Jens Weitkamp's Joy of Thinking

Abstract

AbstractWith the evocation of Jens Weitkamp's life and character this paper tackles from the psychoanalytic theory of Sublimation (Sublimierung) the nature of the specific pleasure taken by researchers. They realize passionately their own driving forces but thus indirectly contribute to culture and progress of humanity. Any sublimated drive to knowledge is based on the acceptance that knowledge always implies simultaneously a future knowledge to be. This specific pleasure is based not on sexual abstinence as stated by Freud but on the renunciation to a stable security, enjoying a mobile order instead of fixity. Nevertheless, the sublimatory derivation that ensures the transition from destructiveness to exploratory curiosity is conditioned by the ability of the researcher not to destroy the object but only its enigmatic character.