reason. Nor consensus. Nor whatever political orders happen to decree. In this book, Richard Hörner attempts a radically different grounding of human rights. He does not ask which rights we may wish to ascribe to one another, but what it is in the human being, in its very constitution, that makes protection necessary in the first place. His answer is striking in its consistency: the human being is not merely a social role, not a moral construct, and not simply the product of historical agreement, but a fragile, temporally limited, conscious life-capsule within Being-Here. It is precisely this life-capsule that is vulnerable, deformable, destructible — and it is from this very condition that the claim to protection arises. In this way, the entire question of human rights is displaced. They no longer appear as the outcome of religious postulates, liberal values, or juridical conventions, but as the consequence of an ontological insight: from the very structure of human existence itself it follows that Being-Here must be protected, because its rupture is an irrevocable event. Not because human beings have decided it should be so. Not because a culture regards it as right. Not because a god has commanded it. But because human existence itself lays bare this necessity of protection. With concepts such as Ground, Phaenon, fundamental affliction, Interio, and poietic Imagio, Hörner develops an original philosophical vocabulary that not only criticizes the present human-rights order, but rethinks it anew from its very origin. His criterion is as simple as it is incisive: a human right is a human right only if it protects the human life-capsule against those afflictions that strike its Here-being at its Ground. What emerges, then, is not another moral appeal and not merely a political manifesto, but a philosophical counter-model of unusual depth: a grounding of human rights in existence itself.

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Richard Hörner
Richard Hörner studied Philosophy, Art History, Sociology, and Law in Tübingen, Mainz, and Frankfurt am Main. He currently resides in Frankfurt/Main.

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