Helmuth Plessner (4 September 1892, Wiesbaden – 12 June 1985, Göttingen) was a German philosopher and sociologist, and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology".

Life and career

Plessner had an itinerant education in Germany between 1910 and 1920. He began studying medicine in Friedburg before moving on to zoology and philosophy in Heidelberg. In Göttingen, he studied phenomenology with Husserl, and finally wrote his "Habititationsschrift" under the guidance of Max Scheler.^[1] Plessner then held a professorship in Cologne from 1926 to 1933, when he was forced to resign his position because of Jewish ancestry on his father's side. Living in isolation, Plessner initially fled Germany to Istanbul. He returned to Europe at the invitation of Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk in the Netherlands. But when Germany invaded, he returned to living underground until 1946, when he was offered the chair in philosophy at the University of Groningen. In 1951, after seventeen years of exile from Germany, Plessner returned as the chair of Sociology in Göttingen. He was chairman from 1953 to 1959 of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie.

In 1959 he became foreign member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.^[2]

Philosophy

His masterwork of Philosophical Anthropology is "Levels of Organic Life and the Human", which argues that the humans are 'naturally artificial beings' within living nature and attempts revocation of mind-body dualism. Plessner's biological framework conceptualizes human living in relation to plant and animal living, however much the human being becomes a cultural animal whose form of life can no longer by gauged strictly by, say, zoology or evolutionary psychology.

Plessner's material(ist) a priori

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

Three categories of nature's a priori and the "eccentricity" of human intentionality

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

Wiesbadener Helmuth Plessner Preis

The city of Wiesbaden has created an award in honor of Helmuth Plessner in 2014. It serves to promote and appreciate excellent scientists and intellectuals who have worked and work in reference to Plessner. It is awarded every three years and is donated with 20,000 euros. The first prizewinner is Michael Tomasello.