Helmuth Plessner
Encyclopedia
Helmuth Plessner was a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 philosopher and sociologist, and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology
Philosophical anthropology
Philosophical anthropology is a discipline dealing with questions of metaphysics and phenomenology of the human person, and interpersonal relationships. It is the attempt to unify disparate ways of understanding behaviour of humans as both creatures of their social environments and creators of...

" .

He was Chairman from 1953-1959 of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie.

Philosophy

Plessner's material(ist) a priori

Plessner developed a philosophical biology and anthropology which amounted to a hermeneutics of nature. According to Plessner, life expresses itself, and part of this expression is in terms of sentient lifeforms. In expressing itself through the human senses, it provides the (material) a priori constituents of perception (to replace Kant's cognitive idealism of a priori categories and intuitions produced by transcendental subjectivity as the filter through which we spontaneously order experience of the world). In other words, the formal qualities that make up our consciousness a priori - given as the conditions through which we experience things - conditions such as time, space, causality and number, and, indeed, the laws of physics, however we may then conceptualize them, are given to us both in our own physical nature, and in the physical nature of the environments we inhabit, through our growth from and interactions within these environments.

The three categories of nature's a priori and the "eccentricity" of human intentionality
From Husserl and Scheler, Plessner adapted the idea of the intentionality of consciousness away from the need for a transcendental ego or apperception and instead grounds it in the behaviour (in the broadest sense of the term) of environmentally interactive organisms as a realizing of borders that represents the point where the impulses or growth of organisms meet with their environments, are realized in the act of self positioning. These are the scopes of action and understanding that define consciousness and which at the same time ground it in the material world of nature. In terms of plants, their self expression is utterly open—their borders are defined by only very simple forms of feedback, and the plant has no ability to express intentional preferences regarding its environment; animals, on the other hand, are aware of their own borders and are constantly pressed back within them, thus exhibiting a closed kind of intentionality trapped by its own borders, this is the limit of their expression; finally, humans alternate between open and closed intentionality - we are these borders, but also, we have them, and the limits of these borders of human action, influence and being Plessner described as the eccentricity of human intentionality in its environmental relations and determination. For Plessner, our own subjectivity can be understood in terms of the expressive a priori in nature, and our experience of and relationship to it.

In German

  • Die wissenschaftliche Idee. Ein Entwurf über ihre Form, Heidelberg 1913.
  • Vom Anfang als Prinzip der Bildung transzendentaler Wahrheit (Begriff der kritischen Reflexion), Heidelberg 1918.
  • Die Einheit der Sinne. Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes, Bonn 1923.
  • Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus, Bonn 1924.
  • Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, Berlin / Leipzig 1928.
  • Macht und menschliche Natur. Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht, Fachschriften zur Politik und staatsbürgerlichen Erziehung, Nr. 3, hrsg. v. Ernst von Hippel, Berlin 1931.
  • Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielersin: Festschrift für H. J. Pos, Amsterdam 1948, 208-223.
  • Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung nach den Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens, Arnhem 1941.
  • Das Lächeln, in: Pro regno et sanctuario. Festschrift für G. van der Leeuw, Nijkerk 1950, 365-376.
  • Die verspätete Nation. Über die Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes, Stuttgart 1959 (ursprünglich 1935).
  • Conditio humana, in: Propyläen Weltgeschichte. Eine Universalgeschichte, hrsg. v. Golo Mann / Alfred Heuß, Bd. I: Vorgeschichte – Frühe Hochkulturen, Berlin / Frankfurt a.M. / Wien 1961: Propyläen Verlag, 33-86.
  • Die Emanzipation der Macht, in: Von der Macht. Hannoversche Beiträge zur politischen Bildung, Bd. 2, hrsg. von der Niedersächsischen Landeszentrale für politische Bildung. Hannover 1962, 7-25.
  • Anthropologie der Sinne, in: Philosophische Anthropologie [1970/A1], 187-251.

In English

  • The Limits of Community. A. Critique of Social Radicalism, transl. and introd. by Andrew Wallace, Humanity Books, New York: Prometheus Books 1999.
  • Laughing and crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behaviour, transl. by J. S. Churchill & Marjorie Grene, Evanston: Northwestern University Press 1970.
  • On the relation of time to death, in: Campbell, Joseph (ed.), Man and Time: Papers from the Eranos Yearbooks, Princeton 1957, 233-263.
  • The Social Conditions of Modern Painting, in: Straus, Erwin W./Griffith, Richard M. (ed..) Aisthesis and Aesthetics. The Fourth Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology, Pittsburgh: Pa. 1970, 178-188.
  • A Newton of a Blade of Grass? (and Discussion), in: M. Grene (ed.), Toward a unity of knowledge, in: Psychological Issues, Vol. VI, No.2, New York 1969, 135-176.
  • De homine abscondito, in: Social Research 36 (1969), 497-509.
  • On human expression, in: Phenomenology: pure and applied. The first Lexington Conference, edited by Erwin Straus, Pittsburgh 1964, 63-74.
  • [The Levels of the Organic and Man. Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (unpublished).]

External links

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