Levels of Organic Life and the Human: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology
07/2019 · Fordham Univ Press
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The groundbreaking classic of twentieth-century German philosophy now available in English—with an introduction by J.M. Bernstein.
Helmuth Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life and the Human, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources to offer a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics—simply put, interactions between a thing’s insides and the surrounding world. Living things are classed and analyzed by their “positionality,” or orientation to and within an environment.
According to Plessner’s radical view, the human form of life is excentric—that is, the relation between body and environment is something to which humans themselves are positioned and can take a position. This “excentric positionality” enables human beings to take a stand outside the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology.
A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a range of vital current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition.
Helmuth Plessner’s Levels of Organic Life and the Human, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources to offer a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics—simply put, interactions between a thing’s insides and the surrounding world. Living things are classed and analyzed by their “positionality,” or orientation to and within an environment.
According to Plessner’s radical view, the human form of life is excentric—that is, the relation between body and environment is something to which humans themselves are positioned and can take a position. This “excentric positionality” enables human beings to take a stand outside the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology.
A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a range of vital current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition.
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Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) was a German philosopher and sociologist. From 1953-59, he was president of the German Sociological Association. Three of his many books have appeared in English, Political Anthropology (Northwestern, 2018), The Limits of Community (Humanity Books, 1999) and Laughing and Crying (Northwestern, 1970).
Millay Hyatt is a writer and translator based in Berlin. Her dissertation, “No-Where and Now-Here: Utopia and Politics from Hegel to Deleuze,” received the University of Southern California's doctoral research prize.
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His writings include The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992), Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (1995), Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002), and Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006). His most recent book is Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (2015). He is working on a manuscript with the tentative title Human Rights: On the Foundations of Ecological Socialism, from which the essay in this volume is drawn.
Millay Hyatt is a writer and translator based in Berlin. Her dissertation, “No-Where and Now-Here: Utopia and Politics from Hegel to Deleuze,” received the University of Southern California's doctoral research prize.
J. M. Bernstein is University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His writings include The Fate of Art: Aesthetic Alienation from Kant to Derrida and Adorno (1992), Recovering Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical Theory (1995), Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2002), and Against Voluptuous Bodies: Late Modernism and the Meaning of Painting (2006). His most recent book is Torture and Dignity: An Essay on Moral Injury (2015). He is working on a manuscript with the tentative title Human Rights: On the Foundations of Ecological Socialism, from which the essay in this volume is drawn.
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