Jens Bonnemann, Paul Helfritzsch, Thomas Zingelmann (Hg.): 1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen

1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen Book Cover 1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen
Jens Bonnemann, Paul Helfritzsch, Thomas Zingelmann (Hg.)
zu Klampen Verlag
2019
Paperback 28,00 €
268

Reviewed by: Matthias Warkus

»1968«, die Studentenbewegung, die Jugendrevolte, wie auch immer man das Phänomen genau nennen mag, ist etwas, wozu es insbesondere aus der Außensicht des politisch interessierten Laien, wie der Verfasser dieser Rezension einer ist, zwei konfligierende Leiterzählungen gibt. Die eine könnte man die orthodoxe oder revolutionäre nennen. Ihr zufolge war »1968« tatsächlich ein Epochenbruch, ein – im Guten oder im Schlechten – grundstürzendes Ereignis, der Beginn unzähliger Kausalketten, die erheblichen Anteil an der Hervorbringung der Welt, in der wir heute leben, hatten. Die andere Erzählung könnte man, um einen Ausdruck von Jacques Rancière auszuborgen, die »furetistische« nennen.[1] Hält man sich an sie, dann war 1968 weniger ein Anfang als ein Ende: der Kulminationspunkt und die Sichtbarwerdung einer bereits seit Jahren im Schwange befindlichen Transformation der westlichen Industriegesellschaften.

Im Zuge der Rechtsbewegung zahlreicher westlicher Demokratien in den letzten Jahren (oder doch zumindest der Aktivierung und Sichtbarwerdung ihrer latenten rechten Kräfte) liegt auch die Frage erneut auf dem Tisch, inwieweit die heutigen Verhältnisse ein Produkt von »1968« sind, was auch gleichzeitig die Frage bedeutet, was anders sein könnte, hätte »1968« größere oder geringere Auswirkungen gehabt. Nicht die schlechteste Lektüre dazu ist der Sammelband 1968. Soziale Bewegungen, geistige WegbereiterInnen, herausgegeben von Jens Bonnemann, Paul Helfritzsch und Thomas Zingelmann (Springe: zu Klampen! 2019, 270 S.).

Schon die Einleitung der Herausgeber führt auf hervorragende und kompakt Weise zu dem Problem der Einordnung des Phänomens »1968« heran (und diskutiert dabei mit hoher Aktualität die Bezüge zum »Rechtsruck« der letzten Jahre, 7–10). Die folgenden Beiträge gehen dieses Phänomen in schlaglichtartigen Einzelbetrachtungen multidimensional und ohne Anspruch auf eine »Entschlüsselung« oder klare Beantwortung der eingangs benannten Fragen an, wobei die Herausgeber (völlig zu Recht) eingangs betonen, dass »1968« Wurzeln hatte, die bis weit in die 50er zurückgehen (16).

Das theoretische Atomgewicht der Beiträge nimmt von vorne nach hinten weitgehend stetig zu. Den Auftakt machen Zeitdarstellungen: Sabine Pamperrien gibt in ihrem Beitrag »Szenen des Jahres 1967«, der laut Anmerkung auf einer Lesung aus ihrem Buch 1967. Das Jahr der zwei Sommer basiert, einen guten Überblick über die Ausgangslage in der Bundesrepublik und international. Sie arbeitet dabei überraschende Parallelen zur Gegenwart heraus. Wolfgang Kraushaar zeichnet anschließend die nach seiner These maßgeblich durch die Situationisten geprägte Entwicklung der in Deutschland führenden Akteure um Rudi Dutschke nach.

Der Beitrag von Hannah Chodura und Paul Helfritzsch nimmt sich für seine Kürze etwas viel vor, indem er anhand von Guy Debords Die Gesellschaft des Spektakels und Goyas berühmtem Alptraum-Capricho eine Neuausdeutung des Traums als Metapher für die kapitalistische Gesellschaft versucht. Deutlich »süffiger« liest sich der Aufsatz von Christian Dries, der in seinem Aufsatz einen hilfreichen Überblick über verschiedene Parameter des politischen Engagements von Günther Anders vor und um 1968 gibt.

Michael Jenewein und Jörg Müller Hipper beschäftigen sich in ihrem Beitrag am Beispiel der Rede Michael Köhlmeiers am 5.5.2018 mit den sartreschen Begriffen von engagierter Literatur und von Literatur überhaupt. Werner Jung diskutiert knapp, aber informativ die Lukács-Rezeption in der Studentenbewegung vor und um 1968, wozu Lukács’ Positionen zum Realsozialismus, aber auch seine Wirkung in die Inhalte von Lehre und Forschung (insbesondere in der Germanistik) gehören. Sein melancholisches Fazit ist allerdings, dass eine tatsächliche produktive und das Gesamtwerk nicht verzerrende Rezeption nie stattgefunden habe.

Gerhard Schweppenhäusers Beitrag über »Marcuse und die Metaphysik« liefert über die Erwartung des Titels hinaus eine kompakt und kurzweilig geschriebene Zusammenschau der frühen kritischen Theorie insgesamt und ihres Verhältnisses zur Metaphysik im Speziellen, die gegen Ende in eine Parallelsetzung von Marcuses und der heutigen Zeit einmündet. Diese geht mit einer in der kurzen Form arg thetisch und formelhaft wirkenden Programmatik für eine Erneuerung der kritischen Theorie einher, wie man sie schon öfters gesehen hat. Der Verfasser dieser Rezension ist in der »Szene« der gegenwärtigen kritischen Theorie ein informierter Außenseiter und weiß nicht so recht, was er von den immer neuen Aktualisierungsforderungen zu halten hat. Manche Punkte Schweppenhäusers erscheinen empirisch fragwürdig, dort, wo zum Beispiel die Rede davon ist, Phantasie konzentriere sich heute »auf das Ausmalen ›technischer Utopien‹«; während zu Marcuses Zeit und noch bis weit in die 1970er, wenn nicht 80er technische Utopien mit fliegenden Autos, Kuppelstädten, Raumkolonien, Abschaffung von Krankheit und Leid seriös präsentiert wurden,[2] hat dies heute eigentlich aufgehört. Die technischen Utopien unserer Zeit, soweit man sich überhaupt noch traut, welche zu äußern, sind sozialtechnische Utopien von »Connectivity« und »Digitalisierung«. Diese kritisiert Schweppenhäuser am Ende seines Beitrages eher schematisch und wenig überzeugend.

Ebenfalls Einführungscharakter hat Alfred Betscharts Beitrag über »Die Vordenker der sexuellen Revolution«, der in großem Bogen von Freud über Reich, Marcuse, Margaret Mead und Kinsey, Gide und Genet, Kerouac und Ginsberg die Wurzeln der sexuellen Befreiung der 60er skizziert, vor allem aber dichte Belege dafür liefert, dass der Einfluss von Sartre und Beauvoir auf diese kulturelle Bewegung nicht zu unterschätzen war. Der auch sprachlich gelungene Aufsatz schreckt vor zielsicheren Spitzen nicht zurück (wenn etwa mokant und eher nebenbei die »in der Frankfurter Schule nicht unübliche[] Umwandlung bildungsbürgerlicher Ideale in vermeintliche linke Postulate« aufgespießt wird, 154f.), lehnt sich aber hier und da etwas aus dem Fenster (es wird etwa angedeutet, Literatur habe nur noch bis in die 1970er eine »außerordentliche Reichweite in der Gesellschaft gehabt, 157, oder »die Ephebophilie« sei »bis in die 1980er Jahre die dominante Form von Homosexualität« gewesen (158), ohne dass dies belegt wird).

Eine pièce de résistance des Bandes, nicht nur aufgrund des gerade erschienen »neuen Houellebecq« Anéantir, stellt für mich der Aufsatz des Herausgebers Jens Bonnemann dar, der sich mit eben jenem französischen Bestsellerautor und seinem Verhältnis zum Erbe der sexuellen Befreiung beschäftigt. Er zeigt, deutlich detaillierter als Betschart zuvor, die Bedeutung von Wilhelm Reich für »die 68er« auf und arbeitet vor allem genau heraus, dass das der freudomarxistischen Kulturtheorie Marcuses immanente Konzept einer Befreiung des Eros nichts mit der zur wirtschaftlichen Deregulierung homologen Befreiung des Sexus bzw. des »Sexual Marketplace«[3] bei Houellebecq zu tun hat.

Jörg Müller Hipper führt in seinem Beitrag mit und gegen Helmuth Plessner den Nachweis, »dass soziale Konzepte der maximalen Nähe und Offenheit«, sprich der Gemeinschaftlichkeit im Gegensatz zur Gesellschaftlichkeit, entgegen der Intuition zahlreicher »68er« keine gangbare Grundlage für neue, bessere Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens darstellen. Im Gegenteil müssten solche Formen schon aus rein anthropologischen Gründen auf einer Gesellschaftlichkeit von Distanz und Takt, »die Möglichkeit, unbehelligt zu bleiben, nicht mitmachen zu müssen« (205) aufbauen.

Herausgeber Thomas Zingelmann nimmt im Anschluss die beliebte Vorstellung auseinander, die verschiedenen Gegenkulturen, die heute mit der Zeit von »1968« assoziiert werden, seien miteinander verflochten und irgendwie eine Einheit gewesen. Er unterscheidet die verschiedenen Unterströme in kollektivistische Protestbewegungen und individualistische Gegenkulturen (und bleibt damit im Groben in der Spur von Müller Hipper zuvor). So liefert er eine knappe, aber informative historische Beschreibung und Einordnung von Beat Generation und Hippies als Vertreter des unpolitischen Gegenkulturaspekts.

Der dritte Herausgeber, Paul Helfritzsch, konzipiert in seinem Beitrag, der nicht mehr unmittelbar kulturhistorisch ist, im Ausgang von Jean-Paul Sartre und Frantz Fanon die Rolle des Intellektuellen als Instanz der performativen Benennung von Unterdrückungsverhältnissen auf Grundlage von Theoriewissen. Auf dem Intellektuellen liegt nach Helfritzsch eine »ontologische Verantwortung«, also eine Verantwortung für das Verfasstsein der Welt in durch diese performativen Benennungen erst etablierten Strukturen von praktischen Begriffen.

Der Band schließt mit einer geschichtsphilosophischen Betrachtung von Peggy Breitenstein, die sich implizit auch gegen eine Reihe der versammelten anderen Beiträge stellt, indem sie mit einem benjaminschen Geschichtsverständnis den Wert von Versuchen der Geschichtsschreibung, die Fragen wie »Was war…?« und »Was bleibt von…?« stellen und sie von berufenen Zeitzeugen (»Siegern«) deuten lassen (245), allgemein in Frage stellt. An verschiedenen Belegen (Erinnerungen der Malerin Sarah Haffner, die Thesen des Westberliner Aktionsrats zur Befreiung der Frauen sowie Kommentare und Reaktionen darauf wie das berühmte »Penisflugblatt«) entlang zeigt sie die der Studentenbewegung als Lebensstil und als politische Bewegung entgegen ihrem revolutionären Anspruch innewohnenden patriarchalischen Strukturen und Selbstwidersprüche auf. Ihre Bilanz bleibt eine melancholische: dass die »selbstreflexive und selbstkritische Praxis« (259), die jede Emanzipation mit Marx sein müsse und die in den weniger theoriegesättigten feministischen Seitenbewegungen von »1968« noch eher zu finden gewesen sei, bis auf Weiteres höchstens Dialogräume und solidarischen Rückzug bedeuten kann, da das Erbe der emanzipatorischen Diskurse bis heute zumindest im akademischen Raum vor allem in Form von »Debattenwettstreit und Konkurrenz«[4] (262) stattfinde. Breitensteins Aufsatz hat aufgrund seiner inhaltlichen Spannweite und stilistischen Brillanz die prominente Position am Schluss, sozusagen als »inoffizielles Fazit«, des Bandes mehr als verdient.

Insgesamt kann der Band, auch wenn nicht alle Beiträge gleich interessant sind und man sich mancherorts einige Belege mehr gewünscht hätte, trotz (oder gerade wegen) seiner Entstehung als Tagungsband für nicht ins Thema Eingelesene als gute Heranführung an das Phänomen 1968 dienen und auch Kundigeren die eine oder andere neue Perspektive vermitteln. Ein Wermutstropfen bleibt die leider nicht geringe Zahl von nicht nur Tipp-, sondern auch Grammatik- und Trennfehlern, über die man in der Lektüre immer wieder stolpert. Die Frage, ob »1968« nun eher Ursache oder eher Wirkung war, löst sich beim Studium des Bandes jedenfalls nach und nach zusammen mit jeder scheinbar kompakten Substanz des Phänomens auf. »1968« erweist sich als Sammelbegriff für eine heterogene, allenfalls familienähnliche Vielfalt von zeitlich grob koinzidierenden Entwicklungen, deren Zusammenordnung unter einer leitenden Erzählung selbst vielleicht am ehesten so etwas ist wie eine popkulturelle Retrofiktion.


[1] Vgl. Jacques Rancière, interviewt von Julia Christ und Bertrand Ogilvie: »Republikanismus ist heute ein Rassismus für Intellektuelle«, in: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 65.4 (2017), 727–761, hier 731.

[2] Drastisch vor Augen führt dies ein Blick z.B. in Ulrich Schippke, Die 7 Weltwunder von morgen, Gütersloh 1972, oder ders., Zukunft, Gütersloh 1974.

[3] Dieser Ausdruck ist in der Szene der militanten modernen Frauenfeinde (»MRAs«, »Incels«) in den sozialen Medien, die u.a. für ihre Unterstützung von Donald Trump und die Anstiftung mehrerer Massenmorde berüchtigt sind, der geläufige. Houellebecq kann, wenn nicht als Stifter, so doch mindestens als geistiger Vorläufer dieses Denkens gesehen werden.

[4] Der Verf. dankt Katharina Herrmann, München, dafür, durch sie schon vor längerer Zeit auf Karl Helds berühmte Sentenz »Ihr wollt ja lieber dichten« beim konkret-Kongress 1993 hingewiesen worden zu sein.

Helmuth Plessner: Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology

Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology Book Cover Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology
Helmuth Plessner. Translated by Millay Hyatt. Introduction by J. M. Bernstein
Fordham University Press
2019
Paperback $35.00
448

Reviewed by: Shawn Loht (Baton Rouge Community College, USA)

This publication of Helmuth Plessner’s 1928 work marks its first translation into English.  In fact, this text is one of only a few of Plessner’s many books that has seen English translation.  As Plessner describes in the Preface to the Second Edition, from 1965, this book did not reach a wide audience upon its publication due to the long shadow of Max Scheler (xix), of whom Plessner was widely seen as a disciple.  The present edition, translated from the German by Millay Hyatt, is a welcome appearance of a seminal text from German philosophy’s very productive engagement with anthropology and the philosophy of life in the first half of the twentieth century.  Regarded by numerous scholars as Plessner’s masterwork, Levels of Organic Life and the Human synthesizes philosophical biology, phenomenology, existentialism, and social philosophy in the process of constructing a systematic philosophy of life from the ground up.  The primary influence on Plessner’s composition of this work is not Scheler, as Plessner maintains in the Preface to the Second Edition, but Plessner’s teacher Hans Driesch, the biologist who favored vitalism as a framework for explaining the presence of entelechy in biological life.  Plessner also cites Wilhelm Dilthey as a major source of inspiration.  Indeed, much of Plessner’s approach seeks to tread a middle ground between the approaches of vitalism and mechanism in accounting for the principles of living things.  Plessner’s aim in fact is not to identify a hidden ingredient, force, or principle driving living things, as much as it is to describe the foundations of life phenomenologically, “finding and testing an approach that would make it possible to characterize the specific modes in which animated bodies appear” (xxiv).  In brief, he writes, the task is to reinvigorate dialogue on what we mean by terms such as “Iife,” “alive,” and “animate,” where supporting evidence can be drawn from what is available to intuition (xxxi).  A task for the specifically anthropological dimensions of this study is to analyze human life from the perspective of the lived body, as opposed to separating human being into dualistic aspects of mind and matter, subjective and objective, or spirit and sensation (32-33).  Plessner maintains that traditional dualism, inherited from the Cartesian paradigm, misconstrues the science underlying anthropology by virtue of separating science into the natural science of measurement on one hand, and the science of consciousness and self on the other hand (65).  Plessner does not want to invalidate this dichotomy entirely; instead, he aims to show how human lived experience is built upon an overlap of both of these dimensions, where human being consists of inner being and outer being at the same time, with the human self centered biologically rather than spiritually.  He stipulates that a specific aim of this anthropology is to highlight human life’s natural existence via a philosophical biology, arguing “The human is carried by living nature; no matter how spiritual he may be, he remains subjugated to it.  From nature he draws the strength and material for any sublimation whatsoever” (71). In other words, “the construction of a philosophical anthropology has as its prerequisite a study of those states of affairs that are concentrated around the state of affairs of ‘life’” (Ibid.).

The primary thesis of Plessner’s study consists of two key claims.  First, living things are defined by the possession of a “boundary” (Grenz), particularly in the manner that this boundary exceeds the physical space occupied by the object (84).  Second, living things are defined by what Plessner calls “positionality” (Positionalität) (121).  By this term, Plessner means the phenomenon of living things’ manner of depositedness or placement within themselves, such that they occupy a place relative to their surrounding environment.  The primary “levels” of the organic Plessner reckons with are plants, animals, and human beings.

To drill down on these main features of Plessner’s thesis, his focus on the concept of boundary is motivated by the fundamental notion that living things are characterized by a divergence, exhibited to intuition, of inner and outer aspects, where this divergence is constitutive of the being of the thing (84).  As Plessner summarizes, “[t]he relationship between outer and inner…determines the appearance of the thing-body as a whole” (92-93).  In other words, living things manifest themselves to intuition such that the exterior’s appearance is a function of interior structure, and vice versa.  Intuition can categorially comprehend an interior essence within the thing which is integral to its outward manifestation.  This intuited, interior essence does not arise with the intuition of inanimate bodies.  The concept of boundary is decisive here insofar as it expresses the phenomenon according to which living things direct themselves outward from inside while at the same time maintaining an inward center.  Boundary is thus not a strictly spatial concept as traditional language tends to construe this term, although it does express a living thing’s way of transcending its own space (119).  Plessner proffers the hypothesis that living things are constituted specifically by relating to their boundary, effecting the transition from where their being extends to where it ceases (94).  He does not provide many examples at this stage, but he seems to have in mind, for instance, phenomena such as that whereby plants are characterized by non-static, outward extension, stretching beyond their physical contours seeking food, water, and the like, but where this seeking is driven by an inward principle.

“Positionality” is another concept Plessner introduces in describing the ontology of living things in terms of their spatiality.  Though he expresses a wariness regarding the overtones of the notion of “position” or “positing” prevalent in German idealism, he selects positionality as a term for describing a living thing’s way of situating its specific way of reaching out of itself while at the same time maintaining its inward-turned character. He writes: “I mean by this [positionality] the fundamental feature of an entity that makes a body in its being into a posited one” (121).  Again, as with the notion of boundary, the crux concerns the fashion in which a living thing self-relates in specifically spatial terms.  A living thing possesses its boundary as its own, whereas a nonliving thing does not (121).  This realization of boundary has the implication of the living thing setting itself into a place.  Plessner describes this phenomenon as follows: “This being-for-itself or being-for-it…thus forms, as it were, the invisible frame in which the thing sets itself apart from its surroundings with the special distinctness of boundedness” (122).  Alternately stated, Plessner continues, living things have the character of “claiming” their space rather than simply occupying it; they have a place of their own, a “natural place” (123).  The Aristotelian slant of this last locution seems an intentional reference on Plessner’s part.  Finally, a further implication of the phenomenon of positionality is the observation that for a thing to exhibit a positional character requires it to become, to be constituted by process (123ff).  For a living thing cannot claim its space without actively doing so.  It must grow beyond the boundary originally given to it.  It must persist, pushing against the abandonment of its space (124).  And on the note of becoming, time comes into the picture, insofar as becoming cannot be understood outside of a framework involving time.  The positional character by which a living thing is always “ahead-of-itself” illustrates that living things are defined by existing in time (166-67).  Although Plessner does not highlight it himself, there is ostensibly a Heideggerian flavor in this discussion of the relation between living things and time; his account here seems to echo Heidegger’s claim in Being and Time that the future [Zukunft] is the fundamental temporal mode.  However, at this stage of the text, Plessner is discussing living things at large, and not yet human being.  I will offer some further comments about Plessner’s encounter with Heidegger below.

Plessner differentiates plants, animals, and human beings with the distinction of a living thing’s “form.”  “Form” characterizes for Plessner the specific way a living thing balances its self-sufficiency with its non-self-sufficiency as something alive (202).  In other words, form describes the living thing’s way of managing the divergence of what it can provide for itself and what it needs from elsewhere.  In this guise, the form of “plant” is characterized by “open” form.  Open form characterizes the type of living thing that “in all its expressions of life is immediately incorporated into its surroundings and constitutes a non-self-sufficient segment of the life circle corresponding to it” (203).  This observation describes a plant’s character of exhibiting total integration in its environment, such that everything it needs in order to persist is immediately available to its outward-directed boundary.  In this light, the plant is completely “open” to and in contact with its surroundings; it does not close itself off from its surroundings because it is stuck where it is.  The plant can only cope with the conditions posed by its surroundings by harmonizing with them, developing in coexistence with what the surroundings offer.  In contrast, the animal is characterized by exhibiting a “closed” form.  The closed form has its essence in the living thing sectioning itself off from its surroundings and maintaining a higher degree of self-reliance (209).  In its closed form, the animal relates to its surroundings in a mediate fashion as opposed to the plant’s immediate contact with its surroundings (213).  Particularly with animals possessing a central nervous system, which harmonizes the operation of organs and routes sense-data to the brain for processing, the closed form entails concentration of powers and drives, but at the expense of the immediate satisfaction of needs (215-16).  For instance, whereas plants are able to obtain all nutrition from their immediate surroundings, animals must make provisions for themselves by finding their food.  Finally, a feature of the closed form of life unique to animals which Plessner suggests is illustrative of the relationship between living things at large and their surroundings is the phenomenon of instinct.  As Plessner describes it, instinct refers to a mapping of the animal’s sensations and needs to its lived surroundings, revealing a necessary coexistence between the animal’s body and the organized field of its surroundings (240).  The occurrence whereby an animal’s instinct on one hand directs it to exhibit a kind of automatic intelligence or programmed behavior, and on the other hand, the ease whereby these patterns can be disrupted by the most miniscule changes in the animal’s field (ex. bees unable to find their hive if it is moved slightly), indicate that living thing and surroundings are reciprocal sides of being that cannot be separated.  Plessner summarizes: “the living thing has itself and its positional field in advance” (236).  The crux of this point is that, pace the theory of natural selection, the living thing’s surroundings are not a force that works against it or threatens its survival (240).  The animal’s surrounding field simply is reflective of what its body perceives and uses; what the animal does not engage with by and large has no meaning for it.

Plessner’s account comes to a climax with his description of human beings in the final chapter.  While this final chapter is the book’s briefest, the account of human beings also has implicit reference to all of the preceding material.  Now that he has accounted for all manner of living things except the human, Plessner’s final task is to highlight what the human level of life possesses in addition to the preceding levels.  In addition to unsurprising human features Plessner takes up here (memory, intelligence), a decisive move comes at the end of the book’s penultimate chapter, in which Plessner describes animal being.  While animals and human beings share in the experience of the “lived body” (an experience not afforded to plants), nonhuman animals lack insight into the contrast of the invisible and the real.  They lack categorial intuition of what is present but not perceived.  Whereas human beings plainly possess this quality.  Upon discussing Wolfgang Köhler’s experiments performed on chimpanzees, Plessner summarizes as follows: “The most intelligent living being in the animal kingdom, the animal most similar to the human, lacks a sense of the negative” (250).  In brief, animals cannot penetrate the excess of negativity in their perceptions; they cannot intuit the “backs” of things (251).  Here, Plessner shows a strong influence from Husserlian phenomenology on the features of human consciousness, although he does not acknowledge so.  This observation paves the ground for Plessner’s principal thesis regarding the human being.  This thesis holds that the human is defined by an “excentric” positionality (271), which is a way of saying that the human being is un-centered, removed from possession of itself, in contrast to the way that nonhuman animals are completely “centered” or at home in themselves positionally speaking.  The nonhuman animal’s self does not exist at any remove from its lived body; these are one.  As a result, interestingly, Plessner’s anthropology, while predicated on the elements of the philosophy of life leading up to it in the text, also contains a strongly Heideggerian overtone by virtue of its insight into the human being’s inherent disconnect with itself (what Heidegger labels in Being and Time with terms like “uncanniness,” “thrownness,” “falling,” and so forth).  One can also observe some rudiments of the early Jean-Paul Sartre regarding the inherent ungrounded negativity of consciousness.  But to reiterate, nonetheless different in Plessner’s model is the out-and-out derivation of the anthropological from the phenomenon of life, where human existence is founded in the lived body.

Two final features of Plessner’s account of the human in this last chapter of the book that are notable for their overlap with themes in German thought of the same period are “artificiality” and “expression.”  These themes are treated amidst a subsection of the final chapter entitled “The Fundamental Laws of Anthropology.”  Like Heidegger, Plessner observes that artificiality or technology is an ineradicable component of the human situation.  However, different in Plessner’s view is that artificiality is a phenomenon driven directly by human finitude whereby human beings, given existential freedom (294), are driven to create in order to secure a stronger permanence beyond themselves.  Plessner writes: “Since the human is forced by his type of existence to lead the life that he lives, to fashion what he is – because he is only insofar as he performs – he needs a complement of a non-natural, non-organic kind.  Therefore, because of his form of existence, he is by nature artificial” (288).  Similarly, “[t]he human wants to escape the unbearable excentricity of his being; he wants to compensate for the dividedness of his own form of life, and he can achieve this only with things that are substantial enough to counterbalance the weight of his own existence” (289).  One particular direction this urge for creation pushes the human being is to create what Plessner terms the “unreal,” or the antithesis of the impermanence of the real.  Ultimately, Plessner maintains, this eventuates in the creation of culture (289).

“Expression,” which Plessner regards as an ontological precursor to language, reveals a phenomenological law of “mediated immediacy” (298-99).  Expression is the phenomenon in which the human being articulates the correlativity between the situation of one’s self and the world.  It is not limited to interpersonal communication or language in the conventional sense, but more broadly includes any type of creative, inventive act.  Plessner calls this occurrence the “fortunate touch,” insofar as it metaphorically manifests a moment of human contact with or grasping of the world (299).  As with the account of artificiality, which parallels Heidegger’s description of technology, similarly here with the notion of expression there is an overlap with bread-and-butter phenomenological accounts of language or signification read as the mode through which the human articulates the state of understanding, or the presencing of what is given in one’s intentional state.  Notable about Plessner’s overlap with Heidegger on these issues and several others are the fact that Heidegger is the philosopher Plessner criticizes the most in this work’s prefatory materials, especially the Preface to the Second Edition.  There is much one could explore here regarding the grounds of Plessner’s criticism, which to its credit is well-informed by the central claims of Being and Time.  However, the brunt of Plessner’s critique of Heidegger appears to lay in the latter’s failure to include any look at embodied life in his account of Dasein.

Much more could be said about Plessner’s account of the human, which, although relatively brief in the grander scheme of the book, covers significant ground and offers many avenues for further exploration.  This relative brevity is also what I see as a shortcoming of the book’s treatment of the human.  This treatment is almost too brief, to the point of being underdeveloped, although, as Plessner asserts in various prefatory passages of the text, this work aims to describe the human specifically as a manifestation of life and as one “level” or form among living things.  So Plessner cannot be blamed too much on this angle, especially given that the final chapter of this text sets the stage for the premise of his next work, Macht und menschliche Natur (published in English translation as Political Anthropology), which appeared shortly after Levels of Organic Life in 1931.  Another challenge posed by the book is its difficulty.  Because the author frequently neglects to include examples, much of the writing is quite abstract (in the vein of the more difficult texts of G.W.F. Hegel or Hans-Georg Gadamer), requiring focused concentration from the reader.  A further complicating factor here is that Plessner frequently adopts the voice of a position he in fact aims to criticize without making this move explicit or providing citations to outside texts and authors.  As a result, in many instances the reader can easily be given the impression that Plessner endorses a given position that he actually means to undercut.  With these challenges in mind, the reader will be advised not to pick this book up casually; one should be prepared for many hours of close reading and revisiting of passages.

This book’s foremost asset is its rich account of the philosophy of life and the various structures that correspond to the “levels” of organic life.  It is a major work in the history of the philosophy of life and should be read alongside other seminal works in the subject, such as Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution, Hans Jonas’ The Phenomenon of Life, and the writings of Hans Driesch.  In addition, its lively engagement with major philosophers of early 20th-century German thought provides a wonderful snapshot of the intellectual atmosphere of the time and the influence of Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, and many others during their own lifetimes.  Levels of Organic Life was published one year after Heidegger’s Being and Time and in the same year as Scheler’s The Place of the Human in the Cosmos.

Jörg Kreienbrock: Sich im Weltall orientieren: Philosophieren im Kosmos 1950-1970, Turia + Kant Verlag, 2020

Sich im Weltall orientieren: Philosophieren im Kosmos 1950-1970 Book Cover Sich im Weltall orientieren: Philosophieren im Kosmos 1950-1970
IFK lectures & translations
Jörg Kreienbrock. Hg. von Thomas Macho
Turia + Kant Verlag
2020
Paperback 20.00 €
125

Helmuth Plessner: Philosophische Anthropologie

Philosophische Anthropologie: Göttinger Vorlesung vom Sommersemester 1961 Book Cover Philosophische Anthropologie: Göttinger Vorlesung vom Sommersemester 1961
suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 2268
Helmuth Plessner. Edited by Julia Gruevska, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri
Suhrkamp Verlag
2019
Paperback 20,00 €
256

Reviewed by: Felipe Catalani (University of São Paulo)

A Chapter of the Philosophical Anthropology in Germany: Helmuth Plessner

The discipline of philosophical anthropology can be described as the work of an historically specific group of conservative German intellectuals, with figures such as Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen who exerted a relatively large influence in the philosophical debate of the first half of the 20th century. At the same time, in an explicitly leftist and anti-conservative milieu, something of a “negative anthropology” was developed (in an independent manner) by authors such as Günther Anders, Theodor Adorno, and Ulrich Sonnemann, whose intent was to think dehumanization without a positive image of what the human is. Due to his entry into the German intellectual debate of the 1920s, Helmuth Plessner is typically included among the first group, despite the somewhat modest and mostly local reception of his work and his rather moderate and anti-radical political positions. As a Jew, he fled Nazi Germany (while Gehlen’s career was advancing in Frankfurt and then in Leipzig during the period of Hitler) and survived the war hidden in the Netherlands (curiously, in his reflections on language in his lectures, Plessner employs often quite particular examples from Dutch). Although he later received a Lehrstuhl in sociology in Germany, the author of Die verspätete Nation remained relatively isolated in the academic scenario of post-war Europe.

Edited by Julia Gruevska, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, and Kevin Liggieri, the transcripts of Plessner’s lectures on philosophical anthropology held at the University of Göttingen in the summer of 1961 have been published by Suhrkamp. This course is comprised of 18 lessons. The first three lessons are dedicated to the idea and the definitions of philosophical anthropology. In the second block of three lessons, Plessner works on the problem of language. Afterwards, a third block of the course proceeds to the relation of man and his environment (Umwelt). After a lesson dedicated to the “utopia of the lost wild form of man,” in which the conceptions of natural man (derived mostly from Rousseau) are criticized, and another lesson on the concept of person, Plessner approaches in three lessons the concept of role, thought in its theatrical, anthropological and functional sense. In the fifth block of the course, Plessner exposes the main points of a study already been published in English under the title Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, in which he works out the relation between expressivity and human condition, comparing these with examples from empirical sciences such as biology and zoology. At the end of the course, two lessons address the problem of disembodiment [Entkörperung] and the human consciousness of death. The last one approaches the actuality of philosophical anthropology, with Plessner reviewing the questions worked through during the semester.

Those are already familiar with the work of Plessner will not find new theoretical material, as these lectures are the basis for his work Conditio humana. But the book certainly permits a different access to Plessner’s formulations on philosophical anthropology, in a similar manner as in recent decades the publication of lecture transcripts of authors such as Foucault and Adorno have thrown new light on their work. Plessner (like Adorno) shows a generous and pedagogical clarity with the students, in strong contrast to the technical jargon present in some of his texts. The spontaneity of spoken thought, the constant evocation of the second person (and also of the we) and a text marked by the contingency of a lecture produce a different complicity between author and reader, the latter of whom is treated as a listener.

First, we should highlight the context of the philosophical anthropology. This discipline saw its high point in Germany after the First World War and began losing relevance in the mainstream intellectual scene around the 1970’s. The relationship between the essential determinations of man and the experience of the first enormous catastrophe of the 20th century is a question not ignored by Plessner. In a strict materialistic sense, Plessner says that “this science [philosophical anthropology] made significant progress with the experiment of brain injuries occasioned by the First World War” so that “the war worked as a violent experimenter” (12). The war “opened up” man for insight in different senses, but also literally. The image of mutilated human beings revealed that it was not any longer evident what “man” was: this was the moment of the rise of philosophical anthropology. In the notes to the first lesson of the course, Plessner writes: “Ph[ilosophical] A[nthropology] is the expression of the uncertainty of man about his ‘determination’ [Max Scheler]” (9). The reference is probably to the essay The Human Place in the Cosmos from 1928 (the same year of the publication of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch), where Scheler writes that “in no historical era has the human being become so much of a problem to himself as in ours.”[1] Already in his Die verspätete Nation (first published in 1935 and then reedited in 1959), which was an attempt to understand the genealogy of fascism, he quoted Golo Mann, who said: “The question of what Germany is, and what should be done with it, was an inevitable one hundred years ago. But time worked fast… What man is, and what man should do with himself: that is the question of the future.”[2] It is also no accident that the new period of ontological uncertainty coincided with a rebirth of conservative humanism (centered in the figure of Scheler).

The historical delimitation of philosophical anthropology as a discipline is something that Plessner approaches explicitly in his lectures: he criticizes openly the idea that there has always been philosophical anthropology, so that it must be seen as an anachronism to speak of a philosophical anthropology in Plato or Saint Augustine. He situates it rather as a late product of bourgeois society that begins to appear in the 19th century, as well as in sociology (that presupposes itself a philosophical anthropology and that has a concept of man diverse from the medical and natural sciences). However, it is effectively in the 1920’s, and as a sibling of the “philosophy of existence,” that philosophical anthropology sees its rise. He says: “Let me say something about the date of origin of philosophical anthropology, in the sense that we want to gradually develop here, and of the philosophy of existence. It is not an accident that both emerged in the 20’s of this century, and at the same time. The first works on philosophical anthropology –  if I don’t think of the predecessors in the 19th century, that actually exist, especially Feuerbach – appear after the First World War, that is, in the beginning of the 1920’s. The problem developed there” (27). Also, the early philosophical anthropology of Günther Anders was named by commentators as a hypostasis of the Homo weimarensis,[3] in which the existential condition of not being completely merged with the world (that is, the “world-estrangement of man”) was at the same time the condition for man’s freedom.  (The latter was, however, “pathological,” as this freedom was a result of man’s “non-identification” and contingency relatively to world – in opposition to animals, that have in the world their “natural place.”) The proximity to Plessner’s formulation of the “ex-centric positionality of man” is evident.[4]

Plessner approaches this motif of the “deficitary nature” of man, of man as a Mangelwesen, a motif that can be traced back to the 19th century, at least back to Herder: Herder would speak of man as an animal without claw, horns, poison fang, or strong bite. That means that the biological existence of man, his instincts, are not enough. If this natural weakness of man was something to be denied – and eliminated – by fascist naturalism (legitimized by the doctrine of race, which was, as Plessner points out, a dominant philosophical anthropology of the 1930s that wished to affirm the natural and “original” force), this separation from nature is, on the contrary, what Plessner wants to affirm: “Man is, before everything, instinctually weak [instinktschwach]” (119). What is not openly said by Plessner, but which we could interpret in this way, is that the instinctual realm carries a historical trauma, the same way as German backwardness appears as an excess of nature, as the “biological fall of man” [biologischer Sündenfall] (as Habermas says in his interpretation of Die verspätete Nation). A moral problem, linked to a specific historical experience as the problem of “evil” (understood as aggression), appears between these lines of philosophical anthropology, which does not wish to naturalize the bestiality happened in the past. Therefore, Plessner’s intention is not to understand fascism as a “destiny” written in human nature – although in these lectures, specifically, Plessner’s reference to German fascism, are quite lateral. In this sense, in a less pessimistic manner as Freud in his Das Unbehagen in der Kultur, the essential determinations of man lie in the fact that he is not subordinated to his instincts (as animals are). The essential is not instinct, but its restraint (the “super-ego,” Freud would say). Plessner became, as it is known, an expert in biology and in other fields of the natural sciences. But at the same time, his interest lies in the limits of nature: a constant procedure of philosophical anthropology is the comparison between man and animals, in order to distinguish them.

What underlies Plessner’s considerations is an anti-Nietzscheanism (in other texts he names the origin of three radicalisms he despises: Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche), and also the critique of what he calls the “utopia of the lost wild form of man,” for him a “biological interpretation of civilization and culture as precisely the fall of man [Sündenfall] from nature” (124). As Habermas points out, Plessner’s vision of human Sündenfall is its involvement in nature, not in civilization (as Rousseau sees it). Plessner certainly doesn’t follow the Frankfurtian interpretation of the Dialectics of Enlightenment and doesn’t see the civilized restraint of the instinctual realm in a pathological manner. Rather, such restraints are what characterize the specifically human and should be positively affirmed. Social norms, which are not identical to vital and biological norms, have a “regulative braking function” [regulierende, bremsende Funktion] (121). “To be human therefore means to be guided and inhibited by norms, to be quickened and braked, directed and at the same time limited. That is, to be human means to be a represser [Verdränger]” (122). A defense of these “humanizing” brakes as a defense of civilization shows an inversion of Rousseau that we could call Plessner’s “utopia of the lost civilized form of man,” that has a special meaning during the Reconstruction and Denazification of post-war Germany. Man may be a “blond beast” – but the “blond beast is in the stable” (126). In a certain manner, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is a praise to the success of domestication of man.

This negation and repression of instinctual nature has a violent dimension. This theory of compensation of the biologically underprivileged condition of man (in which the spirit would result from the insufficiency of the body) finds in Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology a more authoritarian version, as man becomes not a peaceful creature when he leaves the natural condition of animal, but rather becomes a kind of ultra-strong animal. Plessner criticizes Gehlen in these terms: “Capacity of abstraction, language, intelligence become weapons. They become so to speak second order horns and claws” (120). We could even make a comparison on Adorno’s view of the violence of the abstraction as a “second-order” instinct of self-preservation (so that civilization appears as a continuation of the state of nature), but that would lead us too far. However, the compensation of the biological weakness for Gehlen is the social strength – the institutions. Plessner’s view on the break of the biological dimension is different, as he emphasizes language: “Where does man show himself as man, specifically? There where the breaking [Brechung] through language takes place, that is, there where he enters a totally other dimension as the purely biological dimension” (107). To become human means to leave nature behind. We could even identify a proximity with the Habermasian approach (formulated a decade later) on the communicative action as the “breaking out” of the dialectics of enlightenment, in which reason (understood by Adorno and Horkheimer as originally instrumental) is no longer a “second order” instinct, that is, a continuation of the history of violence. However, strangely enough, Plessner doesn’t make any reference to the Dialectic of Enlightenment, a text he certainly knew. When he understands language as a social structure, Plessner “sociologizes” his philosophical anthropology, in which this being for the other – the “communality” [Gemeinsamkeit] – is central. But Plessner never ceases to investigate the relation to nature and the form of the body. He is interested in the mouth, the tongue, and in the capacity to produce sounds. “Language and voice belong to each other” (73). His interests continuously flow from biology to sociology, and back, so that we notice a continuous tension between nature and society, although they always need to be separated.

If Plessner performs this double movement between biology and sociology, it is because his interest lies in the “determination of the double nature of man” (9): on the one side, the cultural and spiritual existence of man, and on the other side, his vital expressions in the biological world. And so he comes back to the discussion with Descartes and the separation of body and soul. This disruption as the essential determination of man is Plessner’s point of departure, and also the point to which he comes back in the last lesson: “a unity that has a break [Bruch] in itself” (219). It is interesting to note how this idea of a unity that breaks itself in two (the gap between body and spirit) is also present in his interpretations of the German historical process. The epigraph of the second edition of Die verspätete Nation (1959) was a quote from Thomas Mann in 1945: “There are no two Germanies, an evil one and a good one, but one, whose best turned to evil through a diabolical ruse.”[5] This was the classical question for German liberal humanists: how was so much hatred and aggression possible in the country of poets and philosophers?

It is difficult to say if Plessner applies his model of philosophical anthropology to understand Germany or the contrary, if his reflections on human nature are an attempt to explain a determinate historical experience. This German unity-in-duality (that in the 19th century allowed the modern rebirth of dialectics[6]) was represented by Marx as Germany’s small body (material and political backwardness) with its huge head (the advanced ideas). But in Plessner there is no dialectics produced by this gap between Germany’s body and spirit and his vision is not the same as Marx’s (neither is dialectics’ two the dualism of body-spirit). For him, Germany’s small body was actually a monster, it was a body without spirit: “Bismarcks Reich, eine Großmacht ohne Staatsidee,”[7] power and force without “idea.” The problem was not the State, incorporated in an idea, but rather an excess of nature. Instead of humanity (the spirit), in backward Germany appeared the organic body: the people, the German Volk. The problem was that the ideological national fundament was: “Nicht Staat, sondern Volk[8]. On the idea of Volk, which for Plessner represents the German anti-humanism, he affirms: “This category, shaped by Herder in opposition to the generalizing abstraction of the universal idea of humanity, in order to overcome the vacuum between the individual rational being and the general human reason, the generic human being, is romantic and flourished in the 19th century towards the significant reality, through which it today reveals the power of a political idea.”[9] To sum it up, Plessner interprets Germany’s backwardness as a lack of spirit: in its excess of nature, Germany “lacked political humanism.”[10] As Habermas affirms, in Plessner’s work “humanism, also the political humanism of the western world, should as a mere postulate continue to ethically maintain its force.”[11]

Although we speak of Descartes’ ontological separation of spirit and body, it is important to say that Plessner is not Cartesian, as he follows the break of the 19th century philosophy that brings nature under philosophical consideration. But following the humanist tradition of Enlightenment, evil is always related to what is not spirit: the organic res extensa (as Deleuze remarked about Kant). For Plessner, however, nature is not evil in itself: evil is a specific human tendency that appears in this division between nature and spirit. Man is no “beast of prey,” says Plessner. At the same time there are no murders in nature, properly said. Only man, in his particular “eccentric position,” can become a criminal. Plessner comes back to this problem in the last lesson of the semester: “Evil in this sense only becomes possible as reality through this peculiar disruption [Zerrissenheit] and brokenness [Gebrochenheit]” (221). It is a conception of human essential determinations, and at the same time we can’t avoid reading it as a response to historical problems. Plessner’s philosophical anthropology has its place in 20th century Germany.


[1] Max Scheler, The Human Place in the Cosmos. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2009, p. 5.

[2] Apud Jürgen Habermas, Politisch-philosophische Profile. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1984, p. 133.

[3] Günther Anders, Die Weltfremdheit des Menschen: Schriften zur philosophischen Anthropologie. München: Beck, 2018.

[4] On Plessner’s concept of “exzentrische Positionalität”, see: Joachim Fischer, “Exzentrische Positionalität: Plessners Grundkategorie der Philosophischen Anthropologie”. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie, 48, (2000) 2, p. 265-288.

[5] Helmuth Plessner, Die verspätete Nation. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982, p. 11.

[6] For an interpretation of the relation between the modern rebirth of dialectics and the historical experience of backwardness in 19th century Germany, see Paulo Arantes, Ressentimento da Dialética: Dialética e Experiência Intelectual em Hegel. São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1996.

[7] Plessner, Die verspätete Nation, p. 48.

[8] Ibid., p. 52.

[9] Ibid., p. 59

[10] Ibid., p. 19.

[11] Jürgen Habermas, Politisch-philosophische Profile. Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1984, p. 134.

Helmuth Plessner: Philosophische Anthropologie: Göttinger Vorlesung vom Sommersemester 1961

Philosophische Anthropologie: Göttinger Vorlesung vom Sommersemester 1961 Book Cover Philosophische Anthropologie: Göttinger Vorlesung vom Sommersemester 1961
suhrkamp taschenbuch wissenschaft 2268
Helmuth Plessner. Edited by Julia Gruevska, Hans-Ulrich Lessing, Kevin Liggieri
Suhrkamp Verlag
2019
Paperback 20,00 €
256

Reviewed by: Julien Kloeg (Erasmus University College)

Helmuth Plessner’s work has been subject to renewed interest for a few years, as evidenced by recent translations into English of his Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) and Macht und Menschliche Natur (1931). While the second edition of the former work was issued only on the occasion of Plessner’s 80th birthday (the fact that Scheler and Heidegger released key work in the same year is often cited), it is today an important source for scholars working in philosophical anthropology, philosophy of biology, and philosophy of technology. This has been the case for several decades, with the release of Plessner’s completed works serving as an important event in the ‘second’ reception of his work in philosophical anthropology. Plessner also has much to offer as a political philosopher, with not only the aforementioned Macht, which most consider a political supplement to the Stufen, but also Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (1924) and Die verspätete Nation (1934), as well as earlier political writings figuring in his sociological rather than anthropological work. Plessner’s work is multifaceted to say the least, and a considerable Nachlass remains to be explored which consists of writings in many fields, from aesthetics to biology. His work can be hard to penetrate not only because of its multifacted nature but also, as the editors of Plessner’s lectures note, because of its sometimes “forbidding” (sperrige) terminology (252)[1]. The eighteen lectures contained in this edition (supplemented by Plessner’s notes for a later lecture series) are the only full introduction into philosophical anthropology provided by Plessner, and also provide a type of final summary of Plessner’s own position within the discipline as relayed to his students in Göttingen (251), right before formally retiring and taking on the role of professor emeritus. The lectures are the only currently available source from which we can gain insight into Plessner as educator (ibid), and the style of his lectures are indeed characterized by “freshness and clarity” (252). Two factors enable this style to come across: Plessner’s own ease in using examples and weaving different themes together, and the editorial work undertaken on the present edition. The edition was based on two identical transcripts kept in the University Library at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, with handwritten notes by Plessner himself and the unknown secretary who produced the transcripts suggesting minor corrections (252-253). Subsequent changes made for the purpose of this edition are clearly marked in the text, most often through footnotes, while sometimes a word or two is added to increase the readability of the text – likewise clearly indicated. The first half of the very first lecture and the first part of the fifteenth lecture are not available: in place of the former Plessner’s lecture notes have been supplied.

The lectures date from 1961, the ninth of the ten years Plessner spent in Göttingen and the final time he lectured on philosophical anthropology there. They are titled simply Lecture: Philosophical Anthropology (Vorlesung: Philosophische Anthropologie, 250). While this may seem like an overly general theme, Plessner does his best to deliver on the apparent promise to cover the entire field in a single lecture series. The first three lectures and the final one reflect on the nature of philosophical anthropology as a field of study. Lectures four to six concern ‘the problem of language’; lectures seven to nine introduce the themes of Welt/Umwelt/Umfeld. Lecture ten then uses the shape of philosophical anthropology that has emerged during the first half of the series to discredit a particular way of thinking about human nature. Lectures eleven to fourteen connect the more biological themes of the first half to sociological themes of personhood, roles and role-playing. The biological and sociological aspects of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology are brought together in the three lectures preceding the final one, which concern laughing and crying as aspects of iterative “personification” (Verkörperung) and then death as “depersonification” (Entkörperung) (197). The final lecture, as mentioned above, is a reflection on philosophical anthropology. However, rather than the considerations on proper subject matter and role vis-à-vis the human sciences featured in the first three lectures, Plessner here insists on the contemporary relevance of philosophical anthropology by connecting it to the world of 1961. For Plessner himself, the Göttingen years marked a homecoming of sorts. Having become a professor by special appoint at Cologne in 1926, he was subsequently relieved of his duties in 1933 because of the Jewish heritage of his father. He fled to Turkey and subsequently to the Netherlands, where he lectured at the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen on themes in sociology and philosophy. Following the invasion of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in 1940, Plessner was again relieved of his duties in 1943, going into hiding until the end of the Second World War in 1945. Having declined to resume his professorship in Cologne, Plessner became a philosophy professor in Groningen in 1946 and then became professor at the newly founded Institut für Soziologie in Göttingen in 1952, remaining in the post until his formal retirement in 1962. The Plessner we encounter in the lectures is thus in an optimal position to reflect on his own young and mature works, the tradition of philosophical anthropology more broadly, but also the cultural and political outburst of totalitarianism. As I will discuss below, in lectures one to three and eighteen Plessner manages to combine all three of these points of reflection, and that is surely not only a highlight of this particular edition but also a succinct statement of the importance of philosophical anthropology that is still capable of making an impression today.

One of the virtues that characterizes the edition as an introduction to philosophical anthropology is its gradual logical mode of progression, which finds man as prehistoric tool wielder and expands into language, culture and sociological analyses. Plessner makes sure to ease the transition into each new topic broached by explaining the connection between old and new topics twice: at the end of a concluding lecture on a first theme, and once more at the beginning of a lecture introducing a second theme. This systematic approach makes it perhaps harder than it should be to stomach the fact that half of the very first hour was not recorded (“At the top of the page in Plessner’s handwriting: ‘second half of the first hour since machine did not work’. On three (appended) pages, Plessner noted keywords that were “apparently “(offensichtlich) at the basis of the first lecture”). The keywords give only a general thematic impression of the first lecture. The first lecture as recorded starts at a consideration of the problem of the double nature of man (the first theme in the notes is the ‘exceptional position of man as organism’) (9). Plessner immediately proceeds to give a historic reference for the problematic status of this double nature with the rise of the independent science of psychology. Psychology was able to give an account of man’s ‘internal world’, and with the rising complexity of the science it became increasingly vexing that it could not be connected to the outside world of concrete objects. Such an attempt, Plessner notes, was made by Gustav Theodor Fechner, “by the way a contemporary of Darwin”, in the form of the science of psychophysics (10). Plessner notes he is only interested in the attempt as a historical example, and adds the further, not historical but purely explanatory, example of taste. A taste experience is related to an external stimulus, and ideally science would be able to exactly measure the relationship between the two. This way of proceeding stresses two separate points that are relevant throughout the edition: first, Plessner goes to great length to supply historical illustrations and intuitively plausible examples, sometimes one at a time but often in the same breath, to support a single argument or point. Second, related more directly to the content of the lectures, Plessner is primarily interested in defining philosophical anthropology with reference to the independent human sciences. Plessner does go into Descartes, but only after noting that Fechner-style attempts to unify internal and external world have the tendency to produce a single entity with two substantial aspects (e.g. body and mind), which has an interesting prehistory in pure philosophy. Plessner thus elegantly steers philosophical anthropology in between a scientistic reduction on the one hand and a philosophically-minded neglect of science on the other hand, thus keeping an open perspective with respect to the “multiplicity of reality” that is represented by the development of many separate sciences (30); in particular through the onset of biology, psychology and physiology, historical science, and sociology (32-35), all of which presuppose a knowledge of what is human. Inquiring after these presuppositions is a matter of “epistemological and methodological questioning” (erkenntnistheoretische und methodologische Fragestellung) (35). Philosophical anthropology positions itself in terms of such questioning, which varies because of the different starting views on mankind that different human sciences offer. But Plessner observes that said starting points produce problems that cannot be resolved within the human sciences themselves. For instance: in evolutionary biology, when specifically can we say that mankind has evolved? (37) In order to do that the biologist must go beyond biology in its determination of external characteristics and inquire into specifically human “monopolies” that point towards a “metabasis”, a shift towards another dimension. For instance, what is it that constitutes specifically human use of instruments or language? (37) These are the philosophical-anthropological questions Plessner develops in the remainder of the first half of his lectures, as discussed above. They in fact offer Plessner’s own set of answers in response to the epistemological and methodological questioning connected to the foundations of the various human sciences.

One aspect of these answers that is striking, and one that is not explicitly mentioned in the present edition, is that each individual approach to problems as diverse as language and role-playing is seen as essentially continuous with a concept that was central to the Stufen: excentric positionality. Plessner does mention it in the lectures without really explaining it, seemingly using it synonymously with “distance” and “apartness” (e.g. 196), as well as referring to the “broken unity” of human nature (e.g. 221). Yet even in such terms, the theme of excentric positionality is only developed as an illustration of the themes under discussion, while in fact the discussion itself is structured almost in its entirety by a sequence of considerations on extrinsic positionality in various domains of human existence. Plessner’s discussion of language illustrates this well. “While the ‘production of sound’ (Lautproduktion) is an important condition of ‘language’ (das Sprechen), it nevertheless seems to be a merely external prerequisite” (52). Sound is as yet the domain of animals, and hence of the biological sciences. Yet at the same time it points beyond itself: determining where sound ends and language or speech begins necessitates the drawing of a boundary between animal and human being, which in turn raises the question what it means to be human. So what is it that distinguishes language from sound, and hence, in the linguistic dimension, the human from the animal? It consists in the removal of specificity from sound: absolution from the “situation at hand”(Situationsentbindung), which permits variation and recombination of sounds to form “word formations” (Wortgebilde) (53). Absolution from the situation at hand in turn requires “objectification” (Versachlichung), in this case of sounds; “and in this sense language and speech stand on exactly the same level as (…) toolmaking”; “objectification, namely, of objects (Sachverhalten)” (59). In these and other cases, what is at stake is the uniquely human ability to relate to oneself, which is given by excentric positionality. For instance, the ability to “separate (one’s own) expressed sound as a There from a Here, as an object, is a fundamental precondition for its instrumental manipulation and imitation in fixated formations, which (the human being) makes use of and has at its disposal as with things” (63). In an edition such as this one, it would seem useful to add an introduction that would note the importance, even if implicit, of excentric positionality to the lectures. It is at least a crucial question to the interpretation of the lectures how Plessner’s use of terms like ‘distance’ and ‘broken unity’ fits with the use of the language of positionality in earlier written work. While the lectures are welcome invitations to further scholarship on Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and its development, the edition does not equip its readers with the tools to understand the lectures in that wider context. In that sense, it is an open question to both Plessner himself (to be asked of the content of the lectures themselves) and the editors (with respect to the decision not to provide an introduction) why an introduction to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology would make so little explicit reference to perhaps its most crucial concept, without reflecting on the implications of its relative absence.

As with language and toolmaking (and the invention of tools), so it is with man’s relationship with his world (as Umwelt) – at a certain point in the development of children, we can see that “the objectification of surroundings has (…) begun and continues, following the lead of increasing linguistic articulation” (am Leitfaden der wachsenden sprachlichen Artikulation) (91). Plessner develops different aspects of a specific theme for each of his ‘triads’ of lectures in almost dialectical fashion: for the theme of Umwelt, the theme is developed first at the problem of how mankind relates to his surroundings, then, second, as an articulation of what is specific about mankind’s relationship with his world, and finally, third, as a reflection on the necessarily limited character or “horizon structure” of any such world (102). This is an interesting consideration of the limits that accompany human existence, which offers a restatement of Plessner’s thought on this matter in written works. The analysis of objectification as the distinguishing feature of the human is in essence continued on another level.

In the tenth lecture, “On the utopia of a lost primeval form of mankind” (Zur Utopie des verlorenen Wildform des Menschen), Plessner uses the notion of horizon against those who would postulate a ‘true’ and ‘original’ form of human existence that was subsequently lost. This turn to the lifeworld, as Odo Marquard would put it, is arguably one of the highlights of the lecture series. The stakes of Plessner’s consistent, tightly argued, but seemingly ‘merely’ theoretical inquiries into the human in the first nine lectures come into full view for the first time. Plessner harks back to “Husserl’s famous pencil” (114) discussed in the previous lecture to describe the simultaneous availability and unavailability of things (to put it simply: we can never see all sides of the pencil at once). Plessner now adds: “There exists a correlativity between thing-structure and self-structure, a strict correspondence” (ibid). The ‘I’ is something that is one the one hand identical with oneself, but also something that is, on the other hand, removed from oneself (115): as we do not see a thing in its entirety, so we do not fully, but only partially, coincide with ourselves. Referring to Ernst Bloch, Plessner uses the phrase: I am, but I do not have myself (ibid). This correspondence of self-structure to thing-structure is evident to us in our “needs” (Bedürfnisse), Plessner continues (117). In addition to the biological needs we share with animals, human beings that have satisfied this first ‘layer’ of needs add a second one, and so on, with each new layer opening up a new world: for instance, of goods, clothing, dwellings, weapons, to name a few. It is up to us whether to stabilize this process or to allow ourselves to be handed over to ever-new phases of new needs. This, Plessner says, is Marx’ insight in a nutshell (118). The ensuing situation is only possible because we are not in fact consigned to a biological cycle of enforced needs and ends. We are too “biologically underprivileged” for such a consignment, and more specifically, too “weak in instinct” (119). Plessner intelligently uses this insight to argue that the tropes of “Overman”, “post-historical man”, “natural man” as well as the accompanying critiques of the “decadence” of the “degenerate” (entartet) and “domesticated” man of the present all belong together (124). And they all fail for the same reason, as none of them is able to recognize the “structural brokenness in the relation of man towards himself and the world” (ibid). Plessner’s analysis shows that this brokenness, which utopians of natural man associate with some exit from paradise (123, 125), applies to mankind as such and is in fact its distinguishing characteristic. What then of “the creature of power, the creature of war, the creature of domination”? Plessner adds considerable rhetorical flourish to this culmination point of the analysis so far: “Well, ladies and gentlemen, the Blonde Beast stands in the stables!” (126) This is of course a critique of national socialism and its aims, but it equally discredits, as Plessner also notes, followers of Rousseau and Marx in stipulating a perfect and thus self-identical (non-broken) human being at either the beginning or end of history. In bringing home the argument more explicitly when reflecting on it in the next lecture, Plessner comes even closer to saying ‘excentric positionality’: “Mankind has never been natural anyway. His naturalness has always been a secondary naturalness, which was provided for him thanks to his “artificial capabilities” (künstliche Fähigkeiten)” (128). This seems a clear restatement of the first anthropological law from the final chapter of the Stufen: the law of natural artificiality. (The law of mediated immediacy is mentioned explicitly one page further on: “(…) its characteristic excentricity, in this ‘mediated immediacy’ (vermittelten Unmittelbarkeit) of its form of life” (129).

In the second half of the lecture series, Plessner applies the theme of domestication, but not in the vein of the misplaced cultural pessimism cum utopian optimism that had justified National Socialism. Instead, he follows it up in the context of continuing his inquiry after the separation between human and animal. Plessner here considers the question of personhood, which in his analysis is tied up with role-playing: our name designates our first role rather than the ‘I’ (135). For instance, our name declares that we possess a certain heritage or have specific attributes: it connects us to something beyond ourselves, in a real sense. This is in its essence what personhood is, and lays the foundation for the creation of institutions: both the person and the institution bring a specific structure to the “shared social world” (sozialer Mit-welt) (137). Plessner understands both types of structure as “personification” (Verkörperung)(146). The distinction between the functional and anthropological notion of role-playing is familiar from the aforementioned Grenzen der Gemeinschaft and once again turns on the absence or presence of the ability of the human being (as role-player) to reflect on her own activity (role-playing) – the presence of said ability distinguishes the anthropological notion of role-playing.

The fifteenth and sixteenth lecture illustrate a different aspect of personification (161), namely laughing, crying and smiling. These lectures essentially provide a succinct and clear introduction to Plessner’s Lachen und Weinen (1941), in which he sets forth these themes as extreme possibilities of being human. More specifically, as Plessner puts it in the present edition, they are “witnesses of man’s personificatory relationship with himself (Verkörperungsverhältnis des Menschen zu sich)” (194). In the seventeenth and second to last lecture, Plessner considers that “depersonification” (Entkörperung) or death is, specifically within human existence, given with the experience of life. The simultaneity of both experiences “once populated the human world with magical powers and mythical creatures, practices and rites” that through the onset of a “mechanical understanding of nature and the society of laborers carried through by the former” is no longer accessible to us (207). Yet the stubborn avoidance of death in our time cannot entirely hide the fundamental human “motivation” (Ansatz) for the production of a “counterworld, however conceived” (Gegenwelt, wie immer auch geartet) (208).

From the advent of speech to the continued need for a counterworld in industrial society, Plessner’s lectures have unfolded for us his perspective on the story of the human, insofar as it is human. In the final lecture, Plessner makes clear that he has taken us exactly to 1961. He reads a long quote – the first time this has occurred in the lecture series – from a reputable biologist who comments on the success of artificial “selection” (Auslese) in domestic animals and suggests that we owe it to ourselves (my paraphrase) as “friend(s) of mankind” to apply the same insight to the perfection of mankind itself, and we would need a type of world government in order to enable the experiment (210). When the quote ends, Plessner immediately remarks that this suggestion surfaces “after a time which has thought about this in exactly the same way and which has brought the greatest misery upon our country. Exactly with the same kind of idealism in the background that also speaks through these words. You see then, ladies in gentlemen, that the past in Germany has not been overcome, and (this is the case) for the greatest minds of our science. That should give one pause” (211). Plessner also compares the biologist’s proposal to the atom bomb, since both “rob mankind of the possibility of existing and being human” – yet while the atom bomb continues to be hotly debated, Plessner says the proposal has not given rise to discussion (212). After commenting on Darwinism, social Darwinism, and Nietzsche as well as picking apart the political conditions of the proposal, Plessner confronts the latter with key insights from the lecture series: the necessarily “broken unity” as the “specific position of man” (218). And here we see how far we are from Descartes: he too saw a break, but only as a “conjunctum”, whereas Plessner emphasizes the element of broken unity (219). The biologist and the “biological politicians of the nineteenth century and their students in the Third Reich” share the theme of domestication, although they travel in the opposite direction (221) – national socialism operates under the idea that the domestication of mankind needs to be undone, whereas the biologist’s proposal is that we should finally face up to the responsibility of domesticating ourselves. Plessner’s final comments are the densest part of his lectures and are certainly deserving of close study. He seems to say that the drive to evil itself is a function of our brokenness, in other words, of the fact that there is no primeval or completed human being. Whereas both the biologist under consideration and the proponent of the blonde beast call on us to overcome certain (“ethical or moral or other”) “inhibitions” (Hemmungen) (ibid), it is ourselves and these very inhibitions of ours we should call on in overcoming our own “criminal disequilibrium” (kriminelle Ungleichgewichtigkeit) (ibid). Plessner finishes on this “moral apotheosis” to which he says he is not normally disposed, and hopes that it was not so abstract after all – that it shows how these theoretical observations of his are truly topical (222).

The appendix contains notes taken at the occasion of Plessner’s lectures on the history of anthropology from 1956. These provide useful focal points for the 1961 lecture series, as well as significant variations. These are all presented in highly condensed and aphoristic form. A notable example of variation is provided by the sustained and interesting reflections on aesthetics (“Kandinsky’s thought of playing music in colors has its limits”, 238), which is not part of the 1961 lecture series. Consider also the following: “Existential philosophy does not know of nature, nor of the world (Die Existenzphilosophie ist naturfremd und weltfremd)” (226).

As an introduction to Plessner’s work, this edition is a great success and a valuable addition, with the qualification of the understated organizing principle of excentric positionality raised above. In a similar vein, it would seem useful to point out (dis)similarities between the content of the lectures and Plessner’s written work more consistently than is the case in the edition. Footnotes of this kind are limited in number and mostly concern Plessner’s introduction on Conditio humana (1961), for which the lecture series served as the “material basis” (251) according to the editors. As it stands, the edition calls out for and has certainly prepared the way for additional scholarly work to make these lectures into an integrated part of Plessner’s oeuvre, albeit with the additional task of taking seriously the specific quality of these lectures qua lectures. They show the capabilities of Plessner during a pivotal time in his life, displaying in particular both his theoretical prowess and his ability to connect philosophical anthropology to the needs of his time. The combination of these aspects of his work, as brought out by this edition, make Plessner an important thinker for his time and ours.


[1] Page numbers refer to the reviewed edition of Plessner’s lectures. All translations from German are my own.

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Helmuth Plessner: Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, Fordham University Press, 2019

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Jasper van Buuren: Body and Reality, Transcript Verlag, 2018

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