DFG-Conference: Contingencia y moral. El extranjero visto a través de la ficción

International Congress from May 7th to May 9th, 2021

The concept of contingency, stemming from Aristotle, which refers to everything that is neither necessary nor impossible, points to a fundamental epistemological fact: namely, that everything humans recognize depends on perspectives and reference systems.

Thus, knowledge is a self-referential process. Recognizing contingency brings uncertainty and fear but also opens up new opportunities for action.

For ethics and general morality, contingency initially poses problems of legitimacy. Because contingency can open the door to arbitrariness and indifference, as it undermines any justification (and application) of morality. At the same time, however, it also values prescriptive ethics as a necessary condition for moral action. Moreover, contingency is the condition for recognizing diversity. The approach of the planned congress is to question how fictional texts (literature, theater, and audiovisual arts, i.e., non-pragmatic texts) convey ethical norms without ignoring contingency.

Following the international conferences held in Passau on moral dilemmas in fictional representations ("Ser y deber ser," 2015) and on diversity regarding moral questions ("Diversidad cultural – literaria – ¿moral?," 2018), a conference on the theme "Contingency and Morality" is now to be held. This theme has already been implicitly present in the two previous congresses: Confronting diversity implies experiences of contingency, as does the fundamental indecisiveness of dilemmas. Ethically, all cases involve the problem of relativism. This becomes increasingly evident in the 20th and 21st centuries, as the increase in possibilities for shaping life and the ever more important role of reflective knowledge multiply experiences of contingency. The research question analogous to the previous conferences is: How do fictional texts that deal with contingency address moral (un)bindingness?

For better comparability of individual studies, the theme of experiencing otherness has been focused on, particularly the experience of otherness resulting from a change of space, whether voluntary (migration) or involuntary (exile). The Spanish term "el extranjero" has been understood in its double meaning, 'the foreigner' and 'the stranger,' implying the unpredictable, incalculable nature of confronting foreign cultures as experiences and, if necessary, coping with contingency.

The planned conference had two fundamental goals: to explore the question of morality in literary texts that address contingency, and to demonstrate, through a specific theme (the foreigner), how the text addresses (or leaves open) the question of dealing with contingency. The overarching question was: How is moral responsibility staged in contingent textual worlds? How is consensus or dissent formulated through fictional texts in a contingent world?

Principal Investigator(s) at the University	Prof. Dr. Susanne Hartwig (Lehrstuhl für Romanische Literaturen und Kulturen)
Project period	07.05.2021 - 09.05.2021
Source of funding	DFG - Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft > DFG - Internationales > DFG - Internationales - Internationale wissenschaftliche Veranstaltungen