Helmuth Plessner

Helmuth Plessner (September 4th, 1892 with Wiesbaden - June 12th, 1985 with Göttingen) was a philosopher and German sociologist and one of the principal representatives (with max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen) of the philosophical Anthropologie. Completely ignored in the French-speaking countries, only one of its works was translated into French language: the laughter and to cry it. A study of the limits of the human behavior (1941/1995).

Anthropology plessnerienne

The base of the philosophical Anthropologie was to make profitable the lesson sciences of nature (biology, zoology, ethology, paleoanthropology, etc) and social sciences to try to determine the characteristics of the mankind, its position specific in the world vis-a-vis to the mineral kingdom, vegetable and animal. Contrary to Scheler, Plessner at all does not question the timeless gasoline of the man nor does not determine the human one (just like Gehlen will do it) by its unfinished and lacunar character. Anthropology plessnerienne (mainly developed in its work Die Stufen of Organischen und der Mensch ) is based around the category of “eccentric positionality”. This one wants to be an answer to two direct questions:

1. What differentiates living it from the inanimate one?
2. How organizes itself living it?

The first question finds answer in the concept of limit (“Grenze”). Contrary to the not organized bodies, the organizations have a report/ratio with their environment, report/ratio controlled by their own limits. The plants and the animals are thus beings determined not their limit (or border) specific. The second answer is indissociable concept of position. Plessner distinguishes three forms (or stages) from organization of the alive one: the plant, the animal and the human one, each one having a specific positionality. The plants are structured in an open way because they do not have any central body. The animals are a centered organization (or closed) because their life arranges themselves around a center constitutive and necessary. The positionality of the men is on the contrary eccentric since, by nature, the man can maintain a reflexive report/ratio with life. The self-awareness constitutes an element of this reflexive report/ratio that Plessner - contrary to the philosophical tradition - does not evaluate like a mental phenomenon (" geistig") but, on the contrary, considers it taking into consideration its biological origin. This mode of organization is according to him indissociable of a double aspect (Doppelaspekt): as an human being we have a body (Körper) and we are also a body (Leib). From this eccentric positionality, Plessner deduces three anthropological laws:

1. The law of the natural artificiality (culture)
2. The law of the mediatized immediacy (history)
3. The law of the utopian place (the religion)

In a later work ( Macht und menschliche Natur ), Helmuth Plessner will add to it a fourth law, that of the unfathomable nature (Unergründlichkeit) of the man opening with considerations of a political nature. On the basis of the biological constitution of the man, Plessner aimed philosophically to found sociology and its disciplines sisters. The current objection towards the anthropology according to which this one would remain restricted with a anhistoric design of the human gasoline does not find any relevance here. Quite to the contrary, the fundamental laws of Plessner affirm our opening in the world and the need it for working artificially, historically and socially - and this because of our singular constitution. One of the principal merits of Plessner was to have exceeded the conflict between natural science and sciences of the spirit - which legitimates the fallacious incompatibility between the subjective and objective prospects. The base of this quarrel finds its origin according to Plessner in the bad use of the “double aspectivity” relating to the human situation: the fact that the man jointly is and has his body and his physical existence, that it can simultaneously be a body thing and a being of spirit. Since Descartes, the Western thought overcomes this difficulty by granting the primacy of the spirit or the physique (the tension object-subject). This thought exaggerates with excess the mental world of the physical experiment and that instead of continuously thinking them in a mutual overlap. Cleavage between the natural point of view and that of the conscience divides sciences of nature and the spirit into that which it exceeds the total representation that the man is done itself. By preserving the double prospect for the overlap, Plessner exceeds this problem. Its philosophy based on biological facts regularly reiterates the examination of the paradoxical composition of the human experiment of oneself and the world.

Principal bibliography

the scientific idea. An outline on its form (1913)
Crisis of the truth transcendantale (1918)
the unit of the directions. Base of a esthesiology of the spirit (1923)
limits of the community. A social critic of radicalism (1924)
stages of the organics and the man. Introduction to philosophical anthropology (1928)
To be able and human nature. For an anthropology from the historical point of view on the world (1931)
the laughter and to cry it. A study of the limits of the behavior human (1941, transl. france: 1995)
For an anthropology of the actor (1948)
the smile (1950)
the delayed nation. On corruptibilité of the middle-class spirit (1959, first edition 1935)
the question about Conditio humana (1961)
emancipation of the capacity (1962)
Anthropology of the directions (1970)

Bonds

the company Helmuth Plessner - Helmuth Plessner Gesellschaft
German Article of Wikipédia on Helmuth Plessner

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