the analytical potential of philosophical anthropology towards technological innovations in

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Allert, Tilman [email protected]

The analytical potential of philosophical anthropology towards technological innovations in clinicalsurgery.

It seems obvious that facing the architecture and conceptual differentiation of Plessner`s work there are a number of immediate responses and helpful ideas social science might easily assimilate. But the amount of compatibility and explanatory adequacy depends on the question “How do we read the philosophical anthropology?”. The wide empirical scope of new phenomena in the field of medical care and surgery therefore has to be thoroughly examined in respect to basic ideas of positional eccentricity and other concepts. The lecture will deal with deep brain stimulation and cranio-maxillofacial surgery as two different medical practises that affect the philosophical self understanding of man. Empirical data from interdisciplinary research will be presented and discussed under the guideline of Helmuth Plessner`s thinking. Could the philosophical anthropology become the conceptual bridge between neurochirurgical and chiropractical disciplines on the one hand and social science on the other hand?

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Anderson, Joel [email protected] “Transparency, Plasticity, and Niche Construction: Plessnerian Reflections on Extended Agency” In this paper, I take up three key themes from the work of Helmut Plessner as a way of shedding light on the phenomenon of extended agency. The phenomenon at issue has to do with the ways in which our ability to act is enhanced, leveraged, scaffolded, and extended by various components of our environment (A. Clark and Chalmers 1998). In particular, I am interested in the phenomenon of niche construction. The notion of “cognitive niche construction” figures prominently in discussions of the extended/embedded mind. The general idea is illustrated by Andy Clark with the case of expert bartenders who arrange differently sized glassware in such a way that it supports them in measuring, mixing, and remembering drink orders (Andy Clark 2008, 62; Norman 1993; Sterelny 2003). A similar point can be made about our ability to motivate ourselves and increase self-control in situations in which we are tempted to procrastinate (Heath and Anderson). Until now, discussions of this issue have not fully benefitted from engagement with the insights of Plessner, and the present paper is intended as a first step in this direction. I focus on three key themes.

The first theme is the idea that our control over our bodies is normally limited. It is fundamental and ineliminable part of the human condition that we are surprised by our bodies, that they don’t always do what we want them to do (Plessner 2003a). Drawing on recent work in disability studies – particularly on the social model of disability (Shakespeare and Watson 2002) and the Plessner-inspired work of the late Andreas Kuhlmann (Kuhlmann 2006; Kuhlmann 1991; Kuhlmann 2005) – I develop this notion in terms of a key slogan of the disability movement, namely that we are “all disabled”. As a result, we all regularly and standardly engage structures that support our limited powers of self-regulation (Plessner 2003b). Niche construction is one form of this.

The second theme from Plessner has to do with his challenge to deterministic and reductionistic Darwinism, particularly in light of his notion of eccentric positionality. It is often assumed that niche construction is driven by evolutionary or functionalistic adaptations. And certainly, in many corners of the animal kingdom this is the case. The specific situation of humans, however, to which Plessner repeatedly called attention, is that we are able to stand back from our nature and take up a position towards it. This same point applies to the context of niche construction, and has significant implications. For it opens up the idea that our overall competence is not a given, but is indexed to task environments that are at least partly our own creation, as are the support structures that we rely on to complete these tasks. The third and final theme I draw on is Plessner’s nuanced understanding of the relationship between “Körper haben” and “Leib sein”. One of the central normative tasks for determining whether a particular form of extended, scaffolded, or prosthetic agency is one’s own lies in specifying the conditions under which the experience is experientially or phenomenologically transparent. And Plessner’s discussion of the relationship between Leib and Körper is particularly relevant for this, in that it incorporates an irreducible tension between the fluid, transparent expression as a lived body and the constant surprise and unpredictability of that selfsame embodiment. Works Cited: Clark, A., and D. Chalmers. 1998. The extended mind. Analysis, no. 58: 7-19. Clark, Andy. 2008. Supersizing the mind: Embodiment, action, and cognitive extension. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press. Heath, Joseph, and Joel Anderson. Procrastination and the extended will. In The Thief of Time: Philosophical Essays on Procrastination, ed. Chrisoula Andreou and Mark White. Oxford University Press, Forthcoming. Kuhlmann, Andreas. 1991. Souverän im Ausdruck: Helmuth Plessner und die "Neue Anthropologie". Merkur, no. 509: 691-702. ———. 2005. Behinderung und die Anerkennung von Differenz. WestEnd. Neue Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 2, no. 1: 153-164. ———. 2006. Krankheit und Freiheit. Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 54, no. 2: 311- 322. Norman, Donald A. 1993. Things that make us smart: Defending human attributes in the age of the machine. Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley. Plessner, Helmuth. 2003a. Gesammelte Schriften 7. Ausdruck und menschliche Natur. 1st ed.

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Suhrkamp. ———. 2003b. Gesammelte Schriften 8. Conditio humana. Suhrkamp. Shakespeare, Tom, and Nicholas Watson. 2002. The Social Model of Disability: An Outdated Ideology? Research in Social Science and Disability 2: 9-28. Sterelny, Kim. 2003. Thought in a Hostile World: The Evolution of Human Cognition. Wiley- Blackwell.

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Berg, Laurens van den [email protected] Out-of-Body Experiences and Telepresence from a Plessnerian Point of View

The steady development of information and communication technologies in combination with ongoing research in the field of Virtual Reality has already led to a lot of publications on the subject of telepresence. It is the idea that we can have a sense of presence at a place other than where our physical bodies are, so it can also be viewed as an ‘out-of-body experience’. Though this is often associated with science-fiction, mysticism or New-Age, recent experiments by psychologists and neurologists (Ehrsson 2007; Leggenhager, et al. 2007) show that it is possible to induce these kind of experiences to almost anyone. With some help of a camera which is connected to a Head Mounted Display (HMD), test subjects report that they experience themselves, including their bodies, to be present on a different place then where their physical bodies are located. In these experimental inductions the ‘centre of consciousness’ or the ‘self’ is placed outside of the physical body, in this way the spatial unity between body and self is broken. In fact, the self is transported in the form of an electronic signal across a wire between the camera and the HMD. It would be interesting to try and link these experiments with the bodily philosophy of Helmuth Plessner. His idea of the so called ‘excentrical position’ is, in a way, a form of telepresence avant la lettre, because here too the spatial unity between body and self is broken. Could this perhaps mean that the excentrical positionality can be transferred through a wire too, or even be distributed across an electronic network? And could the poly-(ex)centric positionality that some authors support (De Mul 2003), where we can escape to a multitude of bodies, become more than just a wild science-fiction idea? - Ehrsson, H. Henrik. (2007). "The experimental induction of out-of-body experiences." In: Science, Vol: 317,

august 24, 2007, p. 1048. - Leggenhager, Bigna, et al. (2007). "Video ergo sum: Manipulating bodily self-consciousness." In: Science, Vol: 317, august 24,

2007, p. 1096-1099. - Mul, Jos de. (2003). Cyberspace Odyssee. Kampen: Klement.

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Boccignone, Martino [email protected] The Duty of Personal Identity: Authenticity and Irony

My talk is about the personal identity of human individuals as seen from the point of view of Plessner’s anthropological law of “natural artificiality”. The main thesis is that personal identity, by nature, is to some extent necessarily “artificial”, i.e.: it is something “made” or “constructed”. This is not to suggest that personal identity has to be false or a product of dissimulation. It is rather a theoretical basis for a critical study of the process of the construction of personal identities. This question is especially important in the present world characterized by an intricate combination of uprooting, strong traditional identities and forms of open, cosmopolitan self-understanding.

The starting point for my argument is Plessner’s philosophical-anthropological insight that it is not possible to reach a complete knowledge and definition of human nature. Specifically, Plessner posits that the human being is necessarily inscrutable (“unergründlich”). At the level of the individual person, this fundamental rootlessness due to the eccentric positionality also means that the individual’s particular nature or identity is opaque.

Despite his profound analyses of individuality and of the social dimension of human life, Plessner does not directly approach the question of personal identity. In his criticism of the community-based conception of society and in his later distinction between social role and private sphere of intimacy, Plessner does contribute to a philosophical-anthropological understanding of personal identity, albeit indirectly. However, especially in his “political anthropology” Plessner restricts the critical potential of his theory, as he strongly links the individual to the collective identity it belongs to, i.e. to a given cultural, political and historical situation. In my address, I will show that the principles of eccentric positionality and of the inscrutability of human nature can give a strong basis for a more open view of the construction of personal identity. This is especially needed in the present political and cultural situation with its widespread problems of integration in multicultural societies and huge global migrations.

As Plessner says, every human being has to conduct its own life in its very personal way, making decisions and designing one’s own behavior, beliefs and habits. In doing that, the individual cannot rely on complete insight into its own “nature” or “identity” since identity itself is an open and dynamic process rather than a static essence. From this perspective, the duty of self-knowledge (expressed by the Delphic motto “Know thyself”) also has a practical meaning because it implies self-design. This circumstance can be considered a particular aspect of the general law of “natural artificiality” of human beings.

The artificiality of personal identity can be opposed to both the naturalness of instinctive life and the implicitness of traditional sets of rules (culture as “second nature”, i.e. as a nature-like concretion of cultural artificiality). The first opposition represents the distinction between the human being and other living beings. The second opposition plays a very important role in the relation between individual and collective identity (based on common shared values) – thus having a deep relevance for issues of social and political philosophy. In both cases natural artificiality explains the possibility of an estrangement from the (both natural and cultural) environment and its constraints. Thus artificiality is the basis for individual freedom and self-determination. The inscrutability of one’s individual identity makes it necessary to review an overly naïve and romantic idea of authenticity understood as a congruence with a given tradition or collective identity. A dynamic conception of identity supports the openness of the individual process of self-determination, though it does not completely deny the role played by collective identity in self-perception and in the development of individuals.

The conclusion of this talk can be summed up as follows: the inscrutability of one’s identity does not simply mean the negative acquisition of the impossibility of knowing oneself completely, it implies rather the openness of every identity as such and the need for practical engagement in the process of self-design. The fundamental approach, as opposed to authenticity and loyalty to one’s “origin”, is then a critical “irony” linked to a consciousness of the relativity and contingency of one’s identity and one’s belonging. Self-irony enables one’s openness to new horizons of meaning and to new forms of individual and collective identity.

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Breyer, Thiemo [email protected]

„Plessner and the phenomenology of intersubjectivity“ How do we perceive others and how do we understand other minds? These questions are central to philosophy and the cognitive sciences. Before this complex problem has been scrutinised by the empirical sciences under the rubric of a ‚theory of mind’ (ToM), phenomenologists in the tradition of Husserl have developed detailed analyses of intersubjectivity pertaining to an understanding of ToM. Plessner’s anthropology, drawing on basic phenomenological insights, gives unique answers to some of the main questions concerning ToM. In this paper I would, therefore, like to pursue three main interests, namely to

1. compare Plessner’s anthropology with phenomenological accounts of intersubjectivity, 2. profile his own position with respect to fundamental notions such as eccentricity and embodiment, and 3. give an outlook as to why Plessner could be relevant for contemporary investigations of ToM.

In the phenomenological tradition, there have been different approaches to the problem of other minds. One account focusses on the face-to-face encounter with the other and explains this experience in terms of a particular mode of intentional consciousness called empathy. The question arising from this is in which respects empathy differs from and how it relates to other modes of intentionality such as perception, remembering, and imagination. A second approach takes the body as a starting point and roots the understanding of others in the alterity that is already given in the embodied self. Insofar as the body has the double aspectivity of being an ‚Empfindungsorgan’ and a physical thing – this becomes apparent in double-sensations, for instance in touching one’s body, where the body is at the same time touching (subjective) and being touched (objective) – there is already otherness within bodily subjectivity. A third option is to regard the relation between subjectivity and world as the origin of our understanding of other minds. In external perception we look at objects from a finite perspective, i.e. an object always appears in ‚Abschattungen’, from one side or the other. We never have a complete perception of the whole object. Nevertheless, we have a tacit knowledge and certain expectations about how the object should look from other angles. In making this knowledge explicit, we take the perspective of an other, looking at the object ‚from there’.

Plessner incorporates many aspects from the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and reformulates them within the framework of his anthropology. As Husserl, Plessner argues against the theory of analogical inference, according to which we have primary access only to the physical appearance of the other and infer by means of analogy to ourselves, by studying the other’s ‚Gebaren’, what his or her mental states, beliefs, desires, etc. could be. Instead, he argues for the ‚psychophysical indifference’ in the experience of the other’s expressions. Another similarity to Husserl and Merleau-Ponty consists in the fact that Plessner states an apriori ambivalence within the self. The eccentricity of being human amounts to a self-friction (‚keimhafte Spaltung’) that is the basis of our understanding of others and of ourselves as experienced by others. From the ‚non-place’ of the eccentric position we experience, as it were, in the place of anyone else. For Plessner, the generality of this ‚utopian’ perspective is the foundation of human social interactions and the development of sociality. As Merleau-Ponty, Plessner also argues that there is already alterity in the self, due to the double-aspectivity of the ‚Leibkörper’. He goes beyond Merleau-Ponty, however, in determining sociality in terms of ‚Mitwelt’ as ‚geistige Welt’.

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Buuren, Jasper van [email protected] Plessner and the Mathematical-Physical Perspective One of the main aims of Plessner’s Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch is to overcome the dichotomy between the natural sciences and the Geisteswissenschaften, and to find a foundation for both categories of science (Stufen 39-41). Plessner seeks this foundation in a concept of man that on the one hand does justice to man’s natural constitution, and on the other hand escapes naturalism. I think that, across the board, Plessner is successful in his attempt, and that the key to this success is a phenomenological approach that turns away from idealism by situating subjectivity, and thereby also philosophical knowledge itself, in the world. However, Plessner’s view is not without problems altogether. I want to endorse Plessner’s way of thinking by addressing a problem concerning the relationship between the mathematical-physical and the phenomenological perspective. The Stufen can be read as a phenomenology of the thing, describing different levels of being, from non-living things, through plants and animals, to man, who is in a sense still a thing himself. Non-living things, in Plessner’s view, cannot be reduced to the matter which is the object of physics (Stufen 32; 128-135). The thing always only shows some aspects of itself, while hiding others. These aspects appear as the properties of the core-substance of the thing, which is not the material ‘centre’ within the space that the thing occupies (Stufen 133). This illustrates that, according to Plessner, the thing as a phenomenon cannot be reduced to its matter in a mathematical-physical space. Plessner’s explanation of the appearance of the thing implicitly refers to a possible subject, which is, at this stage in the Stufen, yet to be thematized. It is after all the subject to whom a thing appears in the first place, i.e. for whom only some sides are directly accessible and others only indirectly. Whereas subjectivity is already implied in the phenomenology of the thing, ‘thingness’ (“Dinghaftigkeit”; Stufen 275), the other way around, remains presupposed throughout the development, in the Stufen, of the levels of living beings and of man. In sofar as man is concerned, thingness is dialectically transcended and maintained as the moment of Körperlichkeit within man’s way of being as a whole. Man’s Körper, Plessner says, is a thing among other things in a continuum within which all direction is relative (“ein richtungsrelatives Kontinuum”; Stufen 367). Plessner adds that the perspective from which man appears as a Körper “leads to the mathematical-physical perspective” (Stufen 367). In this way the Körper and its world constitute the origin and the ultimate foundation of the sciences that concern themselves with the non-living. The first distance to the Körper is constituted by man’s Leib. For the Leib directions are not relative: it lives in a sphere which is organized on the basis of an absolute above, below et cetera. This perspective prepares the natural sciences of the organic. The second distance is constituted by the excentric position, from which man appears to himself as both Körper and Leib. The central problem of my paper concerns Plessner’s definition of the Körper. The description of the Körper as thing seems to contradict Plessner’s general definition of the thing. As noted, the thing according to Plessner appears in aspects. This aspectivity refers to subjectivity: which property presents itself within the total appearance of a thing is relative to a perceiver, who, for instance, stands on one side of the thing and not on the other. According to this definition of thingness, the thing appears in a continuum which is organized on the basis of directions that are by no means relative. Why, according to Plessner, does the human Körper not belong to this phenomenal space, but instead to a “richtungsrelatives Kontinuum”? Phenomenology is the description of experience. Even if the Körper is only one moment within a more encompassing phenomenon – human life is constituted by Körper, Leib and the excentric position – this moment should on principle be given in a phenomenological ‘perception’. Is a continuum without orientations such as above and below thus perceivable? As noted, the perspective from which man appears as Körper according to Plessner “leads to the mathematical-physical perspective”. What does “lead to” mean in this context? Is the continuum without directions not already a mathematical-physical construction? (The paper will address secondary literature.)

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Carman, Taylor [email protected] Are We Our Bodies? Helmuth Plessner, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hubert Dreyfus, and John McDowell all agree that human human experience and action are essentially embodied; that the mind or subject is nothing substantially separate from or additional to the organism. For all of them, the person is, in some sense, his or her body. But human beings can also think rationally, even about their own bodies. Does this imply a distinction between ourselves as rational subjects and our bodies as objects? How can we understand what Plessner calls our "?eccentric"? relation to our bodies without slipping back into dualism?

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Castillo, Gema Ortiz del [email protected] SPAIN AS A PHILOSOPHICAL PROBLEM? Historical judgement and Plessnerian criticism to some foreign views about the problem of modernity in Spain My purpose is to analyze the reviews about the historical judgement and the procedure of historians in Helmuth Plessner’s conference addressed to the Spanish language teachers society, which was published in The Hague in 1935. The English translation of its title were “The problem about a critique to Spanish values”. Spain as a philosophical problem? Many books were written about this question by Spanish and foreign writers at the beginning of the 20th century. Can a country be a philosophical problem? I would like to illustrate the problem with some significant details: 1. Political facts in the 19th century: 130 different governments in only 90 years, 9 constitutions, 3 dethronements, 5 civil wars, dozens of provisional regimes and over 2,000 revolutions (17 revolutions per day). 2. Geography and climate facts: Spain is the peninsula with the largest European range of plants and animals, as well as the greatest variety of climates. 3. Cultural facts: Four different languages and four different dialects are spoken in Spain. Along the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries the Spanish membership to Europe was debated. Does Spain belong to Europe?. It is clear in terms of geography but is Spain a European country in terms of modernity? Spain seemed to be the opposite of modernity in relation to other European countries. This was the perspective of the majority of foreign writers. Spanish writers were divided. Many of them thought that tradition and modernity were compatible. Helmuth Plessner did not accept the extended foreign perspective. He enumerated the following reasons: a) Not all the perspectives were considered when making a critical historical judgement. Only the prejudices of a determinate way were considered. This view makes an analysis following positivist prejudices, which make a positivist comparative between different contexts. b) The intrinsic historical development of the neutrality of a country and its specific evolution must be analysed. c) German Reformation and Spanish Counter-Reformation had the same object. Helmuth Plesner thought that the Spanish problem was an absence of a clear conception about itself, the infertile encounter of its spiritual and political labour in the modern world. Spain has not found its national solution yet. How must the very historical fact be dealt with? Maybe on the basis of causes and effects? Can we be emancipated form the positivist perspective to judge critically? What does “modern” exactly mean? These questions, as well as a range of other positions about this topic, will be discussed in my project.

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Coolen, Maarten [email protected] Bodily Experience and Experiencing One’s Body Helmuth Plessner and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have much in common in their ways of opposing to empiricist and intellectualist accounts of what it is to be a human being, and describing how, in their views, contrary to these Cartesian legacies, it is my body itself that I am and that lets me inhabit the world, which constitutes my perspective on and my openness to the world. This should not be overlooked, even though their philosophical styles differ significantly from each other. Yet, their philosophical paths separate when it comes to the following issue: is it not the case, that I do not only have bodily experiences of and responses to affordances that are presented to me in my world, but also have bodily experiences of my body in which I seem to stumble upon my body as a thing that in a certain sense can also be alien to me? Merleau-Ponty seems to resist a positive answer to this question. For Plessner, on the other hand, this issue stands at the centre of his philosophical anthropology. A human being is eccentrically positioned in his world, which means that (i) he is his living body as body-subject (Leib), (ii) he has his living body, as this body-thing (Körper), and (iii) has to take upon himself the never ending task of realizing a temporary settlement between Leib and Körper. At one point Plessner is even rather critical with respect to philosophical attitudes which, by going back to an allegedly unproblematic, primordial level of human existence, evade the ambiguity of man being both an embodied creature and a creature in the body. It is true that man is immediately with the things in his world, but this immediacy is always mediated by his body, which he himself is, although he occupies it too. If one accepts that this principle of mediated immediacy, which is one of the ways in which man’s eccentric positionality manifests itself, is fundamental for all human openness to the world, then one would have to conclude that the skilful absorbed coping, which has been the subject of the debate between Hubert Dreyfus and John McDowell, must itself be mediated too. But this mediation is not primarily of the kind that necessarily involves making mindful representations of the world. Rather, it consists in that a human being always takes a position outside of himself, remaining the body he is, not by accident or because he wants to, but by virtue of being what he is — an eccentrically positioned living being. Not only must we try to understand what makes it possible for humans, who are absorbed in their world, to step back and observe it; we also need an account of how absorbed coping can fail, how one can be thrown out of the flow by an unexpected resistibility of one’s own body.

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Corbey, Raymond [email protected] The Stellenwert of Plessner on (human) Stellenwert The concept Stellenwert in German is hard to translate. All of the following come close, without pinpointing it exactly: rating, weight, relative importance, positioning, local value. We will look at the Stellenwert, in post-Kantian thought, of how Helmuth Plessner positions humans (and animals) in reality. The way he explicitly addresses the (perceived) "threat" of naturalistic philosophy and tries to somehow combine Kant and Darwin in his "philosophical anthropology" nowadays is as fascinating as ever. How would he position himself, or can we position him, in the present Darwin-year vis-a-vis recent developments in evolutionary biology and cognitive neuroscience such as epigenetic plasticity, altruism theory, theory of mind, embodied cognition, and (non-human) animal cognition?

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Davis, Scott [email protected] Plessner and the Structural Study of Ancient China When we consider Plessner's work in the study of living cultures, we should take care to include the unique perspectives of China. I will suggest ways in which Plessner's views complement later structural anthropologists' in providing frameworks for understanding fundamental features of ancient Chinese culture, that continue to be relevant in many respects today. A basic impulse to archaic Chinese writing was divination activities conducted by the royal court. Writing and textuality were marked by this origin. In the course of the long conversations held between the king and his ancestors, through cracking the turtle shells and bones, Chinese writing expressed the divinatory stance of writing towards the future. Our reflections on Chinese culture focus on the nature of the divinatory stance and on the texts created accordingly. It will be suggested that Plessner's insights are consonant with techniques employed by Claude Lévi-Strauss, and together such study brings out important aspects of the culture. Furthermore, the mode of study promoted here enhances the efforts of studying cultural expression in the same direction as one studies other living phenomena, through provision of suitable modes of boundary mediation and temporality. The development of writing and textuality in China took place during state formation, in which a complex project of boundary-making made use of sophisticated cosmological devices to facilitate symbolic operations. These devices have structural features bringing to mind many aspects of Plessner's treatment of positionality and boundary operations. We can find devices within classical texts that exploit formal properties of eccentric rotation to express ideas about the human condition. Of course, these are in a vastly different context from Plessner's carefully reasoned exposition. And yet, many features of Chinese thought invite exploration in terms of structural and philosophical anthropology. In particular, the textuality of these early works is so different from discursive styles in other traditions; their matrix-like design means that the positioned, or situated, operations of the components are primary design motives. I compare the textual characteristics of Plessner's work to these. In this way, some general views on textuality or textual space can be formulated to bring contributions of Plessner and Lévi-Strauss to bear upon ancient Chinese culture. At the same time, the fact that this project derives from the divinatory stance entails that temporality must be treated in a similar framework. Plessner's remarks at several levels from Stufen suggest ways of interpreting divination as a narrative project with distinctive configurations of temporality suitable to living and human action. Therefore, I will articulate a structural interpretation of narrative in terms of the ways that life is lived ahead of itself, according to Plessner's framework. Finally, having dealt with spatial and temporal aspects, I will further develop an appreciation of ancient Chinese culture from the perspective of its symbolic content as a medium of living human action. Plessner's goal of treating life and human sciences in the same direction can be shown to be approached by recent trends in understanding evolution through developmental plasticity, giving cultural studies a great opportunity to integrate biological and symbolic interpretation. My paper will suggest ways to analyze the divinatory stance with proper spatial and temporal frameworks to bring out the quality of individual action within an evolutionary treatment of human life. In particular, following Plessner's groundlaws of the human habitus, his consideration of "structure" can indicate aspects of the divinatory stance having general applicability in a theory of action and cultural forms.

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Delitz, Heike www.heike-delitz.de

‘Right’ and ‘false’ Evolutionism: Bergson vs. Spencer, Darwin and Co. Plessners special way of thinking about human beings within the realm of the organic life cannot be thought without mention Henri Bergsons Philosophy of Life.

So the aim of my talk is: to spell another time Bergsons elaborative and subtle argumentation against the contemporary evolutionary theories, especially of Spencer and Darwin; but also of Lamarck, of the Neodarwinians (De Vries, Weissmann), Neofinalists (Driesch) and old Vitalists (Bichat).

Actually, Bergson evolved his own philosophy of life (élan vital, creative evolution) in a continuous and deep dispute with the biological theories and researches. His arguments against these theories of evolution of life are far away from a speculative “irrationalism” and an uncritical “intuitionism”, as also Plessner and almost all philosophers of the 20th century mean. Rather, Bergson stresses the implicit metaphysics of his contemporary biological theories: their antique heritage, their contamination with platonic ideas, especially within their conception of time and becoming. Because of a platonic or classical thinking of time are Spencer, Darwin and Co. ‘false evolutionists’. And what Bergsons philosophy of life consequently wants to offer, is a ‘right’ conception of life: concerning his dynamic, unforeseeable and irreversible character.

Bergson is the singular philosopher in a narrow and systematic contact to biological ways of thinking, especially compared to Nietzsche and Dilthey. And this philosophy of life is already – inter alia – a philosophical anthropology. Already Bergson accentuates the singular position of human beings within the organic life.

Contrariness to some gestures of distance, Plessners own modern philosophy of organic life owes Bergson a lot; and by learning from him, he found his own point in thinking organic and human beings, affiliating Bergsons philosophy of life with Jakob von Uexkülls philosophy of the relation between the organic body and his environment.

Because of both: because of Bergsons impact on Plessner and because of his crucial dispute with the evolutionary theory, a precisely look on Bergson could have some currency.

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Dorofeev, Daniel [email protected]

Mutual relations of Scheler and Plessner and the biological bases of their projects of philosophical anthropology.

In the history of the European culture there were some «anthropological turns» – for example,

in 5 century b. c. (sophists-Soсrat) or Renaissance 15-16 cc. But philosophically the most significant is «anthropological turn» second half 19 century, Nietzche carried out first of all – the deepest representative of philosophy of a life. Thus, development of philosophical anthropology is genetically connected with philosophical problems of a life.

In 20 century there were many forms of anthropological knowledge – historical, cultural, social, religious anthropologies; each of them had own leaders, dear thinkers. But nevertheless the philosophical anthropology was the most ambitious and perspective project from the philosophical point of view (though problems of self-determination of the status and possibilities of philosophical anthropology are not resolved till now up to the end). And we are obliged by it first of all to Max Scheler and Helmut Plessner.

Both philosophers developed philosophical anthropology directly addressing to problems of philosophy of a life and biology. It is enough to tell that the first educational diplom’s Plesner was in biology, and it has protected the dissertation in 1920 at Hans Driesch – the large representative of vitalism – in Koln; the concept of Driesch was critically comprehended by Scheler in “Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos”. Koln was that city where the philosophical anthropology was arisen: Scheler worked at the Koln’s university in 1919-1926, and Plessner in 1920-1933 But our philosophers contacted only indirectly and never together worked (though besides their philosophy united interest to sociology: Scheler was the director of Research Institute of Social Sciences in Koln and one of founders of sociology of knowledge, and Plessner in 1958 became the chairman of a German sociological society). Only in 1928 when Plessner has finished the work “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch” and could not find for it the publisher in any way, N. Hartmann has helped to find it and organised to meet for discussion of this book to Scheler. At this meeting, by the way, Scheler has advised to change with Plessner a subtitle of the book from «Bases of philosophical anthropology» on «Introduction in philosophical anthropology» that Plessner and has made.

It is often possible to meet such point of view that Plessner is pupil of Scheler and many important ideas of the philosophy has borrowed at it. Plessner does not consider itself as pupil Scheler on what he and has informed in 1981 in conversation with Heine von Alemann. Really, though, as can seem at first sight, the biological component is available for both philosophers, but late Scheler differs metaphysicality, dualism (Geist und Trieb) even in something Pantheismus, and Plessner in the understanding of the person as eccentric human existence with a being of unity of biophysical and its spiritual parties, being more defined by idea of the organic. Certainly, without certain influence of Scheler on Plessner has not managed (after all it for 16 years was more senior it), but the last the continuer of ideas of Scheler to name inconvenient. Therefore and to speak about German school of philosophical anthropology (Scheler-Plessner-Gelen) it is possible only with very essential reservations. Moreover, and the project of philosophical anthropology declared by Scheler and Plessner, is not carried out till now to the full though its possibilities and prospect are represented very actual for modern philosophy.

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Düwell, Marcus [email protected]

What does Bioethics have to do with Philosophical Anthropology?

The life sciences try to change the natural basis of human life in various respects. An ethical assessment of the life sciences will therefore depend on anthropological as well as ethical assumptions. However, the relationship between ethical theory and philosophical anthropology is contested for various reasons. While some assume that an elaboration of the principles of life and human nature provides a solid basis for reliable moral judgments, others see references to human nature in ethics as fundamentally problematic. Whereas for a long time references to human nature in ethical debates were abandoned altogether, in recent times the topic is back on the agenda. Debates about for example enhancement, transhumanism or human capabilities refer to anthropological assumptions quite often. There is however hardly any systematic reflection on the relationship of such references to ethical theorizing. Focusing on the work of Helmuth Plessner, this lecture will explore the theoretical basis for using assumptions from philosophical anthropology in bioethical debates.

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Ebke, Thomas [email protected]

Life, Concept and Subject: Plessner’s vital turn in the light of Kant and Bergson

“Thus, categories are forms which belong neither to the subject nor to the object alone and have them come together in virtue of their neutrality. They are conditions of agreement and concord between two essentially different and independent entities so that these are neither separated by an insurmountable gap nor influence one another directly.”1 There can hardly be any doubt that the bulk of Plessner’s “re-creation of philosophy” in The Levels of the Organic lies in his attempt to bring about a new Copernican revolution. Following his phenomenological “turn towards the object”, Plessner seeks to clarify that the conditions of possibility for determining an object’s vital border are not rooted in the consciousness of a subject, but in the peculiar constitution of the object itself. This idea is the key to a vital turn in Plessner’s approach: The capacity to know and understand objects in the world is, first and foremost, a vital capacity, a capacity that is entrenched in the constitution of the living. However, it is crucial to notice that Plessner, in the course of The Levels of the Organic, transcends this vital turn by adhering to the problem of the conditions of possibility. He finally arrives at the figure of the eccentric positionality of man who is no longer a mere part of the realm of the organic. In this vein, Plessner carries out a “deduction” that is both inspired by Kant, a transformation of Kant and a critical return to Kant.

My talk will assert that Plessner has pursued this project of a vital turn into an inconsistent direction. To support this criticism, attention will be drawn to a certain shift in the philosophy of life exposed by Henri Bergson: Not unlike Plessner, Bergson opposed Kant with a “turn towards the object”. Revising his own point of view which he had previously expressed in Matière et Mémoire, Bergson argues, in La Pensée et Le Mouvant, that there is a rational disposition in living objects. The concepts that a subject can obtain in reference to living objects are only extensions of a specific conceptual structure that is inherent to the living itself. In contrast to Plessner, Bergson clarified a relation between life and concept from which the position of the subject is radically barred. Calling to mind Bergson’s “turn towards the object” as opposed to Plessner’s, I would like to show that Plessner, in spite of his intentions, fails to account for the real constitution of the living. Because of his loyalty to Kant’s transcendentalism, he keeps alive the problem of the subject and, in so doing, misconceives the relationship between life and concept.

1 Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Berlin/New York 1975, S. 65 [my translation, TE]

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Ernste, Huib [email protected] Eccentric Positionality and Urban Space Human Geography defines itself as a discipline which focusses on the relationship between human being and the environment, or in other words: the relationship between human being and space. It is self-evident that Space is a crucial and central concept in human geography. In the same way it would be self evident that Human Geography deals with the concept of human being. However, until sofar it hardly did. Especially since some post-structuralist scholars conjure the ‘death of the subject’ and others unintendedly neglect the role of the subject, it is worthwile to re-think and reflect upun the role of human being. In particular the spatiality of Helmuth Plessners conceptualisation of philosophical Anthropology gains relevance for Human Geography. Above all his concept of borders and boundaries and the concept of eccentric positionality bewar the potential to mediate between the decentred subject, the action theoretic subject, as well as the subjectless theory of social systems and can put them in a more productive relationship. In this contribution I will attempt to show, how this conceptualisation of human being can shed new light on the relationship between human being and urban space, and how this could lead to another urban policy. I doing so I also want to show that it is not just worthwile to do exegetic research on the original conceptualisations of Helmuth Plessner but also to focus on the potential of these concepts for current research in other fields than philosophical anthropology.

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Fischer, Joachim [email protected]

Philosophical Anthropology – a paradigm between Darwinism and Foucaultism

Considering life and human beings within science nowadays the alternative of two paradigms plays an important part: Darwinism and Foucaultism. Both continue the Cartesian dualism, they are new occupations of the two wings of the Cartisian dualism scince the 20th century. The paper draws attention to modern Philosophical Anthropology (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen) as a special paradigm (not a discipline), which enters the space of theory as a response to this double challenge: Philosophical anthropology means an artifice of thinking, which – reviewed – in it’s origin operates between Darwin and Dilthey and which – renewed – emerges again as a fascinating approach between Darwin and Foucault, between the alternative of naturalism and culturalism. Especially Plessners key concept of „excentric positionality“ could be an appropriate way, to reach within an own philosophical biology the socio-cultural dimension of man. If it works, this approach could offer a technique to control and limit the claims of Darwinism as well as Foucaultism.

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Fröhlich, Thomas [email protected]

Heidelberg: Work in Progress: Plessner & Life Sciences In Heidelberg, a place with quite some meaning for Helmuth Plessner, we try to formalize interactions in living beings. Ten years ago, we met several times with the Heidelberg philosopher Reiner Wiehl in his office – a room used in former times by Karl Jaspers. Hans-Georg Gadamer at that time expressed his gratitude that in our approach the work of Helmuth Plessner is finally regarded as promising also from a life scientists point of view. These feelings have been shared also by Monica Plessner, who wrote: „.. dass er (Helmuth Plessner) so in seinen wesentlichen Absichten verstanden wird und das auch noch im Heidelberger Philosophenkreis, das überrascht mich. Die Brücke zur Biologie liegt ja so nahe – aber sie wurde bisher kaum begangen. Ich wünsche dem Antrag, den Sie mir beifügten einen guten Weg und verständnisvolle Bearbeitung....“ (Letter of 3. II. 1998). Our group – with mathematicians, philosophers, life scientists (biochemistry, physiology), the head of the Clinic for Psychosomatics in Heidelberg and others has had and still has the aim to find a common language for both approaches to men. The research proposal mentioned above has been granted (Med. Fakultät Univ. Heidelberg, Forschungsantrag 100), and the cooperation both with the heads of Psychosomatic Medicine and Medical Informatics (now TU München and TU Braunschweig, respectively) continues. Plessner argued that purely empirical description within Biology is neither able to state the „Gesetz der Grenze“ nor the „Ganzheit als die für das Organische spezifische Ordnungsform“ (S. Pietrowicz, p.353). With regard to an example of an empirically described biological structure – the semipermeable membrane detected in these times, he goes beyond this description in arguing that „Membranbildung … wirkt doppelsinnig: einschließend-abschirmend gegen die Umgebung und aufschließend-vermittelnd zu ihr… sind vermittelnde Oberflächen. An ihnen ist der Körper nicht einfach zu Ende, sondern zu seinem Medium in Beziehung gesetzt.“ (H. Plessner, Ein Newton des Grashalms, GS VIII, S. 247-266). Formally, scientific empirical data emerge from iterated decontextualization procedures. During the corresponding procedures, relatedness and the fact as well as the different kinds of embeddedness in contexts that are given in parallel get lost. Being an inherent feature of the scientific method, this cannot be healed by adding some relational issues retrospectively. Instead, to end with terms that issue relatedness in themselves, one has to begin with such terms and has to take care in the following procedures that what Plessner might call „Perspektivität“ isn´t lost underway. In our presentation, the specific path chosen by our group will be discussed. F. F. Bevier, Die Physik der Information (2002), Bussole-Informations-Verlag Winden, ISBN 3-935031-03-3 T. Fröhlich, Die probatorische Welt. Systemtheorie für Lebenswissenschaften (2008), Carl Auer Verlag, Heidelberg, Online-Version, ISBN 978-3-89670-687-4 T. Fröhlich, Gibt es eine Gemeinsamkeit von Lebenswissenschaften und philosophischer Anthropologie? (2007), Carl Auer Verlag, Heidelberg, Online-Version LesBar S. Pietrowicz, Helmuth Plessner (1992), Verlag Karl Alber, Freiburg, ISBN 3-495-47720-9 Address for correspondence: Dr. Dr. Thomas Fröhlich, Kaiserstrasse 11 A, 69115 Heidelberg

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Gontier, Nathalie [email protected]

Questions of boundaries in nature and culture The Modern Synthesis, that combines Darwin’s idea of natural selection with Mendel’s hereditary laws and de Vries’ mutation theory, clearly demarcates the individual from its environment. The relation between organism and environment is understood to be of a dualistic nature, wherein the organism is passively subjected to a selective environment. Moreover, due to the preference of Darwinian thinking over Lamarckian thinking, a clear directionality is given to this duality, namely, an organism cannot in any way change its biological constitution to the environment it lives in because an organism cannot willingly change its genetic makeup.

As such, in classical evolutionary thinking, the organism has a clear and confined identity. Today however, due to processes such as symbiogenesis, reticulation, niche construction, the Baldwin effect, the ratchet effect etc, we know that the boundary between the organism and the environment is not as clearly definable. Moreover, even the organism and the environment, in their own right, have fuzzy boundaries.

The same is also applicable to the idea of culture. In the 19th century, it was deemed possible to clearly delineate between different cultures and even to put them on scales of progress. Cultures as well as the people that belonged to them and the languages they speak, were considered to be static, closed entities. Today however, anthropology too is coming to terms with the fact that cultures have never been as isolated as previously thought. Rather the importance of cultural borrowing and cultural diffusion is being acknowledged. En in linguistics, language mixing and borrowing is even considered to be a major force of linguistic innovation.

In the talk, the philosophical ideas underlying these conceptual changes in regard to the organism, the environment and culture will be discussed.

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Grunsven, Janna van [email protected] The Body Exploited: Torture and the Destruction of Self

Helmuth Plessner approaches the question of what distinguishes animate life from inanimate things in terms of the notion of boundary [Grenze]. Whereas inanimate things are separated from one another by contours that do not belong to either thing but are simply located in between them, living beings have their own boundary. This boundary, which guarantees a living being’s autonomy within its environment while simultaneously opening it up to it, is a living being’s body. As Plessner puts it: “Die Grenze gehört dem Körper selbst an, der Körper ist die Grenze seiner selbst.”2 As bodily beings that are their own boundary, both human and non-human animals take up a position in their environment.3 This fundamental characteristic of human and non-human life is expressed in Plessner’s term ‘positionality.’4 The specificity human positionality lies in its ‘eccentric’ structure. In short, this means that, due to the specific structure of their embodiment and their relation to this structure, human beings are never instinctively absorbed in their environment in an unproblematic way, but are condemned to constantly establish their position in it.

In this paper I use Plessner’s approach to the notion of boundary in terms of embodied eccentric positionality to make sense, on a philosophical level, of what victims of rape and torture describe as the most devastating after effect of this event, namely the destruction of their identity or sense of self. As tortured holocaust survivor Jean Amery puts it in At the Mind’s Limits:

“The boundaries of my body are also the boundaries of my self. … The other person …, with whom I can exist only as long as he does not touch my skin surface as border, forces his corporeality on me … and thereby destroys me.”5

Victims of torture and rape generally characterize this destruction of their identity in terms of an irrecoverable loss of trust in the world as well as in themselves, where this loss of trust in themselves predominantly takes the shape of a deeply rooted sense of shame.6 In this paper I will mainly focus on the latter after effect (although I do not intend to imply that they should be understood in strict independence from one another.)

Two contemporary philosophers who have attempted to articulate philosophically what makes this loss of trust in oneself possible are Axel Honneth and David Sussman.7 Although I am sympathetic to their projects, I argue that the conceptual framework of selfhood that they each employ cannot fully account for the victim’s loss of trust in herself. What victims’ self-descriptions consistently emphasize is the devastating, shame-causing experience of their very own body involuntarily yet actively participating in the event.8 We will see that, because Honneth and Sussman hold dissatisfying positions with regard to how our sense of self is tied to our embodiment, neither of them can accurately accommodate this phenomenon conceptually.

First discussing Honneth’s and Sussman’s approaches highlights the explanatory power of Plessner’s framework, which I discuss for the remainder of the paper. I argue that the notion of eccentric positionality, which articulates our always having to take up a position within our environment (which includes our fellow human beings within this environment) by coming to terms with our embodiment, sheds light on what makes the victim’s involuntary yet active participation in torture and rape an unavoidable, constitutive element of these events.

2 Literal translation: “The border belongs to the body itself, the body is the border of his self.” Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des

Organischen und der Mensch [Stufen], 127 [my italics] 3 Since it is not relevant for my paper I will leave aside Plessner’s discussion of plants.. 4 Ibid., 129 5 Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits, 28/40 6 Cf. Jean Amery, At the Mind’s Limits, Susan Brison: Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, Elaine Scarry, The Body

in Pain, Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition, and David Sussman, “What’s Wrong with Torture.” 7 Cf. Axel Honneth, The Struggle for Recognition and David Sussman, “What’s Wrong with Torture.” 88 As philosopher Susan Brison recounts of her subjection to rape: “My body was now perceived as an enemy, having betrayed

my … trust … in it.”Susan J. Brison, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self, 44

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Gulmans, Jan [email protected]

Title: Helmuth Plessner and the philosophical naturalism of the life sciences Preference: participation in the theme ‘Embodied cognition’ In his The Intentional Stance Daniell Dennett declares ‘I declare my starting point to be the objective, materialistic, third-person world of the physical sciences … I am exhiliated by the prospect … [of] developing an evolutionary explanation of human intellect … philosophy is allied with, and indeed continuous with, the physical sciences …’9. These assumptions are referred to as epistemological naturalism. Naturalism has many faces. Though contemporary philosophers interpret naturalism differently, the main presuppositions include that (a) nature is a mechanism, (b) all natural events have natural causes and (c) natural mechanisms can be understood by understanding the parts of the mechanism (reductionism). Based on these rather generic presuppositions a variety of elaborations of a naturalistic view on (the methodology of) science, the human position and/or human conscience have been proposed10. In my contribution they will be summarized in terms of differences and commonalities. The naturalistic view will be contrasted with the transcendental view of Helmuth Plessner. I will argue that (1) both views are (to a high degree) incompatible, and (2) Plessner’s view can nevertheless function as a foundation for the life sciences, as will be illustrated for some views on the mind-body problem.

Helmuth Plessner’s transcendental thought opposes to and in a way reconciles the ‘Lebensphilosophie’ (Dilthey, Misch), neo-Kantianism and phenomenology. His approach is, in some sense, similar to that of Kant (aprioric forms of perception) and Husserl in so far as this last philosopher said that a naturalistic perspective presupposes the transcendental view (‘Der natürliche Seinsboden ist in seiner Seinsgeltung sekundär, er setzt beständig den transzendentalen voraus’)11.The transcendental character of Plessner’s stance will be discussed by referring to the categorical principles underlying life (organic modals). These organic modals constitute the essentials of his aprioric theory of the distinctive characteristics of all organisms. Postitionality, one of the organic modals, is identified by taking into account the organization of the organism. Due to the threefold positionality the human world falls apart in inner-, outer world and ‘Mitwelt’(‘Die Mitwelt trägt die Person, indem sie zugleich von ihr --die Person—getragen wird. Zwichen mir und mir, mir und ihm liegt die Sphäre dieser Welt des Geistes’, (Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, Walter de Gruyter & Co, Berlin, 1965, p. 303).

It will be argued that Plessner’s formal or transcendental view is in contradiction with naturalistic assumptions. This will be substantiated by referring to the different views on the mind-body problem. The philosophy, addressing the mind-body problem, addresses questions like: (a) how to determine the relation between the objects of the neurosciences and consciousness, (b) are there two distinct processes: with cerebral activities on the one hand and independent spiritual processes on the other hand, (c) if b is the case, how is explainable the influence which consciousness exerts on our behavior and how can the brain play a decisive role in relation to processes in the consciousness, and (d) if b is not the case and in both cases we do have the same object: how can neuronal processes be so distinctively different from spiritual states, to which they should be identical ? Basic paradigms, which address these questions, are monism, dualism, and complementarism. Plessner’s view on the boundary of a living organism (with her principally divergent inward-outward relation12) will be contrasted with these paradigms.

9 D. Dennett, The Intentional Stance, MIT Press, ISBN-10:0-262-54053-3, 1987, p 5.

10 Th. Sukopp, Naturalismus – Kritik und Verteidigung erkenntnistheoretischer Positionen. Heusenstamm bei Frankfurt am Main [u. a.]: Ontos 2006.

11Edmund Husserl Cartesianische Meditationen I. Meditation. Der Weg zum transzendentalen Ego, Par. 8: ‘Das ego cogito als transzendentale Sujektivität’. 12 ‘Das Doppelaspekt ist radikal’.

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Hätscher, Johannes [email protected]

Stimulating the brain: a case of cyborgism? Parkinson is a neurodegenerative disease specific to human beings. On a pathophysiological level a selective process of cell destruction (Braak-staging) is observable. It is progressing from ENS to CNS in a stereotypical manner. Reaching a symptomatic stage, the clinical phenotype of a complex movement disorder along with a variety of psychosocial consequences emerges. With cardinal symptoms being tremor, rigidity, akinesia and postural instability, the human body begins to take on a life of its own. “The first and most natural instrument of man” (Marcel Mauss) defies control by its owner. The abilities of catching artefacts, walking, speaking as well as performing gestures fall off. Habitualized motoric skills in private and professional settings decline. In the late stage of Parkinson´s disease (PD) the person´s integrity is entirely under threat: Stigmatized, isolated, full of shame and anxiety the individual is in danger of falling out of the world.

Therefore an increasing number of patients decide for the ultima ratio in PD´s therapy: Deep brain stimulation (DBS). An electrode is implanted into the nucleus subthalamicus (STN). It is electrically driven by a battery implanted under the patient´s chest. After successful intervention most of the patient´s previously lost motor functions can be regained. The surgical intervention as such is deeply rooted in a cartesian tradition of thinking: The brain being locked inside a stereotactic frame is conceptualized as “res extensa”. Any region in the CNS can be precisely localised, making it accessible for technical manipulations.

The placement of an artificial auxiliary of the patient´s capability of motoric control provokes a series of psychosocial adapting problems. They are worth an anthropological conceptualisation following Plessner: The human is his body (as living body) and has his body (as physical object). If human life is constituted by continously having to find a settlement with respect to these aspects, not only PD but also DBS leads to a crisis in both the centric as well as the eccentred structure of the being. This is why optimizing the neurodegenerative process on a cellular level does not automatically guarantee to resume possession of the body as well as the reconstitution of the person within the Mitwelt. Sufficient cultural routines need to be established to develop the newly obtained motoric capital. The artefact also has to be integrated in the self conception. Discoursive analysis of the postsurgical situation shows how it is conceptualized as coming into a new being, the being of a cyborg: In narrations of patients and their relatives the myth of Man - Machine arises. From Descartes to Delgado, from Shelley to Gibson it has appeared in scientific and literary discourses since the early modern period. Furthermore the artificial implant is not an extrinsic but an intrinsic feature of the living body fusing with phylogenetic old structures of the brain way beyond consciousness. Mediating the individual and collective “I” in this case is a special challenge, that gives rise to the question whether a stage “beyond man” is reached or the human in its eccentric positionality remains artifical as usual. The topic will be discussed based on first research-results from the Ph.D. - project “Conversion profiles in patients with Parkinson´s disease after bilateral subthalamic nucleus stimulation”13 initiated by Prof. Dr. Tilman Allert in cooperation with the Department of Neurology and Neurosurgery, Goethe University Frankfurt and the Centre of Neurorehabilitation Bonn. Keywords: Parkinson´s disease, deep brain stimulation, transhumanism, cyborg, philosophical anthropology, eccentric positionality, identity work, discoursive psychology;

13 Hätscher J., Allert, N., Hilker, R., Gasser, T., Allert, T.: „Conversion profiles in patients with Parkinson´s disease

after bilateral subthalamic nucleus stimulation“, in: Journal of Neural Transmission, Vol.116, No.2, 2009.

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Hengstmengel, Bas [email protected]

Helmuth Plessner as a Legal Thinker – Role Playing in Legal Discourse

Although Plessner does not offer a complete social and political theory, his work contains important building blocks for theories in these fields. One of the domains in which Plessners work offers very promising insights is the domain of legal studies. In his smaller works Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (1924), Macht und mensliche Natur (1931), Diesseits der Utopie (1966) and Die Frage nach der Conditio humana (1976) Plessner developed a philosophy of the public sphere as a sphere of social roles, prestige, ceremonial, tact and diplomacy. Man is a role player and a wearer of masks. According to Plessner, in his social bonds man is a Doppelgänger: he has to play roles, but can never be defined by a certain role. Because of his roles, he has an intimate sphere. In the classical notion of the theatrum mundi every man has a fixed role to play in the order of being. His identity is his role. With the birth of the modern ‘I’ the private identity is separated from the public one. A difference between ascribed status and achieved status arises. In the contemporary, functionally differentiated society one man can play many roles that need not be connected at all. His private identity ‘hides’ behind the roles he plays. Moreover, the inner is regarded as the real, the outer as the unreal. However, it can be asked whether there is an inner man without an outer one. Man as a Mängelwesen needs culture to live and a role to have an identity. It is role playing that makes society possible, because when every self – Sennet calls it a ‘little cabinet of horrors’ – should throw off its mask, society should disintegrate into a war of everyone against everyone. From this perspective the increasing public exhibition of the private and the striving for authenticity are a danger to society. After the ‘fall of public man’ legal discourse is perhaps the only common form that is left in contemporary liberal society. It can be regarded as a playing field for the homo ludens (Huizinga) that cannot do without forms. Social conflict and impulses need to be articulated, canalized and sometimes suppressed. However, the juridification of social conflict is both necessary and dangerous. The inner man has to stay in touch with the role he plays. Plessner has to offer more insights as a legal thinker. In the first place his thinking about man as a player of roles has the potential to mediate between studies on the individual (psychological) level and studies on the social (sociological) level. Secondly it can offer a model for the legal subject as an abstract bearer of rights. Thirdly it can give an anthropological basis for the theory – already developed by Niklas Luhmann – that the legal subject in adjudication – whether plaintiff or defendant – can more easily accept losing a case because he is playing a role without being identical with his role, thereby being able to identify with the other party’s position and arguments (Rollenübernahme). After all, it’s a pity that legal scholars know Plessners work so badly.

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Henningsen, Peter

Gibt es eine Gemeinsamkeit von Lebenswissenschaften und philosophischer Anthropologie? 1) In Heidelberg hat sich eine zunächst vorwiegend an Dilthey, dann auch an Jakob von Uexküll und Helmuth Plessner orientierte deutsch-kanadische Arbeitsgruppe aus Philosophen, Sprach- und Naturwissenschaftlern, Informatikern und Psychosomatikern gebildet, die nach einer möglichen Gemeinsamkeit von Lebenswissenschaft und philosophischer Anthropologie sucht. Mit Hilfe der Betonung von Zufallsprozessen (1, p 357 ff.) und graduellen Bedingens anstatt Unterstellung abschließender Determination wird die Empirie biologischer, etwa neuronaler Vorgänge angemessen erfasst (2, 3). Zugleich ist so die Tatsache leichter zu berücksichtigen, dass Vorgänge biologischer Grenzen als Grenzleistung u.a. mitbedingen, welche Merkmale die Chance erhalten, für das sich abgrenzende Lebewesen bedingend zu sein. Besonderer Augenmerk gilt dem Verstehen von Markieren und Hervorheben durch Sprechen (4). Markieren und Hervorheben werden als Vorgänge, und diese als Teil einer Vorgangsmenge angesehen, die von Vorgängen an biologischen Grenzen getragen wird und die durch ihr Gegebensein mitbedingt, welche Merkmale die Chance erhalten, für das sich auch dergestalt ab- und umgrenzende Lebewesen mitbedingend zu sein.

Die für ein Lebewesen zu einer Zeit gegebenen Bedingungen liegen in- und außerhalb des Lebewesens. Durch Mitbedingen dessen, was für das Lebewesen von seinem Außen her bedingend sein kann, gibt es eine zusätzliche, von innen nach außen gerichtete Bedingensrichtung, die, so lange es lebt, zu den sonstwie gestaltend von innen nach außen und zu den von außen nach innen gegebenen Bedingensrichtungen hinzutritt. 2) Das das Bedingtwerden mitbedingende Bedingen läuft nach außen und dann auf das Lebewesen zurück, was abgestufte „Rekursivität“ ermöglicht. Es ist als Hin-und-wiederzurück- Bedingen eine Bezogenheit, in der die Jeweiligkeit des Lebewesens gegeben ist als Jeweiligkeit seiner selbst und als von der Jeweiligkeit des Lebewesens bedingte Jeweiligkeit der Auswahl derjenigen Außenbedingungen, die vom Lebewesen die Möglichkeit eingeräumt bekommen, seinen weiteren Weg mitbedingen zu dürfen. Die Auswahl und damit die so „gesehene“ Umgebung ist eine in einer Beziehung zum Lebewesen gegebene, das heißt, eine ansichtige. Sie wird von Jakob von Uexküll als „Umwelt“ bezeichnet. 3) Konvergenz als Zusammenfluss zu einem Bedingen erfolgt durch Vereinigung des Bedingens vieler Vorgänge zur einen Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilung möglicher künftiger Merkmalsausprägungen des von ihnen bedingten Vorgangs. Greifen ist hierfür ein lebendiges Beispiel. Nerven-, Sinnes-, Muskelzellen im Verein mit weiteren bedingenden Zellen wie die Hormonausschüttung, die Vorwegnahmen, die sprachgestützten Vorwegnahmen, das jeweilige Fühlen und die jeweiligen Gefühle bedingenden Zellen bedingen etwas, das zu einem Gemeinsamen wird, nämlich der augenblicklichen Ausprägung der Wahrscheinlichkeitsverteilung möglicher Bewegungen, aus der wiederum eine und nur eine oder aber keine Veränderung der Raumlage der Hand verwirklicht wird. Konvergenz erfolgt an diesem Beispiel auf Bewegungen, also Muskelgruppen. Dem entspricht auch eine Konvergenz auf Motoneurone im zentralen Nervensystem. Die auch dort erfolgende Konvergenz beschränkt sich nicht auf das Gehirn, sie erfolgt nicht alleine und abschließend im Gehirn (5). Das nicht auf ein Organ beschränkte und nicht nur in diesem erfolgende, sondern übergreifende Bedingen kann in der Terminologie des Heidelberger Interaktionsmodells erfasst werden. Der Plessnersche Begriff der Grenze und die in der „Neuen Phänomenologie“ präzisierten Begriffe Phänomen, Situation und Leib heben gleichfalls oder bevorzugt auch auf Vorgänge und Gegebenheiten ab, die nicht ihrer Ansichtigkeit und ihres jeweiligen Eingebettetseins entkleidet wurden. 4) Vermag sich das Lebewesen sprechend zu markieren und sich so in seiner Umgebung und in Bezug auf seine Umgebung herauszuheben, wird ein Teil seines filternden und mitbedingenden Auswählens hörbar. Das Gehörte kann bei Wiederholung auf Dauer in die Filtereinstellungen des Lebewesens aufgenommen werden. Das vom Lebewesen Ausgesprochene kehrt in seine filternden Grenzflächen, das heißt unter anderem, aber nicht nur in seine Sinne zurück – eine Rekursivität, die durch Sprechen hör- und fühl- und spürbar gemacht wird. Mit dem Zurückkehrenden tritt etwas aus Etwas, etwa aus der von ihm

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mitgestalteten Umgebung als Umwelt des Lebewesens in das Lebewesen zurück. Man kann das auch so sehen, dass sich das Lebewesen auch - als sich sprechend hör- und fühlbar Markierendes - mit dem Ausgesprochenen zu einem Teil seiner Umwelt macht, wobei diese Umwelt über die das Ausgesprochene, womöglich Aufgezeichnete aufnehmenden und bewahrenden Filter eine dann mitbedingende Erstreckung auf Vergangenes erhalten kann. 5) Als Jeweiligkeit wird dann die zu einer Zeit gegebene Gesamtheit für das jeweilige Lebewesen gewichtiger Bedingungen im Verein mit von einem Dritten oder von einem sich selbst beobachtenden Menschen möglicherweise herauszugreifenden Vorgängen des Lebewesens aufgefasst. Naturwissenschaften heben dabei auf solche Ansichten von Vorgängen ab, die ihrer Ansichtigkeit weitgehend entkleidet werden können, weil sie für viele, potentiell alle Ansichten gleichermaßen unterstellt werden können. Da es sich um für je viele Lebewesen gleich zu unterstellende Vorgänge handelt, können deren Beschreibung und die der jeweils besonderen Art, in der das Lebewesen das Bedingtwerden durch seine Umgebung mitbedingt bei Bedarf in einem jeweils gültigen Bild zusammengeführt werden. Für andere Lebewesen als uns wird dieser Bedarf nur in Fällen bestehen, in denen es einem wichtig ist, das Verhalten des eigenen Haus- oder Nutztiers zu verstehen. Bedarf besteht aber, wenn es um das bestmöglich umfassende Verstehen, also das Verstehen des für jeden Menschen potentiell Gültigen zusammen mit dem nur für diesen Menschen und darin vielleicht nicht nur, aber jedenfalls auch für diesen seinen Augenblick Gültigen geht. Bestmöglich umfassendes Verstehen ist Erfordernis in jenen Spielarten der Humanmedizin, in denen ohne Rücksichtnahme auf die Jeweiligkeit die Aussicht auf Behandlungserfolg gemindert ist. Dabei gilt für beide aufeinander als gleichzeitige in Konvergenz gebrachte Felder: weder ist das Feld des potentiell für alle Menschen Bedingenden abschließend durchdrungen, noch das Feld, das Jeweiligkeit und Ansichtigkeit umfasst. Bei ersterem wird zumindest die Hoffnung geäußert, die abschließende Durchdringung sei irgendwann möglich, bei letzterem bedingt schon die Form eines Teils seiner Gegebenheit, dass das Markieren und Herausheben an Grenzen stößt. Es kann aber dennoch eine Begriffshülle um das nicht weiter zu Zergliedernde gelegt werden, und die Tatsache jeweiliger Nicht-Abhebbarkeit zu Teilen kann als Sachverhalt benannt, zur Kenntnis genommen und berücksichtigt werden. Den nicht weiter aufzuschlüsselnden Vorgängen liegen durch Grenzleistung Vorgänge an Filtern im Sinne von Mengen von Filtereinstellungen zu Grunde, etwa im Sinn der Einstellungen, die eine generalisierte Angststörung bedingen. Wird deren Ort gefunden, bleibt die Störung auch weiter eine generalisierte, und somit eine, deren Jeweiligkeit sich nicht unbegrenzt in Einzelglieder zerlegen lässt. Die Erfordernis der Berücksichtigung von Jeweiligkeit mitsamt ihrer Ausprägung sichert, dass Anstrengung einschließlich der Begriffsfindung der philosophischen Anthropologie für therapeutische Fächer Anlass und Stellenwert hat. (1) Jos de Mul (2004), The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey’s Hermeneutics of Life, Yale University Press, New Haven & London (2) Tatiana Engel (2007), Firing Statistics in Neurons as Non-Markovian First-Passage Time Problem. Dissertation, Humboldt Universität, Berlin (3) Fröhlich, T, Haux R, Henningsen P, Miall, DS, Roebruck, P (1998) Attention Based Neuronal Processing: A Probabilistic Model of Non-Hierarchical Neuronal Convergence. European Journal of Neuroscience, 10, Suppl. 10, 405 (4) Peter Fonagy, György Gergely, Elliot L. Jurist, Mary Target (2004), Affektregulierung, Mentalisierung und die Entwicklung des Selbst, Klett-Cotta, Stuttgart (5) Miall DS, Fröhlich T, Henningsen P (1998) In the Convergence Zone: A Neuronal Model of Literary Response. European Journal of Neuroscience, 10, Suppl. 10, 3054

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Hildebrandt, Mireille [email protected]

Artificial life forms and the eccentric positionality of human life forms In this contribution I will explore Plessner’s distinction between animal centricity and human eccentricity as ‘a difference that makes a difference’ in the study of artificial life forms (ALFs). The difference is important from the perspective of legal philosophy because it relates to the type of human agency that is presumed in legal notions of accountability (wrongfulness, culpability), thus relating to the question of whether ALFs could be called to account in a court of law for harm caused. I understand animal centricity to refer to the constitution of a self in an environment that is co-constituted as such in the process. This process is ‘autonomic’ to the extent that for creating and maintaining a border with an environment and for sustaining an identity over and against an environment, consciousness is not required. It seems that interesting connections can be made here with Maturana and Varela’s (1998) notion of autopoiesis or self-constitution. IBM has introduced the notion of autonomic computing (Kephart and Chess 2003), using the autonomic nervous system as a metaphor, to describe computing systems capable of self-management (self-repair, self-maintenance, self-configuration). In designing a system that is capable of managing itself, a self may indeed emerge, in the process of defining itself and of actively maintaining its borders. This would imply that even if these systems are programmed to achieve goals that we have set for them, the goal of self-management may at some point gain prominence. Autonomic computing systems could thus qualify as ALFs. Eccentricity refers to a centric self that is consciously aware of itself (Selbstdistanz), looking back at it-self from the position of the other(s), thus decentering the self and introducing the position of the observer. Taking the position of the other (Mead 1959/1934, Merleau-Ponty 1945, Ricoeur 1992, Butler 2005) enables a double anticipation (Hildebrandt, Koops et al. 2008): it enables us to anticipate what others expect from us; it enables us to anticipate how others will interpret our behaviours. It thus enables a reflective self that is capable of meaningful, autonomous action. What interests me here is the position of the observer that is made available by the eccentric ‘nature’ of human beings, since this seems to be preconditional for the kind of agency that is at the core of legal accountability. Liability based on wrongfulness and culpability seems to require an eccentric positionality. In my paper I will investigate how Varela’s understanding of the observer relates to Plessner’s eccentricity and how this can help us to come to terms with the positionality of Alfs (Varela and Bourgine 1992). Butler, J. (2005). Giving an Account of Oneself. New York, Fordham University Press. Hildebrandt, M., B. J. Koops, E.K. de Vries (eds.) (2008). When Idem meets Ipse. Conceptual

explorations. Report D7.14a of the EU funded Network of Excellence on the Future of Identity in Information Society (FIDIS), Brussels, available at http://www.fidis.net/resources/deliverables/profiling/

Kephart, J. O. and D. M. Chess (2003). "The Vision of Autonomic Computing." Computer (January). Maturana, H. R. and F. J. Varela (1998). The Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human

Understanding. Boston & London, Shambhala. Mead, G. H. (1959/1934). Mind, Self & Society. From the standpoint of a social behaviorist. Chicago -

Illinois, The University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris, Gallimard. Ricoeur, P. (1992). Oneself as Another. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. Varela, F. J. and P. Bourgine, Eds. (1992). Towards a Practice of Autonomous Systems. Proceedings

of the First European Conference on Artificial Life. Cambridge, MA, MIT Press.

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Illies, Christian [email protected] Learning from Plessner – the threefold task of Bioethics and the contribution of Philosophical Anthropology Bioethics requires complex reflections on normative standards. In order to have rational authority, a bioethical theory must provide a consistent and well-justified principle or set of norms or values (at least within a cognitivist understanding of ethical theory). We might call this enterprise the first task of Bioethics. Its second task: Bioethical judgements are not possible without a firm empirical basis; to judge the right or best way to act or decide requires a profound understanding of life sciences and their object. Only then will a bioethical theory be truly applicable. How are both discourses related? There seems no direct path from one to the other: Empirical knowledge by itself (and thus life-sciences) cannot ground ethical judgements, nor can ethical standards by themselves tell us something about empirical realities (and possibilities). Yet both discourses are deeply interwoven: Bioethical theory is, after all, an ethical theory for a certain aspect of the empirical world. Bioethical standards without empirical reference would be empty. And life-sciences without normative guidance would be blind with regards to the way they should (or should not) go. While we might formulate rather easily in general terms what we expect from the ideal relationship between bioethical theory and life-sciences, it is difficult to be more precise about methods how to bring it about. We need, most of all, concepts that can be used in both discourses and can bridge between them. In this lecture it will be argued that Philosophical Anthropology - and Helmut Plessner’s version of it in particular – provides useful tools for this endeavour: His key notion of the “exzentrische Position”, for example, allows to connect an evolutionary view of humans and with the human dignity discourse in Bioethics. It can be regarded as a third task of bioethical theory to link itself to such an interpretation of the world (including humans), an interpretation that is in accordance with life-sciences and with its normative content. This third task of Bioethics will provide a much stronger plausibility to its theory than it would have otherwise – or so it will be argued.

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Kockelkoren, Petran [email protected] Varieties in the Cultural Production of the Self: Plessner’s Material A Priori Effectuated In the modern worldview the self seems to be the vantage point around which all of reality is arranged in an orderly way. The self is thought to be innate (a priori), the prerogative of mankind. The self is presented as a solitary agent, whose actions spring transparently from his motivations. Because of this (as yet unwarranted) presupposition the self can take responsibility for his actions. Nature is explored top down accordingly. The ethical assessment of biotechnological interventions in nature is for instance shaped on the metaphor of descending a staircase with four rungs: biotechnological tinkering with humans ‘no’ (only in extreme cases like gentherapy), with animals ‘no, unless’ (unless the production of medicines for humans is at stake), with plants ‘yes, provided that’ (safety measures regarding proliferation are met), with bacteria ‘yes’. This modern conception of man’s place in nature is challenged by the philosophical anthropology of Helmuth Plessner. He puts the modern staircase upside down, or one should rather say right side up again, in his ‘The Stages of the Organic and Man’. In this main work four rungs are discerned in the ladder of nature, this time in ascending order. The self crowns the ladder, but now in an a posteriori fashion; the self emerges out of nature and is culturally shaped and conditioned. Hence the self gets plural articulations, depending on historical and local contexts. The modern view on the self was posited by Descartes and driven to its transcendental pinnacle by Kant. The transcendental self is the warrant for the validity of knowledge. Over and against the modern preoccupation with the possibility of cognition Plessner proposed an investigation of the preceding material a priori of a cognitive existence. Most of the late modern philosophies posit the self as a narrative structure, residing solely in the realm of language and texts. Plessner on the contrary focuses on the materially mediated genesis of the self. Due to its eccentricity human existence is always mediated by language, art and tools (‘culture’ in shorthand). The cultural production of the self varies depending on the material tools and media in vogue at any time. In Descartes’ time the conception of the self was modelled after the camera obscura. No wonder Descartes saw the self as a closed inner space in which a representation of the outside world was projected and received. Representation in text and image became the dominant model of cognition. In the age of Plessner other media prevailed, like film, TV, telephony. The self is produced differently when modelled on the format of a book, a film, or (nowadays) a website. Each time different relationships are involved between the time dimension (narratives, montage, bricolage), images and texts. Since, moreover, the media are incorporated in local practices and bestowals of meaning, the self is differently articulated in varying cultural contexts. The anthropology of Helmuth Plessner points the way towards the conception of a materially mediated plurality of selves, each one differently entangled with nature because of more or less intimate technological mediations.

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Krüger, Hans-Peter [email protected] What makes the Evolution of homo sapiens sapiens possible? – A twofold contribution of Plessner`s Philosophical Anthropology Biological and medical anthropology, social and cultural anthropology, historic anthropology all investigate different aspects of the Human Condition. The first philosophical question arises in trying to integrate these different aspects within one interdisciplinary framework. Such a framework must present connections between nature and culture, individuality and sociality such as might have been produced through evolution. In this sense, philosophical anthropology is not a particular anthropology but rather more universal, to the extent that its structure and function must be balanced to fit an interdisciplinary task. One enconters the second philosophical task as soon as one recognizes that, as a matter of historic fact, anthropological questions and answers have belonged to the Human Condition, since the Axial Ages at the latest (S. Eisenstadt). Anthropological differences and their historic modifications have been a specifically human characteristic, especially since the dawn of Modernity and its anthropological circle (Foucault). Therefore, one must also investigate what makes anthropologies possible as well as how methodological considerations limit what anthropology can entitle itself to. Otherwise, anthropologies and even a philosophically integrated anthropology become merely ideological claims. Hence, I read Plessner`s The Stages of the Organic and Man (1928) in the systematic context of his whole work, particularily, in connexion with his book Power and Human Nature (1931).

Regarding the first philosophical task, I begin with some contemporary proposals under discussion today. Second, I reconstruct a few proposals from the philosophical anthroplogical discourse. My result will be: The latter presents many parallels with Michael Tomasello`s research programme, despite the fact that he underestimates contexts of competition (The Origins of Human Communication, 2008). Finally, my third point will return us to the second philosophical task regarding anthropologies in human practices. 1) Compared to other primates, there is a big gap between human genotype and human phenotype, at least as regards the modern homo sapiens, biologically speaking (i. e. in the last last 100 or 200 thousand years). Evolutionary theory can not offer a plausible explanation for such a great jump. Therefore, one has to work with intermediary steps distributed in time. In bio-evolutionary terms, the basic idea might be that a new niche was constructed which provided for processes of cultural learning. Such a niche might plausible be constructed through a series of small steps beginning with Kin Selection (including Mutualistic Cooperation) proceeding to Reciprocal Altruism (including Strong or Indirect Reciprocity) and eventually to Cultural Group Selection. If one takes these three steps together, they enable „an evolutionary cascade of selective processes“ (J. R. Hurford: The Origins of Meaning, 2007) with feedback effects on Individual Selection (including Sexual Selection) and on historic changes pertaining to cultures. According to Tomasello, such niche construction has to be focused on shared intentionality (as opposed to individual intentionaltiy) and on cultural institutions of learning involving role reversal. 2) I reconstruct some (occasionally better) equivalents of present steps within the interdisciplinary discourse of philosophical anthropology. First, I address the difference between a socio-cultural environment, a bio-social environment and a world; Then I refer to the theory of playing in and with personal roles by means of imitation (not mimicry), which takes place between the poles of laughing and crying (that are non-played); Then I address the increasing gap between ontogeny and phylogeny in human beings (as compared to non-human animals) by refering to the phenomena of an extra-uterine year, and of being a secondary nidicolous animal (with plasticity to domestication). Both phenomena together lead to a hypothesis of premature nativity, fetalisation and cerebralisation/ corticalisation in evolution to human beings (Louis Bolk, A. Portmann). I raise issues of symbolic transformation/ compensation/ repression/ suppression of impulses (Psychanalysis) as well as substitutions for organs in behaviour made possible by technologies (Paul Alsberg). I consider Plessner’s symbolic function in integrating three aspects of human conduct (see his Unity of Senses, 1923), namely, a) aisthetic themes emerging in perception and imagination that put habitual conduct into question), b) making responses precise by means of discourses (paradigms), and c) the role of schematization in answers thanks to cognition/science and technology; Finally, language is understood as coupling expressions with actions in expressiveness of second order including propositions (Plessner: Anthropology of Senses, 1970). 3) Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology saves us from falling into an anthropological circle through a penetrating critique of all mereological fallacies (invalid transitions of finite, conditioned determinations under particular aspects and from particular perspectives to infinite, unconditioned determinations of

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the Whole without aspects and perspectives). Therefore, Excentric Positionality does not determine the essence of Man. Rather, it reconstructs practical presuppositions that enable also anthropological investigations for their own part. The conditions that make anthropology possible are personality (living the difference between being a body and having a body), worldliness (triadic structures of self-reference in outer world, inner world and co-world of fellows), and the basic laws of irreducible ambivalences in leading once’s life (artificial naturality, mediated immediacy, utopian standpoint). These results of a vertical comparison (with non-human beings) within a philosophy of nature are elaborated through a horizontal comparison of human cultures and societies in a philosophy of history. The main result of the latter reconstruction is the homo absconditus (the inscrutable Man who can live in the future only under the condition that history is open-ended) who owes his existance to a public civilisation of cultures and societies in the plural. This outlook includes Plessner’s strong critique of the Western modernity as it is construed on the model of the Copernican revolution (Kant). Each of these revolutions makes its ideological claim to give the final determination of the whole, but this is just an ideological promise of the end of history (see his book The Belated Nation).

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Lerch, Henrike [email protected]

Anthropology as grounding of cultural philosophy . The connection of man and culture by Helmuth Plessner und Ernst Cassirer At the beginning of the 20th century Helmuth Plessner and Ernst Cassirer announced a new formulation of philosophy focusing on culture and cultural science. This had become necessary because Kant, whose critical approach they follow, had based his concept of reason on mathematics and physics science. With the rise of historism and cultural science, new forms of reason had to be reflected on in a critique of reason. Both, Cassirer and Plessner, claimed that in order to understand human cognition we need to go back to a pre-reflective level of the mind , that is the point of origin of the different forms of science – cultural science as well as mathematics. Both authors find this in the understanding of expression (Ausdrucksverstehen).

Although Plessner and Cassirer come up with a similar idea, they deal with it in a different way. Cassirer requires a critique of culture instead of Kants critique of reason. All forms of understanding the world enjoy equal rights. In analysing these forms, such as myth, language and science, in his main-work “Philosophie der symbolischen Formen”, he specifies symbolising as the common mental capacity. This capacity amounts to the difference between humans and animals: the human being is an animal symbolicum. In short, Cassirer develops a philosophical anthropology which is both, culmination and foundation of his cultural philosophy.

In contrast, Plessner's argumentation starts from this point. In his main-work “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch” he outlines a philosophical program with three steps: In order to establish the humanities (cultural science) as hermeneutics we need a philosophical anthropology. But, for this end we need to formulate a philosophy of the living being in general, which can be called natural philosophy. And this natural philosophy makes the difference between Plessner and Cassirer. Plessner has seen this difference, when he criticises Cassirer as someone who knows that human beings have bodies without making philosophical use of this knowledge. Plessner regards the positionality of the embodied individual together with his capacity for eccentric positionality (exzentrische Positionalität) as the basis of the cultural aspect of human life. This natural artificiality again , as Plessner describes culture, is spelled out in Cassirer's work.

In my talk, I will illustrate the similarities and differences between Plessner's and Cassirer's account by characterising the concept of the human being and the role of this concept as grounding of cultural philosophy. To explain the differences in these concepts I will compare their understandings of expression because in this point nature and culture of man fall together. I will conclude that both approach this point from different in some way complementary directions and that in order to understand culture, we need to consider both.

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Lindemann, Gesa [email protected] From Experimental Interaction to the Brain as the Epistemic Object of Neurobiology14

This paper argues that understanding everyday practices in neurobiological labs requires us to take into account a variety of different action positions: self-conscious social actors, technical artifacts, conscious organisms, and organisms being merely alive. In order to understand the interactions among such diverse entities, highly differentiated conceptual tools are required. Drawing on the theory of the German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner, the paper analyzes experimenters as self-conscious social persons who recognize monkeys as conscious organisms. Integrating Plessner's ideas into the stock of concepts used in science and technology studies (STS) provides richer descriptions of laboratory life. In particular, this theory allows an understanding of a crucial feature of neurobiological brain research: the construction of the brain as the epistemic object of brain research. As such, the brain must be isolated from the acting and interacting organism in a complicated process.

14 This paper presents results from the research project “Consciousness and anthropological

difference” funded by the German Research Council.

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Lüdtke, Nico [email protected] Plessner’s ‘Mitwelt’ as a de-anthropologised concept for understanding sociality The aspect that society is restricted to human beings may be seen as a characteristic feature of the modern era. The significant image of ‘man’ or ‘mankind’ is a phenomenon that appears at the end of the 18th century. In modern culture, ‘man’ and ‘society’ seem to be mutually inclusive. Despite the fact that this correlation must be understood as dependent on its historical and cultural circumstances, a wide range of sociological approaches holds the view that the realm of the social can be identified with the human race – a theoretical position that can be designated as anthropocentric. Nevertheless, a number of theorists (e.g. Th. Luckmann, G. Lindemann) have raised the question whether the assumption that only human beings can be social actors is suitable for investigations in social sciences. In this critical perspective, the issue becomes a relevant methodological problem for social theory. The notion that the borders of the social world are changeable addresses the fundamental question of sociality. If the “nature” of the social actors is ambiguous and social boundaries are contingent, which theoretical requirements must be stated as the conditions of social relations?

In that context, I propose to read Plessner’s “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch [The stages of the Organic and Man]” not anthropologically in a classical sense but rather as a social theory. Plessner’s conception of ‘Mitwelt’ offers a unique approach for understanding sociality, without having recourse to an image of ‘man’ or ‘mankind’. Because of the theoretical specification of ‘eccentric positionality’, there are no biological arguments to legitimately describe that distinctive mode of live. In that point, Plessner disagrees with Gehlen. The formal conditions that conceptionally frame ‘eccentric positionality’ avoid any Speciesism. No specific substratum constitutes the eccentric mode of live. That form is defined by the highest level of an organism’s capability on reflexive relationship with the environment. Those entities unfold three worlds of experience: ‘Außenwelt’ as form of the experience of embodiment and nature, ‘Innenwelt’ as form of self-experience, and most importantly ‘Mitwelt’ as form of eccentric experience. ‘Mitwelt’ characterises relational experience, which includes experience of other entities. It is important to emphasise that ‘Mitwelt’, as an abstract principle, describes only formal criteria that have to be considered as the conditions of the possibility of social relations.

In the light of Plessner’s concept, the form of human sociality can be described as the emergence of a social institution. Sociality is constituted by a process of self-delimitating the realm of relations in terms of the ‘Mitwelt’. That process results in the formation of a societal group whose members say to themselves: “we”. An important aspect of the issue is that a sphere of interpersonal relations is associated with a distinct structure of social reality. Based on that theoretical approach, the modern type of human society appears to be a specific historical formation. In that sense, the inherent image of ‘man’ can be considered as a result of a socio-historical construction. In order to understand the process of emergence of the modern society, I will try to develop a sociological concept of ‘Institutionalisation’.

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Magyar-Haas, Veronika [email protected]

De-masking as social pedagogical practice Referring to Helmuth Plessner’s theoretical approach on the “natural artificiality” and the constitutive relevance of masks in social interactions, my interdisciplinary paper will tackle the empirical question of assurance of personal (bodily) integrity and of the constitution of agency in structurally de-masking, shamefaced, and precarious situations, in the very specific context of a social pedagogical field of acting.

In his monograph “The limits of community“ (1924/2003) Plessner describes the “ontological ambiguity” as a core characteristic of human beings. This term refers to the ambiguous character of the “inner self” (soul): the desire for visibility and for disguising, covering, or masking. This “ontological ambiguity” results in the two basic powers of human life: the urge for revelation, the need for recognition, and the urge for restrainment, called shamefulness (Plessner 1924/2003:63). The “inner self” surfaces in the visible, bodily signs of shame, manifests itself at the human boundary, at the periphery of the body, in the expressivity. The revealed contents of the soul need compensation, which have to be “dressed” (Plessner 1924/2003:72) and disguised. This compensational behaviour is essential for protecting the own dignity and integrity (Plessner 1924/2003:41) in the sense of the possibility of drawing artificial boundaries, marked at the verbal or at the non-verbal level.

My talk will demonstrate the significance of this anthropological approach for social pedagogical research. The relevance Plessner’s for this context results in divergent reasons: social work has the role of normalization as a social mandate, the clients are structurally confronted with a lack of recognition, and current social political discourses, for example the discussions about underclass and about migration, have humiliating character. But the phenomenon of shame and of the de-masking have been quite neglected in scientific reflections about these discourses. If social work wants to be understood as a profession of justice (Schrödter 2007:8), as present studies with reference to the capability approach (Nussbaum 2001) postulate, the right of dignity and integrity should have high relevance. On the base of these arguments and of Plessner’s philosophy the paper is interested in two questions: firstly, how and under which conditions processes of de-masking emerge, and secondly, how clients and professionals handle situations characterized by de-masking, how professionals enable the agency of the clients, what kind of possibilities show up in the bodily-spatial context of action.

These questions will be followed up on the basis of audiovisual empirical data, which was recorded in a social pedagogical field, in a youth centre with social worker support. The social-scientific method of video-interaction-analysis (Knoblauch 2001; 2005) allows the interpretation of nonverbal forms of expressivity, such as gesture and facial expression, behaviour patterns and styles of living as well as the analysis of processes of de-masking and potentially re-masking in a certain context. The rights of dignity and integrity and of social justice are formidable challenges for social work, which cannot be considered only on the disciplinary level but which also requires reliable interdisciplinary and international perspectives and debates. Bibliography Knoblauch, H. (2001): Fokussierte Ethnographie [Focussed ethnography]. In: sozialersinn, H. 1, p. 123-141 Knoblauch, H. (2005): Video-Interaktions-Sequenzanalyse [Video-interaction-sequenceanalysis]. In: Wulf, C./ Zirfas, J. (Ed.): Ikonologie des Performativen. München: Fink, p. 263- 275 Nussbaum, M. C. (2001): Women and human development: the capabilities approach. Cambridge University Press Plessner, H. (1924/2003): Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus [The limits of community. A critique of social radicalism]. In: Dux, G./Marquard, O./Ströker, E. (Ed.): Macht und menschliche Natur. Gesammelte Schriften V. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, p. 7-133. Schrödter, M. (2007): Soziale Arbeit als Gerechtigkeitsprofession. Zur Gewährleistung von Verwirklichungschancen [Social work as a profession of justice]. In: neue praxis, Bd. 37, Nr. 1, p. 3-28.

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Matsuzaki, Hironori [email protected]

Does only “human body” matter? Artificial humanoids in the quest for personhood This paper investigates border problems of the social world posed by the development of autonomous humanoid robots, and explores the possibility whether and how these intelligent technological creatures could become equivalent members of a present human-centered society. In doing so, I argue that Plessner’s notion of different kinds of positionality can be used to develop a conceptual framework for the analysis of such elementary border phenomena. In modern democratic societies for which the ethos of human rights is of fundamental importance, it is taken to be self-evident that only living human beings are social persons. However, this equation of the realm of the social with the world of humans has been increasingly challenged in recent years, especially by the advent of human-like autonomous robots. As empirical findings in cultural anthropology reveal, the premise that only living humans can be social persons does not hold true throughout the ages. The realm of the social would rather be demarcated by virtue of the historically contingent process of interpretation. New understandings of Plessner’s concept of “Mitwelt” support this claim. Accordingly, the fact that machines built in the image of humans are becoming more and more integrated into everyday life, will raise crucial issues about the borders of the social world – not least the ethical problem whether or not autonomous robots should be viewed as subjects of legal rights and duties. Humanoid robotics is not only a engineering science of useful machines, but often seen as a new technology of understanding human condition. Researchers are trying to create humanlike machines in search of what constitutes human beings, without exaggerating the singularity of its nature. In this scientific enterprise, any presumptions as to the man-machine distinctions are for methodological reasons disregarded. A humanoid robot is built according the basic assumption that humans are merely meat machines, while the complexity of human bodies on which the construction of embodied AI relies, is generally reduced to simulated biophysical features. In other words, the practices of building artificial humanoids are based on a mechanistic and functionally reductionist anthropology. The pragmatic nature of these operating principles will be analyzed in a first step. In a second step, I discuss the possible social consequences of the reductionism, which underlies the development of advanced types of humanoid robots. When such novel entities enter the ordinary space of lived action, it will be inevitable to define their physical existence. Thus, I concentrate – referring to Plessner’s graduated conception of positionality – on the question how the appearance of a humanoid robot would be interpreted by its human counterpart in the interaction. Do behaviors and bodily expressions of the artifact manifest some characteristics of living beings? Can its human-likeness be acknowledged as a sign of eccentric positionality, i.e., personhood? Or rather, one would argue that it is nothing but a functioning machine? My main goal is to show that these questions can only be explained by employing a formal theory of the social, which focuses on the triangulated interaction within a threesome constellation.

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Moss, Lenny [email protected] Beyond the Dreyfus-McDowell Impasse: Plessner, Human Detachment, the Need for Orientation/Compensation and the Normative Significance of Higher-Level Skill Acquisition. The Dreyfus-McDowell debate illustrates the deficiencies of philosophical discourses lacking an adequate Anthropology. Where McDowell cannot imagine any natural normativity that is not within (or close to) the space of reasons, Dreyfus does not know how to distinguish human everyday coping from that of any other animal and accordingly struggles to find an internal route from everyday coping activity to explicit cognitive awareness. The paper will bring Plessner’s account of excentric positionality into the context of a more general theory of natural detachment with a corresponding emphasis on the affective consequences of high levels of detachment. It will be argued that compensatory need for orientation permeates all and every activity of human life and also accounts for the immanent normativity, e.g., striving for ‘maximum grip’, etc..described by Merleau-Ponty and Taylor Carmen. I will then reconstruct a model of advanced skill acquisition that mediates both the non-cognitive, motor-intentional embodied substratum of our skilled know-how with the moments of executive-level reflective consciousness necessary for new learning and monitoring as needed, with the aid of Plessner’s account of positionality. Humans seek and find compensation by many means, not all of them salutary. In higher-level skill acquisition autonomy and authenticity are brought together in the pursuit of compensation-providing orientation. Accordingly, the social and institutional conditions of higher-level skill acquisition will be presented as the proper normative locus for social criticism and bio-ethical deliberation.

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Mugerauer, Bob [email protected]

The Centripetal-Centrifugal Dynamic of Eccentric Life and Its Environments The proposed presentation will demonstrate three theses that taken together show that a) there is direct continuity between Plessner's ideas and contemporary interpretations of organism-environment relationships at the level of life itself and in cultural manifestations such as architecture, b) current understanding can be deepened by recovering and applying Plessner's insights, especially concerning eccentric positionality, and c) Plessner can provide a basis for a more substantial integration of work in natural and social sciences, humanities, and the social-political realm, as well as in issues concerning well-being and community. First thesis: current advances in the life sciences beyond dualisms and reductive neo-Darwinism (Dawkins, 1976: Wilson, 1975) that develop "a middle way" to understand the co-generative dynamic between organisms and environment were prefigured by Plessner (Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 1928). Simplistic conceptions of environmental niches as pre-given and fixed, waiting to be filled by organisms which need to adapt to survive have been replaced by more sophisticated views of “nice construction”: in fact, organisms actively participate in selecting what amounts to a niche for that organism and in shaping their environments (and thus their own development) in a way that provides a genuine inheritance system modifying future populations (Laland, Odling-Smee, and Feldman, 2001; Sterelny, 2001). Other current research and reassessments in complexity theory, self-organization, phenomenology, and enactivist approaches to cognition correlate with Developmental Systems Theory, emergence, and co-evolution in their development of an epigenetic position (Lewontin,1995, 2000; Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray, 2001; Oyama, 2001, 2002) which shifts the focus to whole organisms rather than to the gene as the critical subject of study at the micro-scale or to entire populations at the mega-scale. Additionally, with fuller appreciation of the extra-genetic (including immediate environs, extended environment and life-cycle, and external phenotype) the organism is neither seen as determined by interior drives or genetic "information" nor deterministically driven by “given” external environments. Rather, the key dynamic is understood as simultaneously centripetal and centrifugal: in Maturana and Varela's terms this is thought as autopoiesis and structural-coupling (1980, 1992), which can be directly compared with and further informed by Plessner's work on boundary (1928). Second thesis: elaborating Plessner’s ideas concerning embodiment specifically for person-environment relationships has important implications for theory and practices concerning human well-being. Insofar as health is fruitfully understood in terms of the ability to pursue possibilities, then healing is restoring compromised freedoms (Gadamer, 1976; Boss and Heidegger, 2001). Here the key matter is opening flow across pervious borders—which again can be more fully illuminated by utilizing Plessner. Third thesis: applying the philosophical and biological concepts of boundaries to the human social realm enables us to think about the character and limits of community. For example, since membranes both provide boundaries and means of connection through their porosity it is instructive (though not without dangers) to extend investigating the complex dynamic across the arc of life and levels of emergent capacities from cell to body, then building, neighborhood, and even border (Mugerauer, 2007, 2008). Such an articulation of the ways our positionality is brought forth in architecture and political life would both develop and be richly informed by Plessner's views of mediated relations and of humans as eccentric. Relation to conference themes;

The paper may be suited for theme #1 (Evolution and Human Life) because it focuses on the broad question of “what is life?” and on eccentric positionality.

However, it also is related to theme #3 (Bio-Ethical) since it develops the ideas so as to treat health and well-being

And to theme #4 (Living Culture) by taking up architecture as a cultural means of extension across porous boundaries.

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Mul, Jos de [email protected] Philosophical anthropology 2.0 Reading Plessner in the age of converging technologies One way to interpret the immense popularity of philosophical anthropology in the first half of the 20th century is to conceive of it as an answer to the revolutionary developments in the natural and social sciences that took place since the second half of the nineteenth century. Especially evolution theory necessitated a fundamental reconsideration of ‘the human place in the cosmos’. From this perspective it’s no sheer coincidence that the author of what is to this day the most fruitful ‘introduction to philosophical anthropology’ (Die Stufes des Organischen und der Mensch) had a biological background. However, in the second half of the 20th century philosophical anthropology became the object of a series of fundamental critiques, either motivated politically (Frankfurter Schule), ethically (the ‘deep ecology’ movement) or ontologically ((neo)structuralism). Though for different reasons, all of these critiques were directed against the alleged (essentialist) anthropocentrism of the project of philosophical anthropology. It seemed philosophical anthropology had to face the same fate as it’s object ‘man’, which – to use the often quoted formula of Foucault - is about to be “erased like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea”. At the beginning of the 21st century the ‘End of Man’ seems to get yet another, more material turn as a result of the development of neo-Darwinism and the converging technologies (biotechnology, information technology, nanotechnology, neurosciences, cognitive science, robotics, and artificial intelligence) that are intertwined with it. Whereas classical Darwinism challenged the human place in the cosmos mainly in a theoretical sense, technologies like genetic modification, neuro-enhancement and electronic implants have the potential to ‘overcome’ Homo sapiens as we know it in a practical sense. This urges upon us a fundamental post-anthropocentric human self-reflection. In my lecture I will argue that Plessner’s magnum opus still offers a fruitful starting point for the development of this ‘philosophical anthropology 2.0’. I will demonstrate this by a rereading Plessner’s three ‘anthropological laws’ in the light of converging technologies. The law of natural artificiality does not provide any reasons to repudiate the cyborgization of man as unnatural, as this process has characterized the co-evolution of the human species, culture and technology from the very beginning. The question is not whether we will use converging technologies to (continue to) modify ourselves, but rather for what purposes and in what manner. However, in the age of intentional bionic artefacts, the laws of mediated immediacy and of the utopian standpoint warn us, in an even more radical sense than Plessner could imagine, for being too optimistic about the controllability of this project and its contribution to (post)human happiness.

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Nicolae, Stefan [email protected]

Living Corpses – Dying Boundaries Towards a Re-Signification of Helmuth Plessner’s Analysis of the Concept of Boundary for the Sociology of Death The discussion on “being-toward-death” (Being and Time, §47) builds a fruitful starting point for any phenomenological, as well as anthropological analysis of the corpse. In an analytical crescendo Heidegger points out three modalities of encountering Dasein’s dead body: an extreme (as present-at-hand), a theoretical (as unliving), and a respectable (as late), as he names them. The third way of coping with it implies three meanings of care – the funerals, the burial, and the cult of the dead – in which the living ones from our »World« still continue to be with him. This difference is then abandoned on ontological grounds, for it delivers no link to an authentically existential analysis of Dasein. Nevertheless, seen exactly from a phenomenological perspective on the life-world, and particularly in the frames of sociology of death, this reading raise at least two major difficulties, that can easily be avoided if we consider Plessner’s interpretations in this respect. On the one hand, the distinction between the unliving, the late, and the dead remains unclear, then it ends up denoting not an ontological, as suggested by Heidegger, but an ontic property of corpses; on the other hand, the whole architecture of Heidegger’s world-concept is at risk in stressing, in absence of any further explanations, a switch in the core-significance of “for-the-sake-of-which”. It is Plessner’s anthropology which gives the theoretical instruments to solve the dilemma. I argue that both problems relate to the specific thought of acknowledging a fundamental social status for the corpse which, as I demonstrate, (a) structures, as inanimate presence, the interwove social actions, (b) questions the very limits of the sociality, and (c) depicts spatial arrangements in the world of daily living. My presentation concentrates on the first issue and indicates basic lines of argumentation for the other two. I start (1) with a brief survey of a threefold problematic in Plessner’s Stages of The Organic and Man: boundary, eccentric positionality, and a shared world (Mitwelt), and try to show how corpses could be described in Plessner’s vocabulary of organic beings. A primarily accent on sociological and ethical dimensions of the shared world is then (2) underlined, whose implications for the topic are elucidated through contemporary debates on corpses, ranging from the blurred status of “cadaver markets”, up to organs-donation and euthanasia. Social, ethical, and legal aspects, which place the corpse in the center of commonly and scientific preoccupation, shape the main discourse of the sociology of death. Yet, a focus on the part the corpse plays for and in the social construction of reality as an actant (and not as an “actor”) is still missing. Relying on human categories in addressing the corpse’s position, acknowledging handled restrictions and standards of action, and taking account of body’s dignifying ownership goes beyond a naïve anthropologization: it indicates a prolonged understanding of the human and the diffuseness of societal boundary (3). Plessner’s philosophical-anthropological view based on eccentric positionality enhances therefore the sociological analysis of death and sets forth the inquiry on reassembling the social.

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Oosten, jetstke van [email protected] The unbearable freedom of dwell ing In order to explore the meaning of architecture within the context of a (post-) modern world, this paper critically describes an encounter between the philosophy of Helmuth Plessner and the utopian architecture of Constant Nieuwenhuys. It was Plessner who was one of the first philosophers to consider the spatial constitution of man to be an important feature of his being. While developing this spatial constitution of man in further detail, Plessner identifies man as the sole being that is able to not just see what is real, but to visualize what is possible as well. Only man can imagine the world to be different from what it is. As a consequence, he can choose to change the world around him: what was once just a possibility, can be turned into reality. Man has the freedom to create.

This human freedom to create played an important role in the work of the artist Constant Nieuwenhuys, who worked for over twenty years on an architectural project that he called ‘New Babylon’. Constant envisioned a world in which people would have the possibility to create their own environment according to their own needs and desires. In an attempt to bring this world of freedom to life, Constant produced numerous models, maps, drawings and paintings. New Babylon grew to become an enormous project, representing Constants architectural ideas.

Unfortunately the models, maps, drawings and paintings of New Babylon over the years proved themselves to be frightening representations. In capturing a glimpse of a world of total freedom, they represented the horror of its totality. The models, maps, drawings and paintings showed that in offering man total freedom, New Babylon could not offer man a place to be ‘home’. For this world of total freedom, this world of possibilities, lacked the restrictions of reality. And without a restricted reality, to which man can relate in an unreflecting way, there will be no security or trust. Man has no place in a world in which nothing is fixed and everything is possible. In New Babylon, man is ‘homeless’. This raises the question about what the meaning of architecture is within the context of today’s (post-) modern world, at a time when formerly stable concepts in architecture like ‘place’ and ‘matter’ are suffering from inflation and many topical architectural debates mention a ‘homelessness’ of man. While the architectural discussions often deal with the homelessness as a feature of (post-) modern man, Plessner argues it to be a fundamental property of human existence. A reading of Plessner’s work can teach us how the human positionality forms the driving force of architecture. Architecture acts on the brink of possibility and reality in the sense that in architecture man tries to unite the two. These efforts are, however, in vain, as possibility and reality are in fact two sides of the same coin that can never be united. Architecture will never be able to offer man a final home. Man will always be homeless. However, this is does not affect the importance of architecture. If any, it confirms its relevance. For as a consequence architecture forms a fundamental element of human life as a practice in which the freedom to create repeatedly encounters a call for the reality of place and matter.

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Pols, Kirsten [email protected]

Strangely Familiar The debate on multiculturalism and Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology In his own writings, Plessner usually drew a strict line between his philosophical anthropology and social or political theory. At the very least, he claimed that his philosophical anthropology was neutral when it came to drawing any political conclusions from it. Nevertheless, when it comes to understanding the contemporary debate on multiculturalism, I think that Plessner’s philosophical anthropology can be of great help. Liberal theorists like John Rawls explicitly denounce the use of any comprehensive theory of what it is to be human, when dealing with questions of justice, even in a multicultural society. Communitarist theorists like Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre reply by claiming that any theory of justice has inevitably to be grounded in a comprehensive theory of the subject; a theory of justice that does not incorporate recognition as a basic human need has to be considered itself to be unjust. Whether the discussion focuses on recognition versus redistribution or on essentialism versus structuralism, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology provides an interesting position that underpins the liberal emphasis on human freedom, while at the same time defending the need for recognition as a fundamental human feature. It provides a framework within which one can understand the nature of intercultural tensions and the need for recognition in dealing with these tensions.

My defence of this thesis comprises two parts. Firstly, I will show how Plessner’s three constitutive anthropological laws play an important part, not only in theories of the subject, but also in theories of intersubjectivity. They enable us to clarify the role of culture and morality in intersubjectivity and the tension between freedom and encumberedness that characterises our relation with culture and morality. In Plessner’s philosophical anthropology man lives his life and knows of it, he cares about his existence. From his eccentric position he is aware of himself and of others, he finds himself placed as an ‘I’ between other ‘I’s’, and from this position he discovers and constructs his identity among the identities of other individuals. This is the basis of his freedom as well as of his responsibility. Despite his possibility to take up a ‘view from nowhere’ within the Mitwelt, because of his eccentric positionality a human being remains tied to his embodied existence. The embodiment of his existence is twofold: not only is he a unity of body and mind prior to any reflexive division of those two, also any reflexive ability of his mind needs an embodiment in language, practice and norms that have their own objectivity towards this thought. Plessner’s philosophical anthropology acknowledges both the freedom of the subject that we find in liberal theories, and the ties to an embodied existence, which we find as a strong argument in communitarist theory. Secondly, Plessner’s philosphical anthropology provides a framework within which we can correlate in a very concrete way our own identity with that of the other. As an eccentric being it is possible to see oneself ‘with other eyes’. This is beautifully illustrated and underpinned by Plessner’s own account of his experience as an immigrant in the Netherlands during the Second World War. Plessner describes the experience of viewing himself as being ‘a German’, of objectifying his own identity as ‘different’ from the other people around him, as one that was very painful for him, and with a deep philosophical significance. Both his philosophical and his personal descriptions of this experience open up the possibility of drawing out the ability of self-objectivation as a consequence of the eccentric positionality. Self-objectivation and thereby self-estrangement are consequences that can lead to anxiety and tension as well as new horizons.

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Pott, Heleen [email protected]

Emotion, evolution and ‘laughing’ rats: Plessner’s Importance for Affective Neuroscience. Why do we laugh? One of the most enigmatic things about laughter is that we do not consciously and purposefully choose to break out laughing - we do not decide to do it, it simply happens to us in certain situations. During exuberant laughter our facial expressions alter, we make sounds, tears stream, bodies collapse, our physical existence is completely disorganized. Yet, laughter is not a mere bodily event either.

According to Helmuth Plessner (1941), the key to the mystery of laughter lies in the structure of our bodily existence. We laugh, Plessner observes, at unanswerable situations, that confront us with ambiguity and multiplicity of meaning. Laughing happens when the direction is missing in which we must organize ourselves, as ‘excentrically positioned’ human beings. In such situations the body slips away from our control and takes over. According to Plessner, laughter gives us insight into what is distinctive to the human condition. It is is a capacity that we have as persons, neither simply as bodies, nor simply as minds.

Today, almost seventy years after the publication of Lachen und Weinen (1941), a possible criticism of Plessner’s thesis might be that the capacity to laugh is not proper to human beings, but exhibited as well by other mammalians. Affective neuroscience recently defended the thesis that the discovery of play- and tickle-induced ultrasonic vocalization patterns (50 kHz chirps) in rats may have more than a passing resemblance to primitive human laughter. In an interesting paper in Physiology and Behavior 79 (2003), titled ‘Laughing rats and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy’, Jaak Panksepp and Jeff Burgdorf summarize a number of reasons for the working hypothesis that such rat vocalizations reflect a type of positive affect that may have evolutionary relationships to human laughter, even though the cognitive accompaniments are bound to differ markedly.

Their ‘laughing rats’ research provides a provocative example of the exciting results produced in affective neuroscience today. According to the authors, the animal data highlight some of the homologeous controls that exist in human brains. They argue that since laughter is about communicating playful intent and bonding, it’s underlying neural systems may be controlled by social cues – which explains why one cannot tickle themselves. They also suggest that the data on animal play and laughter may be of considerable relevance for understanding certain psychiatric syndromes, especially ADHD. It is to be expected that advances in the study of neurochemical systems in the regulation of emotions will soon be able of guiding predictions at the human psychological level.

In my paper I will elaborate on the differences and similarities between today’s affective neuroscience research and Plessner’s views on laughter. I will argue that they show remarkable convergence. I will also argue that Plessner’s notion of positionality has an important role to play in elucidating the evolutionary antecedents of human joy.

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Rehberg, Karl-Siegbert [email protected]

New Biology and Unchanged Old Questions: Recent Research and the ‘Sonderstellungs’-hypotheses of the Philosophical Anthropology

Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner – later also Arnold Gehlen (like Plessner deeply influenced by the empirical research and in some respect also the ‘vitalism’ of Hans Driesch) – were impressed by the importance of evolutionary theory since Darwin, but preferred a special kind of “philosophical biology” (like that of Jakob von Uexkuell, Louis Bolk and others, continued until a biologist like Adolf Portmann). The aim of all authors of the philosophical-anthropological approach (“Denkansatz”, Fischer 2008) was to react on the new life sciences. Suggestive was the term “life” also in philosophy and in intellectual discourses at the beginning of the last century, as it is expressed in a wonderful formulation in Plessner’s introduction to his “Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch” (1928).

In the first part of my contribution to the section “Evolution and the human life” I will show the (complex) relationship of Scheler, Plessner and Gehlen to the evolution theory. Scheler with his model of graduation (Stufenmodell) accepted the basis of evolutionism even for human beings, but he relocated the difference between man and animal from intelligence to “spirit” as the human anti-natural capacity to say “No”, to be a “protestant” and “ascetist” in nature. Plessner also affirmed the basic facts of the development of species, but he kept a distance to a direct reception of Darwinism or also to the new approach of a synthetic evolution theory in his theory of life forms and the crucial problem of their boundaries. Gehlen was closest to evolutionary perspectives and results but he worked with the Neotonie thesis of Bolk (today proved in respect to the phenomena but not accepted by the majority of paleontologists by its explanation of an inner reductionism). Insofar, all of the main authors of the philosophical anthropology had an ambivalent position in respect to the evolution theory.

Secondly, I will discuss the actual position of the philosophical anthropology in relation to recent scientific research. In particular, I will focus on the ethological field of primate studies (like these by Michael Tomasello) but also give some remarks to the mostly unrealized affirmation of man’s exceptional position (Sonderstellung) – here and also in the modern brain-sciences. In both fields this special position of man (even if interpreted as a “niche” like every species has) is shown by the special structure and the dynamic development of the human brain as well as by the principle difference of all communication systems of animals on the one hand and of the human language on the other. Admittedly, 98,8 percent of human genes correspond to those of chimpanzees, but we alone have 100 percent of language as – to say it with Wilhelm von Humboldt – a medium not only of communication but of producing ‘a world’.

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Russo, Marco [email protected] M&P. A parallel action Plessner’s and Merleau-Ponty’s works are so similar that we can speak of a “parallel action”. Similar is the conception of the relationship men-world, where body and nature take such a relevance which allows a re-interpetation of many philosophical categories (reality, world, knowledge, culture). This re-interpetation find nowadays confirmation in the cognitive and human sciences, in their more and more dominant “bio-paradigma” or “life turn”. Nevertheless the action remain parallel, no communications took place: ontology and anthropology remained opposite approaches, whereas the theoretical opposition became a quarrel between conservation and innovation. So my paper try to analyze the whole field of this parallel action, as well as in his concordance as in his discordance. Steps of my analysis are: 1) comparison of Plessner with Merleau by characterising their man-world conception on the basis of a common “bio-paradigma”; 2) comparison of their conception with the recent orientation in the human and cognitive sciences; 3) remarks on the meaning and actuality of the opposition between M&P, on the negative side their parallel action.

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Ryberg Ingerslev, Line [email protected]

Social experience and objectification

The paper raises the question whether self-distance is a constitutive part of social experience. A positive answer would enable an account of the social vulnerability of personhood when the self-distance is not balanced. In a recent article from 2008 Stephen Burwood argues that there is a double aspect to the bodily self-relation, which he suggests we conceive of in terms of ‘the uncanny body’. The uncanny body explains how the body can appear at the same time “intimately alien [and] strangely mine” (“The apparent truth of dualism and the uncanny body”, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, (2008) 7:277, Springer). To understand how dissociation from one’s own body is possible, we need a notion of embodiment that can account for the experience of oneself as an object. The guiding questions of the paper are the following: to what extent can I experience my own body not only as a lived body but also as an object, and what does that tell of the structure of social experience?

The paper proceeds in three steps. First, I attempt to show that self-distance is related to being embodied. Plessner’s notion of eccentricity is helpful to spell out the social implications of the double aspect of having and being a body. To be embodied means to be physically limited by the body: there are limits to how fast I can run, how far I can reach my arm etc. There are times when we must surrender to the body. At the same time, embodiment means to be in control of and aware of the capability of my own body. In social relations we play with and balance the self-distance of being controlled by and having control of the body, which is the case in expressive phenomena. Second, if the notion of self-distance explains how self-dissociation is possible in the first place, how is self-distance related to the structure of social experience? Here the paper turns to Sartre. According to Sartre, a primary relation to the other is there even before the other appears to me as an object. In my bodily self relation the other is already present: my body becomes an object for me because of the gaze of the other. The other is the one who sees me; the one to whom I am an object; and the other is the radical negation of my subjective experience. Unfolding these insights helps us to clarify the relation between embodiment and its social aspects, a relation that is crucial to Plessner’s idea of eccentricity. In a final step, the paper questions whether social objectification in the sense of treating or experiencing persons or oneself as a thing can only be accounted for if self-distance is already considered a part of embodied self-experience.

The double bound self-relatedness of embodiment, the paper claims, shapes our ways of being a person. The idea is not the trivial claim that the body is material; hence it has objectivity to it. Rather, if we are to account for the possibility self-dissociation we must be able to account for how we can experience ourselves as objects too: the social experience of being a body among other bodies is explained not by the fact that we have a body, but by the structure of embodied eccentricity.

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Schlossberger, Matthias [email protected] Habermas and the Philosophical Anthropology of Plessner. Habermas has always taken a critical position towards the so-called ’Philosophical Anthropology’. In the sixties and seventies he criticized Gehlen and Plessner as conservative and backward philosophers. In particular, Plessner was attacked because of his traditional subjectivism. This attack took place a long time ago, and since then Habermas has neither modified nor taken back his arguments. In his recent works concerning the ethics of the human species and the future of human life, Habermas uses some arguments from Helmuth Plessner without referring to his former critical position. In my paper I want to demonstrate that Habermas should have first carried out a fundamental revision of his main philosophical convictions, in order to take a serious position on Plessner’s ideas. In fact, Habermas himself realized that it was not possible to tackle the problems of the biological future of mankind using the terms of his former theory. However he did not make it explicit that his former theory is too weak (and why it is to weak). Facing the consequences would mean a change of paradigm: from philosophy of language towards a philosophy of life or towards a philosophy of expressions.

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Soeffner, Hans-Georg [email protected] (secretary)

Functional purposelessness. The ‘practical meaning’ of aesthetics15 The title of this essay has two parts, each containing a deliberate paradox: (1) aesthetic purposelessness assumes a function and (2) the relatively – as opposed to the practice-oriented conceptual sensory of everyday thinking and everyday activity – ‘finite province of meaning’16 of aesthetics assumes a practical meaning. This must and will be substantiated below. Here, I will not – or only marginally – follow the traditional limes of a philosophy of aesthetics represented from the 18th century by Baumgarten, Kant or Hegel to the present, by e.g. Martin Seel. Instead, I will attempt, as much as this is possible in a short lecture, to characterize on the basis of phenomenological-protosociological and anthropological thoughts the relationship structure between everyday thinking, aesthetics and science. The term “Beziehungsgefüge” (relationship structure) already indicates a decisive assumption: No matter how much socially constructed systems and world views, especially in modern and increasingly differentiated societies, may be separated into seemingly self-contained individual segments and dissociated into a variety of perspectives – socially experienced reality is always relational: structure and process of “interaction” (Simmel).

15 Opening lecture of the 6th Annual Meeting of the Sonderforschungsbereich 626 „Ästhetische Erfahrung im Zeichen der

Entgrenzung der Künste“. Subject: „Ästhetisierung“. Geschichte und Gegenwart einer Krisendiagnose, 6. November 2008.

16 Cf. Schütz, Alfred (1971), Gesammelte Aufsätze, Band 1, Den Haag, p. 407.

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Spreen, Dierk [email protected] Not terminated. In a Plessnerian perspective “cyborgized” men still remain “human” beings Today, there are many examples of technologies which are used as implants or prostheses. More and more the modern Man is transforming into a “cyborg”. By some media and social theorists such technologies and the general artificialization of society are seen as omens for a new “posthuman” era. In my lecture I’d like to discuss a perspective that dismisses “the human” because of the mechanization of the body.

According to Helmuth Plessner the human can be seen as a “natural-artifical” life form. But then – why should the mechanization of the body and the living environment stand for a posthuman society? – With Plessner I would rather see “the cyborg” as a discourse of reflexive modernity with raises new experiences with body, technology and media. But the step to the cyborg body is not a step into a world beyond humanity.

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Sydow, Björn [email protected]

Exzentrical Positionality and Practical Subjectivity The dualism between body and mind is still alive. This can be seen particularly clear in the theories of action and practical reason which follow the tradition of Hume and Kant, for example in Harry Frankfurt’s thinking. And there are good reasons for a dualistic standpoint for we cannot think of reasonable action without presupposing the existence of something like an agent who has properties and capacities that could not be found in the material world. Because of this, it is quite reasonable to suppose a reality of mind which stands in exchange with the material world. The alternative seems to be to deny the possibility of a reasonable subject. And this forces us to conceive of the world as a place where we can only find things and events that follow physical laws. The behaviorist is the one who tries precisely this because he describes our actions without any reference to the inner.

Like the late Wittgenstein, Plessner holds on to the thought, that there is no reality beside or behind the bodily world. But he shows that the bodily world is a complex one for it has to be understood as an unity of substance and appearance. Plessner’s decisive achievement consits in developing this structure such that the reasonable subject could be understood as the substance behind the appearance of the human action. He thinks of excentrical positionality as a type of substance which becomes real in human behavior. Instead of settling subjectivity in the inner, i.e. behind the surface of the human body and its movements, Plessner develops subjectivity in the sense of a forming principle of the bodily visible action. The subject is not independent of the appearing bodily movements. The subject cannot cause the action because it only becomes real in the course of the behavior. Plessner develops this possibilty as a possibility of life. The decisive move lies in conceiving of life as a feature or quality of a body, namely as the capacity of realizing some form of positionality. Consequently, a body is a living being as long as it is able to realize positionality or at least as long as it owns the possibility to develop such an ability.

Plessners reinterpretation of practical subjectivity from a mental reality to the substance of a series of appearances leads to the result that the basic form of our behvior can only be understood as a realization of practices or roles. This changes our understandig of practical reasons. Usually, we think of them as generated by the human mind, i.e. as a result of our wishes or our capacity of pure reason. Now, they arise out of the practices, respectively out of the situations perceived in the light of certain practices or roles. So, one can escape the almost endless dispute between Humians and Kantians. Above all, one is now able to grasp our everyday reference to practical reasons in a more adequate way.

The paper will develop the outlined understanding of exzentrical positionality in order to have a closer look at the alternative conception of practical reason.

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Oreste Tolone [email protected]

According to Plessner’s third anthropological law, the eccentric man is an utopian animal. He

never coincides with himself, neither with his own body nor with the world surrounding him (Buber). So, at the same time, man is a body and has a body, he is his own world and has his own world. Man’s health resides in this perpetual dialectic; but this dialectic can be interrupted by physical and mental illness. When he suffers, man draws back: his body coincides with his world, and the world is reduced to his body.

I’m going to focus my attention on the concepts of centricity, eccentricity and world-openness (Weltoffenheit), and on their relationship with illness, and especially with mental illness. It’ll be necessary therefore to analyze, more than illness, the ill person (Weizsäcker). When a man is ill, his way of being open to the world becomes ill, as well as his ability to assume a distance to the world and to himself. We can see clear evidence of this especially in cases of mental illness.

I’m going also to show that the dialectic between centric and eccentric is related both to mental disease and to its recovery. The eccentricity of man means that he «is never entirely what he is» and therefore implies that even an ill person never coincides entirely with his own illness. We can never identify a man with the desease affecting him (anthropological psychiatry).

Finally, I’ll try to show how eccentricity can affect the doctor-patient relationship. I’m going to show how Plessner’s anthropology can be helpful in getting over the idea of medicine as a merely ontic science, and in recovering an anthropological dimension (medical humanities).

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Varul, Matthias Zick [email protected]

The Eccentricity of the Romantic Consumer: Campbell, Simmel, and Plessner This paper will argue that Plessner’s anthropology can contribute to an understanding of the construction of personhood in consumer culture and to a refutation of gemeinschaft oriented criticisms of consumerism.

Colin Campbell’s conceptualisation of “autonomous imaginative hedonism” will be taken as a starting point as it captures both the increased complexity and flexibility of identity constructions in contemporary consumer societies and the persistence of integrated personhood. Campbell traces the roots of contemporary consumer culture to what he identifies as a “Romantic Ethic,” but he fails to explain how romantic-inspired consumerism has been sustained and spread long after the demise of the Romantic movement. It will be argued that Georg Simmel’s analysis of money holds the answer to this question in that it can be used to show that there is a structural romanticism in the use of money, in that it creates dynamic of lacking and longing.

Underpinning romantic consumerism with a Simmel’s sociology leads to the discovery of further key Romantic elements in consumer culture, in particular what Carl Schmitt abhorred as Romantic “occasionism” – the rejection of committing decisions and choices and a preference for the always possible but never actualised. Romantic consumerism practically opposes Schmittian decisonism as radical choice that ultimately commits the individual to a community of fate – it opts for a non-commital, sequential decisionism that encourages the individual to revel in a wide range of possible identities. The only fundamental commitment here is to choice itself, not to a particular choice.

In recourse on Plessner, and particularly his critique of gemeinschaft and his adaptation of the sociological role theory, it will be shown that consumer culture as emphatically gesellschaft oriented offers a practical critique of social radicalism. It will also be shown that far from dissolving self-identity into “multiple personalities”, consumer culture enhances the potential that lies in the anthropologically given possibility to develop a personhood “behind the masks” for the daydreaming consumer. In a perspective informed by Plessner what appears as the dissolving or “decentring” of subjectivity and identity in postmodern consumerism can be understood as embracing of an eccentric positionality that enables (but not automatically produces) identities which are at once more complex and flexible, but no less integrated than the personal identities behind the functional roles of modernity he so ardently defended.

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Verbeek, Peter-Paul [email protected] De-limitating humanity: On cyborgs, posthumans, and Plessner’s concept of “boundary realization” In Plessner’s anthropology, the concept of “boundary” plays a central role. All entities, ranging from inanimate objects and plants to animals and human beings, can be characterized in terms of the ways in which the boundary between their environment and themselves is realized. While inanimate objects are delimited externally, human beings realize their boundary themselves. Rather than being ‘res cogitans’ in a vessel of ‘res extensa’, human beings constitute what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in their interactions with their environment. The current physical hybridization of humanity and technology – as a result of technologies like neuro-implants, genomics, and tissue engineering – challenge Plessner’s theory of boundary realization. Current technological developments urge us to add a fifth, posthuman, entity to the fourfold of objects, plants, animals, and humans, and to rethink how this new entity realizes its boundaries. The paper will explore the idea that ‘cyborgs’ or ‘posthumans’ realize their boundary by actively blurring it, moving betond the limits of humanity and taking the ‘outside’ world of technological artifacts into their ‘inside’. In doing so, they radicalize Plessner’s postulates of natural artificiality, mediated immediacy, and the utopian standpoint.

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Zijderveld, Anton C. Philosophical sociology – an oxymoron? The idea of a philosophical anthropology is generally accepted in Europe, however the idea of a philosophical sociology has generally been rejected on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The German sociologist René König, for instance, heavily influenced by Anglo-saxon analytic sociology declared in the 1950’s the notion of a philosophical sociology as nonensical. The University of Leiden knew in the same period a professorial chair in philosophical sociology which was held during the 1960’s by the at that time prestigious philosopher R. F. Beerling. In Germany the idea of a philosophical sociology was brought up long before that time by Georg Simmel. It was often also formulated in terms of Allgemeine Gesellschaftslehre, i.e. ‘General Theory of Society’which, of course, did not help to clarify the scientific status of this brand of sociological theory.

To many sociologists philosophical sociology is an oxymoron, a terminological contradiction, since as a philosophical enterprise it escapes the methodological tests of empirical verification or falsification. Yet, if one broadens one’s methodological scope, this conclusion is rather questionable. In sociological research one focuses on human behavior in organizational (institutional) settings which are not just functional systems but for the actors under investigation also meaningful configuration. These systems combine in an intricate manner forces of freedom and control, and they do so within a historical context. One cannot disregard such issues as meaning, freedom, control, history because they don’t fit one’s scientific methodology. Moreover, sociologists do research within society, within organizational (institutional) set-ups which too define meaning, control, freedom, history. In phenomenology (Husserl) society is more than a system of organizations (institutions). It is a pre-reflexive (and thus pre-scientific, pre-sociological) Lebenswelt, a life-world, which Alfred Schutz called a ‘world-taken-for-granted’. Sociologists should be aware of this fundamental, philosophical fact, before they engage in empirical research and employ concepts like organization, institution, social role, social fact, etc.

In this lecture the idea of a philosophical sociology will be illustrated by means of a concrete phenomenon: the sociological nature and functions of strangers.

the analytical potential of philosophical anthropology towards technological innovations in

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