As human beings we are controlled by emotions and by our intellect – at any time both are invariably involved, even if it sometimes seems as if we are dealing with either purely emotional people or pure intellectuals. A mathematic formula, for example, which to an average person may seem as cold, lifeless and repellent as a prison wall, may produce enchantment and ecstasy in a mathematician who perceives it something extremely beautiful and elegant. In other words, he experiences much the same feelings as a musician who is playing Mozart or Bach. Feelings and the intellect don’t present themselves to us with an either-or, but we may definitely speak of prevailing tendencies.
The more emotionally driven man
let’s himself get involved with an object and makes it his own step by step in ever greater depth and complexity. This is how the artist proceeds, but this is also how any normal student approaches his subject. He feels attracted by an object, then slowly acquires more and more knowledge and skills in its handling – and at some point he himself will become an expert. In the course of his studies he acquires a reputation or at least some official certificate testifying that he may with legitimate competence express himself about the matter.
Those who identify with the object of their studies in this usual way hardly ever perceive it as a problem. A classical musician is not supposed to ask himself whether it is not the mere coincidence of his birth that is responsible for the fact that he loves Bach so much instead of, say, the musical tradition of the Peking Opera. The philosopher who grew up with Kant sees the world through the eyes of the famous man from Königsberg, he usually does not ask himself why he does not see it through the glasses of Shankaracharya’s Vedanta. The intense emotional attachment to a beloved object very often virtually excludes even the mere awareness of problems. People who grow up in a certain tradition therefore often reject as unconscionable the mere attempt by outsiders to doubt, to question or to modify it. The understandable reaction of such an affective relationship then consists in the motto that one holds against any intruders: „Unauthorized persons are forbidden to enter“.
More intellectually controlled persons
seldom follow the straight and slow path of a growing emotional bond; on the contrary, they are attracted to problems and fractures without necessarily scoring with great knowledge in the first place. „Die arbeitslose Gesellschaft„, S. Fischer, 1997 (Society without work) proved to be a publishing success, but Jenner had never attended an economics seminar. What preoccupied him was not the economics subject as such, which until then had hardly attracted his attention but something quite different: a problem. During his stay in Japan for the purpose of study and work, he experienced how this country – much like China today – was taking over more and more industrial capacities from the West. He wondered what an increasing outsourcing of industrial production to Asia (at that time mainly to Japan and the „East Asian Tigers“) would mean for Germany. This problem preoccupied him – and it was only while working on it that he, as an autodidact, acquired the necessary economic knowledge to be able to have a say in the matter.
Problem solvers may be recognized by the fact
that they turn the usual order upside down: they rarely start with years of study, gradually and lovingly deepening their understanding until they are rewarded with some official certificate; instead they get involved with some problem that challenges them, fascinates them – and this then pushes them to an often stormy conquest of the subject in question. Without doubt, this approach contradicts the above-mentioned motto, because in this case an unauthorized person gains access. In other words, problem solvers tend to do so in an unusual way, often considered improper, namely without first asking the reigning luminaries for permission.
The risk of such a procedure is obvious
We know that lots of inspired weirdos are constantly busy conjuring up solutions to all kinds of world problems from all kinds of esoteric hats. At best, such people appear as problem finders – they point out existing fractures and conflicts – but rarely do they emerge as real problem solvers. You only need to take a quick glance at the Internet to see the truth of this statement. On the other hand, no society can do without problem finders and problem solvers, because emotionally attached people often tend to be inaccessible or completely blind to fractures and contradictions. They cling to what they have learned and to their respective subject as if it were a beloved one whose beauty they not even dare to question.
As for Jenner, he was certainly lucky
Prof. Bert Rürup, then a renowned leading German economist, who acted as an economic advisor for the German government as well as for S. Fischer publishing house, supported his work (whose topic, outsourcing, may again be quite relevant in times of the Corona). In this way he paved the way for the book’s success. The usual reaction towards an outsider: „Access prohibited for unauthorized persons“ was overridden by Prof. Rürup’s timely recommendation. Jenner had gained access to the ranks of the economic guild – at least for a certain time.
However, problem solvers are unpredictable
precisely because they tend to question many things that others take for granted. This was soon to be seen in the case of the newly qualified economist. Jenner undoubtedly owed Mr. Rürup a great debt of gratitude (which, of course, he only noticed later, when the latter had already turned into his enemy). Had his manuscript fallen into the hands of an average editor, instead of being presented to the distinguished economist, the editor would have asked first of all: „Is this man even authorized to comment on the subject?“. He would of course have answered this question in the negative, and the manuscript would have been rejected by the publisher with the usual haughty arrogance.
But gratitude was no reason for Jenner to accept a course of action that to him seemed not really gentleman-like. On one of the first pages of his second book published by S. Fischer „Das Ende des Kapitalismus -Triumph oder Kollaps eines Wirtschaftssystems“ (The End of Capitalism – Triumph or Collapse of an Economic System), Prof. Rürup described himself as co-author – literally: „Expert advice: Prof. Dr. Dr. h. c. Rürup“. Since Jenner could not remember any advice even after the most strenuous self-questioning, he immediately spotted a new major problem, which he personally solved by publicly rejecting this usurpation.
Of course, Jenner should have known that in Germany such a procedure is perfectly in tune with academic ethos. Professors consider it their God-given right to have most back-breaking work done by assistants and to adorn themselves with borrowed intellectual plumes, whenever this seems opportune. Jenner believed he had to protest against this venerable tradition. That was naive, because he had, of course, soon to pay for this audacity. Mr. Rürup made sure that from then on his access to the S. Fischer publishing house would be blocked.
Two more economic works were related to obvious problems
Both were published by major editors: „Energiewende – so sichern wir Deutschlands Zukunft“ (Energy turnaround – how to secure Germany’s future) in 2006 (Propyläen), when there was yet hardly any talk of the impending climate crisis. Here Jenner propagated the transition to sustainability with a slogan that became part of popular usage later after the disaster of Fukushima. Jenner literally spoke of a „national project„. However, in that book he had drawn too black a picture of the German economy. The loss of competitiveness in key German industries (especially the automotive sector) due to outsourcing and Chinese competition is only now becoming apparent.
With „Das Pyramidenspiel“ (The Ponzi Scheme) on the dynamics of public and private debt published by Signum in 2008, Jenner once again attracted the attention of an economic expert, namely Prof. Gerhard Scherhorn. Scherhorn also introduced the book with a benevolent foreword. In contrast to the first-mentioned economist, Jenner still remembers this outstanding scientist with great respect, even though he did not follow the fatherly advice he received from him. Prof. Scherhorn urged him to refrain from sending his texts (newsletters) to God and the world. This, he rightly said, was simply not usual among serious academics.
A characteristic of problem finders and problem solvers
is their volatility. Jenner had acquired knowledge and interest in basic economic facts. But the economy as such had attracted him less than the preoccupation with foreign cultures, which he had turned to from the very beginning of his studies, being concerned mainly with the Indian, Chinese and Japanese cultures. During his last stay in Japan, however, a problem began to worry him, which in time was to become the problem par excellence for him, although he first encountered it where most people are usually not even aware of it, namely in language.
Germans think it is evident to call a monkey with the word „Affe“, while an Englishman says „monkey“, an Italian „scimmia“, a Japanese „Saru“, a Chinese „Houzi“. The famous Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure concluded that the signs that humans use for concepts are arbitrary, i.e. the outcome of chance. This view is, of course, a purely intellectual insight, which is in stark contrast to the way in which the emotionally attached person normally experiences his mother tongue. In most earlier cultures, people were convinced that the gods expressed themselves with the very same words – these could therefore by no means be merely coincidental.
Nevertheless, the reader will wonder whether it is not ridiculous to see a problem in the relationship of a concept to its sign?
No, in reality this is much less ridiculous than it seems at first glance. How far this relationship actually extends becomes obvious as soon as we relate the question to other cultural „self-evidences“. Just try to tell a Muslim that the consumption of pigs is no more and no less justified than that of cattle. Or a Christian that his faith in Jesus Christ could be explained by the coincidence of his belonging to this specific religious community just as much as a Hindu’s faith in Shiva or Vishnu. Both will react to this with utmost anger. Obviously we are dealing here with cultural positions that have been able to incite people against each other in such a way that they repeatedly bash each other’s heads.
But first Jenner „only“ looked at the problem of language,
because here he was confronted with a most intriguing question. If in natural languages all individual signs (tree, monkey, cloud, etc.) are arbitrary, as de Saussure claims, does this not apply to language as a whole, namely also to all those regularities, which we refer to by the term grammar? And furthermore: if every language as a whole is a work of chance, can we expect any connecting similarities to exist between different languages? After all, there can be no similarity between mere coincidences!
This question became a problem for Jenner, which fascinated him to such a degree that it gave rise to his next and quite ambitious work. As in the case of economics, he had never dealt with the subject matter itself – in this case linguistics -, although he had learned several languages in the course of his studies. Now he immediately fell under the spell of one of the leading linguists of the time: the then Pope of Linguistics, Noam Chomsky, who had asked the same question in quite a similar way. Is there a universal linguistic ability that is common to all human beings and can be demonstrated by drawing up a Universal Grammar? Apparently such a Universal Grammar would separate linguistic chance from linguistic necessity. Although people would use arbitrary signs in any language, the rules that codify their connection in grammatical patterns would then be universal, that is, far from accidental. Chomsky believed he had discovered such universal patterns, but in their description he used the same basic concepts that traditional grammars had gained from the study of Indo-European languages. Jenner soon realized that this path was misleading. Chomsky had never understood that the basic concepts he used can’t be applied to other languages – for instance Chinese. 1
Jenner was and remains in agreement with Chomsky as to the goal
It is about the description of the universal properties of the human faculty of speech. Where does chance end, and where do we find the structural laws common to all of them? After all, there must be a Tertium comparationis – how else would could we otherwise explain that they can be translated (to a large extent, though by no means completely!).
The outer garment of their random form must be based on meanings and structures of meaning that are understood as such by all human beings. Between 1981 and 1993, when Jenner’s „Principles of Language“ were published (by Peter Lang Verlag), Jenner set out to define these non-random „deep structures“ together with their partly random, partly formally necessary realization in various empirical languages. From today’s perspective, much of what he wrote at that time now seems to him to be too difficult to read and even more difficult to understand. He only agrees with the revised edition of the Principles published by Amazon in 2019 („The Principles of Language: Towards trans-Chomskyan Linguistics„).
In this case too, Jenner acted as an unauthorized outsider,
who invaded a field of knowledge that originally was quite foreign to him. But this time he did not have the chance of finding a patron who appreciated an investigation openly contradicting the prevailing paradigm. Instead, he was confronted with the typical reaction: „Unauthorized persons are forbidden to enter!“ 2
The reason is not hard to discover. Renowned scientists had wasted the most precious time of a short human life on the almost superhuman task of shedding some light on the largely incomprehensible scholasticism of Noam Chomsky, and an outsider simply declares this effort superfluous, making fun of respectable scientists, so to speak, when he claims that even the basic concepts of Generative Grammar are misleading because they are simply not universal. The answer followed immediately, it was: „Don’t even ignore the outsider!“ 3
And yet it was by no means absurd to assume that a linguist should have acquired a certain knowledge of his subject, i.e. a knowledge of empirical languages. It is said of Chomsky that, apart from English, he only speaks Spanish and a little Hebrew, while Jenner earned his doctorate in Sanskrit, reads and understands Russian, Japanese and Chinese, and studied at the Sorbonne (Paris), at the Università degli Studi in Rome and at the School for Oriental and African Studies in London. Chomsky would, of course, not accept such an objection. He believes that he can do without trivialities such as empirical knowledge, as he carries a „homunculus“ within him, as he literally confesses. Therefore, he only needs to study this tiny man in order to discover everything essential about language within himself. In other words, the knowledge of empirical languages does not really count and concern him! 4
The problem of chance and freedom
continued to be Jenner’s obsession. Having first encountered it in language it soon turned into a problem of a much more basic nature. With his book „Creative Reason – A Philosophy of Freedom (dedicated to William James)“ he now ventured into a large terrain that had always intrigued him, but until then not as a particular challenge.
We noticed that in language the existence of chance is undeniable, nobody can explain why a concept like tree is „realized“ with the sound prescribed for it in English while it could as well be realized by an infinite number of different signs. It must have seemed all the more strange to Jenner that since the 17th century a dogmatically held doctrine held sway over European science, namely determinism, which fundamentally denies chance and explains it as a mere indication of human ignorance. In truth, this doctrine states that all of nature, including man, is governed exclusively by laws. Chance does simply not exist. According to this view, human freedom, too, is dismissed as an illusion – more precisely, as a subjective delusion.
„Creative Reason“ is in its first part a historical work. The book traces the denial of chance and freedom through the philosophical history of the past three hundred years. It shows why science insisted so much on the denial of freedom and that even when quantum physics finally accepted the existence of chance, it did not know what to do with it. Chance is dismissed as blind and meaningless.
In contrast, with regard to chance and freedom
Jenner’s position is the exact opposite to the traditional one. „We cannot even think necessity without freedom (chance). A deterministic science is a logical self-contradiction because on logical grounds it presupposes the existence of freedom.“ In his view, Creative Reason is of equal importance beside that Reason, which is based on the recognition of laws.
Jenner considers „Creative Reason“ to be his best and most original work, because for the first time, it establishes freedom alongside necessity as a logically indispensable dimension and thus opts for a basic change of our present world view. In his view, „tantum possumus quantum scimus“ (we can only do as much as we know – this statement about man, accepted since Francis Bacon) has been wrong from the start. In every moment of his personal life, each human being can and does far more than he knows. Creative Reason is a book whose aim is both to illuminate and explore the scope and limits of human reason.
In human history
the antithesis of necessity is not chance but freedom, with the essential difference between both resulting from the fact that we do not understand what we encounter as chance in nature, whereas we do sympathize with the motives of other people and are therefore able to give meaning to their as well as to our own freedom in thoughts and in acts. Why this world exists at all and why it is the way it is, we will never decipher, even if we describe existing order in thousands of laws. That is why in nature, necessity (comprising the totality of laws) is opposed to chance, which we perceive as blind and senseless, just because we are unable to endow it with any human meaning.
On the other hand, human history is so fascinating for us precisely because people always orient their own actions along some kind of meaning, which we may detect and decipher. Of course, there is necessity here as well. We can only survive in nature as long as we obey nature’s laws, but we can use these laws for purposes designed by ourselves – and indeed since the Industrial Revolution we have been doing so to an extent never seen before.
The three books
„Reflections on Meaning and Purpose in History – The Destiny of Mankind in the 21st Century“,„Peace, War and Climate Change – a Call for New Strategies„, and finally „Homo IN-sapiens – A Short History of Human Insanity“ were written by Jenner again in the capacity of a problem solver, who gropes for the meaning of history. Let us remember: in language he was concerned with finding universals beyond the arbitrariness of signs.
He now set himself the same task with regard to the differences and contrasts in culture that go beyond language – aren’t all those infinite rules concerning food, behavior and belief equally arbitrary?
The basic question remained the same: Do we find supra-cultural meaning in human history? With regard to omnipresent evil, meaning seems indeed very hard to come by. But this is certainly not the last word. At least we can always ask for the motives of human agents, and – when finding them – explain evil to a certain degree.
As to the goal of history,
however, it seems to Jenner not only possible, but downright necessary to offer a solution to this paramount problem (which from Immanuel Kant to Arnold Toynbee, had already been conceived in a similar way).
Since the second half of the 20th century, the survival of humans as a species is in evident danger. Using the huge arsenal of existing nuclear bombs and ballistic missiles, it is as much in his hands to end his earthly existence as by irrevocably destroying the globe’s natural environment. For the first time in history, the goal of history becomes therefore perfectly clear. We are all in the same boat and together we must prevent it from capsizing and pulling us all into the abyss. In concrete terms, this means that we must radically change our economic system together with current politics. The problem of freedom being directly related to war and peace suddenly becomes very concrete, because man is not merely confronted with nature, but with his fellow human beings – and they pose a similar threat to his survival. In our days, the race between nations for greater economic, military and political power is the major force threatening to drive homo insapiens into insanity.
The intellectually controlled human being,
who is a problem finder and sometimes also a problem solver, who points to existing fractures, conflicts and contradictions, can only reveal insanity but not overcome it. He can show how Homo insapiens acts against his own advantage even risking his own survival. There is no lack of supreme intelligence in all modern states. Indeed, the breathtaking ingenuity of science and technology has radically transformed the face of the earth within only three centuries. But we now understand that intelligence alone does not make man a Homo sapiens. For this to happen, something else is needed, namely wisdom that springs from feelings, from sympathy for other beings, from mutual respect and help. As long as the disastrous race of nations for greater economic and military power is not ended, we can hardly hope that Homo sapiens – the wise and not the merely intelligent man – will steer history in a different direction.
For his large-scale history project
Jenner did not meet with any interest from major publishers, despite several attempts. Meinhard Miegel, a well-known German author whose writings Jenner always held in high esteem, expressed his praise both for the style and content of „Reflections on Meaning and Purpose in Human History“ (referring, of course, to the German original). Miegel insisted that it must absolutely be published, and that he would like to support this if necessary with a printing cost subsidy. Not only Mr. Miegel welcomed Jenner’s new work, but Karl Acham, a renowned Austrian professor of sociology, even vouched for its scientific respectability with an extensive foreword.
Prof. Acham recommended the Springer publishing house (sociology), being convinced that his preface would open the door to the author. This time, however, things turned out quite differently from when he had offered „Die Arbeitslose Gesellschaft“ (Society without work) to the Fischer Verlag. Just two days after the manuscript arrived at the publishing house, it was rejected without even being examined.
This out-of-hand rejection is not as strange as it may appear at first glance. A proofreader is hardly allowed to rely on his own opinion or that of a foreign reviewer. As in the Colosseum, where thumbs up or thumbs down decided on the life or death of a gladiator – all turns around the “placet” of one of those demigods in the German professorial sky who reserve for themselves the last word on what may or may not be published – anonymously, of course, nobody can hold them accountable. This time the motto obviously prevailed: „Unauthorized persons not allowed to enter„.
Since then, Jenner has published on Amazon
In a certain way, this kind of publication even seems to suit the author’s inclinations, for he not only finds fault with others, but often with himself as well. He continues to retouch his own writings, to add or to remove whole passages. Nothing worries him as much as when he can be proven to have made a mistake in the reception of facts or the framing of arguments (and, unfortunately that sometimes happens. Jenner is a lone fighter, so mistakes can never be wholly excluded). 5 In any case, the publication at Amazon accommodates his tendency to self-correction, because changes in both the print as well as in the Kindle edition can be done on the personal computer within hardly more than half an hour – a procedure that would be completely unthinkable at other publishers.
1 Jenner’s thesis that the basic concepts of Chomsky’s Universal Grammar (verb, nouns etc.) are not universal is either right or wrong. One would therefore think that serious scientists would either accept or disprove it. But Jenner knows of no linguist who has seriously dealt with the problem. So much has the orchid subject linguistics become a „paradigm“ as described by Thomas Kuhn, that no one studies its premises anymore. Although attacks on Chomsky have increased recently, the child is now being ejected with the bath: The legitimate goal of getting language as such into view, and not just individual languages, is being questioned.
2 Jenner’s habilitation thesis on linguistics, which already contained his main propositions, was rejected „for formal reasons“, although a reviewer (Prof. Peter Hartmann from Konstanz) had stood up for it in the review board. However, Prof. Bernfried Schlerath, the then full professor at the Free University of Berlin, was not to be trifled with. And that for understandable reasons: Jenner had never sat at his feet for Even a single hour.
3 Chomsky is as clear in his political writings as he is unclear in his linguistic texts. That is probably why he finally abandoned the second and embraced the first area. Even a linguist like Steven Pinker rejects the scholasticism of his academic mentor. Pinker convinces with his amazing knowledge, with a clear language and clever argumentation. Jenner criticizes Pinker for another reason: he considers him not quite honest. His idea of a prelinguistic language (mentalese) is completely on Jenner’s line, and the conclusion resulting from this premise seems obvious. Pinker, like him, would have to replace Chomsky’s basic concepts of Generative Grammar with prelinguistic ones. But Pinker shrinks from doing so, for he would then be in danger of breaking away from Chomsky altogether and standing by the side of a still ignored outsider. Here again, we experience the power of paradigms so vividly described by Kuhn. Kuhn had tracked down dogmatism in the natural sciences through their paradigms. He would have had a much easier job if he had looked for them in the humanities. If a company plans and produces new devices according to the known laws of nature, we can be sure that the laws it applies are true – otherwise the devices would simply not work. But in the humanities, the most outlandish theories can emerge with no need (and often no possibility) for their proponents to test it by confronting it with reality.
4 Homunculus science, as practiced by the late Chomsky, is questioned by David Golumbia in the essay „The Language of Science and the Science of Language – Chomsky’s Cartesianism“ as a violation of the principles of an empirical science.
5 Jenner is a lone wolf, his last books have not passed through the hands of an editor, nor has he asked friends to peruse them. Sometimes this has led to mistakes that quite embarrassed him. For example, the term Anthropocene he erroneously did not use in the sense intended by its inventor Paul Josef Crutzen to designate the industrial age, but referred it to the entire history since man actively changed his environment. We know, that this already happened at the time of hunters and gatherers, when they largely exterminated the existing megafauna. Jenner corrected this mistake by using the term „Great Anthropocene“.