Between openness and closure: Helmuth Plessner and the boundaries of social life

Abstract

This article introduces the basic notions of the widely neglected Philosophical Anthropology of Helmuth Plessner. Instead of defining man as a privileged holder of consciousness, Plessner claims that all living organisms can be defined by their specific relation to their physical boundaries. In contrast to other living organisms such as plants and animals, however, the ‘eccentric’ nature of man allows for a comparatively high degree of freedom from the physical environment, which enables him to transcend, objectify, and deconstruct the boundaries of the same. The article concludes by outlining Plessner’s original contribution to contemporary debates in social theory, in particular constructivism and post-humanist studies.

Bodies and persons: The politics of embodied encounters in asylum seeking

“…While Helmuth Plessner's philosophical anthropology has recently started to attract a growing interest across the social sciences (De Mul, 2014a;Dobeson, 2018;Ernste, 2004;Honenberger, 2015;Krüger, 2010), it is fair to say that his thought has hitherto been largely neglected in the Anglophonic world. A prolific writer and highly original thinker, his thought on the human condition and positioning in the world has found deep resonances with a number of debates that center on the classical question of what is the human (Henkel, 2018;Häkli, 2018;Korf, 2008;Pugliese, 2016).…”

“…Perhaps the most original aspect of Plessner's thought is his insistence on the need to reformulate the question of being as a human attribute. Whereas the critiques of Cartesian conceptions of the body/mind dualism have tended to lead either to the naturalistic de-differentiation of humans from the physical world, or to the constructionist reductionism of nature to signification (Dallmayr, 1974;Dobeson, 2018), Plessner (2019) carefully shifts the ground beneath the question by placing humans into a continuum, rather than a relationship, with organic nature (Grene, 1966;Henkel, 2018). This he does by approaching the question of being from the point of view of an organism's relation to its environment, mediated by the body as its boundary and interface.…”