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Critical anthropology? On the relation between philosophical anthropology and critical theory
(2022)
This article compares Max Horkheimer's and Theodor W. Adorno's foundation of the Frankfurt Critical Theory with Helmuth Plessner's foundation of Philosophical Anthropology.
While Horkheimer's and Plessner's paradigms are mutually incompatible, Adorno's << negative dialectics >> and Plessner's << negative anthropology >> (G. Gamm) can be seen as complementing one another.
Jurgen Habermas at one point sketched a complementary relationship between his own publicly communicative theory of modern society and Plessner's philosophy of nature and human expressivity, and though he then came to doubt this, he later reaffirmed it. Faced with the << life power >> in << high capitalism >> (Plessner), the ambitions for a public democracy in a pluralistic society have to be broadened from an argumentative focus (Habermas) to include the human condition and the expressive modes of our experience as essentially embodied persons. The article discusses some possible aspects of this complementarity under the title of a << critical anthropology >> (H. Schnädelbach).
According to Plessner, both adaptation and selection can be conceived not just as requested by the environment but also as actively proceeding from the organism. In this respect, Plessner finds in Uexküll’s new biology a powerful counterweight to the constraints of Darwinism. However, despite all the points in common in their respective understanding of the problem, Plessner reproaches to Uexküll to have entirely missed the intermediate layer of the lived body [Leib] between the organism and its environment. Unlike Uexküll, concerning the more developed animals, Plessner took up elements of animal psychology from Wolfgang Köhler and Frederik Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk. Finally, Plessner finds insufficiencies also in Uexküll’s distinction between the notion of world and the notion of environment, which would lead to the parallel positing of different environments. In reaction to Uexküll’s leveling of all environments, Plessner drafted a philosophical-anthropological spectrum between the intelligent way of living observed in the great apes, whose intelligence had been demonstrated, and the co-wordly life of the symbolic mind as seen in the personal sphere of human life.
J. Dewey and H. Plessner both and independently of one another treated the central question of what new task philosophy must set itself if the assumption is correct that the life-form of mind, i.e., the mental life-form of humans, arose in nature and must also sustain itself in the future within nature. If nature has to reconceived so as to make the irreducible qualities of life and mind truly possible, then it can no longer be restricted to the role of physical material. Conversely humans cannot no longer take on the role of God outside and independent of nature. Instead these philosophers distinguish between three plateaus (Dewey) or stages (Plessner), between physical (inorganic) nature, psycho-physical (living) nature and the nature that is mental life. This distinction is drawn such that a connection between the plateaus is truly possible. The third level, that of the mental form of life, answers mentally within conduct to the break with the first two levels. Hence it depends in the future as well on the continuously renewed difference (between the precarious and the stable for Dewey, between immediacy and mediation for Plessner) in our experience of nature. Within this difference nature as a whole remains an open unknown, which is why we can credit Dewey with a philosophy of diversified and negative holism, Plessner with a differential philosophy of the negativity of the absolute.
Though Peter Gordon mentioned philosophical anthropology in his book Continental Divide, he has not yet realized how it works independently from Cassirer's and Heidegger's prejudices. The whole argument between them before, in and after Davos (1929) raged around the status of philosophical anthropology: How do the spiritualisation of life and the enlivening of the spirit come about? This was not just the central question for philosophical anthropology founded by Max Scheler, but also in Wilhelm Dilthey's life philosophy, which was systematized by Georg Misch. Cassirer and Heidegger shared three shortcomings with respect to the Life-philosophical Anthropology. Neither had a philosophy of nature or a philosophy of sociaty or a philosophy of history. The insight into the unfathomability of humans (Misch) is given a political edge in Helmuth Plessner's book Power and Human Nature (1931). Elevating it to the principle of democratic equality with respect to the worth of all cultures one opens up the potential for a form of civil competition that might supersede ethnocentric wars.