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Abstract
Axel Honneth and Hans Joas claim that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is problematically ‘solipsistic’ insofar as it fails to appreciate the ways in which human persons or selves are brought into being and given their characteristic powers of reflection and action by social processes. Here I review the main argument of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie (1928) with this criticism in mind, giving special attention to Plessner’s accounts of organic being, personhood, language, sociality, and historicity in that text. I argue that Honneth and Joas’s criticisms understate the extent to which Plessner takes sociality to be a constitutive condition of human forms of life within the structure he calls ‘ex-centric positionality’. This reading of Plessner also provides resources for answering a more common criticism of his philosophical anthropology – namely, that it is problematically ‘essentialist’, paying insufficient heed to the historical variability and contingency of human forms of life.
Acknowledgments
Thanks are due to the following individuals for comments that contributed to the present form of the paper: Scott Davis, Abe Gibson, Vida Pavesich, Lynnette Regouby, Sam Talcott, and an anonymous reviewer for the journal. Thanks are also due to the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, for providing an intellectual environment and research and library support that facilitated completion of the paper.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 For recent discussions of philosophische Anthropologie, see Iris, Citation2009; Fischer, Citation2009a, Citation2009b; De Mul, Citation2014c; Honenberger, Citation2015.
2 For criticisms of philosophical anthropology along these lines, see Horkheimer Citation1993 [1935]; Smith, Citation2007; Pihlström, Citation2003; Gebauer and Wolf, 2009; Esposito, Citation2011 [2002]; De Mul, Citation2014a, Citation2014b.
3 In quoting from this text, I make use of an unofficial English translation by Scott Davis. I thank the translator for permission to use this document.
4 For development of the theme that the phenomenon of life was neglected in (and through the influence of) Cartesian dualism, see Grene, Citation1974, which was partly inspired by Plessner. For analysis of the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ along lines suggestively similar to those of Plessner in Die Stufen, see Luhmann, Citation1995 [1984].
5 By the ‘reflexivity’ of a form of organic life Plessner means, roughly, the role of the organism’s past and present states in determining or steering its future states. This generally corresponds to the complexity of mediation of the organism-environment interaction. These matters are clarified in sections 3 and 4 below.
6 What distinguishes ‘lower’ from ‘higher’ in this account will be described more fully below.
7 Regarding the inevitably controversial matter of human distinctiveness, and other distinctions between types of organisms: Plessner attempts to protect his distinctions from disconfirmation by rare counterexamples through construing the structural distinctions made in Die Stufen as idealized descriptions, rather than exception-less claims about the characteristics of all members of one or another empirically delimitable subset (species, genus, family, or otherwise) of organic beings (Plessner, Citation1965 [1928], pp. 234–6). From a contemporary standpoint, one might compare Thompson, Citation2008.
8 An anonymous reviewer suggested that Plessner’s Doppelaspekt might fruitfully be compared to Davidson’s ‘anomalous monism’. Despite the apparent similarity between Plessner’s Doppelaspekt and Davidson’s ‘anomalous monism’, as expressed in Davidson, Citation2001 [1970], there are also crucial differences, which might be approached through a distinction between Plessner and Davidson’s conceptions of ‘nature’ and of ‘mentality’. For Davidson, ‘nature’ is best describable in terms of deterministic physical laws: this is implied throughout his discussion in the ‘Mental Events’ paper, including his ‘Principle of the Nomological Character of Causality’ (Davidson, Citation2001 [1970], p. 208) and his quotation from Kant at the start of the paper. For Plessner, on the other hand, ‘nature’ is not exclusively or even best describable by physical and deterministic models, even if a certain ideal end-point of the hermeneutic process of natural scientific modeling is in such models (see Van Buuren, Citation2014). Regarding mentality, Davidson follows Descartes in conceiving of ‘mental events’ as including sensory, volitional, and rational states and processes, and assuming that the question of ‘mental-physical’ relations must be solved by stating the relation between deterministic physical descriptions, which seem not to be necessarily or lawfully related to mental events at all, on the one hand, and the entire set of such mental events, on the other. Plessner, on the other hand, recognizes two kinds of ‘mental’ processes (corresponding roughly to the difference between the terms ‘seelig’ and ‘geistig’ in German): ‘inner’ mental processes (one half of the Doppelaspekt), which would include sensations and the internal mediation of motor responses even in the case of non-human animals; and eccentric processes, which include emotional, rational, and embodied expressive acts of many sorts (say, gestures and forms of embodied problem-solving), as these are specially characteristic of human mentality in distinction from that of non-human animals. Plessner’s account of mentality is thus both wider in scope, and more nuanced in internal distinctions, than Davidson’s. His notion of eccentricity may further explain, better than does Davidson, why we human beings confront our ‘daily traffic with events and actions’ in a ‘heteronomic’ rather than ‘homonomic’ vocabulary (Davidson, Citation2001 [1970], pp. 218–21). Plessner’s views on mentality (like Hegel’s) are plausibly read as anticipating later discussions of ‘externalism’ and ‘the extended mind’.
9 See, for instance, Honneth and Joas, Citation1988; Joas Citation1985, Citation1996; Honneth Citation1995.
10 For elucidation of this point, see Davis, Citation2015. See also Plessner, Citation1965 [1928], Ch. 7, sect. 3.1, where Plessner’s reasons for being wary about causal accounts of the ‘origins of culture’ are presented.
11 Though a detailed discussion of Mead’s views is beyond the scope of this paper, there seems to me to be little in G. H. Mead’s account that would provide the specificity about developmental or evolutionary historical origins that Joas and Honneth find lacking in Plessner. As far as I have seen, Mead’s accounts of the origins of human selfhood are for the most part comparative-behavioral, implying developmental or evolutionary-historical lessons, but not carrying out the argument in those terms. The distance between the two figures, on this matter, is not as great as Joas’s criticism might suggest. I venture that what Mead actually provides, in his account of the emergence of characteristically human selfhood, are putative structural conditions of possibility of that selfhood. If Plessner’s account is inferior to Mead’s, it must be by neglecting or occluding some necessary structural feature of human reflexivity or sociality: but what is that feature? Neither Mead nor Honneth and Joas have convinced me that Mead’s contrasts and favored concepts are the crucial ones; hence, I remain unconvinced by their objection to Plessner’s structural rather than causal approach. For instance: it is unclear to me whether Mead’s ‘response to the generalized other’ is best understood as a component of ex-centric positionality, or vice versa; thus I find the argument that something crucial is missing from Plessner’s account questionable.
12 For discussion of Uexküll’s significant but somewhat subterranean influence on twentieth-century philosophy, see Buchanan, Citation2008.
13 Driesch borrowed the distinction from the nineteenth-century developmental biologist Karl Ernst von Baer. For more on Plessner’s relationship to Driesch, see Fischer, Citation2009a. For discussion of ‘closed’ and ‘open’ form in Plessner, see Grene, Citation1974, Ch. 18.
14 Developing Plessner’s account in a pluralistic direction, perhaps we ought to say that this centricity can be possessed in different ways as well.
15 For a similar view, expressed in contemporary biological terms, see Moss, Citation2006, Citation2014. The latter text conducts an analysis of the material structural conditions for the emergence of new degrees of freedom, passing from single atoms through molecules, cells, multicellular organisms, and eventually human individuals and societies.
16 For a more recent and expanded development of this insight, see Luhmann, Citation1995.
17 The zoologist Adolf Portman may have been thinking of Plessner when he claimed that the traditional idea of an evaluative hierarchy of living beings – the justification for which he recognized as a difficult and controversial problem – could be constructed on the basis of the degree of sensibility of the creatures in question: ‘Though we think we are fairly clear about what we mean by “higher” and “lower” forms of life, we should be hard put to it if we were asked to give an exact definition. In fact, every hierarchical decision is an intuitive decision about levels of sensibility, i.e. about a given animal’s aptness to be affected by external influences. Though sensibility itself is difficult to measure, it can usually be gauged by accompanying factors…’. ‘The development of the brain stem is a measure of the general degree of evolution’: Portmann, Citation1964, pp. 54, 59.
18 Plessner’s emphasis on ‘spatiality’ in Die Stufen is arguably conducted at the expense of ‘temporality’, as is insightfully discussed by Marquard, Citation1989 [1981], pp. 114–15, and De Mul, Citation2003, Citation2009, Citation2014a.
19 One might compare Heidegger’s Mitsein in Heidegger, Citation1965 [1927].
20 For discussion and application of these ‘anthropological ground-laws’, see Grene, Citation1974, Ch. 19; Grene and Eldredge, Citation1992, Ch. 7; Fischer, Citation2009b; and the essays in De Mul, Citation2014c.
21 Cf. De Mul, Citation2014b, p. 462, who suggests Plessner might be classified as an ‘anti-essentialist essentialist’.
22 A parallel argument to that offered in this section could be made through the categories of ‘artifactuality’ and ‘technology’ rather than ‘language and expression’, by showing how the constitutively ‘artifactual’ dimension of ex-centric positionality that Plessner posits in his notion of ‘natural artificiality’ [natürliche Künstlichkeit] itself involves various openings of human beings to sociality and historicity. Due to limitations of space, I pass over that opportunity here. For recent discussion of the scope and limits of historicity deriving from Plessner’s ‘natural artificiality’, see De Mul, Citation2014b.
23 Furthermore, this historical dimension of expression is only one way in which human beings are related to their histories through their excentric positionality: the more obvious ways are through the not-necessarily-consciously-recognized historical contingency attaching to social and technological conditions themselves (detailed above), and through the intentional artifactual construction of historical understanding and the imaginary role-taking of historical actors (cf. Plessner, Citation2003). Plessner’s philosophy of history, as expressed in other works, emphasizes contingency: see Krüger, Citation2013, for discussion.
24 Not just to be, in Scheler’s well-known term, world-open (weltöffene), but to have fully realized all possibilities opened by world-openness (cf. Scheler, Citation2009 [1928]).
25 This is also an indication of why Plessner, in his political writings, is suspicious of ideals of ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) that many of Plessner’s contemporaries hoped would overcome or substitute for the artifice of ‘society’ (Gesellschaft). The actual desirability of the latter, more mediate condition is partly motivated, in Plessner’s account, by the conviction of the inevitable failure of understanding and communication that always characterizes human life to some extent and in some way. Peaceful immediacy always comes to an end: the only real choices are between peaceful mediacy through society (Gesellschaft) or eventually violent immediacy (war): see Krüger, Citation2015, and Plessner, Citation1999 [1924]. Whether this view is problematically Hobbesian (as argued by Esposito, Citation2011 [2002]) or insufficiently theoretically motivated (as argued by Honneth and Joas, Citation1985, pp. 85–90), is an important question, but one that cannot be addressed here.
26 One might compare this account of language’s ability to describe human behavior and articulate its meaning explicitly to Robert Brandom’s well-known project of ‘making explicit’ the connection between the semantic content of human expressions and human practices. See Brandom, Citation1994.
27 On the choice between transcendentalism and a priorism, and alternatives, in the reading of Plessner, see Ebke, Citation2014, and Kockelkoren, Citation2014.