- Helmuth Plessner
Helmuth Plessner (
September 4 ,1892 ,Wiesbaden -June 12 ,1985 ,Göttingen ) was a Germanphilosopher andsociologist , and a primary advocate of "philosophical anthropology " .He was Chairman from 1953-1959 of the "
Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie ".Philosophy
Plessner developed a philosophical biology and anthroplogy which amounted to a hermeneutics of nature. Life expresses itself and in terms of sentient lifeforms, does so through the senses, providing the (material) a priori constituents of perception (to replace Kant's congitive idealism of a priori categories and intuitions produced by transcendental subjectivity as the filter through which we spontaneously order experience of the world). 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 of sensing 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, thus representing what we know as consciousness in its dialectical dance through our own expressiveness. 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.
Literary works
* "Die wissenschaftliche Idee, ein Entwurf über ihre Form" (1913)
* "Krisis der transzendentalen Wahrheit im Anfängen" (1918)
* "Die Einheit der Sinne. Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des Geistes" (1923)
* "Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus" (1924)
* "Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie" (1928)
* "Macht und menschliche Natur. Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht" (1931)
* "Zur Anthropologie des Schauspielers" (1948)
* "Lachen und Weinen. Eine Untersuchung der Grenzen menschlichen Verhaltens" (1941)
* "Das Lächeln" (1950)
* "Die verspätete Nation. Über die politische Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes" (1959, ursprünglich 1935)
* "Die Frage nach der Conditio humana" (1961)
* "Die Emanzipation der Macht" (1962)
* "Anthropologie der Sinne" (1970)References
* Kai Haucke: "Plessner zur Einführung", Hamburg: Junius, 2000, ISBN 3-88506-326-3
* Kockelkoren, Petran. 'The Mouse in the Cat's Claws', in W. Zweers & J.J. Boersema (eds.), Ecology, Technology and Culture; Cambridge: White Horse, 1994.
External links
*
* http://www.bautz.de/bbkl/p/plessner_h.shtml
* [http://www.helmuth-plessner.de/ www.helmuth-plessner.de]
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