Helmuth Plessner

Helmuth Plessner: The Philosopher of the Border Between Body and Self

In 1928 a Cologne philosopher published a book arguing that the human being is a "naturally artificial" creature — an animal so constituted that it must invent itself in order to exist at all. Five years later the same man lost his chair because of his father's Jewish ancestry, fled to Istanbul and then the Netherlands, and spent the occupation living underground while writing for the clandestine press. Helmuth Plessner had theorised the human condition as a matter of standing outside one's own position. Then history made him do it.

Medicine, Zoology, Phenomenology

He was born on 4 September 1892 in Wiesbaden, to a family with Jewish ancestry on his father's side. His education was unusually broad and deliberately empirical: medicine at Freiburg, then zoology and philosophy at Heidelberg, then phenomenology with Edmund Husserl at Göttingen. He took his doctorate at Erlangen in 1916 under Paul Hensel and wrote his habilitation at Cologne under the supervision of Max Scheler.

That training matters to everything he later argued. Plessner came to philosophical anthropology through biology rather than around it, and his central works read as attempts to derive a theory of the human from the structure of living things generally rather than from consciousness alone.

The Levels of the Organic

He held a professorship at Cologne from 1926 to 1933. In 1924 he published *Die Grenzen der Gemeinschaft*, a critique of social radicalism and of the German cult of community. Then, in 1928, came *Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch* — the Levels of the Organic and Man — his masterwork and the founding document of European philosophical anthropology.

Its organising concept is *eccentric positionality*. Plants and animals occupy a position in the world; an animal is centred in its own body and lives outward from that centre. The human being does this too, but also stands outside that centre — occupying a position and simultaneously observing itself occupying it. From this Plessner derived his definition of humans as naturally artificial beings: creatures for whom nature has provided no fixed way of being, and who therefore have to produce culture, institutions and self-interpretations as a biological necessity rather than a luxury. The move let him reject Cartesian mind-body dualism without collapsing into either idealism or mere biology. Britannica describes the resulting framework as balancing "an 'inner' and an 'outer' self," and credits him with establishing European philosophical anthropology as a field.

1933

The Nazi seizure of power ended his Cologne career; he was forced out on grounds of Jewish descent. He went first to Istanbul, and in November 1933 accepted an invitation from the physiologist F.J.J. Buytendijk to come to the University of Groningen under a special arrangement for displaced academics. He stayed seventeen years. In 1939 he founded Groningen's Sociological Institute and eventually held a chair in the Faculty of Law, receiving the philosophy chair in 1946.

The occupation drove him underground, where he remained until 1946. He wrote for the clandestine papers *De Vrije Katheder* and *Het Parool*, and in 1941 published *Lachen und Weinen*, his study of laughing and crying as the two expressive forms in which the human being's control over its own body breaks down — the eccentric position collapsing back into the body it usually observes.

He also produced the political book he is best known for in Germany. First published in 1935 and reissued in 1959 as *Die verspätete Nation* — the Belated Nation — it examined how the absence of a settled democratic tradition in Germany had prepared the ground for what followed. His conviction, in the Groningen library's summary, was that "when people are forced to live with an extremist ideology, they are limited in their opportunities to develop freely and to come into contact which each other." In a 1947 essay, "Duitslands toekomst," he proposed dissolving a supervised Germany into a unified Europe, and was accused of anti-German sentiment for it.

Return

He went back to Germany in 1951 as chair of Sociology at Göttingen, and chaired the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie from 1953 to 1959 — a significant post in a discipline rebuilding itself after twelve years of ruin. He died at Göttingen on 12 June 1985, aged 92.

Why Helmuth Is Called a Genius

The claim rests on a single conceptual move of unusual reach. Eccentric positionality is one of those ideas that reorganises a problem rather than solving it: by locating the distinctively human in a structural relation — being both a body and outside that body's centre — Plessner dissolved the mind-body dilemma without needing either substance dualism or reductionism, and he did it in terms continuous with zoology. That is why he is credited with establishing European philosophical anthropology as a field rather than merely contributing to it. Almost nothing else in twentieth-century philosophy attempts to run a theory of culture, of politics, of laughter, and of the organism itself off one structural premise. *Lachen und Weinen* is the demonstration: an entire phenomenology of two bodily reflexes derived from the same principle that generates his account of institutions.

The counter-case is that he is far less read than his originality warrants, and the reasons are not purely accidental. Scheler and later Arnold Gehlen occupy more space in the anthropological canon, and Plessner's exile removed him from German intellectual life during exactly the years when reputations in that tradition were made. His prose is difficult even by the standards of German philosophy, and his key texts waited decades for English translation. There is also a fair objection that eccentric positionality, however elegant, is more a redescription of the human situation than a testable thesis — it illuminates without predicting. Britannica's own entry on him is thin, and does not even name the concept. The honest verdict: a genuinely first-rank structural thinker whose central idea has outlasted his fame, and who is now more often rediscovered than read continuously.

Legacy

Plessner gave his archive to the University Library of Groningen, where it remains a working research collection — the city that took him in when Germany expelled him keeps the papers. In 2014 Wiesbaden, his birthplace, established the Helmuth Plessner Award, worth €20,000 and given every three years. The award is a modest but pointed act of restitution by a city whose country had once made him stateless. What survives most usefully is the argument of *Die verspätete Nation*: that a nation lacking a practised democratic tradition is structurally vulnerable to extremism, and that ideological coercion damages people by cutting them off from free development and from each other. He reached that conclusion from a philosophy of the organism, and then lived seventeen years of exile confirming it.

Achievements

• Notable work: Wie muß der deutsche Nation-Begriff heute aussehen?
• Held posts at University of Cologne, University of Groningen and University of Göttingen
• Fields: philosophy