Phillip Honenberger (Eds.) - Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology - Nature, Life, and The Human Between Transcendental and Empirical Perspectives (2015, Palgrave Macmillan UK) PDF

Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology
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Naturalism and
Philosophical
Anthropology
Nature, Life, and the Human between
Transcendental and Empirical Perspectives
Edited by Phillip Honenberger

Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine, US
Selection, introduction and editorial matter © Phillip Honenberger 2015
Remaining chapters © Contributors 2015
Softcover reprint of hardcover 1st edition 2015 978-1-137-50087-8
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First published 2015 by
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Notes on Contributors viii
Introduction 1
Phillip Honenberger
1 In Pursuit of Something ‘Essential’ about Man: Heidegger and

Philosophical Anthropology 27
Beth Cykowski
2 Gehlen, Nietzsche, and the Project of a Philosophical

Anthropology 49
Richard Schacht
3 Hans Blumenberg: Philosophical Anthropology and the

Ethics of Consolation 66
Vida Pavesich
4 Naturalism, Pluralism, and the Human Place in the Worlds 94

Phillip Honenberger
5 Plessner’s Conceptual Investigations of ‘Life’:

Structural Narratology 121
Scott Davis
6 Gehlen’s Philosophical Anthropology: Contemporary

Applications in Addiction Research 147
Sally Wasmuth
7 The Hybrid Hominin: A Renewed Point of Departure for

Lenny Moss
8 Intentionality and Mentality as Explanans and as Explanandum:

Michael Tomasello’s Research Program from the Perspective of
Hans-Peter Krüger
9 Biology and Culture 219

Joseph Margolis
v
vi Contents
10 The Mortal Self: Toward a Transcendental-Pragmatic

Anthropology 229
Sami Pihlström
Index 253
Acknowledgments
The editor would like to thank three professional organizations for

hosting sessions at which some chapters contained in this volume
were first presented: the International Society for History, Philosophy,
and Social Studies of Biology (ISHPSSB), under the titles ‘Philosophical
Anthropology I’ and ‘Philosophical Anthropology II’, in Montpellier,
France, 2013; and the Society for Humanist Philosophers at the annual
meeting of the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division,
in Baltimore, MD, 2013, under the session entitled ‘Naturalism and
Philosophical Anthropology’. The APA session was chaired and facili-
tated by John Shook (thank you John!).
The Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine has
provided the editor with library support, relief from teaching duties,
and a stimulating research environment since 2014, thereby facilitating
completion of this project. For the cover image, the editor is indebted to
Frances Osugi, who first noticed the relevance of Waterhouse Hawkins’
famous image to the book’s themes, and then, upon request, pains-
takingly produced a satisfactory transformation of this image. Finally,
thanks are due to Palgrave Macmillan and especially Esme Chapman for
seamless support and guidance throughout the publication process.
vii
Notes on Contributors
Beth Cykowski is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. Her

dissertation examines Heidegger’s engagement with the life sciences and
philosophical anthropology, and her wider research interests include the
post-Kantian ‘continental’ tradition in philosophy as well as the concep-
tual history of biology and anthropology.
Scott Davis holds an MA in Regional Studies: East Asia and a PhD in Social
Anthropology, both from Harvard University. He lives in Jinan, China,
where he teaches in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at
Shandong University. His research mostly involves Bronze Age Chinese
thought and culture; he is working on demonstrating the structural rela-
tions in textual composition coordinating three of the most sacred books
of the classical Chinese tradition: the Yi jing, the Confucian Analects and
the Zuo zhuan of the Springs and Autumns historical writings. He is the
author of The Classic of Changes in Cultural Context: A Textual Archaeology
of the Yi jing (2012). Twenty-two years ago, he produced an unofficial,
functional translation into English of Helmuth Plessner’s Die Stufen des
Organischen und der Mensch and has been happy to share a copy of this
unofficial translation with interested researchers worldwide.
Phillip Honenberger is Program Coordinator and a Fellow-In-Residence

at the Consortium for History of Science, Technology and Medicine in
Philadelphia, PA. He completed a doctorate in Philosophy at Temple
University in 2013, writing on the philosophical anthropologies of
Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, and G. H. Mead. He holds a BA in Philosophy
and Music from the College of William and Mary, 2003. In addition to
philosophical anthropology, his research interests include the history
and philosophy of science (especially biology and the human sciences).
His work has appeared in Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological
and Biomedical Science, Metaphilosophy, Journal of the Philosophy of History,
and International Philosophical Quarterly.
Hans-Peter Krüger is the Chair for Political Philosophy and

Philosophical Anthropology in the Department of Philosophy at the
University of Potsdam, Germany, and co-editor of the Deutsche Zeitschrift
für Philosophie. His research areas are philosophical anthropologies,
classical pragmatisms and neo-pragmatisms, and political and social
viii
Notes on Contributors ix
philosophies of public communication. He has held fellowships at the

University of California at Berkeley (1989), the Wissenschaftskolleg zu
Berlin (1990–1991), and the University of Pittsburgh, PA (1992–1993),
and has been a guest professor at the Jagiellonen University Kraków,
Poland (2002–2003), University of Vienna, Austria (2003), and Ernst
Cassirer Professor at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Studies in
Uppsala, Sweden (2005–2006). His recent monographs include (all in
German): Philosophical Anthropology as Life Politics. German-Jewish and
Pragmatist Critiques of Modernity (2009), Brain, Behaviour, and Time. The
Research Framework of Philosophical Anthropology (2010), and Heroism and
Labour in the Origin of Hegel’s Philosophy (2014).
Joseph Margolis is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple

University. His recent publications include four volumes on American
philosophy at the end of the twentieth century: Reinventing Pragmatism
(2002), The Unraveling of Scientism (2003), Pragmatism’s Advantage (2010),
and Pragmatism Ascendent (2012). He is also author of The Cultural Space
of the Arts and the Infelicities of Reductionism (2010) and The Arts and the
Definition of the Human: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology (2009).
Lenny Moss holds a doctorate in both Comparative Biochemistry and

Philosophy. He is a former molecular cell biologist and has since been a
professor of philosophy at Notre Dame and currently at the University
of Exeter. He is the author of What Genes Can’t Do (2003) and numerous
articles in leading journals of social philosophy, philosophy of science,
and biology and biomedicine. His work focuses on questions of nature
and normativity and draws especially upon traditions of philosophical
anthropology, Frankfurt School critical theory and the human and
natural sciences. He’s been an invited guest lecturer at numerous univer-
sities through Europe, North America and Australia.
Vida Pavesich holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of

California San Diego, 2003. She lives in Oakland, CA, where she is a
lecturer at the California State University East Bay and Diablo Valley
College. Her research concentrates on philosophical anthropology, in
particular the work of Hans Blumenberg. Her articles have appeared
in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Thesis 11, Philosophy and Social
Criticism and others. She aims to bring philosophical anthropology into
dialogue with contemporary philosophical discussions occurring in crit-
ical theory, poststructuralism, and the ethics of vulnerability. Recently,
she has developed an interest in the use of evolutionary biology and
anthropology, as well as cognitive science in articulating a nuanced
philosophical anthropology.
x Notes on Contributors
Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University

of Helsinki, Finland, where he also previously (2009–2015) worked as
the Director of the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies. In addi-
tion, he leads the team focusing on contemporary philosophy of reli-
gion within the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence, ‘Reason and
Religious Recognition’ (2014–2019). He has written widely on pragma-
tism, philosophical anthropology, transcendental philosophy, ethics,
and philosophy of religion. His recent books include Pragmatic Pluralism
and the Problem of God (2013), Taking Evil Seriously (Palgrave Macmillan,
2014), and the Bloomsbury Companion to Pragmatism (2015).
Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of

Liberal Arts and Sciences (Emeritus) at the University of Illinois. He has
written extensively on Nietzsche and other figures and developments in
the post-Kantian interpretive tradition. His interests revolve around the
general topic of human reality and issues in social, normative and value
theory. His books include Nietzsche (1983, in Routledge’s ‘Arguments of
the Philosophers’ series), Making Sense of Nietzsche (1995), Hegel and After
(1975), Alienation (1970), The Future of Alienation (1994), and Finding an
Ending: Reflections on Wagner’s Ring (2004, with Philip Kitcher). He is the
editor of Nietzsche: Selections (1993), Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality (1994),
Nietzsche’s Postmoralism (2001), and a forthcoming Norton anthology,
After Kant: The Interpretive Tradition (2015).
Sally Wasmuth is an associated health research fellow at Richard

L. Roudebush VA Medical Center, Indianapolis, and Assistant Professor
in the School of Occupational Therapy at University of Indianapolis.
Wasmuth received her PhD in Philosophy with a focus on philosophy
of biology, neuroscience, and addiction from the University of Exeter,
UK, and her Master’s in Occupational Therapy from Indiana University,
Indianapolis. She is involved in a number of VA-funded studies exam-
ining translation and implementation of mental health and addiction
research into practice and innovative occupation-based interventions
for addiction. Wasmuth’s most recent work in the area of addiction-as-
occupation has been published in the British and Canadian Journals of
Occupational Therapy as well as the Journal of Occupational Science and the
American Journal of Psychiatric Rehabilitation.
Introduction
Phillip Honenberger
The main goals of this volume are, first, to extend and deepen the
contemporary Anglophone discussion of philosophical anthropology;
and, second, to do so as a contribution to contemporary discussions of
naturalism, broadly construed. The main purpose of this Introduction is
to elucidate and motivate these goals, as well as to provide an overview
of the chapters that follow. I fulfill that purpose in three stages: first, a
brief clarification of the meaning of the volume’s title and the motives
for its selection; second, a cursory historical and thematic introduction
to the volume’s main theme, philosophical anthropology; and, third, an
overview of individual chapters.
Naturalism and philosophical anthropology: nature,

life, and the human between transcendental and
empirical perspectives
What are human beings? What are their fundamental limits and capaci-
ties? What conceptual frameworks or research programs would be best
for understanding and explaining them? Though these questions are in
some sense perennial, they have taken on radical new shades of meaning
in modernity. Nowhere have they been more subtly and insightfully
addressed than in the tradition known as ‘philosophical anthropology’,
associated with the work of Max Scheler (1874–1928), Helmuth Plessner
(1892–1985), and Arnold Gehlen (1904–1976), among others. In the past
30 (if not 100) years, European discussions in and about philosophical
anthropology have steadily increased in frequency and sophistication.
Until recently, these discussions were almost entirely inaccessible to
Anglophone readers. The publication of this volume, as well as several
1
2 Phillip Honenberger
recent others (Iris, 2009; Giri and Clammer, 2013; De Mul, 2014), herald
a welcome reversal of this trend.
The expression ‘philosophical anthropology’ designates not only a
tradition of research and reflection, however, but also a field of inquiry,
definable (albeit controversially) as that which includes all philosoph-
ical inquiries into ‘the human’. A distinction between the tradition and
the field of philosophical anthropology is often made, though vari-
ously articulated (compare, for instance, Fischer, 2009b, pp. 153–154;
Pihlström, 2003, p. 260; Krüger, 1999, p. 24). While most essays in
this volume are concerned with the tradition in some way, a few are
presented only as contributions to the field. However, the tradition and
field are not entirely distinct, insofar as each displays some historical
and thematic overlap with the other. I further clarify the meaning of
‘philosophical anthropology’ in both senses below.
The other main conjunct of this collection’s title – ‘naturalism’ –
is likely to be more widely recognized among Anglophone readers.
Anglophone philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century,
for instance, was nothing short of obsessed with ‘naturalism’, seeking to
clarify its status and implications with seemingly tireless enthusiasm.1
And while non-philosophical disciplines may be less inclined to thema-
tize naturalism directly, similar issues are central to debates throughout
the academy. Some of the main questions that have motivated debates
about naturalism could be expressed as follows: What is the scope, and
what are the limits, of the epistemic authority of the natural sciences,
particularly in comparison with the social sciences, humanities, and
religion? What is the ontological status of ‘the natural’ (and, relatedly,
the ‘physical’, ‘material’, ‘biological’, ‘organic’, and so on)? What are
we to make (epistemologically, metaphysically, or empirically) of those
entities that do not appear to be natural, or do not have a clearly articu-
lable place within natural scientific discourses, such as normativity and
first-personal experience? What are the implications of new or changed
conceptions of nature, for other aspects of human life and experience?
The essays in this volume seek to address issues pertaining to these and
related controversies through engagement with philosophical anthro-
pology as a tradition or as a field.
1
For recent discussions, see De Caro and MacArthur, 2004, 2009. To some
extent, discussions similarly motivated to those surrounding naturalism are
currently taking place under the headings of ‘materialism’ and ‘new materialism’.
See, for instance, Bennett, 2010.
Introduction 3
The first part of the volume’s subtitle – ‘nature, life, and the human’ –
identifies three key subsidiary themes of the essays that follow. By any
measure, the concepts of ‘nature’, (organic) ‘life’, and ‘the human’, are
crucial philosophical and scientific reference points, whose meanings
and interrelationships are something close to dialectically unavoidable,
given their obviously wide-ranging significance. The precise articula-
tion of any of these concepts is extraordinarily laden with controversy.
A characteristic feature of philosophical anthropology, both as tradi-
tion and as field, has been its effort to achieve a satisfactory articu-
lation of and orientation to these concepts, both singly and in their
relation to one another. Relevantly to this project of clarification and
interpretation, the three main founders of the tradition of philosophical
anthropology – Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen (discussed further in the
following section below) – were sympathetic inheritors of two intellec-
tual streams that have rarely come together: (1) the broadly naturalist,
bio-philosophical, and evolutionary-biological and ecological traditions
that flourished in fin de siècle thought, including, for instance, Charles
Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Henri Bergson, and Jakob von Uexküll; and
(2) the German idealist, hermeneutic, and phenomenological traditions,
including G.W.F. Hegel, Wilhelm Dilthey, Edmund Husserl, and many
others. This unusual dual heritage alone suggests that philosophical
anthropology may lend a special subtlety and innovation to contem-
porary discussions of nature and naturalism, materialism, organic life,
biology, and the human.
The second half of the subtitle – ‘between empirical and transcen-
dental perspectives’ – signifies the special methodological diversity and
range of the approaches taken by the volume’s contributors. Both the
tradition and field of Philosophical Anthropology are especially marked
by concerns with, and controversies over, method – in particular, the
validity and implications of the methods by which human beings are
conceived and studied. The selection of ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’
as boundary points of the range of methodological options exhibited is,
to some extent, arbitrary, insofar as structural, pragmatic, existential–
phenomenological, and other methodological options are also presented
and discussed in the essays that follow. But given the great significance
of the empirical–transcendental distinctions in post-Kantian philosophy,
and its marked legacy in ongoing debates in and around philosophical
anthropology, including in the essays that follow, this couple seemed an
especially appropriate choice of metaphorical ‘bookends’ for the meth-
odological range in question.
Philosophical anthropology as tradition
History of the tradition

The tradition of philosophical anthropology is generally taken to have
begun with Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner in the 1920s. The ques-
tion of the extent to which Scheler or Plessner deserves primary credit for
this initiation is a matter of controversy (see Fischer, 2009a, for discus-
sion). As early as 1924, Scheler had announced an intended work on
Philosophische Anthropologie.2 This work was never completed, but by the
time of Scheler’s death in 1928, he had produced a number of drafts and
notes for the project, as well as given a talk in Darmstadt in 1927 that he
described as a ‘summary’ [Zusammenfassung] of the intended work. The
1927 summary was soon published as ‘Die Sonderstellung des Menschen’
in Der Leuchter, Vol. VIII (1927), and then as a standalone book: the well-
known Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos [The Place of Human Beings
in the Cosmos] (1928a). Scheler’s statement at the opening of that text
that ‘[e]ver since the awakening of my philosophical thinking, the ques-
tion “what is the human being and what is his place in being?” has
occupied me more fundamentally than any other question I have dealt
with’, gives evidence of the seriousness and centrality of this project for
Scheler’s late-career self-understanding (Scheler, 2009 [1928], p. 3).
Plessner’s claim to have co-founded philosophical anthropology rests
largely on his Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in
der philosophische Anthropologie [The Stages of the Organic and Man:
Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology] (1928), published near-
contemporaneously with Scheler’s sketch. Because Plessner’s views on
the subject were arguably more fully worked out than Scheler’s – as indi-
cated by the impressively systematic structure and content of Die Stufen –
one might say that, if Scheler was the first to conceive of philosophical
anthropology as a project, Plessner was the first to carry a project of that
form to something like a complete expression.3
Due to Scheler’s wide-ranging influence, the concept and name of ‘phil-
osophical anthropology’ were certainly ‘in the air’ in German-language
2
Fischer (2009a, p. 665).
3
Based on common thematic or methodological characteristics, a number of
earlier figures are sometimes retroactively included in the tradition – notably
J.G. Herder, Immanuel Kant (especially in the pre-critical period, as detailed by
Zammito, 2002), Wilhelm Dilthey, and Friedrich Nietzsche. An effort to iden-
tify the tradition on the basis of thematic or methodological characteristics is
conducted in the following section.
Introduction 5
philosophy by 1929, if not sooner. By that time, for instance, Heidegger

could, in his Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (Kant and the Problem
of Metaphysics), distinguish his reading of Kant’s central philosophical
insight – on Heidegger’s account, the ‘analytic of finitude’ – from all
‘philosophical-anthropological’ readings of Kant’s work.4 But Heidegger’s
rejection of philosophical anthropology, while influential, was hardly
universal. Plessner continued to write about philosophical anthropology
throughout the 1930s to the 1950s, contributing important reflections on
the defining problems, concerns, and methods of philosophical anthro-
pology as a new intellectual project, distinguished from earlier and other
contemporary intellectual projects (for instance, Plessner, 1937, 1941,
1956). And Ernst Cassirer, writing from Yale University in the 1940s,
could consider subtitling his forthcoming English-language monograph
An Essay on Man (1944), ‘Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology’ –
a subtitle that, by the time of the book’s publication, he had changed to
‘An Introduction to the Philosophy of Culture’.5
The next major contribution to the developing tradition of philo-
sophical anthropology saw publication in 1940: the first edition of
Arnold Gehlen’s Der Mensch: Sein Natur und Seine Stellung in der Welt
[Man: His Nature and Place in the World]. This text went through 10
editions, including major revisions, between 1940 and 1974. Gehlen’s
apparent inclusion in a tradition of philosophical anthropology, along
with Scheler and Plessner before him, may be partly a product of
Gehlen’s own influential articulation of the continuity and defining
themes and positions of the tradition.6 In a manner comparable to John
Dewey’s construction of a ‘pragmatist tradition’ of philosophy through
a construal of the innovations of Charles Peirce and William James as
precursors of his own, Gehlen contributed greatly to the perception
4
Heidegger, 1990 [1929], §§36–37. By contrast, a few years earlier in Sein und
Zeit [Being and Time] (1965 [1927]), Heidegger had discussed Scheler’s views,
particularly of ‘the person’ (as presented in Scheler, 1973 [1913, 1916]), but
without any explicit mention of philosophical anthropology.
5
Cassirer (2005). The partially drafted but never completed fourth volume
of Ernst Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen [Philosophy of Symbolic
Forms] included detailed discussion, from as early as 1928, of Scheler’s and
Plessner’s philosophical anthropologies (Cassirer, 1996). Of Die Stufen, Cassirer
wrote in 1928 that ‘Plessner’s ... results are very close to my own, even though
they were reached by an altogether different route’ (1996, p. 62).
6
Some contemporary discussants have questioned whether Gehlen belongs
to a common tradition with Scheler and Plessner. See for instance Krüger (2010),
contra Fischer (2009a, 2009b).
that philosophical anthropology was a delimitable and distinct tradi-

tion and, at the same time, secured his inclusion as a ‘founding figure’
within a lineage that prominently included the earlier founders. To be
sure, Gehlen’s ability to accomplish this feat rested in large part on the
scope and brilliance of Der Mensch.
Anxieties surrounding Gehlen’s place in the tradition of philosophical
anthropology are not limited to questions of historical fidelity. By the time
of Der Mensch’s publication in 1940, Plessner – whose ancestry included
some Jewish background and whose politics tended towards a democratic
liberalism inconsistent with the ascendant Nazi platform in Germany –
had left Germany for the Netherlands. Scheler, born of a Jewish mother,
had long since passed away. But Gehlen had been living and teaching in
Germany as a professor of philosophy since 1933.7 Furthermore, he had
explicitly articulated his support and fidelity to the Nazi regime. Scholars
have attempted to trace evidence of Nazi themes – especially racialism, biol-
ogism, and authoritarian politics – in at least the first editions of Gehlen’s
Der Mensch, and sought clarity on whether later editions were changed
in such a way as to eliminate these elements – or, perhaps, were not so
changed. While the issue remains controversial, there seems to be some
consensus that while Gehlen’s anthropological views do quite plausibly
support a conservative or even authoritarian politics, and while Gehlen
himself was undoubtedly more a conservative than a radical (consider, for
instance, his vocal opposition to the student movements of the 1960s),
evidence of racism, and especially anti-semitism, is very hard to find in
any edition of Gehlen’s main text. (See Rehberg [1988] for a review of these
inquiries and Honneth and Joas [1988 (1980)] for discussion.)
From 1940 to Gehlen’s death in 1976 and Plessner’s death in 1985, the
two figures published numerous commentaries and systematic works,
intended both to clarify the overall project and identity-conditions
of philosophical anthropology – the project that had self-consciously
begun with Scheler and Plessner in the 1920s – and to develop and
extend their own substantive philosophical anthropologies, as well
as related treatments of matters sociological, political, aesthetic, and
otherwise.8 Other self-described contributors to philosophical anthro-
pology during this period (or, at least, figures who sympathetically
7
Gehlen’s first full professorial appointment was at Frankfurt (1933–1934), as
replacement for Paul Tillich, who had been forced into exile. See Rehberg (1988,
pp. xxviii–xxxii).
8
See Gehlen (1978–1985) and Plessner (1980–1985). For the remainder of this
section, only a small selection of the relevant literature is cited in detail.
Introduction 7
discussed philosophical anthropology and/or made positive use of the

views of Scheler, Gehlen, or Plessner) include Erich Rothacker, Odo
Marquard, Michael Landmann, and Hans Blumenberg. More recently,
Peter Sloterdijk, Hans-Peter Krüger, Jos de Mul, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg,
Heike Delitz, Lenny Moss, and many others have made what could be
described as contributions to the tradition.9
Philosophical anthropology began in Germany, and it continues to
be more recognized and discussed in German-language contexts than
anywhere else in the world. The tradition has become increasingly
important worldwide, however. For the sake of this book’s Anglophone
readership, a brief review of the English-language secondary litera-
ture may be helpful. Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influen-
tial text on social psychology, The Social Construction of Reality (1966),
made extensive use of Scheler’s, Plessner’s, and Gehlen’s ideas, arguing
that these provided a naturalistic basis for a relativistic social science.
Marjorie Grene (1968, 1974) introduced the ideas of Helmuth Plessner
and related figures (though not Scheler and Gehlen) to Anglophone
audiences, as did Fred Dallmayr (1974) for Plessner’s and Gehlen’s
political philosophies, and Richard Schacht (1976) for the place of the
philosophical-anthropological tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century European philosophy. In recent years, several English-language
publications have discussed aspects of the tradition in even more
sophisticated ways. Among these was the translation of Axel Honneth
and Hans Joas’s Soziales Handeln und menschliche Natur (1980) [Social
Action and Human Nature (1988)]. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg’s introduc-
tion to the 1988 English-language translation of Gehlen’s Der Mensch,
10th ed. (Rehberg, 1988; Gehlen, 1988 [1975]), provided an incompa-
rably thorough English-language discussion of that work. Scheler’s texts
and views have long been discussed in English by Max Frings, Eugene
Kelly, Kenneth Stikkers, and many others.10 In the past five years, several
English-language essay collections have addressed aspects of the tradi-
tion in unprecedentedly sophisticated ways.11 We intend this volume as,
among other things, an addition to this growing literature, which will
9
Lysemose (2013, p. 48) suggestively refers to Marquard, Blumenberg, and
Sloterdijk as key members of a ‘second generation’ of philosophical anthro-
pology. For Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology, see Pavesich (2008) and
her essay in this volume.
10
Schneck (2002) is an especially interesting recent collection.
11
In particular, Iris (2009), Giri and Clammer (2013) and De Mul (2014).
help intellectuals both today and in the future to enter into, make use
of, or at least satisfactorily orient themselves to this tradition.
Defining aims of the tradition

To appreciate a philosophical school or tradition, one needs more than
a description of the networks that connect its participants. In partic-
ular, one wants to know about such things as its characteristic themes,
commitments, motives, and methods.12 In this section, I attempt to
distinctively characterize the philosophical-anthropological tradition
through appeal to three of its central motives or aims. The three aims to
be considered are:
(a) to develop a theory of human beings that lends unity to the variety
of discourses and disciplines that study them;
(b) to situate human beings within a continuum of modes of being that
includes non-human organisms and, to some extent, non-organic
being (such as material, environmental, or ideal being);
(c) to better grasp and explore the role of the conditions that shape
one or another manifestation of human subjectivity, in regard to
their relevance for philosophical questions and controversies (for
instance, regarding cognition, agency, and social structure).
(a) The unity of the human being

The first of these aims is emphasized by Scheler (1928a) and Plessner
(1928), and recently emphasized again by Piet Strydom (2013), who
writes that philosophical anthropology’s ‘motive was to overcome disci-
plinary boundaries by bringing together philosophy and science as well
as the various sciences themselves, in so far as they deal with the nature
12
Efforts to characterize philosophical traditions – such as logical positivism,
pragmatism, phenomenology, or philosophical anthropology – are of course
subjects of high-level intellectual controversy in their own right, and concerned
parties have filled literally thousands of pages attempting to instructively recast
such traditions. In this editor’s opinion, discussions of the identities of such
traditions are important and indispensable. We write and think about them both
because it matters, and because we have to in order to be understood by others
and to understand ourselves. Yet we should remember that the objects we seek to
capture in these descriptions are also contingent and open-ended historical enti-
ties. Strict ‘necessary and sufficient conditions’ for membership in such traditions
are not sensibly to be insisted upon.
Introduction 9
of human beings’ (p. 111).13 Schacht (1990) likewise gives voice to this
intention of the tradition when he writes,
[W]e already have a discipline called “anthropology,” with both phys-

ical and cultural branches, and beyond that a whole cluster of “human
sciences,” biological, social, and psychological. Why add another,
“philosophical” anthropology to the list ... ? ... A part of the answer
I would give is that all of these disciplines, by their very natures, are
restricted to dealing with human reality from particular perspectives,
and in ways limited further by the very methodologies which enable
them to develop as disciplines. A philosophical anthropology, which
would be locked into no such particular perspective and restricted to
no such methodology, would for that very reason be better able to
make collective sense of the human reality with which they all deal,
drawing upon them and yet achieving a more comprehensive under-
standing than they severally can. (Schacht, 1990, pp. 157–158)
Scheler’s, Plessner’s, and Gehlen’s articulations of this aim differ from

one another in interesting ways. Scheler stresses a division between
rational, spiritual, and naturalistic conceptions of the human being,
traceable to Ancient Greek philosophical, Judeo-Christian religious, and
modern scientific understandings and interpretations of human beings,
respectively (Scheler, 2009 [1928], pp. 5–6). His account is intended
to integrate these perspectives, giving each its appropriate ontological
place and epistemic authority in relation to the others.14
Plessner, on the other hand, emphasizes the special challenges that
nineteenth-century sciences, such as linguistics, biology, and ethnology,
posed to the inherited triumvirate of metaphysical options: mental–
physical dualism, materialism, and idealism (Plessner, 1928, chs 1–2;
Plessner, 2003 [1937]; Plessner, 2003 [1961]). On Plessner’s account,
these new sciences show the failure of the inherited views by requiring
13
Suggestively, Strydom emphasizes the political impetus to this ‘unification’
motif, writing of a ‘widespread conviction in the early twentieth century that
science could make a meaningful contribution to social life only if it were related
back to the epoch-making cultural crisis of the time ... [Thus, t]he search for this
synthesis [the one above] was driven not by an abstract yearning for universal
knowledge, but rather by the urgent need for practical understanding, for know-
ledge which could give direction and guide the living of life’ (pp. 110–111).
14
This distinction among divergent inherited views of the human being is
interestingly developed by Landmann (1974 [1955]).
that the ‘interior’, psychological life of human beings and their ‘outer’
behavior in space and time, be more closely related than the inherited
views allow. Plessner diagnoses the root cause of the failure in what he
calls, ‘the Cartesian alternative’: namely, the idea that all entities must
be either mental and internal, or physical and external, but not both.
Plessner’s philosophical anthropology (in Plessner [1928] and, to some
extent, Plessner [1923], [1941], and elsewhere) is intended to supply a
new mapping of the ontological and phenomenological relationships
between the ‘inner’ and the ‘outer’ through construction of a new set of
fundamental categories, inclusive of nature, lived body (Leib), physical
body (Körper), organic life, environment (Umwelt), and expression.
Gehlen (1940, 1975), finally, conceived of the problem of ‘unity’
as simply one that emerges from the increasing plurality of empirical
sciences that take human beings as their object, such as evolutionary
biology, developmental psychology, and sociology. Each of these
sciences is (and ought to be, consistent with its own intentions and
methodological strengths and limitations) focused only on one or a
few aspects of human beings’ behavior, cognition, and experience. The
role of philosophical anthropology, as Gehlen conceived it, was as an
integration of the findings of such specialized perspectives within a
coherent theory of their common object, ‘the human being’. Gehlen’s
unifying anthropology was thus empirical, and no more ontological or
‘fundamental’ than the sciences it synthesized; it was also more general
and more likely to be controversial.
(b) The human being within continua of being

A second characteristic aim of philosophical anthropology is an effort to
articulate the ‘place’ of human beings within the continuum of forms of
organic life.15 This inquiry could be summarized as a concern with the
question of ‘human distinctiveness’, that is, an effort to clarify which
powers, tendencies, and modes of relationship with their environments
human beings share with non-human forms of organic life, and which
15
One might interpret this aim as a sub-class of inquiries into the place of
human beings within being in general, or within various continua or planes of
being. See Honenberger, this volume. However, there is arguably some privileged
significance to the frame provided by a continuum of organic beings. In any case,
the organicist frame is one held in common by Scheler (2009 [1928]), Plessner
(1928), and Gehlen (1940, 1988 [1975]), as Fischer (2009a, 2009b) emphasizes.
Introduction 11
are distinctive of human forms of life, and why. Fischer (2009b) describes
this aim as follows:
[F]or Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen the comparison between plants,

animals and human beings or, at the very least, between animals
and human beings, is a postulate for the development for their argu-
ment. ... Each of the relevant authors begins by considering the living
body, placed at a remove, within its environment, and then proceeds
through the classification of the various types of life (plants, animals),
to arrive at the end-point, which is the [specifically human] mind.
(Fischer, 2009b, pp. 154–155)
Similar projects have more recently been undertaken by philosophers

explicitly inspired by one or more central figures of the philosophical-
anthropological tradition (Moss, 2006, 2014, this volume; Krüger, 1999,
2001, this volume; Pavesich, this volume). It is noteworthy that, as
Fischer (2009b) points out, the philosophical anthropologists do not
undertake this aim simply for its own sake, but rather for the sake of the
other insights it provides – regarding, for instance, the epistemological
subject, the relation between human beings and nature, the relation of
human beings with one another, and the ontology of human beings
and human concerns, including (for instance) norms, values, divinities,
artifacts, concepts, human society, space, time, and death.
Each of the three founders of philosophical anthropology conducts
this setting of human beings within the continuum of organic being in
a different way.16 Scheler (1928a) attributes to all living things a vital
impulse (Lebensdrang). He distinguishes human beings from other living
things by the former’s capacity to suspend this impulse and experience
things ‘objectively’.17 This gives them access to a world (Welt) rather than
merely to an environment (Umwelt), including a realm of spirit (Geist). On
Scheler’s view, Geist, following a revised sense of the Hegelian meaning
of that term, is the realm of persons, their acts (including emotive and
expressive as well as cognitive acts), and their mutual understanding and
communication. For Scheler, Geist is in principle irreducible to physical
16
These differences have been discussed extensively elsewhere: for instance,
Fischer (2009b) and Honenberger (2013). I provide only a brief sketch of them
here.
17
Scheler’s Lebensdrang appears to be a conceptual descendent of Bergson’s élan
vital, as presented in Bergson (1907).
matter or organic life (Scheler, 1976 [1913, 1916]; 1980 [1926]). Plessner
(1928) distinguishes living from non-living beings by the form of relation
between core and boundary in each case: living things exhibit (phenom-
enologically) a deeper interiority than non-living things, as well as a
dynamic rather than static relationship between core and boundary.
Human beings are distinguished from non-human forms of life by their
capacity to take a position regarding this dynamic relationship itself. For
this reason, Plessner describes the human mode of life as an ‘excentric
positionality’: human beings can take a position about their position.
This involves unique ways of relating to their bodies, to their environ-
ments, time and space, and one another.18 Gehlen (1940) describes the
human being as an ‘undetermined animal’ (following Nietzsche [1886],
§62), as well as a ‘deficient being’ (Mängelwesen), and elucidates these
characterizations through three different lines of argument: evolu-
tionary, developmental, and social. The first line of argument proceeds
through appeal to a neoteny thesis, favored by the anatomists Louis
Bolk and Adolf Portmann, among others, that human beings are born
in an especially ‘undeveloped’ state, in comparison with other primates,
and thus that, in some sense, the socioculturally mediated environment
of the human infant’s first year of life constitutes a ‘second womb’. The
second line of argument builds on developmental psychological litera-
ture to argue that human action involves a distinct and characteristic
form of behavior that Gehlen calls ‘relief’ [Entlastung]: namely, formation
of habits that allow a winnowing and channeling of the ‘overburdening’
multitude of sensations that would otherwise cripple action. The devel-
opment of linguistic abilities and (in the third line of argument) the
close coupling of institutionally established regularities with individual
patterns of choice and expectation, lead to the formation of an inte-
grated habit-set, or ‘character’ [Haltung]. These processes are explained
by Gehlen as instances of the characteristic and relatively distinctive
human capacity (and need, from a biological standpoint) for relief.19
(c) Conditions of the epistemic and practical subject

A final characteristic aim of philosophical anthropology is to reveal
the significance of anthropos (‘the human’) for classical philosophical
18
See essays by Davis and Krüger, this volume, for discussion of Plessner’s
views on this theme.
19
See essays by Schacht and Wasmuth, this volume, for further discussion of
Gehlen’s view and its applications.
Introduction 13
questions. This significance derives from the recognition of at least a

near-identity (even if a contingent rather than a necessary one) between
anthropos and the classical philosophical subject – the subject of ethics
and epistemology, for instance. Schnädelbach (1984) emphasizes this
aim in his reading of the tradition when he writes:
Philosophical anthropology belongs to the history of the crisis

caused by the ‘collapse of Idealism’ for the traditional self-inter-
pretation of man, and it forms in a certain sense the terminating
point of that history (p.220). ... [One may characterize] philosoph-
ical anthropology as an answer to the question, ‘Who are we?,’ in
which, for reasons derived from the history of science, empirical and
interpretive knowledge enter into a particular constellation [emphasis
added] ... [T]he scepticism with regard to the traditional self-image
of man, from which Scheler, Plessner, and many of their contempo-
raries start, is accompanied by scepticism with regard to all attempts
to resolve the ‘crisis of Ego’ with the traditional philosophical or
reflexive self-certainty: hence the precarious connexion of the philo-
sophical with the empirical elements in the concept of a philosoph-
ical anthropology. (p. 224)20
This aim is best appreciated by reflection on the state of philosophy at

the time that the foundational figures first presented their philosoph-
ical anthropologies. The comprehensive speculative systems of German
Idealism and Naturphilosophie had been eclipsed by a materialist and
empiricist turn in the natural sciences and a similar turn in the social
sciences (as evidenced, for instance, by Karl Marx, August Comte, and
Herbert Spencer). These sciences, through their empirical success and
their affiliation with (and usefulness for) the growing institutional
framework of industrial capitalism (Strydom, 2013, p. 107), increasingly
acquired philosophical defenders, who claimed for the sciences’ descrip-
tions and models an epistemological and ontological sufficiency and
completeness. At the same time, in an effort to remain faithful to intel-
lectual developments both in the natural and social sciences, on the one
hand, and “humanistic” inquiries (such as linguistics, ethnology, and
source-critical history), on the other, the Kantian tradition expanded
20
This heightened awareness of the significance of anthropology to philosophy
should not be mistaken for an anthropocentrism, a point made by Schnädelbach
himself (1984, p. 234).
and become subtler. Neo-Kantianism thus pursued an expanded ‘crit-

ical’ project that would articulate the conditions of possibility, and thus
constitutive limits and division of epistemic authority, of knowledge in
the new disciplines. The work of Wilhelm Dilthey, Wilhelm Windelband,
Heinrich Rickert, and Hermann Cohen, exemplify this trend.
These developments led to a new appreciation for the complexity of
the relation between the human being as ‘epistemological subject’ and
as ‘epistemological object’, a distinction that was pivotal to the Kantian
epistemological framework. Indeed, the dialectic between subject and
object became so complex as to reach a kind of breaking point.21 At the
same time, and for the same fundamental reason, reductive idealisms and
materialisms were increasingly challenged: the factors that would have to
be considered in making coherent sense of, for instance, Fechner’s psycho-
physics, made such one-dimensional views prima facie implausible.
The philosophical anthropologists sought to cut through this Gordian
knot by starting from a clarification of the increasingly puzzling
subject–object doublet – that is, the human being.22 This allowed them
to continue the trend (clearly already underway in nineteenth-cen-
tury philosophy) towards an identification of the conditions – socio-
cultural, linguistic, biological, technological, and so on – of human
cognition and agency, and thus of the ‘philosophical subject’ (in the
Kantian-Hegelian sense) in one or another instance. The interplay of
variability and universality in the appearance of this subject was an
explicit focus of the philosophical anthropologists’ concern. Their
attentiveness to anthropos allowed them to provide innovative system-
atic solutions to a special kind of ‘coherence problem’ that emerged in
late-modern thought – namely, how human beings and the social and
cultural systems associated with them could both be a part of relatively
stable ontologies and slow-moving processes (such as those of evolu-
tionary and physical–cosmological history) and at the same time be
relatively undetermined and ‘free’. Plessner’s notion of ex-centricity, his
21
Hegel, in his critique of Kant’s critical philosophy, had argued for the inev-
itability of a breakdown of this kind well in advance of later developments, but
the appearance of new and specific cases of breakdown within the emerging and
increasingly empowered empirical sciences both lent greater weight to an argu-
ment of this form and necessitated the revision of Hegel’s specific systematic
efforts at a solution to the problem.
22
Compare Foucault (1970 [1966]), who describes man, as he appears in the
late modern (post-1800) human sciences, as an ‘empirico-transcendental doublet’
(p. 318, and ch. 9, §§2, 4).
Introduction 15
later notion of the ‘homo absconditus’ (Plessner, 1969), and Gehlen’s

notion of the human being as ‘undetermined animal’ bear witness to a
concern with this problem.23
In this way, philosophical anthropology has also harbored, as one of
its major characteristic aims, the project of constructing an effective
orientation to a variety of epistemological, practical, and socio-political
factors that are not normally considered within the same discourse or
inquiry. These factors include the hermeneutic and the naturalistic, the
natural and the cultural, the transcendental and the empirical, and many
other pairings that cross familiar divides between methodologies, as well
as ontologies, in modern intellectual life. It could even be argued that
the focus of the tradition on ‘the human subject’ emerged as a conse-
quence of this original strategy of response to nineteenth-century scien-
tific developments (again, see Schnädelbach, 1984). Even if this focus
on ‘the human’ is today recognized to be more questionable than it
was in the intellectual context of the 1920s through 1950s, apprecia-
tion of the larger problem it was intended to solve may somewhat miti-
gate the strength of that objection to the tradition’s self-formulation.24
It is instructive, in this regard, that the discipline of anthropology (in
general) is not intrinsically restricted to anthropocentric or humanist
procedures or self-conceptions.
Philosophical anthropology as field: an attempt at a

definition
Those seeking to make contributions to philosophical anthropology as a

field (rather than the tradition initiated by Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen)
define ‘philosophical anthropology’ itself in a variety of ways. Perhaps
the most common among these is ‘philosophical inquiry into human
nature’. Schacht (1990), for instance, writes of ‘philosophical anthro-
pology, understood very broadly as the philosophical examination of
human nature’ (p. 159), and Pihlström (2003) writes of ‘philosophical
anthropology, i.e., philosophical study of humanity (“human nature”)”
(p. 259). Haeffner (1989 [1982]) claims that ‘[p]hilosophical anthro-
pology stands for the path of knowledge concerned with the nature or
23
More recently, see Moss (2014), and Moss’s essay in this volume.
24
See, for instance, the recent literature on ‘post-humanism’ (such as Wolfe,
2010, and Braidotti, 2013), which is not doctrinally or methodologically so far
from philosophical anthropology as might be assumed.
essence of human beings: the typical form of existence, the inner struc-
ture and dynamics, and other concerns’ (p. 4). The expression ‘human
nature’ has problematically narrow implications, however, implying that
the field of philosophical anthropology must be committed to essen-
tialism, or self-restricted to a concern with the ‘natural’ or ‘innate’ side
of human existence. The authors just quoted do not intend such impli-
cations and even explicitly warn against them; nonetheless, the English
term ‘human nature’ strongly inclines us to this misunderstanding.
I suggest defining the field of philosophical anthropology simply as
the ‘philosophy of man’, or, to use a (thankfully) gender-neutral expres-
sion, ‘philosophy of the human’. This treats philosophical anthropology
as an analogue of such disciplines as ‘philosophy of art’, ‘philosophy of
language’, and ‘philosophy of mind’. Note that in many of these fields,
the character and identity-conditions of the central subject matter are
themselves topics of controversy. In philosophy of art, for instance, a
central, open, and controversial question is, ‘What is art?’ By analogy
with these disciplines, a central (but not the only) question in philo-
sophical anthropology is, ‘What is man?’ (or, ‘What is a human being?’
and ‘What is humanity?’).
Insofar as human beings and ‘the human’ can be objects of many
different kinds of concern, it might be worried that philosophical anthro-
pology is, by this definition, too broadly defined to be considered a single
field. However, some widely recognized sub-disciplines in contemporary
philosophy – such as metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics – have equally
broad if not broader scopes of concern: plausibly summarized as ‘reality’,
‘knowledge’, and ‘value’, respectively. If these can be fields, it could be
argued, why cannot there also be a field of philosophical anthropology
as defined above? Indeed, if philosophical anthropology so-defined is of
a scope comparable to that of metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics, this
even provides evidence of its high importance, in comparison with other
philosophical sub-disciplines – an importance that, as we’ve seen, the
tradition of philosophical anthropology has itself tended to claim. This
seems to be the way that Kant conceived of what later became known as
the field of philosophical anthropology when he wrote, in an oft-quoted
passage of his lecture course on Logic,
The field of philosophy ... may be reduced to the following questions:

1. What can I know?
2. What ought I to do?
3. What may I hope?
4. What is man?
Introduction 17
The first question is answered by metaphysics, the second by morals,

the third by religion, and the fourth by anthropology.25
I would further argue that the field of philosophical anthropology

is not well captured by the phrase ‘philosophy of anthropology’, nor,
as has recently been suggested, ‘philosophy-in-anthropology’ (Brezina,
2013). These locutions would make the field analogous to disciplines
focused on bodies of knowledge or institutional knowledge-forma-
tions (as in philosophy of science or philosophy of psychology) or to
philosophical interventions within those bodies of knowledge and
knowledge-formations (as would be philosophy-in-science or philoso-
phy-in-psychology). On the reading given here, philosophical anthro-
pology is as much analogous to the philosophy of nature or philosophy of
mind, as to the philosophy of science, philosophy of psychology, philos-
ophy-in-science, or philosophy-in-psychology – though obviously there
are close relationships between these disciplines. Philosophical anthro-
pology, on the definition proposed here, collects all philosophical
inquiries into the human. At the very least, assimilating philosophical
anthropology to ‘philosophy of anthropology’ or ‘philosophy-in-an-
thropology’ would miss important features and open questions of the
field as it is frequently and self-consciously practiced.
Why should we care about philosophical anthropology as field? One
convincing reason may be that we have to. In addressing many other
questions and topics, ideas about human beings – for instance, their
capabilities, tendencies, and relations with other things (whether causal,
constitutive, intentional, social, historical, or otherwise) – are impli-
cated. In this way, whatever is said or thought about these matters has
philosophical anthropology as a transcendental condition of its own
possibility (compare Pihlström, 1998, 2003, and essay in this volume).
These implicit commitments can always, in principle, be made explicit
and reflected upon. Thus the field is potentially highly relevant even in
many cases where it is never discussed explicitly. With the caveat that
such explication may sometimes disrupt rather than contribute to forms
of knowing (compare Polanyi, 2009 [1966]) and other values we may
25
Kant (1885 [1800], p. 15). Kant goes on to write that ‘[i]n reality, however, all
these might be reckoned under anthropology, since the first three questions refer
to the last’ (p. 15). This is a claim that Heidegger (1990 [1929]) found highly ques-
tionable. A more precise discussion of the relationships between metaphysics,
epistemology, ethics, and philosophical anthropology is bound to be controver-
sial and would require space beyond that allotted to this introduction.
hold (compare Plessner, 1969), it is plausible that these assumptions and

commitments ought to be made explicitly and critically reflected upon
somewhere in the intellectual landscape.
Summary of the chapters
Chapters 1–5 approach figures or texts within the tradition of philosoph-

ical anthropology primarily from a historical or text-critical perspective;
Chapters 6–10 are primarily concerned to engage contemporary issues or
controversies, and draw on the tradition or field of philosophical anthro-
pology as tools in this engagement. This division is not a perfect one:
parts of the first five essays are clearly devoted to contemporary issues
and controversies, just as many of the last five help us to understand
the history of the tradition. But the distinction of emphasis between a
focus on the past and on the present serves as a useful principle for an
initial ordering.
The first chapter, written by Beth Cykowski, compares the basic project
of philosophical anthropology with Heidegger’s views in the late 1920s,
particularly in his lectures on the Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
(1929–1930), well known and much discussed for their thesis that ‘the
stone lacks world’, ‘the animal is poor in world’, and ‘the human being
has world’. Cykowski reveals the extent to which Heidegger, despite
his explicit self-distancing from philosophical anthropology in these
lectures and elsewhere, is actually involved in a very similar problem-
atic and, to a great extent (though, significantly, not entirely), comes
to similar conclusions. The critical comparison and contrast between
Heidegger’s favored terminology and concepts, on the one hand, and
those of philosophical anthropology, on the other, makes Cykowski’s
essay especially useful as an introduction to philosophical anthropology
in the context of twentieth-century European philosophy.
Richard Schacht’s essay on Gehlen and Nietzsche presents central
features of Nietzsche’s work as an anticipation of Gehlen’s version of
philosophical anthropology, and presents Gehlen’s work as a continua-
tion and systematization of many of Nietzsche’s anthropological insights.
Schacht does not miss the opportunity to stress Nietzsche and Gehlen’s
common concern with ‘naturalization’ in the sense of Nietzsche’s
project to ‘translate man back into nature’ (1966 [1886], §230), nor their
common concern with the role of the social in constituting and qual-
ifying that setting. Schacht also notes a difference between the goals
that Gehlen and Nietzsche suppose are definitive of human ways of life,
with Gehlen setting ‘survival’ as the ultimate explanatory heuristic, and
Introduction 19
Nietzsche resting his analysis rather on the ‘will to power’. Likewise,

Gehlen is relatively more pessimistic about human beings’ ability to
adapt to new or uncertain institutional formations than is Nietzsche.
Vida Pavesich’s essay provides a critical overview of Hans Blumenberg’s
‘phenomenological anthropology’, showing how Blumenberg, in his
writings on myth, rhetoric, and elsewhere, transposed the themes of
Gehlen’s model of the human being as a ‘deficient creature’ and Paul
Alsberg’s notion of human culture as ‘distancing’, into a phenomeno-
logical register. For Blumenberg, on Pavesich’s account, consolation is a
phenomenon that characterizes human existence (in the Heideggerian
sense), and the various practices, institutions, and symbolisms of
myth, religion, rhetoric, and philosophy, provide such existential
consolation in the form of a ‘distancing’ from contingency and the
fact of death, including through such mechanisms as conceptualiza-
tion and ‘time-saving’. This perspective motivates a reinterpretation
of reason as rhetoric and ratiocination – no longer a harbinger of abso-
lute certainty, yet still an existential and anthropological necessity –
and suggests the importance, in ethics, of recognizing and protecting
vulnerabilities.
Phillip Honenberger critically compares a number of late-modern
answers to the question, ‘What is the human place in the world?’,
looking particularly closely at the views of Thomas Henry Huxley, Max
Scheler, and the contemporary ‘pluralists’ Huw Price and Helen Longino.
Honenberger notes the variety of things that the language of ‘place’ can
mean in the phrase ‘the human place in the world’ and related locutions.
Drawing on aspects of the views of Scheler, Plessner, and Lenny Moss,
he argues for the superiority of an emergentist strategy of response to the
main question itself, in contrast to familiar naturalist, non-naturalist,
and pluralist alternatives. The advantage of an emergentist strategy
derives, in brief, from its intention to simultaneously respect both the
radical diversity of ‘places’ that human beings can occupy, on the one
hand, and the rich interconnections – even impossibility of complete
‘detachability’ – between these, on the other.
Near the end of his paper, Honenberger mentions Plessner’s philo-
sophical anthropology as an instance of the sort of emergentist strategy
he favors. Scott Davis’s rich and challenging paper provides a more
thorough overview of Plessner’s views, presenting these not primarily
as emergentist but rather as fellow travelers of structural and narrato-
logical analyses. Davis focuses on Plessner’s magnum opus Die Stufen
des Organischen und der Mensch (1928) and delineates five methodolog-
ical and conceptual themes in that text: (1) the structure of the text
itself as an icon of self-reference (with self-reference also being one of

the text’s central substantive themes); (2) Plessner’s original concept
of ‘positionality’ as a spatial intensifier; (3) Plessner’s methodology of
drawing analytical conclusions from deliberately hypothetical or spec-
ulative premises (that is, under the auspices of one more instances of
the ‘as if’); (4) Plessner’s concept of ‘mediated immediacy’ as an expres-
sion of relations between what some contemporary theorists, following
Gilles Deleuze, describe as ‘the virtual’ and ‘the actual’; and, finally,
(5) an interpretation of Plessner’s famed concept of ‘ex-centric position-
ality’ as a form of narrative interaction between human beings and their
environments. Davis instructively highlights resonances between these
five delineated themes of Plessner’s work, on the one hand, and subse-
quent intellectual developments in the fields of cultural anthropology
(Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Bourdieu), evolutionary biology (Mary
Jane West-Eberhard), and cognitive science (Alva Noë; the extended
mind thesis).
Davis’s essay serves as an excellent transition to the remaining five
essays of the volume, wherein contemporary questions and concerns
take center stage. Sally Wasmuth sketches a model of addiction,
based in part on Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology – particu-
larly, his understanding of the human being as a ‘deficient creature’
(Mängelwesen) that needs the support of stable social institutions to
develop an effective repertoire of patterned responses to environ-
mental stimuli. Wasmuth shows how Gehlen’s model, given the right
interpretation, suggests two different directions in which human
action can fail: by being too tightly bound to institutions and previ-
ously formed habitual responses, on the one hand, and by being too
untethered to any institutional or habitual guidance, on the other.
Addictive behavior thus becomes understandable as a disconnection
from those institutional structures that could give fuller meaning to
one’s life, and occupational therapy presents itself as a promising
alternative to a number of prevalent treatments. Wasmuth further
conjectures that a model such as Gehlen’s could help solve a puzzle
that addiction theorists and researchers have long faced: namely, the
source and validity of normative judgments about addiction and its
distinction from ‘healthy’ behaviors.
Moss’s essay seeks to extend and place contemporary philosophical
anthropology on a new footing through donation of a new set of inter-
related concepts, most prominently that of ‘detachment’ (see also Moss,
2006, 2014). Like Wasmuth, Moss also addresses the classical philo-
sophical-anthropological Mängelwesen thesis from the standpoint of its
Introduction 21
lessons for contemporary inquires, but rather suggests a supplement to

that thesis, in order to avoid a paradox in its standard articulations.
Moss’s concern is that the deficiency thesis alone appears to require that
human beings ‘break’ from the continuum of natural processes. Moss’s
solution for restoring continuity – and thus more effectively articulating
the ‘place’ of human beings within nature – is to follow and extend
recent suggestions about human evolutionary history, to posit a stage
(roughly associated with the appearance of Homo erectus) wherein a
new kind of group involvement (a ‘Hominin superorganism’) became a
crucial mediating factor in the lives of individuals of the species. Moss
reads Freud’s views on group psychology and Heidegger’s notion of
‘the they’ (Das Man) as expressing affective and existential dimensions
of human beings’ involvement in such a superorganism. However, to
understand subsequent human biological and civilizational history, on
Moss’s account, a second stage (a ‘second detachment’) must also be
posited: one wherein human individuals achieve, particularly through
language, enhanced abilities of self-differentiation from the superorgan-
ismic groups to which they originarily belong. Moss notes the way that
a Hegelian view of ‘explicitation’ gives voice to this second detachment
characteristic of Homo sapiens sapiens’ form of life.
Krüger’s essay also takes up the problematic of human evolutionary
and civilizational history, as well as models of individual human
ontogenesis. Krüger’s main charge is to critically review, evaluate, and
philosophically extend and qualify, Michael Tomasello’s recent work
in comparative primatology, particularly his efforts to specify (that is,
distinguish) human beings’ powers and behaviors from those of non-
human primates. In taking up this project, Krüger draws upon and
compares Tomasello’s views to those of Helmuth Plessner. He concludes
with sympathetic accolades to Tomasello’s project, but also gestures
towards those issues on which it may require philosophical supple-
mentation or qualification – particularly regarding large, complex, and
historically contingent social groupings (such as nations and civiliza-
tional traditions); epistemological and metaphysical aspects of reflex-
ivity, symbolism, and socially mediated experience; and the difficulty
of construing the identification of ‘enabling’ conditions as ‘naturalistic’
explanations (as Tomasello, to some extent, seems to do in the cases of
the relation between ‘joint attention’ and ‘culture’).
The final two essays of the collection do not discuss the tradition of
philosophical anthropology, but rather propose novel and suggestive
moves within the ongoing field. Margolis’s essay takes up the canon-
ical late-modern question of the relation between biology and culture,
arguing that the logics of standard biological disciplines – such as

molecular biology – are fundamentally different from those of cultural
disciplines; and yet, complications in achieving the once-dreamed-of
highly linear and regularized (law-based) explanatory models in the
former, imply the equally unlikely discovery of such models in the
latter. Margolis contrasts E.O. Wilson’s and Lenny Moss’s judgments
on the relation between DNA and ‘higher-level’ biological and cultural
phenomena in order to make the point for biology: an appreciation
of the diversity of ways in which molecular systems can function, as
shown by Moss, makes (on Margolis’s argument) Wilson-like dreams
of a reduction of biology alone to any single explanatory framework,
as well as (thus even more so) of culture to a biological framework,
extremely implausible. Margolis further argues that this conclusion, if
valid, precludes the legitimacy of Kantian (transcendental) regimenta-
tions of biological concepts, discourses, or models, as much as it does
classically reductive ones.
Finally, Sami Pihlström’s essay sketches some features of ‘philo-
sophical thanatology’ (that is, philosophy of death) as a crucial aspect
of philosophical anthropology. Pihlström’s essay stresses the way
in which a transcendental perspective on death, wherein the direc-
tion of one’s life and its finitude may in principle always be called
into mind and into question, allows us to approach the problem of
death in a manner that simultaneously pays due heed to various of its
naturalistic, existential, cultural, and pragmatic dimensions. In this
regard, Pihlström’s approach to death shows the analytical power of
his own philosophical anthropology as he has developed it in earlier
works. This philosophical anthropology incorporates transcendental
and naturalistic perspectives within an overarching pragmatism.
Pihlström’s essay further serves as an especially insightful new over-
view of the defining problematics of the field of philosophical anthro-
pology in general, with reference to the concrete test case (or case
study) of death. Of particular note is Pihlström’s new discussion of
his influential fourfold typology of philosophical anthropologies (in
Pihlström, 2003) drawn from Heikki Kannisto: essentialist, naturalist,
existentialist, and culturalist.
We hope that readers will find this collection especially noteworthy
for the diversity and sophistication of the essays contained therein, as
well as for the great and general significance of its central themes. We
leave it to them to determine whether our hopes have been fulfilled.
Introduction 23
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1
In Pursuit of Something ‘Essential’
about Man: Heidegger and
Philosophical Anthropology
Beth Cykowski
Introduction
The question of the degree to which Heidegger can be counted as an

anthropological thinker is a controversial one. Throughout his corpus,
Heidegger expresses concern with the fundamental character and
destiny of human existence, but does the possession of such a concern
situate Heidegger within the history of the German philosophical-
anthropological tradition? Heidegger’s interest in the human appears to
circumnavigate many of the issues and questions that occupy this tradi-
tion. For instance, Heidegger frequently appears to be more concerned
with what the articulation of the question of what it means to be human
itself says about human existence, than with seeking a positive defini-
tion of the human as a particular living species. Nevertheless, through
his interrogation of the human as a being that possesses the capacity
to articulate this question, Heidegger does develop an understanding
of human existence that could be said to approximate a philosophical
anthropology.
Despite this apparent kinship, Heidegger envisages his own task very
differently. He is in pursuit of something ‘essential’ about man: the ulti-
mate foundation of human existence, that ground from which all other
disciplines that claim to know about the human derive their content.
Heidegger insists that, as one such discipline, anthropology, ‘philo-
sophical’ or otherwise, is a form of ‘Darstellung’, a representation of the
human that is based on ‘regional’ rather than fundamental suppositions
(1995, p. 76). As such, anthropology does not and cannot provide a
‘complete ontology’ of Dasein, that is, a description of the foundation
and total structure of human existence (1962, p. 38).
27
28 Beth Cykowski
According to Heidegger, a consistent and fatal characteristic of all

versions of the anthropological perspective, including philosophical
anthropology, is its treatment of the human as a living species. Prior
to all of its information-gathering, anthropology has already presup-
posed that the human is a biological being amongst others that can be
observed, tracked, and measured. Such a method examines the animality
in the human, and does not reveal anything about the human as such.
Heidegger claims that when it comes to securing ‘essential’ knowledge
concerning the human, anthropology is no more than a ‘confusion’, a
distraction (1995, p. 280). The task of uncovering something ‘essential’
about the human is not an anthropological one, because, as Beistegui says,
for Heidegger the essence of the human ‘is itself nothing human’, that
is, nothing hominid-like (2003, p. 13). When we question what human
beings are, we are already questioning something in excess of the idea of
the human as a type of primate (Beistegui, 2013). This is because, in the
very activity of posing this question, we have already broken away from
the domain of the purely ‘natural’ by opening ourselves up to concerns
that go beyond the simple matter of our survival. We have opened
ourselves up to the question of existence as such. It is the propensity for
this type of openness that interests Heidegger, because it is a requisite for
all methods of determining the kind of being that the human is.
In this essay I will elaborate Heidegger’s critique of philosophical
anthropology and question its legitimacy. I will focus in particular
on Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course, The Fundamental Concepts
of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude,1 which contains an emphatic
rejection of the discipline. The lectures are particularly pertinent,
since they are delivered during the most fertile period in the history
of the philosophical-anthropological tradition, following some of its
most significant publications.2 The essay will examine various passages
of Heidegger’s lecture course in order to contextualize his critique of
anthropology as Darstellung, and will then provide a brief exposition of
the philosophical-anthropological tradition in light of this critique. I will
ultimately argue that, though there is a methodological and conceptual
chasm between their respective approaches, the outcome of Heidegger’s
analyses and those of the philosophical anthropologists converge in a
profound way.
1
Hereafter FCM.
2
For example, Max Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928), and
Helmuth Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928).
Heidegger and Philosophical Anthropology 29
The ancient conception of the human’s place in physis:

Heidegger’s 1929–1930 lecture course
Do we know what is ‘essential’ about man? Have we ever known?

According to Heidegger, essential knowledge concerning human exist-
ence was articulated in Greek philosophy prior to the establishment of
Plato’s Academy and the organization of different philosophical schools.
In the opening passages of FCM, Heidegger outlines this essential articu-
lation. At the dawn of philosophy, Heidegger says, Heraclitus reveals a
deep insight into the dynamic relationship between the human, nature
(understood as physis), and philosophy, implied in his claim that the
‘prevailing of things [physis] has in itself a striving to conceal itself’
(cited in Heidegger, 1995, p. 27). Beings, according to Heraclitus, are not
transparent and available for us; they tend towards obscurity. Through
the logos they are given expression – ‘revealed’ and ‘torn from conceal-
ment’ (p. 27). As the being that accesses the logos, the human is the
agent of this ‘unconcealment’. It is the means by which physis is spoken
out (pp. 26–27).
Heidegger insists that physis, in this ancient context, is not to be under-
stood as ‘nature’ in the modern scientific sense; it does not simply name
the domain of animals and plants, but also ‘irrupts in the primal experi-
ence of man’ (p. 25). The human, like other living beings, belongs to
physis. However, though the human is part of physis, ‘entwined’ within
it just as primordially as all other living beings, it has a deviant relation-
ship to physis in the sense that, as the being who partakes in logos, it has
always already ‘spoken out’ about physis from within it:
In Greek, speaking is called λέγειν; the prevailing that has been

spoken out is the λόγος. Therefore – it is important here to note this
from the outset, as we shall see more precisely from the evidence –
it belongs to the essence of prevailing beings, insofar as man exists
among them, that they are spoken out in some way. If we conceive
of this state of affairs in an elementary and originary way, we see
that what is spoken out is already necessarily within φύσις, otherwise
it could not be spoken from out of it. To φύσις, to the prevailing of
beings as a whole, there belongs this λόγος. (p. 26)
The human is described here as tied into the realm of physis in a dual
sense. Its own form of life is such that it ‘exists among’ natural beings,
and it is also the being that, via its participation in the logos, is the
medium through which physis is given expression. This dual relationship
30 Beth Cykowski
to physis, which appears, prima facie, to amount to a detachment and

freedom from the natural terrain that encapsulates all other beings,
subjects the human to a dissonant existence: though it is the being that
is able to somehow ‘go beyond’ physis, it is also one of the beings about
which it speaks out. Consequently, the human will never be able to
complete the exercise that defines its being, for it is part of the very
totality that it attempts to disclose, and it will thus never be able to
detach from physis in order to attain an elevated, non-situated perspec-
tive that can capture the entirety of physis.
The outcome of Heidegger’s analysis of this Greek conception of the
human and its relationship to physis is the idea that the human is consti-
tuted by a kind of ‘metaphysical’ disposition in the following, original
sense of the term ‘metaphysical’. Heidegger claims that the ‘meta’
component of the word denotes a movement ‘away from one matter
and over to another’, a ‘turning around’ from one position to another
(p. 39). The ‘physika’ component, which comes from physis, originally
means beings ‘as such and as a whole’; it names all beings that ‘prevail’
as well as ‘prevailing’ as such (p. 30). The term ‘metaphysics’ thus desig-
nates a ‘turning around’ towards physis, a ‘going after’ beings (p. 39).
It denotes the fundamental tendency of the human being to strike out
beyond beings, to take in and articulate the ‘whole’. It is this capacity
for metaphysical thought that singularizes the human; the human is the
meta-physical being.
In developing this conception of the human as a ‘meta-physical’ being
on account of its relationship to physis, Heidegger also problematizes
it. Given that the human is necessarily tied to the nature about which
it speaks, how is metaphysical thinking even possible? In other words,
how can human beings inquire into the totality of beings if they neces-
sarily remain within that totality? Heidegger addresses this problem by
claiming that, from within its position of detachment from the domain
of beings as a whole, the human can only do metaphysics if it first gains
a ‘grip’ on what it is trying to understand (p. 7). Following the meaning
of the German begreifen, this ‘becoming gripped’ amounts to a concep-
tualization or understanding of beings rather than a passive reception of
them. Gaining a grip on entities is only necessary if such a grip is initially
lacking. If the human were seamlessly homologous with other entities,
if it were not disconnected from physis, it would not be compelled to
grip onto entities. There is a sense of intemperate urgency contained
in this idea that the human needs to gain a grip in this manner, an
urgency that stems, Heidegger claims, from an originary ‘homesickness’
(p. 5). This homesickness is responsible for all of the human’s efforts
to claim a world of meaning for itself from within the abysses of its
tenuous relation to physis, for all instances in which human beings
‘go beyond’ physis and engage in metaphysics. In making this claim,
Heidegger follows Novalis’s description of homesickness as a requisite
of all philosophizing, and cites the following fragment: ‘Philosophy is
really homesickness, an urge to be at home everywhere’(Novalis, cited
in Heidegger, 1995, p. 5).
Though the ‘speaking out’ through which the human detaches from
physis appears to grant it a superior position in nature, Heidegger insists
that it also consigns it to an endless struggle, a struggle that is expressed
in the relationship between logos and physis. Heidegger claims that the
Greek sense of logos as that exercise of uncovering through which beings
are revealed implies that, as Heraclitus observes, beings are initially
hidden (p. 27). Physis is primarily self-concealing, and this conceal-
ment, Heidegger says, is implied in the negative a- prefix in the Greek
aletheia (p. 27). Like the German ‘un-’, this prefix signifies the absence
of something:
It expresses the fact that something is lacking in the word it prefixes.

In truth beings are torn from concealment. Truth is understood by
the Greeks as something stolen, something that must be torn from
concealment in a confrontation in which precisely φύσις strives to
conceal itself (p. 29).
Once again, an intemperance, this time bordering on violence, is evident

in Heidegger’s conception of the human’s relationship to physis. On
account of their self-concealing tendency, beings must be ‘torn’ from
concealment, wrested into appearance via the logos (p. 27). Truth, in this
aletheic sense, is ‘something stolen’ (p. 29).
This exercise through which the human appropriates beings and
develops a world of meaning for itself comes prior to all distinct fields
of enquiry. As the most radical expression of this exercise, the activity
of metaphysics is something ‘ultimate’, something that ‘stands on its
own’, and the human stands on its own as the being that undergoes
this activity as a result of its detachment from physis (p. 2). The upshot
of this idea, according to Heidegger, is the Novalisian conception of
metaphysics as the outcome of a kind of brokenness in the human,
a negativity that expresses itself as homesickness. For Heidegger, this
negativity has two dimensions. Firstly, as a finite being, the human is
always exposed to the constant possibility of the imminent negation of
its existence (p. 294). Secondly, as we have already seen, this negativity
32 Beth Cykowski
is expressed in the inevitable struggle pertaining to the fact that, ‘insofar

as he exists’, man ‘has always already spoken out about φύσις, about
the prevailing whole to which he himself belongs’ (p. 26). The human’s
dubious status as both the object and instrument of metaphysics means
that there something inherently unstable about its capacity to ‘speak
out’ about beings. However, if we wish to understand the kind of being
that the human is we need to explore this instability, rather than trying
to remove the problem by constructing definitions of the human that are
sought, outside of philosophy, in the sciences or in the ‘proclamations
of worldview’ (p. 1). Though the Greeks and particularly the Presocratics
achieved this profound level of exploration, in the time that has elapsed
since, Heidegger says, their enlightened awareness of the structure of
human existence has been lost and replaced by a far more superficial
methods of defining human beings (pp. 35–37).
‘Scholastic splitting’ and the birth of the

anthropo-biological ‘worldview’
On reading Heidegger’s endorsement in FCM of this antiquated depic-

tion of the human, are we convinced of its essentiality and primor-
diality? Saddled with our modern conceptions of the human and its
position in nature, are we persuaded by the idea that human existence is
founded on a pervasive homesickness that is the expression of its funda-
mental insecurity and desire for inclusion in the whole of physis? As the
lecture course proceeds, Heidegger poses this question himself by exam-
ining how contemporary metaphysics depicts human existence.
Heidegger argues that the history of metaphysics has been a process
of covering over ancient knowledge of the ‘co-belonging’ between the
human and metaphysics, with the result that metaphysics is no longer
understood in terms of the original meaning of its component terms:
meta and physika. Since antiquity, the concept has been subjected to a
corrosive disciplinary ‘splitting’, wherein the field of physis is broken
down and regionalized (Heidegger, 1995, p. 35). Heidegger claims that
this splitting occurs because, in the work of Plato and Aristotle, ‘the
formation of schools becomes unavoidable’ (p. 35). This formation of
philosophical schools begins with the establishment of a fundamental
conceptual division between those beings which are understood as
‘natural’, that is, beings that ‘subsist’, ‘grow’ and ‘prevail’ independ-
ently, and those beings that exist as a result of human action (p. 35).
The former assemblage of entities is designated by the title ‘physis’, and
the second by the title ‘ēthos’ (p. 35). The term ‘ēthos’, Heidegger says,
‘comprises everything referring to human deed and action, including

man and his activity’ (p. 35). Ēthos marks all the various ways in
which the human ‘conducts’ itself as a being. Whereas, according to
Heidegger, pre-Platonic man existed in subservience to physis, and did
not project his own form onto beings, after Plato and the construction
of academic schools, the terrain of the human is seen as distinct from
physis. Meanwhile, physis is reinterpreted more narrowly as the domain
of the ‘natural’ (Heidegger, 1995, p. 30).
Heidegger claims that the distinction between physis and ēthos
results in a movement towards the classification and systematization
of thought and the ‘decline’ of genuine questioning (p. 35). The subse-
quent history of philosophy is a process of further separations, which
continue to mobilize the idea of a division between ‘man’ and ‘nature’
in increasingly unthinking ways. This disarticulation within philosophy
of ancient knowledge, beginning with the delimitation of the fields of
logic, ethics, and the philosophy of nature, means that all questions are
localized, confined to problems that are treated from within their own
category of the schema, and according to their own specified principles
and methodologies. These questions are ‘dealt with’ according to the
individual discipline’s ‘methodological schema of question and proof’
and, though they produce communicable results, they encompass none
of the ‘enrootedness’ of the questions originally posed prior to Plato
(p. 37; p. 35).
The separation of the dimension of the human’s way of being from
the being of physis triggers a reduction, generalization, and simplifica-
tion of philosophical questioning:
[B]ecause the enrootedness of ... philosophizing has been lost, the

school and those who come after are left with the task of somehow
stitching together the divergent elements which are now splitting
apart ... Everything that had once grown out of the most diverse
questions – extrinsically unconnected, but all the more intrinsically
rooted – now becomes rootless, heaped together in subjects according
to viewpoints that can be taught and learned. The context and its
rootedness are replaced by an ordering within subjects and scho-
lastic disciplines. The question is which viewpoints now regulate the
ordering of this rich material, which is no longer taken hold of at its
core or in its vitality. (p. 35)
Since the Greeks, philosophy has tended towards subject-centered calcu-

lation and representation, with the anodyne result that human beings
34 Beth Cykowski
are no longer compelled to confront themselves directly. Heidegger

argues that the ‘contemporary situation’ that remains is one in which
we are so thoroughly embedded within a complex set of narrow fields of
research, each of which claims to know certain facts about the human,
that we have entirely lost sight of anything ‘essential’ about the human.
We have never known ‘so much and such a variety of things about the
human being as the present era’, and yet ‘no era has known less about
what a human being is than the present era’ (Heidegger, 1990, p. 203).
Our epoch is one of ‘journalism’ rather than philosophy; of exchanges
of opinions rather than genuine questioning (Heidegger, 1995, p. 71).
What we have now are ‘worldviews’ in which the character and fate of
the human is presupposed, and in which metaphysics is seen as contin-
uous with other disciplines, rather than as the radically and constitu-
tively human activity (p. 71). This trajectory in Western thinking, as
Heidegger envisages it, leads us to what we might term an ‘anthropo-
biological’ definition of the human: rich in data, but destitute of philo-
sophical curiosity as Heidegger understands it.
Though he does not use the term, this ‘anthropo-biological’ worldview
is the apex of a general trend of ‘journalistic’ thinking which Heidegger
traces in FCM. This trend, Heidegger says, conducts a ‘setting-out’ of the
human (Dar-stellung), a ‘diagnostic’ representation of it based on catego-
ries that have been recycled and reconfigured in new ways throughout
the history of metaphysics (p. 76). In order to justify his claims regarding
this trend in thinking, Heidegger looks briefly at the work of what he
takes to be its key exemplars: Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages, Max
Scheler, and Leopold Ziegler. Heidegger’s interest in these four ‘spokes-
people’ of the epoch lies not in the content of their interpretations but
in what the presence of these interpretations says about the juncture we
have reached in the history of metaphysics. Each thinker claims an inti-
mate understanding of the character of contemporary man, but, despite
their somewhat grandiloquent tones, none of their accounts deeply
‘concern’ or ‘grip’ us according to Heidegger (p. 77). When we read their
accounts, we do not recognize ourselves in them as the very beings that
they claim to describe. Instead, we respond only superficially to their
proclamations, subscribing readily but unthinkingly to their ‘exciting’
statements concerning our condition and role in history (p. 75).
If we take a very brief look at Heidegger’s analysis of these four inter-
pretations of the contemporary epoch, we will be able to identify the
point at which they mark a mutation towards the anthropo-biological
worldview that he denounces. Each thinker, Heidegger says, envisages
human beings as embroiled in the drama of a dynamic opposition
between two concepts: life and spirit. Their conception of this opposi-
tion, Heidegger says, is a derivation and reconfiguration of Nietzsche’s
earlier account of the relation between the Dionysian and the Apollonian
(p. 72). They thus envisage life is as the domain of growth and fecundity,
the ‘simmering of drives’ that constitutes the ‘breeding ground of the
mythical’ and of all creative and destructive forces, and ‘spirit’ as ratio, a
regulative, tempering and ordering force (p. 70). In the four depictions
of this opposition, as Heidegger presents them, we can detect the free
floating debris of the ancient division he attributes to Greek philosophy
in the wake of Plato. The concept of ‘spirit’ harks back to ēthos as the
domain of human activity, and ‘life’ to physis understood as the domain
of the ‘natural’. Heidegger contends that, despite implicitly appropri-
ating this ancient conception, Spengler et al. fail to recognize that the
division between life and spirit, which grounds their analyses, stems
from an instrumental formation of philosophical schools in Plato and
Aristotle, and that the installment of convenient divisions of this kind
marks the beginning of the end of ‘living questioning’ (p. 35). Each of
the four interpreters, Heidegger says, ‘[points] out what is known today,
what is spoken of, and in part has already been forgotten again, interpre-
tations that are partly borrowed second- and third-hand and moulded
into an overall picture, views that subsequently penetrate into the higher
journalism of our age’ (p. 71). The irony of the situation, according to
Heidegger, is that the disciplines that claim to know about the human
actually corrupt any possibility of grasping it ‘essentially’ (p. 76). This is
because, in ‘setting-out’ what the human is, they treat it as a single item
in an already-ascertained taxonomy of beings. Heidegger claims that
they therefore miss the fact that ‘when we ask about the essence of man
we are asking about ourselves’, and not about some other being in nature
(p. 281). We are trying to face who we are essentially. Though Spengler
et al. theorize about the ‘human condition’, they do so as if the human
were a composite of properties, some life-like, some spirit-like, that is
somehow detached from us as questioners. In seeking out this kind of
scientific objectivity, they produce theories about the human that ‘do
not involve us’, that serve to ‘untie us’ from any confrontation with
ourselves, and yet do so precisely as anthropology’ (p. 77). Spengler,
Scheler, Klages and Ziegler all propagate a version of anthropology, and,
according to Heidegger, it is in virtue, and not in spite of the fact that
they produce anthropological theories, that they not only deter but
subvert philosophical enquiries into the essence of the human.
Anthropology, the very discipline that seeks knowledge of man, of
anthrōpos, is thus described as a kind of epistemological nostrum; a
36 Beth Cykowski
delusion that stems from the idea that we already know what the
human is, and that we are therefore free to present facts about its various
components. This anthropological worldview becomes anthropo-
biological when it is blended with an understanding of the human’s
place in relation to the rest of nature. Heidegger refers to Scheler’s evalu-
ative account of the human as a biological being with certain extra-
natural properties as an especially notable example of this view:
[W]e can see that the conception of life in terms of its intermediate
position between material nature and human existence often forms
the core of a general view that interprets man and everything else
from the perspective of life: the biological worldview. Max Scheler
recently attempted to treat this hierarchical sequence of material
beings, life, and spirit in a unified manner within the context of an
anthropology. He did so in the conviction that man is the being who
unites within himself all the levels of being – physical being, the
being of plants and animals, and the being specific to spirit. I believe
this thesis to be a fundamental error in Scheler’s position, one that
must inevitably deny him any access to metaphysics. (p. 192)
According to Heidegger, this Schelerian position, like the entire philo-

sophical-anthropological tradition, treats the human as if it is a being
‘out there in nature’ that we can encounter, entrap, observe, and measure,
all the while retaining a scientific detachment. However, in reality our
starting point is neither as simple nor as privileged as this. As the being
that engages in metaphysics, that is, as the being that ‘speaks out’ about
beings whilst being one amongst them, we are always already faced with
the fact that we are part of that which we seek to explain; we are that
which we seek to explain. This brings with it a profound ambiguity, but,
Heidegger says, from within the confines of our own viewpoint, ‘we
simply cannot demand anything else’ (p. 19). For Heidegger, remaining
aware of the impact of our own essential involvement in the question of
what it means to be human is not nearly as anthropocentric as the phil-
osophical-anthropological supposition adopted by Scheler, that is, the
idea that we already know, and can simply presuppose, the human and
its biological and spiritual properties. The very term anthropology, from
this Heideggerian perspective, betrays a tendency to anthropomorphize,
to treat the human as a being with already-determined boundaries that
exists in a natural continuum.
Despite launching this global criticism at philosophical anthropology
in FCM as a form of Darstellung, Heidegger does not dedicate a lot of
space to examining the content of the tradition. In the following section,

I will explore Scheler’s anthropology further in order to then return to
Heidegger’s critique and assess the legitimacy of his claim that anthro-
pology cannot discover anything ‘essential’ about man.
The German tradition of philosophical anthropology and

Heidegger’s response to it
In his critique of anthropology in FCM, Max Scheler is Heidegger’s

prime target. The following discussion of philosophical anthropology
will therefore be focused around Scheler, but will also include a brief
look at a pre-Schelerian figure, Johann Gottfried von Herder, who is, in
many respects, a progenitor of the field of philosophical anthropology,
and a post-Schelerian figure, Arnold Gehlen. Taken together, these
three thinkers mark the heritage and development of the core ideas of
the discipline, and gaining a perspective on their work will enable me
to appraise Heidegger’s critique of philosophical anthropology more
closely.3
In his 1772 Treatise on the Origin of Language, Herder claims that
nonhuman animals belong to a ‘circle’ (Kreis) within which they behave
in accordance with specific environmental triggers (2002, p. 65). The
human, Herder says, is unique in its absence of this ‘circle’, as well as
its development of language (2002, p. 78). Herder proceeds to identify a
reciprocal relation between these two peculiarly human characteristics.
The human is estranged from an encircling environment and its senses
‘are not sharpened for a single thing; he has senses for everything and
hence naturally for each particular thing weaker and duller senses’ (p. 79).
The human’s detachment from an environment and sensory weakness
is twinned with a capacity for understanding and awareness, which
Herder names Besonnenheit (p. 128). Herder claims that this capacity
‘had to express itself immediately when the weaker sensuality and all the
poverty of [man’s] lacks expressed itself. The instinctless, miserable crea-
ture which came from nature’s hands so abandoned was also from the
first moment on the freely active, rational creature which was destined to
3
There are of course many other important contributors to the field, but since
Scheler is Heidegger’s principal target in his critique of philosophical anthro-
pology in FCM, I will stick chiefly to him and, due to lack of space, give merely a
brief exposition of the heritage of his anthropological claims in Herder and their
legacy in Gehlen.
38 Beth Cykowski
help itself, and inevitably had the ability to do so’ (p. 128). The human’s
dearth of instinct and subsequent attempt to establish itself in other
ways is, for Herder, constitutive of its essential nature. Man’s ‘centre of
gravity, the main direction of his soul’s efficacies, fell as much on this
understanding, on human awareness [Besonnenheit], as with the bee it falls
immediately on sucking and building’ (p. 128).
The way in which Herder isolates the structure of the human’s organic
deficiency and amelioration in the form of Besonnenheit and language
anticipates Scheler’s concern, beginning in the 1920s, with under-
standing human beings in terms of their distinctive absence of speciali-
zation. However, prior to the genesis of Scheler’s anthropology, a crucial
intermediary development takes place in biology, one that shapes and
informs the field of philosophical anthropology in general. This devel-
opment occurs in the work of Jakob von Uexküll. In the early twentieth
century, Uexküll developed a pioneering understanding of the way in
which an organism relates to its surrounding environment, its ‘Umwelt’
(Uexküll, 1909; 1926). For Uexküll, a picture of organismic function
could only be achieved through an examination of animal behavior,
which in turn demands an understanding of the way in which the
animal relates to its Umwelt. The variation in the complexity of different
animal species is likewise best described in terms of the varying range
of relevant environmental triggers available to them in their Umwelten.
This research empirically furnished Herder’s earlier comparative anthro-
pological analysis based on the notion of the ‘circle’ of different animal
species and its conspicuous absence in the case of the human. From
the start of his inquiry, Herder is certain that human existence lacks an
environmental circle. Uexküll, on the other hand, seems more agnostic
about the question of the human’s possession of an Umwelt.4 This ques-
tion prefaces Scheler and Gehlen’s work, and the German tradition of
philosophical anthropology generally. In taking up this line of enquiry,
the philosophical anthropologists observe that the human does not
appear to exhibit fully determined organic traits, but instead seems to
incorporate, in its very physiology, a kind of tenuousness or insecurity.
The philosophical anthropologists, as Landmann says, entirely revise
4
As we will soon see, Heidegger criticizes Uexküll for failing to deal with the ques-
tion of the human’s relation to its world. The extent to which Uexküll considers
the human being to be in possession of an Umwelt is debatable. For a discussion
of this matter see Geoffrey Winthrop-Young’s Afterword to Uexküll’s Foray into the
Worlds of Animals and Humans (2010), trans. by J. O’Neil (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press).
the orthodox categories, rules, and methods of biological analysis, with

the result that the human is understood as a being that foregoes the
organic drives of other animals:
Man ... has no instincts – let this exaggeration be allowed for the sake
of clarity. Nature does not say how he is to behave in a given situ-
ation. With the help of his own reflection he must determine his
behaviour independently, he must decide on his own how he will
use the world and get along in it. He does not merely react to it, he
acts upon it. But to do this he must know the world. He must have
deeply penetrating and objective experience of it, as comprehensive
as possible, in order to shape his behaviour according to the measure
of this experience. Therefore his knowledge has a completely different
and broader mission in the total economy of his life than the animals’
knowledge has for them. It must not only discover signals and release
mechanisms but also establish a much richer relationship to reality;
it must not only select a sector of the world but also bring the world
to as adequate a realisation as possible. (1974, p. 192)
In keeping with this approach, Scheler observes, by means of compara-

tive analysis similar to that employed by Herder, a disconnect between
the human organism and its environment. Scheler coins the term
‘world-openness’ (Weltoffenheit) to describe the human’s lack of adapta-
tion to any specific natural habitat, and its corresponding reduction of
organic instincts. This organic deficit is depicted by Scheler as a condi-
tion for the possibility of the human’s ‘higher’ forms of development
(1978, p. 191). Scheler accounts for the human’s uncanny ‘detachability’
from nature by invoking the concept of ‘spirit’ (cited in Weiss, 2003,
p. 52). It is only as a ‘spiritual’ being that the human is able to interpret,
understand and express itself, to determine a position and role for itself
in the face of its absence of any organic determination (p. 52). This
principle of spirit, Scheler says, is ‘opposed to life as such, even to life in
man’ (p. 52). As a spiritual being, the human foregoes the sharp biotic
capabilities enjoyed by other animals. The human’s distinct capacities,
for example its use of tools, intellect, and the way in which it develops
culture, must be regarded, according to Scheler, as compensations. The
tool, Scheler says, when ‘looked at from a vital standpoint, is not to be
regarded ... as a sign of a positive development of life creating organs. It is
rather the expression and consequence of a vital lack’ (1978, p. 191).
The ability to develop biologically supererogatory faculties that are not
found amongst nonhuman animals ‘can only arise when the power to
40 Beth Cykowski
produce organs, and the capacity for vital development has exhausted
itself in principle, or when the natural powers of attack and of over-
coming other animals or of handling the environment by organs has
itself proven to be so weak that only the method of deception is left to
overcome this weakness’ (p. 191). When considered in this way, intellect
and tool use appear, Scheler says, to be ‘pitiable surrogates for new organ
development’ (p. 191).
Scheler attempts to ward off concern over the metaphysically loaded
character of the term ‘spirit’ by rejecting the definition of spirit as a
‘stage of life’, a category found near the top of a hierarchical scala
naturae (cited in Weiss, 2003, p. 52). Rather, the term spirit is used to
denote the human’s relationship to ‘world’, the ‘world-openness’ that
is the result of its freedom from an organic niche. Gehlen appropriates
certain aspects of this idea, setting Scheler’s comparative physiology
into a more richly empirical, morphological context, but ultimately
entirely rejects all language of ‘spirituality’. According to Gehlen, the
anthropological definition of the human does not involve a meta-
physical overcoming of the natural, and can be explained in terms
of the human’s distinct morphology (1988, p. 9). Gehlen claims that,
compared with the great apes, with their ‘overdeveloped arms for
swinging, feet designed for climbing, body hair, and powerful canine
teeth – man appears to be hopelessly unadapted’, and is to be ‘char-
acterised by a singular lack of biological means’ (cited in Weiss, 2003,
p. 63). Where other animals slot neatly into a habitat, there exists an
irreducible gap between the human and the environment. According
to Gehlen, human beings quite literally embody this gap; it is incorpo-
rated into the configuration of its organism. In the human, a ‘hiatus’ is
created between impulses and action, which ‘opens up the possibility
of an “inner life” for the human being’, a reflective space that is felt
when the human is in a state of ‘complete rest’, detached from any
active engagement with its surroundings (1988, p. 333; p. 335). There
is thus a space for reflection built into the morphology of human
beings with the effect that, unlike animal impulses, human impulses
are plastic and open. This structure, Gehlen argues, ‘is necessary for an
acting being who must exist within the open abundance of the world,
responding to whatever situation it may encounter by forming expec-
tations dictated by experience’ (1988, p. 336).. Because the human
domain is one of cautious reflection and ‘suspenseful alertness’,
humans are ‘denied the direct gratification ... that an animal enjoys’,
and must ‘confront the world and its constant surprises and render
it available, knowable, intimately familiar and usable’ (p. 238). The
human being’s attempt to structure a meaningful world for itself is, for
Gehlen, a visceral need that pertains to its morphological ‘incomplete-
ness’ and subsequent instability. Gehlen claims that this description
of the human as ‘not yet determined’ has two important implications
(cited in Weiss, 2003, p. 60). Firstly, ‘it is yet undetermined exactly
what man is; second, the human being is somehow “unfinished”, not
firmly established’ (pp. 60–61).
Does this brief exposition of some core principles in philosophical
anthropology serve to corroborate Heidegger’s claim that anthropology,
philosophical or otherwise, is a form of Darstellung, a ‘setting out’ of
the human that does not capture anything ‘essential’ about him? For
Heidegger, any attempt to absolve philosophical anthropology of the
charge that it is a form of representation founded on derivative and
unquestioned concepts of life and spirit will be entirely misguided. It
is impossible to explain away the fact that, as the progeny of a fixed
anthropo-biological worldview, philosophical anthropology begins
with the supposition that the human is a biological entity, a primate.
Armed with this definition, philosophical anthropology subsequently
fails to recognize that that which is ‘essentially’ human is itself nothing
hominid-like, but is rather, as Beistegui says, ‘an originary openness to
a constitutive and non-human otherness’, openness to being, to physis
(Beistegui, 2003, p. 13). The question of the essence of the human sits
within this broader question concerning physis and the human’s relation
to it, which is ultimately the question of the essence of metaphysics.
This question, Heidegger says, necessarily comes ‘prior to all philosoph-
ical anthropology and cultural philosophy’ (Heidegger, 1990, p. 192).
Buchanan describes the founding aim of philosophical anthropology
as an attempt to ‘“return” humans back into the context of nature
without necessarily naturalizing them’ (2008, p. 66). Though this vision
claims to denounce anthropocentric biases, for Heidegger, it is already
operating at the whim of an implicit, and therefore all the more worrying
anthropocentrism. This is because the philosophical-anthropological
approach assumes that we already know so much about what a human
being is, including the boundaries that circumscribe our kind of being,
that we can lift human existence from whatever context we find it in
and reinsert it into a natural setting.
Though philosophical anthropology attempts to draw on and unify
the findings of different disciplines in order to construct a complete
description of the human, it remains, according to Heidegger, indebted
to a culturally embedded emphasis on the life-spirit distinction. Our phil-
osophical matrix of knowledge about human beings has disaggregated
42 Beth Cykowski
itself since ancient times, and philosophical anthropology is a product

of, rather than a remedy for, that disaggregation. In the following, final
section of this paper, I will attempt to counter this critique by demon-
strating what I consider to be the deepest achievement of philosophical
anthropology, and by revealing the affinity between this achievement
and aspects of Heidegger’s own project in FCM.
The achievement of philosophical anthropology:

philosophy as Trieb
Does philosophical anthropology stand a chance of discovering some-

thing ‘essential’ about human beings on Heidegger’s terms? In the
remainder of this paper I wish to argue that, in its own idiosyncratic
and non-Heideggerian way, philosophical anthropology does intersect
some of the issues and concepts that matter most to Heidegger. This
affinity between the Heideggerian approach and that of philosophical
anthropology has two dimensions. The first concerns the way in which
Heidegger isolates a problem that arises in Uexküll’s biology. Heidegger
remarks, in Part Two of the lecture course, that he sees great value in
Uexküll’s concept of the animal Umwelt, which avoids the dangers
of mechanistic reductionism by recognizing that the organism is not
a closed system, but an entity that actively and continually responds
to stimuli and forces dictated by its environment (Heidegger, 1995,
p. 264). However, like the philosophical anthropologists, Heidegger
sees Uexküll’s Umwelt research as an essential but provisional stage of
an investigation that must go far deeper. Implicit in Uexküll’s concep-
tion of the Umwelt is, Heidegger says, the idea that ‘what the animal
stands in relation to is given for it in a different way than it is for the
human being’ (p. 264). This observation marks the ‘decisive problem’
which lies concealed and demands to be exposed’ (p. 264). We cannot
take the concept of the surrounding world of the animal and ‘proceed
to talk about the human world in the same manner’ (p. 263). Though
living beings may disrupt the physico-chemical categories employed by
the mechanistic tradition to describe organisms, the human disrupts the
more holistic organism–environment nexus described by Umwelt theory.
As is the case with the philosophical anthropological reading of Uexküll,
Heidegger’s implication here is that the human cannot be properly
understood if it is treated, along with other creatures, as an entity that
is housed within a sealed segment of an ecosystem. This is because, for
Heidegger, the human being does not possess the keen ‘discriminatory
capacities’ that bind other organisms to their environments (p. 19). The
human is not, therefore, the centrifugal nucleus of a specific habitat to

which it is adapted and which governs its range of possible actions. We
have seen that this divergence from Uexküll in Heidegger’s thinking also
takes place in philosophical anthropology; indeed, it marks its founding
problematic. The philosophical-anthropological tradition, counter to
Heidegger’s representation of it, begins with the enigma of the human’s
peculiar separation from a natural environment, its ‘existential libera-
tion from the organic world – its freedom and detachability from the
bondage and pressure of life, from its dependence upon all that belongs
to life’ (Scheler, cited in Weiss, 2003, p. 52). Rather than confidently
and simplistically positing the human as a living being plus some ‘spir-
itual’ capacity, as the site of a convergence between life and spirit, phil-
osophical anthropology begins with the more subtle observation that
the human subverts the customary schemas used in biology to describe
organisms.
This shared interpretation of Uexküll gives rise to the second,
more fundamental dimension of the affinity between Heidegger and
the philosophical anthropologists. This concerns the convergence
between Heidegger’s understanding of the human as a rupturing in
physis, an opening through which physis realizes itself in and through
logos, and the philosophical-anthropological definition of the human
as ‘world-open’. Though they start out from very different perspec-
tives, with Heidegger eschewing all ‘regional-ontological’, physiolog-
ical determinations of human beings in favor of retrieving a more
primordial understanding from Greek philosophy, the outcome of the
two currents of thought intersect on this point: the human is envis-
aged in both as an opening in nature. According to the Schelerian
anthropology examined above, the very ability of the human to take
an attitude towards itself and to simultaneously discover and invent
its reality is the most salient clue when it comes to questioning what
it means to be human. This idea corresponds in a striking way with
Heidegger’s claim in FCM that, prior to any concrete theorizing,
human existence has always already exemplified its own singularity as
an opening onto world, an opening in physis that is capable of taking
in and questioning existence as such. In this respect, human Dasein
‘always already intrinsically brings the truth about itself along with it’
(Heidegger, 1995, p. 281).
Insofar as it begins by isolating an openness to world as the condi-
tion for the possibility of all of the human’s singularizing traits – its
inquisitiveness, language and self-interpretation – rather than presup-
posing its biological and ontological kinship to other animals, it does
44 Beth Cykowski
not seem to be the case that philosophical anthropology is straightjack-

eted, in the manner that Heidegger identifies, by the dictates of a biolog-
ical worldview. For Herder, Scheler, and Gehlen, the human exists in a
state of limbo. Its organism does not latch onto that which is organic,
and it is therefore forced to negotiate, order and manage its openness,
to ‘develop an understanding of [itself]’ (Gehlen, cited in Weiss, 2003,
p. 65). This idea resonates with Heidegger’s claim in FCM that man ‘is
that inability to remain and is yet unable to leave his place ... the Da-sein
in him constantly throws him into possibilities and thereby keeps him
subjected to what is actual’ (Heidegger, 1995, p. 365). A similar perspec-
tive can be seen in both positions, in which the human is depicted as
the only type of being that has to confront its existence; a being for
whom entities are hyper-available, rather than available only insofar as
they are relevant, and whose own being presents a burden, a ‘difficult
problem’ (Gehlen, cited in Weiss, 2003, p. 61).
Though the philosophical-anthropological tradition criticizes
Heidegger for failing to deal with life and embodiment, there is a further,
related sense in which the tradition expresses a Heideggerian principle,
albeit using its own distinct vocabulary. This principle concerns the way
in which human Dasein comes to do metaphysics, that is, comes to
question its existence and relation to physis. Only by being ‘gripped’,
Heidegger says, is such questioning possible (1995, p. 7). As a being that
originates in and is constituted by a breakage in physis, and is thus funda-
mentally ‘attuned’ to its existence by a kind of primordial nomadism,
an essential ‘homesickness’, the human must begin its enquiries by first
finding a point of stability. This idea is akin to that which runs through
Herder, Scheler, and Gehlen, namely that the human is rendered vulner-
able by an extreme receptivity to sensations, none of which directly
capture its attention. According to this philosophical-anthropological
perspective, the human being must continually face up to the fact that
its life is not anchored in nature – that it is ‘homeless’ in the sense
invoked by Heidegger – and that it must therefore find the means to
stabilize itself and gain a grip on its life. Uexküll expresses this point
when he claims that the infusorian, with its basic sensory world, ‘rests
more peacefully in its environment than does the child in its cradle’
(cited in Gordon, 2010, p. 75).
If we consider the conceptual origins of philosophical anthropology,
we find that it attempts to articulate its problems and questions in a
way that avoids the self-sundering dichotomies of Cartesianism, of
faculty psychology, and of reductionist biology. This approach attempts
to retrieve the whole of the human being from out of the mutilating
metaphysical compartmentalization of these fields of enquiry. To

this extent, philosophical anthropology seems to reassemble, rather
than isolate even further, the disparate ‘free floating’ disciplines that,
according to Heidegger, broke away from one another following the
formation of Plato’s Academy (1995, p. 35). If we read the content of
philosophical anthropology in a more imaginative and charitable spirit
than Heidegger does, it does not look like a disarticulation of the essen-
tial and primordial knowledge possessed by the Greeks. Philosophical
anthropology is more than a fragment of knowledge buffeted about on
the sea of Western metaphysics. Its entire aim is to emulsify the reve-
lations of the history of philosophy with an empirically rich under-
standing of human morphology.
Heidegger’s claim that philosophical anthropology is rooted in a
derivative and non-essential understanding of life and spirit and their
relatedness in human beings thus seems unwarranted. When we take
into consideration the philosophical anthropologists’ Herderian-
inspired line of questioning, it does not appear to be the case that its
approach to the human is grounded in a treatment of life and spirit
as already-determined ‘components’ of the human. On the contrary,
the situation appears to be the reverse. According to the philosophical
anthropologists, it is the curious absence of orthodox biological prin-
ciples that is conspicuous when it comes to examining the structure of
the human being, and which demands that we question the human
in new ways. The term ‘life’ is thus seen as the name for a series of
problems and questions and not as the name of a specific domain of
beings or a discernible sector of human existence. The same applies to
the term ‘spirit’. The influence that Scheler has on subsequent works
of philosophical anthropology, as can be seen in Gehlen’s thought, lies
not in the idea of spirit as a distinct supersensible realm that levitates
above life, but rather in the idea that human action is liberated by a
retardation of instincts. Scheler places spirit in the context of human
morphology, describing the human’s spiritual capacities as ‘illnesses’
that only develop in ‘hereditarily sick animals’ (1978, p. 191). Gehlen
takes this morphologization of the concept of spirit further, replacing
the use of the concept altogether with a comparative physiology and
close study of human action. Heidegger’s claim that the philosophical
anthropologists treat life and spirit as two already-determined prop-
erties that are tacked onto the human thus seems to be misguided.
Life and spirit come on the scene not as two readily determined traits,
but rather as concepts that open up a series of questions about the
being of the human. Gehlen follows Nietzsche in claiming that the
46 Beth Cykowski
human is the ‘not yet determined animal’, a creature that we have

yet to comprehend (Gehlen, cited in Weiss, 2003, p. 60). Though
Heidegger would reject all definitions of the human that are founded
on concepts of animality, this statement does contain some resonance
with Heidegger’s insistence that fixed, hierarchical conceptions of the
human as a living being plus spirit, reason, or language are ‘prema-
ture’, and that the being of the human is something that we have not
yet succeeded in clarifying.
I wish to conclude this paper by arguing that the deepest point of the
intersection between Heidegger’s thought and that of the philosoph-
ical anthropologists concerns Heidegger’s invocation of the Novalisian
concept of ‘homesickness’. We can recall that, in his elaboration of
this homesickness, Heidegger cites Novalis’s description of philosophy
as the embodiment of an ‘urge’ (Trieb) to be at home. It is important
to note Novalis’s use, in his fragment, of the term Trieb, rather than
Sehnsucht, connoting a visceral, non-deliberative desire, a bodily appe-
tite rather than an activity of elevated contemplation and yearning.
The implication here is that in order to understand philosophy, which
is, in a sense, the most ‘radically human’, counter-natural activity, we
need to understand the manner in which this activity is staged within
and through our own living being. The achievement of philosophical
anthropology from Herder onwards resides in its ability to investigate
the complex reciprocal relation between the human qua finite, living,
breathing entity, and this apparently counter-natural propensity for
reflection, for Besonnenheit, for philosophy. Philosophical anthropology,
then, appears to capture the ambiguity, the apparent intractability of
the human’s relationship to life, the life in the human, and the sense in
which this life is itself the condition for the possibility of the human’s
stance within nature, its capacity to question the world to which it is
open.
The philosophical-anthropological approach does, therefore, even-
tually arrive at somewhat Heideggerian territory: a conception of the
human that is founded neither simply on human biology, nor on the
notion of a supersensible soul, but on an essential and constitutive
‘openness’. The ‘hiatus’ within the human, the capacity for Besonnenheit
that belongs to it most intimately, stems essentially from an ‘unfin-
ishedness’, an absence of characteristics (Gehlen, cited in Weiss, 2003,
p. 62). This absence is conspicuous, Gehlen says, throughout the human
body itself, from its retarded instincts to its weak musculoskeletal struc-
ture (see Weiss, 2003, p. 63). Despite the initial distance between the
philosophical-anthropological and Heideggerian projects, the former’s
approach to the question of what it means to be human thus approxi-

mates Heidegger’s conception of the human as the site of a negativity, a
brokenness (Gebrochenheit) in physis that results in a primordial home-
sickness, which in turn impels it to ‘grip’ onto entities and forge a world
of meaning for itself.
There are thus important dimensions in which philosophical anthro-
pology develops a conception of the human that is doxographically
similar to the Greek conception as it is presented in Heidegger’s thought.
The human is described as a living being whose very materiality ejects it
from that which is material. Human morphology, with its weak organs
and blunt instincts, means that the human is never able to immerse
itself in the environments of other animals. The result of this scenario
is that the human is open to the whole, to world, to its own being. If
philosophical anthropology is indeed a ‘diagnostic’ form of Darstellung
based on a crude conception of the life-spirit distinction, it is clear why
it should be essentially uninteresting to Heidegger. But given the prox-
imity in the outcome, if not the origin, of their respective analyses, phil-
osophical anthropology can be said to contain the germ of something
essential about human existence on Heidegger’s terms.
References
Beistegui, M. (2003) Thinking with Heidegger (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University
Press).
Buchanan, B. (2008) Onto-Ethologies: The Animal Environments of Uexküll, Heidegger,
Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze (Albany: SUNY Press).
Gehlen, A. (1988) Man: His Nature and Place in the World (New York: Columbia
University Press).
Gehlen, A. (2002) ‘Man as a Special Biological Problem’, in D. Weiss (ed.),
Interpreting Man (Aurora, CO: The Davies Group Publishers).
Gordon, P. (2010) Continental Divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press).
Heidegger, M. (1962) Being and Time, trans. by J. Macquarrie and E. Robinson
(Oxford: Blackwell).
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(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).
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(Philadelphia: The Westminster Press).
48 Beth Cykowski
Scheler, M. (1978) ‘On the Idea of Man’, trans. by C. Nabe, Journal of the British
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2
Gehlen, Nietzsche, and the Project
of a Philosophical Anthropology
Richard Schacht
Arnold Gehlen stands in the first rank of those to whom we are indebted
for the emergence and development of ‘philosophical anthropology’
in European philosophy during the first half of the twentieth century
as an explicit and self-conscious philosophical project, in competition
with Existenzphilosophie (the philosophy of human Existenz) and other
tendencies in the contest of philosophical approaches to the interpreta-
tion of human reality. In this respect Gehlen is commonly linked with
Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner, who were already active in this
respect in the late 1920s, a dozen years before the publication in 1940 of
his first and most notable book-length contribution to this enterprise,
Der Mensch: Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt (Man: His Nature and
Place in the World; henceforth ‘Man’).
But Scheler and Plessner were not Gehlen’s only predecessors. Another
thinker, with whom he not only can and should be linked but also has
a closer philosophical kinship than he does with either of them, is
Friedrich Nietzsche. It is with Gehlen’s philosophical-anthropological
relation to Nietzsche that I shall concern myself here. I had the good
fortune to have visited and talked with him at some length at his home
in Aachen in the summer of 1975, not long before his death, and will
draw upon that conversation as well as upon my reading of his work in
the second part of this essay. I shall begin, however, with a brief discus-
sion of Nietzsche, whom Gehlen regarded as a seminal thinker of great
importance for the movement that came to be known as philosophical
anthropology. That is a judgment with which I strongly agree.
Nietzsche once was commonly associated with existentialism.
More recently, he has often been associated with post-structuralism. I
consider both associations to be questionable at best, and to misrep-
resent his fundamental philosophical orientation and significance,
49
50 Richard Schacht
which I conceive in terms of his attempt to inaugurate a radical but

sophisticated ‘naturalizing’ approach (as he called it in The Gay Science
[hereafter GS, §109]) to the reinterpretation of human reality in the
aftermath of ‘the death of God’ (and to the understanding and revalua-
tion of values as well). In my opinion he deserves to be regarded as the
originator – or in any event one of the most important precursors and
advocates – of something like a philosophical anthropology, and more
specifically, of the kind of philosophical anthropology associated with
the names of Plessner and Gehlen, that emerged as the leading rival of
Existenzphilosophie in the reinterpretation of human reality in Central
European philosophy in the second quarter of the twentieth century.
And that is the Nietzsche whose example Gehlen quite explicitly sought
to follow, develop, elaborate, and also – for better or for worse – to
improve upon, in ways he believed to be warranted on either human-
scientific or philosophical grounds.
Nietzsche does not use the expression ‘philosophische Anthropologie’.
He does make frequent and pointed use of the expressions ‘der Mensch’,
‘menschlich’ and the like, however, and deals with ourselves as ‘Menschen’
both explicitly and extensively. Kant and Hegel had both used the term
‘Anthropologie’ in connection with philosophical inquiry into what is
‘human’ about ourselves. Feuerbach had championed the idea of an
‘anthropological reduction’ of Hegel’s entire philosophy of Geist, and of
the replacement of both theology and Hegelian ‘speculative philosophy’
with a ‘philosophy of the future’ of which ‘Anthropologie’ would be the
centerpiece. It was Nietzsche, however, who brought ‘der Mensch’ and ‘der
Typ [or “Typus”] Mensch’ into the kind of focus and prominence in his own
‘prelude to a philosophy of the future’ (in Beyond Good and Evil [hence-
forth BGE], of which this is the subtitle, and elsewhere) that became the
hallmark of twentieth-century European philosophische Anthropologie.
To be sure, Nietzsche is highly critical of the kind of essential meta-
physical nature philosophers have long tended to attribute to ourselves.
Since he also is often associated with Existenzphilosophie and post-
structuralism, he is commonly assumed to share their repudiation of
the very idea that ‘der Mensch’ has anything like a ‘nature’ of which
anything that is more than merely biological can meaningfully be said.
To my way of thinking, however, this is to misinterpret him quite drasti-
cally. Indeed, I would argue that the philosophical reinterpretation of
‘the type “man”’ was one of Nietzsche’s central concerns and tasks, from
the beginning to the end of his productive life.
Gehlen agreed. He told me in Aachen that he saw his own philosophical
anthropology as an attempt to carry forward this project that Nietzsche
Gehlen, Nietzsche, and Philosophical Anthropology 51
had advocated and had himself begun, along lines that Nietzsche
had largely anticipated. I first shall sketch my reasons for interpreting
Nietzsche as I do on this matter, and my understanding of his general
conception of and philosophical approach to our ‘menschlich’ reality,
with all of which I believe Gehlen to have been in general interpre-
tive accord. I then shall turn to some of the respects in which I believe
Gehlen to be in agreement with Nietzsche, and some of the more signifi-
cant respects in which I consider them to differ.
I begin with a familiar quotation from Nietzsche:
All philosophers have the common failing of starting out from man as
he is now and thinking they can reach their goal through an analysis
of him. They involuntarily think of ‘man’ as an aeterna veritas, as
something that remains constant in the midst of all flux, as a sure
measure of things. ... Lack of historical sense is the family failing of all
philosophers, ... . They will not learn that man has become, that the
faculty of cognition has become ... . But everything has become: there
are no eternal facts, just as there are no absolute truths. Consequently
what is needed from now on is historical philosophizing, and with it
the virtue of modesty. (Human, All Too Human [hereafter HH] I, §2])
Thus spoke Nietzsche – very programmatically and significantly –

in 1878, at the beginning of Human, All Too Human, his first overtly
philosophical book. Nietzsche makes it clear here that, although he
completely rejects the idea of an eternal metaphysical essence of human
nature, he by no means repudiates the very concept of ‘man’ as philo-
sophically meaningful and significant. On the contrary: he proposes
the task of the reinterpretation of human reality as his own project. He
considers it very important for us to think of ourselves first and fore-
most as Menschen, human beings, and to proceed to investigate and
interpret ourselves accordingly. (The same is true of Gehlen.) This is a
task that Nietzsche pursued throughout the course of his philosophical
career. (Gehlen likewise.) One could quite appropriately call it ‘philo-
sophical anthropology’, for it basically amounts to the examination and
endeavor to comprehend our human reality in a philosophically sophis-
ticated manner appropriate to it.
One reason why Nietzsche himself does not use this expression, its
availability owing to its significant use by Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach
52 Richard Schacht
before him, may be that he did not want to associate himself (or be asso-
ciated) with their styles and versions of philosophical ‘anthropology’
and treatments and conceptualizations of it. In any event, there is a
great difference – much to Nietzsche’s advantage, I would say – between
his treatment of human reality and what any of them called (their)
‘anthropology’.
Nietzsche’s conception of human reality is uncompromisingly natu-
ralistic – not in the sense of being scientistic or biologically reductionist
(which it is not), but rather in the sense of being guided by his convic-
tion that, in the aftermath of the philosophical demise of the credibility
of religious and metaphysical thinking, a thoroughgoing ‘naturalizing’
of our understanding of human reality and the world in which we find
ourselves is necessary, treating everything about ourselves and our
world as something that ‘has become’, in the course of entirely human-
developmental events and in entirely mundane ways. For him ‘man’ is
fundamentally a kind of living creature, and remains a piece of nature,
which however has developed in distinctive ways that have transformed
the character of human life and human possibility quite significantly.
We therefore must ‘translate man back into nature’, he writes, and
‘henceforth stand before ourselves even as we now stand before that
“other nature”’, the nature in which we find ourselves, ‘hardened in the
discipline of Wissenschaft’, with an intellectual conscience that is no
longer susceptible to the temptation to see ourselves as having some
more than merely natural origin (BGE, §230) – and yet also attempt to
do justice to the respects in which human reality is no longer merely
natural. So man’s ‘dis-animalization’ (Enttierung) is one of his favorite
themes and topics, to which he returns again and again. In one of his
most vivid indications of its extent and influence he writes: ‘the fact of
an animal soul on earth turning against itself and taking sides against
itself was something so new, deep, unheard of, puzzling, contradictory
and auspicious [Zukunftsvolles], that the aspect of the earth was thereby
fundamentally [wesentlich] altered’ (GM II, §16).
These are the twin fundamental tasks of Nietzsche’s kind of philosoph-
ical analysis of the kind of creature der Mensch has come to be. ‘When
may we begin to naturalize ourselves [uns Menschen zu vernatürlichen]’, he
writes in The Gay Science, in the context of an entirely natural concep-
tion of nature – a ‘pure, new-found, newly redeemed nature’ (GS, §109) –
while also not selling ourselves short by underestimating the full nature
and significance of our attained human reality and attainable human
possibility, as simplistic ‘clumsy naturalistists’ do when they suppose
that the only alternative to metaphysical thinking is scientistic thinking,
and ‘no sooner touch “the soul” than they lose it’ (BGE, §12). The kind
of thinking he calls for is to be scientifically sophisticated and atten-
tive (scientian, as I would say) without being scientistic, and to bring the
further sophistication of a skilled and astute interpreter of things histor-
ical, cultural, linguistic, social, and psychological to bear upon the whole
rich texture of human activity and experience, from the ‘all too human’
and pathologically human to the exceptionally and admirably human.
The general strategy Nietzsche adopts is to develop and propose hypo-
thetical analytical, diagnostic, and genealogical interpretive accounts of
human phenomena of many sorts – moral, religious, artistic, social, polit-
ical, intellectual, interpersonal, psychological – that do justice to them,
relate them to others, and make sense of them and their occurrence.
These accounts are worked out and offered in a manner that is avowedly
non-dogmatic, experimental, provisional, and sensitive to the possibility
of error and need for revision. That applies in particular to his selection
and treatment of the kinds of phenomena that he deems to have been of
particular importance in what he calls the ‘dis-animalization’ of human
life, which he considers to be a key philosophical-anthropological issue.
To what extent and in what respects has human reality been significantly
transformed in relation to its own simply animal origins and to the char-
acter of other forms of animal life?
Nietzsche sought both to understand what the differences are (as
well as what they are not), and to be able to establish the plausibility
of the idea that these differences could have come about without any
sort of supra-mundane intervention. He was obviously interested in the
‘genealogy’ of modern-day morality, for example, and of the various
related moralities and other moral phenomena he discusses in his On
the Genealogy of Morals; but he further was also greatly interested in
the ‘genealogy’ of modern-day humanity, in the roles played by those
phenomena in that genealogy, and in what their significance might
be not only for ‘the philosophy of the future’ but also for the possible
humanity of the future.
A telling example of such a Nietzschean anthropological specula-
tion is to be found in the concluding section of the second volume
of Human, All Too Human: ‘Man had to be bound by many chains, in
order to un-learn behaving like an animal’. There he had in mind not
the ‘social strait-jacket’ he discusses in Genealogy (GM II, §2), but rather
those of religion and morality – which however had been effective at a
price: ‘It is only when the chain-sickness is also overcome that the first
great goal is reached: the separation [Trennung] of man from the animals’
(HH II: Two, §350).
54 Richard Schacht
Another such example is Nietzsche’s recurring interest in another

means of transformation that can also be understood in a ‘naturalizing’
way: the phenomenon of sublimation and the transformations of the
manner in which our basic affects express themselves that it makes
possible – which also have social and cultural presuppositions, and can
be either fostered and furthered or pathologized by different sorts of
institutions, practices, and valuations. So Nietzsche has Zarathustra
proclaim, in the work that bears his name: ‘Once you had wild dogs
in your cellar; but in the end they were turned into birds and lovely
singers’ (TSZ, Book 1, §5).
Nietzsche further has a very strong interest in what he calls the
‘enhancement’ of human life and the human possibility of a ‘higher’
type of humanity that has been and is a human reality to some extent
and in varying respects, and in the conditions of their possibility; and
in this context too he reflects upon the ways in which the character
of human reality can be affected by social and cultural circumstances
and structures. That is the general topic, for example, of the concluding
part of Beyond Good and Evil, in the opening section of which he writes:
‘Every enhancement of the type ‘Mensch’ was previously the work of an
aristocratic society – and so it will always be’. For ‘Without the pathos of
distance’, he surmises, there never could have originated the sense of and
longing for a new and different sort of ‘distance-widening within the
soul itself’ that the striving for a higher sort of spirituality involves and
requires (BGE, §257). Nietzsche’s Lamarckism is another case in point.
‘One cannot remove from a person’s soul what his ancestors most liked
to do and most persistently did’, he writes in the same work. ‘It is simply
not possible for a person not to have the traits and preferences of his
parents and ancestors in his body’ (BGE, §264).
Speculations of these sorts may be problematic; but such specula-
tions and surmises too are very much a part of his kind of philosoph-
ical anthropology – not to be asserted dogmatically, but tentatively
ventured, for scrutiny and assessment, and subject to revision in the
light of changes in what we come better to comprehend (or to think we
know) about these and other aspects of our human constitution. (So,
for example, his thinking is only contingently rather than essentially
Lamarckian; and he surely would be no Lamarckian today.) And in any
event, the underlying question of the sorts and extent of fixity and vari-
ability of that constitution is one that Nietzsche considers to belong
on the agenda of his kind of inquiry into and interpretation of human
reality. He supposes that the line between nature and nurture – or rather,
between what we have come to call the genetic and psychophysiological
and the sociocultural and biographical – is not only blurred but mutable
and perhaps even manipulable; and that this can have significant conse-
quences, both philosophically and humanly.
Nietzsche ventures out onto this thin ice, and takes interpretive and
extrapolative risks in the hypotheses and surmises that he advances; but
he does so in an experimental spirit. He would have philosophers of
the future not be Nietzscheans in the sense of followers of his every
interpretive lead and adherents of his every proposition, but rather phil-
osophical companions in the naturalizing reinterpretive (and revalua-
tive) enterprises he considers to be the central tasks of post-religious and
post-metaphysical philosophy, striving – as he was – to be the best gene-
alogists and interpreters of all things human and of human reality and
possibility that they can be, and prepared to challenge him as well as
agree with him in the contest of interpretations that philosophy needs
to be. That, I believe, rather than discipleship, is what embracing him as
a philosophical educator and making common cause with him can best
mean, and did mean for him.
II
Gehlen viewed Nietzsche and Nietzsche’s kind of philosophical anthro-

pology in precisely this way – and I believe it to have been his wish to
have us do likewise with respect to his own thinking and philosophical–
anthropological efforts. He considered Nietzsche to be not only a kindred
philosophical spirit but also a philosophical inspiration and guide. No
other philosopher is cited more often in Der Mensch – or more favorably.
Gehlen cites him at the very beginning of the book, for having ‘referred
to man as “the not yet determined animal”’ and as having ‘recognized
precisely’ the very point that Gehlen is emphasizing: namely, ‘Man is a
being whose very existence poses problems for which no ready solutions
are provided’ (Man, p. 3). When Nietzsche is cited on other occasions,
as in this instance, it is generally as an authority, whose anticipation of
and agreement with whatever point Gehlen is making is taken to count
in its favor.
Gehlen’s use of Nietzsche in this manner, however, is selective. He
has little to say, for example, about many of the conceptions for which
Nietzsche is best known, such as ‘will to power’, ‘self-overcoming’, ‘life-
enhancement’, ‘higher humanity’ and ‘eternal recurrence’. As he told
me, he got many of his main ideas about human nature from Nietzsche,
but had little use for such notions as these, considering them to be mere
figures of speech and rhetorical flourishes having little philosophical
56 Richard Schacht
worth. About them, he said, it is best simply to remain silent. He consid-

ered Nietzsche to have been too ‘literary’, and not ‘wissenschaftlich’
enough; and he took it to be his task and contribution to take what
he considered to be Nietzsche’s good ideas, give them a more prop-
erly wissenschaftlich formulation, develop them much more fully than
Nietzsche had done, and turn them into the basis of a comprehensive
and systematic philosophical anthropology.
In any event, Gehlen’s commitment to a strongly wissenschaftlich
conception of philosophical inquiry and case-making was far more
consistent and rigorous than Nietzsche’s. This is one of the primary
respects in which he found Nietzsche to be unsatisfactory, and consid-
ered himself to have made a significant improvement upon him. He
cited (to me) Nietzsche’s own professions of allegiance to ‘wissenschaftlich
method’ as indicative of his being more faithful to the general spirit of
Nietzsche’s thinking than Nietzsche himself sometimes was.
For Gehlen as for Nietzsche, man is fundamentally an animal – a
type of living creature among other types of living creature – but one
that has come to be importantly different from the rest. Gehlen’s philo-
sophical anthropology takes this difference as its point of departure and
central theme. He characterizes it in terms of a radical difference in our
basic structure (‘Bauplan’) in relation to that of other forms of animal
life. Man, for him is a biological ‘exception’ to the general rule among
animals, and so poses a special problem (‘Sonderproblem’) both biologic-
ally and philosophically. ‘Nature has accorded a special position to man’,
he writes. ‘In man she has pursued a unique, hitherto untrodden path
of development; she has created a new organizational principle’ (Man,
p. 10). We are not simply a type of living creature like other creatures
from which we differ by having something that they lack, in addition to
a similar underlying biology, differing from theirs only in the morpho-
logical details and a differing set of drives and dispositions. Compared
to them, it is we who are structurally lacking.
So Gehlen characterizes man as a ‘deficient being’ (‘Mängelwesen’). We
differ from other living creatures not in having a distinctive set of special-
ized instincts, dispositions, abilities, and associated bodily equipment,
but rather in lacking that sort of refined specific structure almost entirely.
We have developed in a radically different direction from the rest – away
from specialization and toward versatility. Our remote ancestors may
have been akin to other creatures in this respect; but very long ago our
development diverged from theirs, foregoing increasing specialization
of specific instincts and bodily tools and weapons attuned to specific
environments in favor of plasticity, ‘world-openness’ or adaptability to
differing environments, and an enhancement of learning, communi-

cating, and information processing abilities, and eventually sacrificing
the former (‘primitivising’ our structure) for the sake of the latter.
Gehlen tends to view these changes as compensatory (necessitated by
our deficiencies) rather than strategic, and in any event makes much of
the riskiness of the alternate developmental direction our species has
taken. So he agrees with Nietzsche that man has lost the security and
reliability of instinct, becoming the ‘unfixed’ animal, and thereby also
the ‘most endangered’ animal. For it is a consequence of having gone
in this different direction that the burden of survival strategizing and
behavioral guidance and control has been shifted from our determinate
constitution to our social and cultural practices and institutions. This
has made the living of a human life profoundly different from the living
of a non-human animal life, each of which has its vulnerabilities and
limitations as well as its assets.
A central concept of Gehlen’s anthropology, intended to underscore
this difference, is the concept of action (Handlung). Human action differs
profoundly from animal behaviors (both instinctive and learned), in many
ways, which Gehlen explores at length. His philosophical anthropology
is therefore also a kind of ‘philosophy of action’ – a characterization
he himself used to describe it in our conversation, as a way of under-
scoring the difference between his kind of philosophical anthropology
and the philosophies of mind, Geist and Existenz, on the one hand, and
the strongly biological anthropologies that have found favor among the
more scientistically minded, on the other. Man, for him, is indeed first
and foremost a type of animal – but an animal whose entire constitu-
tion is structured around the phenomenon of action, which is the key to
its survival. It is at once bodily, purposive, learned, linguistically medi-
ated, and social. Gehlen’s analysis deals with it in all of these respects and
perspectives. In the human Bauplan all of these dimensions are intercon-
nected, in a configuration making it radically different from any and all
animal behavior. It is fundamentally practical in character, but admits of
many sorts of refinements and special developments, to which the rich-
ness of human cultural, social, and intellectual life bears witness.
An example of the interesting ramifications of Gehlen’s analysis of
human action relates to his observation that it requires a perceptual
system that produces an excess of sensory stimulation that needs to be
dealt with, and an affective system that generates an excess of motoric
impulses constantly available to be drawn upon – both of which excesses
must be channeled and coordinated if chaos is to be avoided and prompt
effectiveness is to be possible in a constantly shifting environment. This
58 Richard Schacht
leads him to another of his central concepts: the need for ‘disburden-
ment’ (‘Entlastung’) or ‘relief’ from what would otherwise be an over-
whelming profusion of both sorts of stimulus and from the strain of
greater complexity than can be handled. Ways of ordering and simpli-
fying things are required. Gehlen contends that many features of human
life – perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, psychological, cultural, and insti-
tutional – perform these ‘disburdening’ functions and are responses to
this need, while also setting the stage for and providing the means of
many particular types of action and interaction that are required of us.
Another example of a key concept in Gehlen’s philosophical-
anthropological scheme is that of a kind of ‘hiatus’ (break or pause)
between sensory stimulation and perceptual recognition and the initia-
tion of action sequences, making it possible for things other than what
is occurring in the moment to come into play. It is essential for the
possibility of reflection, self-mastery, deliberation, and decision, all of
which are conditions of the possibility of meaningful human action in
contrast to mere animal behavior. Like every other feature of the human
Bauplan, however, Gehlen considers it to be a structural response to
practical necessities arrived at in purely mundane ways. It is in this sense
that his anthropology may be seen as a ‘naturalizing’ one. He rejects the
characterization of it as ‘naturalistic’; but that is because he conceives of
‘naturalism’ as a simplistic scientistic way of thinking, usually involving
a kind of biologistic determinism that he rejects. He does make much
of our biology himself; but one of his main concerns is to show that
and how our biology has developed in ways that supersede the biolog-
ical determinism characteristic of other forms of life – even while being
responses to very real and very practical necessities.
These necessities, for Gehlen, center upon survival. Our world is one in
which human survival is possible but at risk. The entire human Bauplan
has become geared to the expectation that human beings will come into a
world that is social rather than merely natural, and that that social world
will be sufficiently ordered and structured to keep them alive initially
and enable them to remain alive subsequently. That, on his view, is what
archaic societies were in effect designed to do; and they did it remarkably
well for a very long time, even if typically on a very minimal level. His fear
is that the type of society that has come to replace them in the modern
world, which may seem to be a vast improvement upon them, is all too
likely to fail in the long run, or perhaps even in the shorter run. In his
most important book after Der Mensch, entitled Urmensch und Spätkultur,
he considers their differences, and invites us at least to understand that
concern. It differs considerably from Nietzsche’s greatest concerns with
respect to modern society and the modern world, which he encapsu-

lates in his images of the twin dangers of ‘the advent of nihilism’ and
the triumph of what Zarathustra calls ‘the last man’; but for Gehlen
those concerns are luxuries in relation to his, for the very viability of
humanity.
III
I now shall indicate briefly what I consider to be some of the most inter-
esting and significant further respects in which Gehlen and Nietzsche
are in agreement and disagreement.
(1) Like Nietzsche, Gehlen contends that a new, post-religious and
post-metaphysical ‘interpretation of human existence’ (Man, p. 3) is
needed, and that its development is properly a philosophical task; for
it must be an interpretation that does justice to what Gehlen calls ‘the
whole man’, which ‘cannot be derived from any one of the single disci-
plines involved, but which is instead a philosophical one’ (Man, p. 6).
Unlike Nietzsche, however, Gehlen insists upon the desirability of devel-
oping ‘an understanding of man’s nature that would make use of very
specific concepts, applicable only to the subject of man’ (Man, p. 4). For
Nietzsche it is an open question at the outset what sorts of concepts
will be needed; and as he goes along he avails himself of concepts some
of which do and some of which do not have this sort of ‘anthropic’
specificity.
(2) Like Nietzsche, Gehlen seeks a reinterpretation of human reality
that is thoroughly ‘de-deified’ (GS, §109) and (broadly speaking) ‘natu-
ralizing’ – not in the sense of restricting itself to mechanistic or biolog-
ical concepts and explanations (in the manner of mere mechanism or
biologism), but rather in the sense of availing itself only of concepts and
explanations that can be understood entirely in terms of our existence
as a form and type of living creature and its multifarious development
within the context of the varying conditions and circumstances of its
and our existence in this life and in this world. For both, human reality
is a life-form even in the highest reaches of humanly possible spirit-
uality. Human life has an ‘inner’ dimension that is real, complicated,
and of the utmost importance. But it has come about owing entirely to
transformations of the piece of nature that our kind of creature was in
the first place.
(3) But again like Nietzsche, Gehlen is resistant to an ‘evolutionism’
that would construe human reality merely as a variation on other forms
of biological existence, and would conceive of man as having ‘descended’
60 Richard Schacht
from pre-human life-forms, having developed out of them in a manner

that is continuous with them, and that is to be explained in biological
terms (for example, in terms of the development of certain features that
were ‘selected for’ owing to their long-term reproductive advantages).
Rather, Gehlen follows Nietzsche in contending that human reality
has become something quite different in a fundamental and perva-
sive way from other forms of life, even if under circumstances and in
ways that are themselves entirely mundane and contingent. Man is and
long has been an ‘exceptional’ sort of creature with a distinctive place
(‘Sonderstellung’) in the world, representing a break with (rather than a
merely structural refinement of or addition to) the character of other
types of living creature.
(4) Gehlen further follows Nietzsche in holding that this transforma-
tion of our nature is related to our social manner of existence. Section
16 of the Second Essay of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals is a text of
particular importance in this context, not only for Nietzsche but also
for Gehlen. In this section Nietzsche suggests that the imposition of
the constraints of social existence resulted in ‘the most fundamental
change [man] ever experienced’, of which ‘the “bad conscience”’ was
one pathological consequence, but of which the necessity and there-
fore the ability to redirect our natural impulses and instincts inwardly
was a more general consequence of the greatest significance. ‘The entire
inner world’, Nietzsche there writes, was first developed in this way,
under these conditions, and ‘expanded and extended itself, acquired
depth, breadth, and height, in the same measure as outward discharge
was inhibited’. He goes on to observe that ‘the existence on earth’ of
a creature of this sort was something ‘so new, profound, unheard of,
enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of
the earth was essentially altered’ (GM II, §16). Gehlen agrees; and he
went so far as to say that one could regard his entire anthropology an
elaboration of this passage. ‘It’s all there’, he said to me: the uniqueness
of our nature in relation to that of other types of creature, its relation
to the conditions of social existence, the role played in it by our ‘inner
life’, the phenomena of ‘instinct reduction’ and ‘drive redirection’, the
differentiation of human action from animal behavior, and the origin of
the crucial ‘hiatus’ between impulses and action.
(5) Like Nietzsche, Gehlen holds that human existence has come to
be structured in a manner both suited to social existence and requiring
it – a form of social existence profoundly different from anything of the
kind to be found among other creatures. In human life social norms,

practices and institutions of a complex nature, mediated by language
and symbolically coded valuations, are not merely added to the kinds
of highly structured instincts and disposition-guided conditioning and
learning that are characteristic of other types of creature: they have
completely replaced them. For Nietzsche, however, this ‘socialization’
of man has been a mixed blessing, resulting not only in a variety of
dangerous pathologies (such as ressentiment, the ‘bad conscience’ and
ascetic ideals) but also a stultifying over-‘domestication’ of man and
widespread ‘herd’ mentality that threaten to preclude those enhance-
ments of life beyond the level of bland mediocrity that alone can endow
human life with worth. Gehlen is much less ambivalent about this
phenomenon – or at any rate, he believes that our nature is what it is, for
better or for worse, and that we cannot survive and flourish without the
intensive and extensive normativization of human life by way of strong
social institutions. Like Gehlen, however, Nietzsche considers human
life to have been seriously endangered in terms of its basic viability by
its loss (or at any rate lack) of instincts that would enable humankind to
survive in their absence. This picture is at the heart of Gehlen’s ‘institu-
tion theory’, which thus may be seen as his development of a theme of
Nietzsche’s.
(6) For Gehlen as for Nietzsche, this emphasis upon the social character
of human existence does not entail the abandonment of a fundamen-
tally biological conception of human existence. Gehlen characterizes his
view of and approach to human existence as ‘anthropobiological’ – by
which he means an approach ‘that brings together the peculiar physical
structure of man and his complex and complicated inner life’ (Man,
p. 9); and that characterization could be used to describe Nietzsche’s as
well. But it diverges significantly from a sociobiological interpretation
of human as well as animal forms of life, in that it does not suppose
patterns of social behavior and social life to have been ‘selected for’ in an
evolutionary-biological process of Darwinian ‘natural selection’. Rather,
the basic idea to which both Nietzsche and Gehlen are attracted is that
human life is no longer a merely biologically driven affair, and now
requires to be comprehended in terms taking account of the ‘instinct
reduction’ that socialization has required, the replacement of instinctive
behavior by socially established forms of normativity, and the psycho-
logical consequences of the social restrictions placed upon the expres-
sion of our drives, desires and impulses. For Gehlen as for Nietzsche,
62 Richard Schacht
this ‘inhibition’ was and remains the key to all human spirituality, and
to the development and enrichment of the ‘inner life’ that has rendered
human reality a radically unique form of life.
(7) Gehlen follows Nietzsche in the further contention that both our
human morphology and general psychology and our higher intellectual
and spiritual abilities – including all elements of our ‘inner life’ are to be
conceived and explained in a broadly functional manner. Both agree that
we would not possess our various capacities if they were not needed or
useful for a creature of our sort – although it may be that that usefulness
was in the past, under different circumstances, and that under other
circumstances they can prove harmful.
(8) Nietzsche and Gehlen differ in their characterization of the func-
tionality that has been decisive in the development of our human
constitution. The central theme for Gehlen is ‘conditions of existence’
or ‘conditions of life’ very concretely understood – in a word: survival.
His ‘anthropobiological’ perspective is defined in terms of this concept
and human task. So his answer to the question ‘What then constitutes
the anthropobiological approach?’ is this: ‘It consists of answering
the question of what are the necessary conditions for man’s existence
[Existenzbedingungen]’. Man is said to be exceptional and incomparable
among living creatures because ‘he lacks the conditions for survival
which animals possess’. This raises the question: ‘What problems does
such a being face in simply staying alive and surviving?’ And for Gehlen
that means for it ‘to survive until tomorrow, next week, and next year’
(Man, p. 10). Gehlen here is clearly thinking of the survival of a human
being as a particular living creature. And he contends that our entire
inner life and our social and cultural life as well are to be so under-
stood. ‘The higher functions of imagination, language, thought, and so
forth ... must be necessary for survival ... ’ (Man, p. 12).
(9) Nietzsche at times was inclined to think in the same way; and
Gehlen seized upon and further developed this line of though. However,
Nietzsche also identified a quite different disposition – which he called
‘will to power’ – that in his view was more fundamental. In relation to
the ‘will to power’ he considered mere self-preservation and other such
dispositions to be only secondary or even deficient. Gehlen rejected
this idea, considering it to be lacking both in scientific value and in
plausibility. Simple survival, for Gehlen, is man’s ‘greatest challenge
and greatest accomplishment’ (Man, p. 10). Nietzsche would presum-
ably regard Gehlen’s entire ‘survival-anthropology’ in the same (critical)
way as he viewed the similar interpretations of our fundamental orien-
tation of Spinoza and Schopenhauer. This is a fundamental difference
between them and their anthropologies, which places Gehlen closer to

Schopenhauer than he is to Nietzsche in this respect.
(10) Gehlen does to some extent echo Nietzsche’s interpretation of
our constitution as power-oriented in his identification of ‘action’ as the
fundamental characteristic (Grundbestimmung) of human reality, and of
‘ability to work’ (Arbeitsfähigkeit) as compensating for our constitutional
deficiencies. It is even discernible in his contention that something more
than mere Darwinian ‘natural selection’ was involved in the transforma-
tion of ‘deficiency’ of fixed structures in man’s biological constitution
into a kind of advantage in the struggle for survival, by the flexibility
it made possible. Both for Gehlen and for Nietzsche there is something
fundamentally active in our human nature. But Gehlen departs from
Nietzsche in his contention that this active disposition is fundamen-
tally directed toward nothing more than mere individual survival. For
Nietzsche that is a deficient modality of the healthier sort of assertive-
ness that might be thought of on the model of attempting to have one’s
way with the world in whatever way one can.
(11) Nietzsche’s anthropology is a genealogical anthropology. He
emphasizes that ‘man has become’, and advocates an anthropology
that is attentive to the social and historical as well as biological devel-
opments that have contributed to the ‘becoming’ of the kind of crea-
ture we are, with the kinds of differences as well as similarities we
display and the kinds of possibilities (and vulnerabilities) we have.
His genealogical anthropology is (unfortunately) influenced, in some
respects, by his acceptance of the then-respectable but subsequently
discredited Lamarckian idea of the biological heritability of acquired
characteristics (that is, traits and tendencies developed within a crea-
ture’s lifetime). Gehlen, on the other hand, had nothing to do with
Lamarckism. He certainly grants that important aspects of what and
how we are have been developed – but only, on his view, as compen-
sations for our deficiencies that can be transmitted by instruction or
imitation, and without alteration of our basic constitution. He main-
tains that man is an organically deficient and therefore world-open
being – that is, a being that is able to function in many sorts of envi-
ronment. What changes, according to him, is not our fundamental
structure, but rather what is done with it. His basic idea is that the
various deficiencies in our human constitution, which viewed from
the perspective of our survival as a type of living creature are a great
challenge, burden, and problem, have been turned to our advantage as
a different sort of means of existence by making flexible activity and
purposive action humanly possible.
64 Richard Schacht
(12) If everything that man has made of himself in these ways can
only be sustained and transmitted culturally, then Gehlen’s anxiety
about humanity’s future is quite understandable. But if that is so, this
also poses the question of how such a constitutionally deficient crea-
ture could have come into existence in the first place, and could have
existed long enough to be able to develop the compensatory traits and
abilities that Gehlen describes. Nietzsche shares this concern. He is,
however, rather more optimistic than Gehlen, because he is convinced
of something that Gehlen doubts: the long-term alterability as well as
the short-term stability of our constitution, through the development of
a significant interaction between our biological nature and the contin-
gently changing social conditions of human life. And this idea is inde-
pendent of Nietzsche’s Lamarckism. This difference is among the most
important ones between them.
IV
Gehlen was certainly right about one thing: although he and Nietzsche
disagree on some points, his philosophical anthropology owes much
to Nietzsche’s thinking with respect to human reality. Indeed, in my
view one of Gehlen’s most important contributions to philosophical
anthropology as a movement was that he emphasizes and makes much
of this aspect of Nietzsche’s thought, and attempts to carry on with it. In
doing so he presents us with an exemplary instance of how one might
proceed with such a task – by which I mean both Nietzsche’s project of
a (non-scientistic) ‘naturalizing’ reinterpretation of human reality and
the project of a philosophical anthropology.
Gehlen remarked to me that in his opinion it is no longer possible
for a single philosopher to work out a systematic and comprehensive
philosophical anthropology of the sort he attempted to develop in Der
Mensch and its sequels. His reason was that there is simply too much
relevant science that needs to be taken into account. In the future, he
suggested, such a project will have to be pursued as a collective and
collaborative effort. That was quite some time ago. If this was already
so then, it is even more so today. Nietzsche himself expressed a similar
thought and worry long before that, in Beyond Good and Evil (§205). Yet
we still will need the kind of astuteness and audacity we find in both
Nietzsche and Gehlen – the ability and willingness to think in a compre-
hensively insightful way through and then beyond fragmentary philo-
sophical investigations and scientific inquiries, and to venture broader
interpretations not only of aspects of human reality but of that reality as

whatever kind of whole it is.
In conclusion: I find myself in complete agreement with Nietzsche
and Gehlen with respect to the need for a reinterpretation of ourselves
as Menschen of the sort that Nietzsche called for and began, and that
Gehlen subsequently developed in Der Mensch and elsewhere under
the banner of ‘philosophical anthropology’. The fact that Gehlen’s
own version of a philosophical anthropology is no more satisfactory
than is Nietzsche’s must be admitted, but is no objection to the project
itself, and does not diminish the significance of their efforts. The chal-
lenge is to improve upon them, learning from what is problematic as
well as from what is insightful in their thought and work. If (or when)
philosophers of the future attempt to do so, I believe that Nietzsche will
continue to be important as a point of departure – as he was for Gehlen,
and as he has been for me. And I believe that they will do well to become
acquainted with Gehlen too – not as a point of departure, perhaps, but
as a challenge. Criticizing Gehlen is not difficult, and differing with him
is easy; but improving upon him is a genuine accomplishment.
References
Gehlen, A. (1988) Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. by C. McMillan
and K. Pillemer (New York: Columbia University Press) = Man.
Nietzsche, F. (1967–1978) Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Berlin: Walter
de Gruyter & Co.).
Nietzsche, F. (1966) Human, All Too Human, trans. by R.J. Hollingdale (New York
and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) = HH.
Other specific works by Nietzsche cited (my translations)

Beyond Good and Evil = BGE
The Gay Science = GS
On the Genealogy of Morals = GM
Thus Spoke Zarathustra = TSZ
3
Hans Blumenberg: Philosophical
Anthropology and the Ethics of
Consolation
Vida Pavesich
Preface: consolation and Kant’s fourth question
In Beschreibung des Menschen [Description of Humankind], Blumenberg

claims that consolation [Tröst] ‘played a decisive role in anthropogenesis’,
that it made the unbearableness of human contingency bearable (2006,
p. 626). Although consolation may be a pat on the back when times
are bad, its anthropological function is complex. Consolation embraces
and soothes the existential vulnerability for which there ultimately is
no solace [Untröstlichkeit]. Consolation presupposes a complex inter-
subjective and cognitive reflexivity as well as an empathic perspective-
taking capacity, which is a source of ethical reflection (2006, p. 651).1
And although consolation is not equivalent to care, as for example in
Heidegger’s ontology or in the ethics of care literature, care for oneself
and for others, as well as cooperation (ideally) depend on a capacity for
consolation. That is, they depend on being able to put oneself empathi-
cally in the shoes of others, which is the precursor to compassion. This
1
According to Frans de Waal and Joshua M. Plotnick, consolation behavior is
rare in other species, with the exception of great apes, canines, corvids, and possibly
elephants. They attribute this rarity to the underlying cognitive mechanisms that
allow for empathic perspective taking and reflexivity. See http://www.emory.edu/
LIVING_LINKS/publications/articles/Plotnik_deWaal_2014.pdf. De Waal also notes
(2009, pp. 139–143), that most animals perform altruistic behavior without payoffs
in mind and so in a sense their altruism is more genuine. How humans avail them-
selves of their more developed perspective taking capacities is another question.
66
Hans Blumenberg and the Ethics of Consolation 67
is normatively significant, for as Blumenberg states in Work on Myth,

‘Only an assessment of the risk involved in the human mode of exist-
ence makes it possible to discuss and to evaluate functionally the
behavior that was serviceable in mastering it, and to take seriously the
tentative inclination to be able to avail ourselves of such serviceability
again’ (1985, p. 111). It follows that preserving positive human capaci-
ties – which are deeply rooted in our evolutionary history – ought to
receive serious ethical consideration. In addition, Blumenberg connects
ethics to the preservation of the ‘human’. A detailed discussion of the
‘human’ and its relation to consolation will be deferred to the section on
ethics. However, the nodal point of Blumenberg’s anthropology is the
complex claim that the preservation of a human world, and even happi-
ness (2006, p. 646), involves compensating for the provisional nature of
our existence. Consolation is one such compensation.
Philosophical anthropology and consolation are best viewed in rela-
tion to Blumenberg’s view that we have ‘forgotten man’ and that it is still
worth pondering Kant’s famous fourth question, ‘What is the human
being?’ Kant did not forward a crystal clear answer to his question
despite claiming that asking what we can know, should do, and ought
to hope should all be referred to it (Kant, p. 538). Although Blumenberg
rejects essentialist answers – ‘What remains as the subject matter of
anthropology is a “human nature” that has never been “nature” and
never will be’ (1988, p. 456) – he defends asking Kant’s questions, which
he reformulates to reflect changes since Kant. ‘Can we remember what it
is we once wanted to know?’ ‘How is the human being possible?’ (2006,
p. 535). Restating the claims central to philosophical anthropology is
a normative enterprise because asking about the possibility of human
existence helps us to sharpen our focus on what we most fundamen-
tally need, especially in light of the ethical vacuum created by a long
celebration of antihumanism and dislocations stemming from acceler-
ating technological and other types of change. Retrieving a notion of
the human demonstrates the relevance of philosophical anthropology
as an alternative both to antihumanism and to dissolution of ques-
tions about ‘man’ into reductive naturalisms. Fred Dallmayr claims
that antihumanism, with its tendency to slide into dehumanization, is
beginning to ebb and make room for a ‘subdued, self-critical ... nonhe-
gemonic view of the “human’”, which includes a turn to philosophical
anthropology (2013, pp. 360–361). Clearly the forces Dallmayr refers to
as inhumane – accelerating change, overconsumption, and so on – mili-
tate against the compassion that Blumenberg centralizes in Description
of Mankind. Philosophical anthropology might be understood as a
68 Vida Pavesich
tempered humanism, one that was there all along in the occluded tradi-
tion of philosophical anthropology.
Blumenberg and his intellectual context: Husserl, Heidegger,

and philosophical anthropology
Husserl and Heidegger

Blumenberg, born in 1920, came of age philosophically in a climate
shaped by Husserl and Heidegger, both of whom rejected the philo-
sophical anthropology of their day (for example, Max Scheler) as reduc-
tive and anthropocentric. Despite this, Blumenberg defends Husserl’s
phenomenological method, which he adapts to construct a ‘phenom-
enological anthropology’2 that would be immune to charges lodged
against anthropology. Husserl had aimed to penetrate the taken-for-
grantedness of experience by bracketing beliefs in the natural world
and to thematize and describe the a priori of the ways in which the
world is given to the subject and how the subject intentionally consti-
tutes its objects. Husserl hoped to discover a rational structure that
could be intuited and would open the door to ultimate certainties. For
Blumenberg, however, what remains for Husserl is an ‘absolute subject’
or ‘reason as such’ that does not belong to the world.3 Blumenberg,
unlike Husserl (and Descartes before him), rejects the quest for certainty,
refusing to model philosophy on scientific ideals of knowledge, which
would banish the concrete finite being from the theoretical scene (1988,
p. 437). Because Husserl’s search for absolute evidence contradicts the
limits of finitude, his transcendental phenomenological method should
be recast to describe the phenomenon of the finite being. This in turn
reconfigures what have been taken to be the higher faculties of man,
such as disinterested reason, which Blumenberg sees as a ‘cultural trans-
formation of life-serving and life-promoting instruments deployed by
finite human beings in their struggle for existence’ (2006, p. 520). I will
say more about Blumenberg’s understanding of rationality later.
On the surface it appears that Blumenberg has more in common with
Heidegger. Heidegger also claimed that Husserl’s focus on conscious-
ness and the theoretical subject was too divorced from the realities and
2
See discussions of Blumenberg’s phenomenological anthropology in
Heidenreich (2005), Müller (2005), and Pavesich (2003).
3
See Franz Josef Wetz (2009, p. 394), and Cesar Gonzalez Canton and Stephane
Dirschauer’s reviews of Blumenberg’s Beschreibung des Menschen (2009).
pressures of the spatiotemporal world. Blumenberg agrees with Heidegger

about facing up to contingency; however, he questions Heidegger’s
assumption that Dasein, as a being-in-the-world alongside other beings
can be the starting point for philosophy. An explanation of how we have
become beings-in-the-world is necessary. In other words, Heidegger’s
fundamental ontology obscures the need for self-preservation and fails
to see that the philosophical import of finitude is precisely its lack of
self-evidence.
Blumenberg thereby modulates the anthropocentricism charge. He
wants to clarify the frame of reference within which we make claims
by interrogating the relationship between groundlessness and the
possibility of existence. Heidegger has ignored the ‘long prehistory’ by
means of which the species ‘deprived itself of an immediate relation
to its abysses’ (1985, p. 110). Here Blumenberg refers to the millennia-
long-work of mimesis, ritual, and myth that stabilized human exist-
ence and distanced it from an anxiety-provoking vulnerability. Given
this, Blumenberg sees no reason for Heidegger to valorize anxiety as
the possible harbinger of an authentic existence. Heidegger may be
correct to identify how Care, as the ‘Being of Dasein’ is disclosed in
states of anxiety in the face of nothingness, but this groundlessness is
best understood as Arnold Gehlen’s Mängelwesen – a biologically defi-
cient being burdened with cares and anxious about lacking guarantees
for its continuing being-in-the-world. The upshot is that rather than
Heidegger’s being-toward-death in a futural sense, human beings survive
and stabilize their existence by continually distancing themselves from
the prior problems of biological vulnerability and various breakdowns
or sudden losses of adaptation. Anthropogenetically, the reference point
for all subsequent adaptations, was the change in biotope that coincided
with the emergence of an upright, large-brained, prematurely born
species that could neither fight nor flee its existential situation and was
therefore driven to adapt or perish.
If cultural adaptations and rationality are solutions to the problem
of contingency, then immediate relations to Heideggerian abysses are
impossible and run counter to an accurate appraisal of the true risks
associated with existence. Like Heidegger, Blumenberg is concerned
with ‘retrieval’, but this means retrieving the rationalities sufficient to
address the problem of various absolutisms with which humans have
to cope, such as theological absolutism at the close of the middle ages
(The Legitimacy of the Modern Age [1983]), technological acceleration,
various utopias, and so on, all of which resonate with the need to nego-
tiate the absolutism (contingency) at the heart of biological existence.
70 Vida Pavesich
Reason, as a cultural adaptation, should renounce certainty – renounce

the desire to answer a metaphysical question with inadequate means.
Human beings operate on what Blumenberg calls a ‘principle of insuf-
ficient reason’. This means that the pressure of contingency (where
Heidegger’s nothingness overlaps with Gehlen’s Mängelwesen), which
is amplified by modern conditions but a constant nonetheless, moti-
vates problem solving or the provision of ‘sufficient reasons’ to continue
existing. Both (rational) competence and the work of philosophy must
reference this anthropological feature rather than an outmoded meta-
physical essence. We are not left without reference points. As for Kant,
humankind is capable of rationality, but this idea must be enlarged
to address the function of our common sense social reality, which
Blumenberg refers to as ‘rhetoric’ – modes of provisional rationality
comprised by the symbolic structuring of a lifeworld.
Philosophy is not relative to a conception of human nature, because
human beings have no nature. To foreground the problem of biological
contingency and its compensations underscores the limits of inquiries
and does not privilege any specific content or image. Specific content
may provide a historical foothold for interpretation, but this does not
centralize a conception of human nature (Heidegger’s charge against the
German anthropologists). Nor does this anthropology of deficiencies
lead back to a discussion of Heidegger’s Being. It is an ‘anthropological
optic’, delineating a frame of reference for inquiry based on real existen-
tial limits.
Gehlen and Alsberg4

In ‘An Anthropological Approach to the Contemporary Significance
of Rhetoric’, Blumenberg addresses Gehlen’s ‘creature of deficiencies’,
going on to describe ‘man’ in the ‘language of biological anthropology’
as ‘a creature who has fallen back out of the ordered arrangements that
nature has accomplished’ (1988, p. 433).5 Echoing Gehlen, he claims
that action compensates for the ‘indeterminateness’ of the creature
man. By action, both Gehlen and Blumenberg mean that purely reactive
4
Gehlen and Alsberg were not the only philosophical anthropologists who
influenced Blumenberg, but Gehlen’s notion of the Mängelwesen and Alsberg’s
emphasis on ‘distance’ are key concepts. Certainly, Helmuth Plessner, Erich
Rothacker (his teacher), his friend Hans Jonas, and many others were part of
the intellectual context. Length considerations preclude consideration of these
figures.
5
See also (2009, pp. 217–218), for a discussion of Gehlen.
or stimulus-response behavior proved inadequate after the change in

biotope. Humans had to develop foresight and conscious control of
behavior. Gehlen, who wanted to develop a purely empirical anthro-
pology, captured the idea of human vulnerability – in contrast to
other animals – as ‘world openness’, as instinctually poverty. As such,
humans are in dire need of stabilization, which requires nonnatural
solutions: ecologies of compensation in the form of a normatively struc-
tured life-world, composed of language, morals, various habits, skills,
meaningful occupations, and so on, which he summarized with the
term ‘institutions’ – a concept Blumenberg also appropriates. Gehlen
emphasized how compensatory behavior patterns then become ‘quasi-
automatic’, thereby maintaining stability by restricting the latitude of
action (Gehlen, 1988, p. 76). In short, human beings address the prob-
lems posed by their lack of biological specialization by acting rather
than reacting to circumstances within the context of a lifeworld that
supports, shapes, informs, and stabilizes biological plasticity. The term
‘compensation’ refers to all acquired modes of living, including forms
of social recognition that have become institutionalized and internal-
ized, whether benign, oppressive, salutary, or some mixture of these. For
Gehlen, human beings are so threatened with modernity’s exacerbation
of their contingency that institutions should be preserved indiscrimi-
nately. Hence his philosophical anthropology was congenial to the rise
of National Socialism. For Blumenberg, this Hobbesian ‘absolutism of
institutions’ (1988, p. 439) amounts to a renunciation of responsibility
for criticism and reform.6 He would doubtless say that Gehlen’s anthro-
pology is incomplete in another way – it ignores the capacity for conso-
lation that is also an evolutionary achievement.
Blumenberg has special praise for Paul Alsberg, whose book Das
Menschheitsrätel [The Riddle of Man] (1922) was rewritten and updated as
In Quest of Man: A Biological Approach to the Problem of Man’s Place in Nature
(1970).7 Alsberg shares the premise of biological underdetermination
6
For the history of philosophical anthropology’s eclipse, see Axel Honneth
and Hans Joas (1988). Gehlen’s Nazi sympathies and Heidegger’s excoriation
of Scheler’s and Cassirer’s philosophical anthropology, along with Heidegger’s
insistence that Daseinsanalysis was no philosophical anthropology, were also
responsible. In addition, the anthropologists were interested in biology, which
at that time was mired in preformationist and Social Darwinist assumptions. For
an account of the complicated relationship between Blumenberg, Heidegger, and
Cassirer, see Pavesich (2008).
7
See Blumenberg’s discussion of Alsberg (2006, pp. 575–579, 584–600).
72 Vida Pavesich
with the anthropologists Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen. Seeking what he

calls ‘the start of man’, Alsberg emphasizes how early humans’ increas-
ingly skillful tool use distanced them from existential dangers and
became our species’ primary means of adaptation. Alsberg claims that
‘by making extra-bodily defense his exclusive life-protecting device, one
that was instinctively adopted, practiced and furthered by each following
generation, [man] created a new situation in which the use of artificial
tools became automatically incorporated in his evolutionary scheme’ (1970,
p. 132). Alsberg refers to this as ‘body-liberation’, a subjecting of tools,
and later technology, rather than the body to evolutionary processes.
The new ‘intimate interplay’ between systematic tool-use and brain
development, emerged out of a dire need to cope with environmental
stresses, which ushered in a shift from ‘the animal to the human prin-
ciple of evolution’ (1970, pp. 136–137).
What Blumenberg takes away from this is Alsberg’s emphasis on
creating ‘distance’ from a threatening reality, in a literal sense. Unable to
fight or flee, and now lacking the protection of forests, humans became
more visible as prey and thus had to develop compensatory skills and
aptitudes, such as tool use and a culture, which by creating distance
shielded the frail body (Blumenberg, 2006, p. 591). Of a piece with this
is the stereoscopic vision associated with an upright posture. Vision is
‘action at a distance’, enabling the species to prevent unwanted occur-
rences (2006, p. 586). However, the increased horizon also coincided
with the loss of a certain visual acuity, for which the development of
intelligence compensated (2006, p. 591). Intelligence depends on the
development of memory – another form of ‘action at a distance’ – crucial
for foresight (2006, p. 583). The ever-increasing capacity to direct atten-
tion selectively prevents the species from being at the mercy of contin-
gencies and overrides reactive behavior – a highly adaptive capacity for
an unspecialized species.
The principle of hominization as cultural distancing is not a typical
solution to the problem of the self-assertion [Selbstbehauptung] of life on
earth; it is surprising (novel) and unusual to subject technical means
and culture to evolution to minimize selection pressures on bodies
(2006, p. 585). The upshot is to correlate increasing biological despe-
cialization and learning to survive in many environments and eat many
types of diet (2006, p. 589). Our versatility, with its rich array of adapta-
tions, were conserved phylogenetically and passed on ontogenetically.
That is, we became historical beings, whose complex cultural transmis-
sion conferred a kind of ‘resilience’, which Blumenberg identifies as an
anthropological ‘constant’ (2006, p. 591).
Philosophical anthropology and the natural sciences

Work in contemporary biological sciences supports the biological
underdetermination thesis. As organisms become more complex they
become more ‘detached’ or less integrated naturally into an environ-
ment. Thus, they must become increasingly more involved in their own
niche construction. Ever greater levels of what Gehlen called ‘world
openness’, and which we now call ‘biological plasticity’, thus coincides
with increasing endogenous and adaptive phenotypic plasticity and
effective evolutionary novelty. Recent research accentuates the role of
epigenetic models of phenotypic stabilization and inheritance.8 All of
this emphasizes the flexibility and increasing degrees of internal freedom
(potential for self-generated adaptability) that accompany all higher-
level organisms. As organisms and animals become more complex, they
also become increasingly susceptible to contingent relationships and
formations, a process that culminates in the most detached animal, the
human being.9 Thus, the human being is the most vulnerable because it
is the most underdetermined and emotionally labile species; so it must
become more self-directing to manage the ever more complex and vari-
able circumstances to which it might be exposed. There is, as Alsberg
states, a ‘new category, one in which Life, now based on freedom, reaches
a higher level of integration’. Nonetheless, as Blumenberg adds, success is
not programmed in. The species can ‘fail’ and, what is more, it can know
that it can fail. For Blumenberg, therefore, the first proposition of a phil-
osophical anthropology must be, as he claims in ‘The Anthropological
Significance of Contemporary Rhetoric’: ‘it cannot be taken for granted
that man is able to exist’ (1988, p. 438). In Description of Mankind
Blumenberg refers to man as the ‘impossible being’ (2006, p. 535), an
‘improbability made flesh’ (2006, p. 550). Kasper Lysemose, puts it this
way: philosophical anthropology is about trying to understand ‘how a
being without a nature is possible within nature’ (2013, p. 50).
Because Blumenberg had access to more up-to-date research in the
natural sciences than his predecessors, and because contemporary
biology is somewhat less mired in preformationist assumptions and
8
See especially Mary Jane West-Eberhard (2003).
9
For more on recent biological research, see Lenny Moss and Vida Pavesich
(2011) and Lenny Moss (2006). Drawing in part on the work of Maynard Olson,
and arguing against ‘preformationism’, Moss claims that ‘human evolution is due
to a “less is more” phenomenon – that the loss of genes plays the most important
role in opening up a new phenotypic possibility space’ (p. 936).
74 Vida Pavesich
does not carry a Social Darwinist taint, he was in a better position to

bring the sciences to bear on addressing questions about how such a
being is possible. Work on Myth offered a speculative anthropogenesis,
but Description of Humankind makes more use of paleoanthropology and
evolutionary anthropology and biology, which support the accounts in
Work on Myth and in ‘The Anthropological Significance of Contemporary
Rhetoric’. Blumenberg does not reduce philosophy to science or assume
that philosophical anthropology will be a ‘standalone science’. ‘The task
of philosophy lies neither before, nor above, nor between the sciences;
the most acceptable approach, I would suggest, is to locate the place of
philosophy after the sciences’ (2006, p. 481). As Franz Josef Wetz claims,
Blumenberg offers us ‘an existential description of the human being
that science investigates as one particular species of the animal realm.
Blumenberg exploits, so to speak, the results of the positive sciences for
the elaboration and development of his own distinctive anthropolog-
ical investigations’ (2009, p. 395). Hence, Blumenberg’s reformulation
of Kant’s fourth question does not elevate our species or deny its overlap
with other species. It realistically and soberly appraises the difficulties
our biology poses and assesses the competencies that made human exist-
ence possible. Contemporary science confirms the underdetermination
thesis, and philosophical anthropology examines the significance of our
‘second nature’. Only then is it possible to assess what it might mean
to flourish.
Cassirer: biological plasticity and our second nature –

the Animal Symbolicum
For Blumenberg, we are not simply the consequence of organic evolu-
tion (2006, p. 490). Through ‘creative symbolism’ our species makes itself
‘at home in worlds of [its] own’ (1988, p. 433; p. 428). Some accounting
of how both tools and symbols make life possible is required. Like Ernst
Cassirer, Blumenberg understands humans as symbolic animals who have
the capacity to express existence in linguistic, mythical, religious, ethical,
aesthetic, and physical worlds. Symbols, too, are proxies for bodily evolu-
tion. ‘The organic system resulting from the mechanism of evolution
becomes “man” by evading the pressure of that mechanism by setting
against it something like a phantom body. This is the sphere of his culture,
his institutions – and also his myths’ (Blumenberg, 1985, p. 165).
The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms: The Metaphysics of Symbolic Forms
(Volume IV) was written at various stages in Cassirer’s career and published
posthumously. In a section entitled ‘The Problem of the Symbol as the
Fundamental Problem of Philosophical Anthropology’ (1928), Cassirer
asserts that the philosophy of symbolic forms (language, art, science)

is the key to a proper philosophical anthropology. The achievements
of intelligence and creative work ‘intersect with bodily existence’. Man
is no longer the ‘subject-object of science ... but the subject-object of
culture’. Cassirer claims, ‘we can predict that the fundamental answer
to the question of the “essential concept” of mankind which it [phil-
osophical anthropology] seeks can come only from a philosophy of
“symbolic forms”’, which mediate distance and proximity to the world
(1996, pp. 36–38). For Cassirer, the starting point should be the concept
and structure of this configuration, which distinguishes humankind
from all other living creatures.
Although Blumenberg praises Cassirer and agrees with the media-
tion thesis, he criticizes Cassirer for assuming an unquestioned biolog-
ical support for symbolic forms. Blumenberg reinterprets Cassirer’s
philosophy of symbolic forms functionally to address the problem of
human groundlessness emphasized by Heidegger, which of course he
reinterpreted as a ‘loss of biological security’ (1985, p. 169). So, from
Blumenberg’s perspective, the arena in which perspective taking,
empathy, and consolation, for example, can occur is rooted in how
the symbolic structuring of the world ‘distances’ humans from what
would be an unbearable – and indeed impossible – absolute contin-
gency. Culture – a lifeworld – does not express a given nature, as Cassirer
would have it. Culture and finding significance in the world are them-
selves forms of consolation because to varying degrees they free us from
being at the beck and call of biological contingency. For example, the
consoling rituals, symbols, and stories that emerged early in hominid
evolution regulated emotion and provided group cohesion.10
Blumenberg also disagrees with Cassirer’s claim that there is a final
system of symbolic forms or that they measure progress toward a future.
If removal away from contingency is the criterion, the function of
10
Consolation will be discussed in more detail later, but Blumenberg uses
the term to refer to how institutions, such as myths and rituals, which substi-
tute a familiar world for one alien to our needs, are forms of consolation for the
species. On an individual level, consolation respects and makes bearable human
suffering.
According to Randall Collins (2004, ch. 1), ritual continues to be a source of
social cohesion in daily life, because through rituals individuals share emotions,
experiences, heightened mutual awareness, and solidarity. Matt Rosano specu-
lates that late Paleolithic campfire rituals of focused attention ‘enhanced [the]
working memory capacity required for symbolic thinking’ and was a critical
factor in the success of homo sapiens (2007, p. 47).
76 Vida Pavesich
‘form as such’ is a ‘means of self-preservation and stability in the world’

(1985, p. 168). All ‘form’, whether symbols, rituals, myths, or rationality,
distances us from groundlessness.
Anthropogenesis: concepts and constants
The absolutism of reality and the lifeworld

This section introduces Blumenberg’s speculative anthropogenesis in Work
on Myth, which continues the theme of understanding culture and form
functionally as self-preservation and because Description of Humankind
is best read in relation to the schema formulated in Work on Myth. The
discussion of consolation is deferred to the next section, where it can be
integrated into the exposition of Blumenberg’s anthropology and mapped
out as a key to understanding ethical reflection. Work on Myth begins with
a discussion of the change in biotope, the adoption of an upright posture,
and what it means ‘that man came close to not having control of the
conditions of his existence and, what is more important, believed that he
simply lacked control of them’ (1985, p. 4). As cognitive scientist Merlin
Donald describes this: ‘A human being is thus a remarkable paradox: bound
by the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology like every other species; yet
aware of being so bound, and quite capable of feeling anxious about that
condition’ (2008, pp. 46–49). In Blumenberg’s schema, this vulnerability
has a necessary counterpart, a reality wholly other and beyond human
control, the ‘absolutism of reality’ – a limit concept Blumenberg believes
is justified by the ‘common core of all currently respected theories on the
subject of anthropogenesis’ (1985, p. 4). That is, if the biologically vulner-
able creature is understood as a limit condition – as the vanishing point
of human existence – then the Mängelwesen represents the fact that no
biological, practical, or metaphysically guaranteed orientations are given
with the conditions of existence. Like no one else, Blumenberg has asked
us to think through the implications of these facts.
The absolutism of reality is, as Barbara Merker claims, a phenomenon of
consciousness, known (represented) only because humankind has coped
with the loss it represents (1999, p. 81). As a concept, the absolutism
of reality can become a horizon for reflecting on how the familiar life-
world of symbolic forms and institutions are antidotes for a reality that
would otherwise be ‘nothing but a chaotic stream of impulses’ (See Sels,
2013, p. 9). Thus, a perfect life-world – an impossible perfect congruence
between the creature and its world – is a limit concept parallel to the
absolutism of reality. It reflects and represents the desire for atemporal
reference points, such as those once hoped for from myth and traditional
metaphysics; and although human beings in some sense need these as part
of a cosmos of meaning, they too are not given. Historical existence can
be mapped out between these two limits; we become human by means of
a sedimented history of symbolic constructs. And, because the problem
of human self-preservation does not solve itself, we must become ‘self-
assertive’, intensely involved in our own niche construction. Self-assertion
[Selbstbehauptung] includes the desire, impulse, and action necessary to
resist subsumption by an indifferent reality. Because self-assertion tends
to exceed or fail to acknowledge limits, an idea of the human as a mean
between the equally impossible extremes of chaos and perfect orientation
emerges from Blumenberg’s anthropogenetic reflections. Blumenberg’s
anthropology, thus far, can be characterized as a self-assertive autonomy
within the limits posed by biological vulnerability – a form of existence
motivated by a desire for self-preservation and stabilized by an intersub-
jective and meaningful lifeworld that limits arbitrariness.
Myth, or what Blumenberg terms the work of myth, was the initial
response to reality’s absolutism. The term ‘myth’ compresses a series
of millennia-long-stages, a buffer already behind us that has digested
the absolutism of reality problem piecemeal by telling stories that over
time did not conflict with reality and narrated a successful accommo-
dation to it (1985, p. 99). Anxiety, boredom, and meaninglessness are
merely reminders that the problem is never definitively solved. Later, in
Description of Mankind, Blumenberg refers to such anthropological solu-
tions functionally as a heterogeneous set of ‘corrections of difficulties
and adaptations’. Existential risk is common to all living species, but for
humans survival is about producing biological surrogates, having learned
to specialize in ‘getting out of extreme situations’ or perish. Humans
can make mistakes in how they construe existence, can be unlucky, and
can be tricked, existence can become degraded, and they can fail (2006,
p. 550). This has not changed – for example, a substantial number of
people in the U.S. believe that climate change is a hoax, which may
have far reaching consequences for human (and other species’) viability.
As Blumenberg states: damaging factors can take root in an instant and
have irreversible consequences (2006, p. 552).
Distance, the concept, saving time, and resilience

In Description of Mankind, Blumenberg articulates forcefully a series of
anthropological constants that create ‘distance’. These constants include
the concept, resilience, saving time [Zeitgewinn], and consolation. What
does Blumenberg mean by the term ‘concept’? As vulnerable beings,
we are plagued with anxiety, which Blumenberg traces to the added
78 Vida Pavesich
visibility associated with an upright posture.11 Suddenly more vulner-

able to attack, we also have a horizon that confers a wide visual scope
and therefore more freedom from impulsive fight or flight reactions.
The erect gait also meant ‘the emancipation of the foremost extremities’,
that is, the hand (2006, p. 575). Such freedom led to tool making and
expressive gesture. However, even though visibility is a double-edged
sword (we can be seen without our awareness), it is a preliminary of the
conceptual instrumentality needed for survival (2006, p. 566). By main-
taining distance from objects, we transcend some of the limitations of
the other senses. Learning to imagine something in its absence and to
anticipate threats means the freedom to pursue options and survive in
many environments. Blumenberg sees in the anxious awareness of ‘dead
ends’ the impetus to feel our way toward a goal – to begin to conceptu-
alize alternatives. Concepts and reason are thus modes of distance. As
Blumenberg claims in Work on Myth, ‘reason signifies coming to terms
with something – and in the extreme case, with the world’ (1985, p. 490).
Hence, the emergence of concepts and rationality are potentially modes
of ‘prevention’ based on the capacity for foresight.
Blumenberg argues that the corrective to misconstruing reason is to
examine its evolutionary function and to appreciate that it, just like
human existence itself, was a contingent adaptation to a perilous situ-
ation. Broadening what counts as reason, he claims: ‘Reason may have
been the last resort and desperate device of this particular organic
system for coming to terms with distressing features ... that characterize
the very conditions of its existence’ (2006, p. 520). Reason is ‘the sum
of all presumptive, anticipatory, and also provisional achievements’, a
capacity we possess because we have learned to achieve delay and hesi-
tation, not the other way around (2006, p. 559). Long before it was
made into a noble cultural achievement and defining characteristic of
the human species, reason was a developmental compensation (2006,
p. 490). Perhaps this anthropogenetic story will help dethrone the
autonomous, self-determining subject that has been at the center of so
much of moral theory. At the same time, this story elucidates how self-
determination and autonomy are as a matter of course intersubjectively
embedded in a cluster of self-assertive modes of life within the cradle of
collective human cultural achievements, which themselves are contin-
gent but stabilizing artifacts that foster ‘resilience’.
11
Blumenberg also reminds us of the association between the upright posture
and dignity (2006, p. 518).
Resilience depends on another ‘anthropological category’ – saving

time [Zeitgewinn]. Given that our advanced cerebral powers are not
the product of biological evolution – biology ‘does not train, alter, or
enhance brain development’ (2006, p. 608), we are ineluctably historical
beings whose continuance depends on transmitting cultural learning
to offspring. This ‘saves time’ because the species does not begin from
scratch with each new generation or with each new individual. Had
we not become historical beings, our species would not have survived
after the change in biotope. Given the lack of definitive solutions to the
problem of contingency, Blumenberg does not rule out this threat in the
future. Nor does he rule out further changes in the brain (2006, p. 542;
p. 548).
Blumenberg makes much of the radical fear of indeterminateness that
must have emerged with the change in biotope (2006, pp. 566–567),
an anxiety that continues to accompany breakdowns in social and
cultural continuity. He also refers to impulse control and the canal-
izing of emotions, which had to involve social bonding and cooperative
behavior, even though he draws little attention to how all the compe-
tencies are intersubjective and presuppose emotional bonding. Taming
impulses and reactive behavior through ritual, storytelling, and myth
are collective enterprises, but his ontogenetic treatment of this issue is
thin given his overall concern with the emergence of anthropogenetic
constants on a species-wide level. References to ontogenesis are brief
and related to how it stabilizes and conserves phylogenetic changes.
The next section supplements Blumenberg’s anthropogenetic story with
recent research on these undertheorized moments in his thought, which
is the bridge back to locating the ethical impulse in anthropological
reflection and in ‘consolation’.
Consolation as distance – an ‘achievement of vulnerability’

Blumenberg opens his essay on consolation, ‘Tröst und Untröstlichkeit
des Menschen’ in Beschreibung des Menschen, with reflections on
Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae. Boethius claims that philosophy
should console rather than provide the truth, which Blumenberg takes
to heart. Consolation, and presumably philosophy, helps us to ‘bear the
unbearable’. He notes that people are often contemptuous of those who
seek and give comfort, seeing this as weakness and escapism. However,
he quickly moves on to how the capacity for giving and receiving conso-
lation reveals something distinctive about our species. Consolation is
a ‘special category’ that leads into the complex of ‘characteristics that
philosophical anthropology thematizes’ (2006, p. 623), which means
80 Vida Pavesich
the ‘constants’ that emerged because ‘man cannot get help in elemen-
tary ways’ (2006, p. 626). As an emotionally labile species, humans have
ongoing and sometimes acute needs for assurance, especially when
breakdowns from situational vulnerabilities, such as natural disasters,
illnesses, loss of family members and friends, betrayals, oppressive situ-
ations that aggravate a feeling of powerlessness, and so on, occur. Losses
of continuity also accompany developmental stages in childhood, which
highlight human dependence on and need for others. Humans crave
solicitous attention in order to bear the anxiety and pain that arises
from brushes with the absolutism of reality.
Importantly, consolation presupposes the development of reflexivity
and perspective taking. Humans suffer, but they are also conscious of
suffering and of the need for sympathetic others. There is thus the para-
doxical suffering of suffering that consolation assuages. For example,
everyone understands how ‘distortions of the face’ divert the suffering
by announcing the pain to a receptive other (2006, p. 624). Suffering
can be ‘delegated’ – diffused by the rituals of consolation that allow
for symbolic processing of emotion. Thus, consolation distances; it is a
detour that puts off future moments of time, allowing for assimilating
emotions and managing disappointments. Humans are vulnerable to
others when they seek consolation, and the rituals express ‘respect’,
which has a ‘protective function’ (2006, p. 628). Ultimately, consola-
tion derives its significance in human experience from the fact that at
our limit there is no consolation [Untröstlichkeit]. ‘Consolation appears
when reality cannot be changed’ (2006, p. 624), and thus the rituals
and institutions of consolation have formed in which respect and trust
compensate. In all of this, there is a moment of ‘freedom’, because there
is distance (2006, p. 631).
To get at why Blumenberg sees in consolation a source of ethical reflec-
tion, it is critical to understand how it humanizes us. The situations in
which consolation is absent throw into relief its significance, namely
how fundamental trust, respect, and sharing emotion are to human
existence. Jean Amery, a Holocaust survivor, describes his experience of
torture and how all ‘trust in the world [broke] down’ when he received
the first blow (1980, p. 28).12 He goes on to say:
12
For an account of the significance of trust, see J.M. Bernstein (2015), who
refers to trust as the ‘substance of ethical life’. Blumenberg also points out that
humans had to learn to substitute consolation for violence (2006, p. 633).
The expectation of help, the certainty of help, is indeed one of the

fundamental experiences of human beings, and probably also of
animals ... . The expectation of help is as much a constitutional psychic
element as is the struggle for existence. Just a moment, the mother
says to her child that is moaning from pain, a hot-water bottle, a cup
of tea is coming right away, and we won’t let you suffer so!
Amery speaks of help, but he also speaks of assurance or consolation –

the deeply rooted expectation people have that others will recognize
and assuage their suffering, and help if they can. The mother reassures
the child that the suffering will be bearable, which means she recog-
nizes the child and the child’s vulnerability and dependence. More
than a helpless body, the child is a vulnerable person. Amery’s incre-
dulity that other human beings could do to him what they did was
beyond his ‘mind’s limits’, beyond the limits of what can be described
or processed symbolically. When Amery says that ‘the tortured person
is only a body, and nothing else beside that’ (1980, p. 33), he has been
brought face to face with the absolutism of reality in the form of another
being who wields absolute power over him. Amery is forced to live in a
world stripped of the achievements of humanity. As Sels notes, ‘it is the
truly unbearable ... that coincides with the pain that can never find an
adequate symbolic expression’ (2013, p. 8).
Amery refers to torture as ‘the total inversion of the social world’,
the world in which ‘we can live only if we grant our fellow man life,
ease his suffering, bridle the desire of our ego to expand’ (1980, p. 35).
Torture inverts the world of institutions whose anthropological func-
tion is to make human life not only possible but livable by providing
humane detours away from the absolutism of reality. It is precisely the
symbolic structuring of this social world that makes sense of the need
for consolation and clarifies its distancing function. We expect other
human beings to recognize and respect our common vulnerability with
its ethical imperative that the exploitation of vulnerability ought not to
be done.
Blumenberg makes the odd claim – on the surface – at the end of the
essay that, ultimately, consolation is ‘rhetoric’, and that humans can
be consoled (or hurt or insulted) by ‘fictions’. Rhetoric for Blumenberg
comprises all the institutions (in Gehlen’s sense) that make up a livable
world. Consolation rituals – for example those associated with funerals
and bereavement – are institutions, as are religious rituals (2006, p. 624).
Rhetoric is what humans have because definitive truths are unavailable.
Strictly speaking, human beings do not share vulnerability. They share
82 Vida Pavesich
the accumulated history of rhetorical solutions, which include both

rituals of consolation and ethical imperatives, all of which depend on
the symbolic dimension of human existence.
As a side note, consolation is not the same as Heidegger’s Sorge.
Heidegger claims that care is the structure of Dasein’s being-in-the
world. Dasein is characterized by concern ontologically; that is, Dasein
is constitutionally enmeshed in activities and relationships that occupy
its attention and about which it has concerns and worries and can be
affected. However, from Blumenberg’s point of view, Heidegger does
not illuminate the anthropological function of care because he does
not see Sorge as the result of having solved a prior problem. Granted,
Heidegger’s word is Sorge and Blumenberg’s is Tröst. Tröst is about giving
and receiving succor and comfort, about sharing the experience of
suffering and gaining relief from the oppressiveness of finitude. So, we
may be concerned and we may care in the sense of being attentive, of
being affected, and of worrying, but Heidegger’s Sorge does not include
this extra dimension of subjective relief that Blumenberg associates with
Tröst, which points to the inescapable intersubjectivity and interdepend-
ence of human beings. Furthermore, for Heidegger care of the self is not
about relationships to others or ethics – it is a fundamental ontolog-
ical structure. The self in its thrownness has priority. That Blumenberg
selected consolation rather than Sorge, at least in Heidegger’s sense, as
an anthropological constant is significant. According to evolutionary
anthropologist Sarah Hrdy,
without the capacity to put ourselves cognitively and emotionally in

someone else’s shoes, to feel what they feel, to be interested in their
fears and motives, longings, griefs, vanities, and other details of their
existence, without this mixture of curiosity about and emotional
identification with the other, a combination that adds up to mutual
understanding and sometimes even compassion, Homo sapiens would
never have evolved at all. (2011, p. 28)
The foundation for consolation reaches deep into our evolutionary

history. Like Blumenberg, Hrdy notes that natural selection does not aim
for future payoffs. Adaptations solve emergent problems and one such
adaptation is the extent to which our species, more than any other –
despite its often bellicose behavior – engages in elaborate modes of
cooperation. Hrdy argues that, ‘the emotional qualities that distinguish
modern humans from other apes, especially mind reading combined
with empathy and developing a sense of self, emerged earlier in our
evolutionary history than anatomically modern humans did’ (2011,

pp. 137–138), and she claims that emotion sharing had to precede the
emergence of language. Human babies, unlike infant apes, were cared for
by more than one caretaker and thus became more aware of distinctions
between self and others, better able to read mental states, and better able
to seduce people into caring for them. They had the same genotypes as
apes but different experiences, and without help from others the large
brained, slow maturing, needy, and long-dependent children, would not
have survived (2011, pp. 139–140). Prehumans may have been apes but
they had novel phenotypes exposed to novel selection pressures. The
individuals who were the best cared for and best fed would be better at
meeting survival challenges.
Hrdy emphasizes – and Blumenberg only alludes to – the critical
formation of attachment systems in human anthropogenesis, systems
that must also form in the life of every individual. It is well documented
that human brain development is dependent on the formation of
attachment systems with care providers.13 Those who do not receive reli-
able and tender caretaking are at great survival risk or their mental and
emotional capacities may be stunted. According to Merlin Donald, there
are no records of late successful language acquisition ‘in anyone who
has been deprived of this vital early stage’ (2001, p. 257). Blumenberg,
who as usual highlights phenomena functionally, claims that the young
need ‘specific environments’ because of the ‘plastic variability of the
capacity of this organic system’ (2006, p. 636), and that the mother/
child relationship is a shield against the raw pressures of space/time
13
Allan Schore (1994, pp. 31–32) documents an ‘epigenetic sequence of adap-
tive issues which must be negotiated by the caregiver-infant dyad to achieve
self-regulation’ via neurophysiological maturation. He claims that the primary
caregiver facilitates ‘the experience-dependent maturation of a structural system’
involving the growth ‘of connections between cortical limbic and subcortical
limbic structures that mediate self-regulatory functions’. ‘Early object-relations
experiences directly influence the emergence of a frontolimbic system in the
right hemisphere that can adaptively autoregulate both positive and negative
affect in response to changes in the socioemotional environment ... . The core
of the self lies in patterns of affect regulation that integrate a sense of self across
state transitions, thereby allowing for a continuity of inner experience’. Failures
of dyadic affect regulation often lead to later maladies, such as borderline person-
ality disorder. Schore’s account supports how the ontogenetic transmission of
emotional learning occurs and why recognition is a critical factor. The caregiver
must be empathically aware of the infant’s fluctuations and needs for a secure
holding environment.
84 Vida Pavesich
contingency. The birth trauma is the foundation for all future traumas
relating to contingency (2006, p. 640).
Blumenberg does not mention that even though human beings are
born helpless, they are also not entirely without resources of their own,
such as a striving for life (self-assertion that resists the absolutism of
reality), and they appear to have evolved hardwiring to seek connec-
tion. Our species is born longing for recognition. At birth, humans are
able to imitate what they see in the faces of adults [see Gallagher (2005,
ch. 5)]. This seeking must be reinforced from the outside, which is
accomplished through the emotional attachment that facilitates acqui-
sition of symbols and language. Mimesis is ‘closest to our cultural zero
point’ – leading to the ‘huge unwritten fabric of shared feeling, group
bonding, and common behavior [that] underwrites the deep encultura-
tion of each infant’ (Donald, 2001, p. 256). Clearly, Cassirer was correct
about the importance of symbolic forms, but the anthropogenetic and
ontogenetic accounts of symbol formation and its necessary precursors
in emotion regulation and attachment systems justifies their signifi-
cance in human ecology.
Donald challenges the ‘myth of the isolated mind’, identifying
key anthropogenetic stages that led up to the symbolic competences
characterizing modern humans. A ‘relatively simple expansion of the
executive brain’ led us to become ‘culture-mongers, driven by the very
nature of our awareness to seek refuge and solace in community’ (2001,
p. 253). Symbolic thought and language are both by-products of these
mimetic, emotionally charged connections, results of conscious minds
interacting with one another. Like Blumenberg, Donald assesses the
survival importance of symbol use and language, which he sees as neces-
sarily involving the externalization of collective memory and attendant
modes of cooperation (2001, chs 7–8). Symbols, language, books,
customs, and now computers and clouds connect minds. The point is
that when Blumenberg refers to distancing, anxiety as a precursor to the
concept, resilience, time saving, and then consolation as an achieve-
ment of vulnerability, he has compressed a great deal of human devel-
opment into short formulas. He also presupposes rather than examines
the formation of crucial attachment systems as integral to how a species
that had to manage its fight or flight impulses (an ongoing issue) and
develop extensive modes of cooperation contributed to solving self-
preservation issues. If ethics is about the preservation of the human,
some accounting of attachment systems is necessary. I return to this at
the end of the next section.
Modernity, acceleration, and an ethics of consolation
Kasper Lysemose notes the close relation between philosophical anthro-

pology and modernity. The formative years for philosophical anthro-
pology, despite its historical origins in disagreements between Kant
and Herder (Zammito, 2002), were in Germany between the two world
wars Following a loss of faith in the progress narrative, a mounting
concern for the human life world, and the loss of traditional answers
to the question of what man is, philosophical anthropology emerges
not with a ‘new and better theory of man’, but with a ‘philosophical
reflection on the historical experience of the loss of all such theories’
(2013, p. 49). Surely, knowledge from the natural and historical sciences
has given us – and continues to give – incredible and unprecedented
factual knowledge about human beings and much else, but as Scheler
remarked in the early twentieth century, ‘It can be said that man at no
point in history has become so problematic for himself than is presently
the case’ (1961, p. 14). What Scheler said in 1928 is still true given the
ever-accelerating pace of change. According to Lysemose, ‘the loss of
essence – a characteristic of modernity as such – is the acute historical
experience at the root of philosophical anthropology’. Understanding
‘how a being without a nature is possible within nature’ then becomes
a meditation on the conditions of our possibility in the midst of forces
that Blumenberg explains functionally as ‘excessive demands’ on the
creature that must distance itself from absolutes, construct ‘detours’,
and rely on institutions that contain possible points of attachment
or recognition. The need to ‘save time’, which Blumenberg identified
as an anthropological constant, has produced astonishing technical
achievements but now threatens the possibility of a humane world
(1988, p. 445). Donald wonders whether our species’ brains can adapt
to such rapid technological change (2009, p. 49). Selection pressures
on our species have accelerated – the ‘fastest-evolving genes in the
human genome are those associated with the central nervous system’
(Hrdy, 2011, p. 292).
Ethics from the point of view of philosophical anthropology is some-
thing of a paradox. How can there be a normative conception of the
human if humans have no nature or essence? Where does norma-
tivity lie? At the beginning of this paper, I claimed that Blumenberg’s
anthropological reflection is a mode of ethical inquiry. To answer the
question about normativity, I begin with the early (and only) essay
that Blumenberg wrote about ethics, consider the scattered remarks in
86 Vida Pavesich
his various writings, and conclude with how consolation fits into the
picture.
In ‘Ist eine philosophische Ethik gegenwärtig möglich?’ [Is a philo-
sophical ethics possible today?] (1953), Blumenberg defines ethics as
the ‘self-preservation of the human’. If human striving is often blind
and destructive because it tends to exceed limitations, and if the core
meaning of self-assertion is protest against raw contingency in the
interest of self-preservation, an idea of what counts as human orienta-
tion is implicit in all of Blumenberg’s mature works, which meditate on
how metaphor, myth, philosophy, literature, history, memoir, music,
and film record the detours human beings have taken from their exis-
tential vulnerability. The urge to counter arbitrariness, whether this
was the change in biotope or now the speed of technicization, must be
guided by a sense of the limits within which human life with its needs
for detours and meaning is possible. To be human therefore means to
recognize and inhabit limits in a specific way, as Blumenberg affirms in
this essay.
Blumenberg acknowledges that Kant’s abstract idea of humanity as
the power to set ends has receded into the background and the moral
universalism of the Enlightenment – the ideal of an invulnerable, self-
determining subject – should give way to requirements stemming from
the vulnerability of embodied human beings. However, he invokes
Kant when he distinguishes human comportment from stimulus-
response or reactive behavior (Kant’s ‘alien causes’?). Does it make
sense to discuss ethics without first determining the conditions for
self-preservation that would support value conferral? In this context,
Blumenberg both holds on to a residual Kantian moment and under-
scores his own skepticism about the possibility of a Kantian type ethics.
He cites contemporary barriers such as the ethical deficit produced
by the loss of a ‘cosmic ought’, the temptation to lead an aesthetic
existence (let life happen rather than lead it), allow interest in tech-
nical efficiency to override all interest in ends, or allow ourselves to be
subsumed and crushed by an administered society, thereby transfer-
ring the role of the subject to an anonymous collective (1953, p. 174;
pp. 180–181). These threats call for an anthropological reinterpretation
of the Kantian postulates that separates them from metaphysics and
views them and the objects of their striving as part of the ‘rhetoric of
ethics’. The postulates have value for ‘giv[ing] meaning to improving
the conditions of life’. In the absence of metaphysical grounding, we
can still wager ‘as though’ we can benefit (1988, p. 450). In the Kuno
Fisher speech, written twenty years after the ethics essay, Blumenberg
urges us not to forget Kant’s and Cassirer’s guidance, but he cautions

about understanding the idea of humanity as a self-grounding subject
that escapes from contingency or as a particular conception that can
be universalized such that history becomes one (oppressive) history
(1981, p. 171). To be human is to be so in particular ways as this or
that individual.
A strict definition of the human may not be possible, but some char-
acteristics have been gleaned from Blumenberg’s various works. These
follow from the core idea of distance from absolutes, whether this is
understood as an indifferent reality, a modern artificial absolutism, or
an idea of the perfect congruence of human need with an environment
(for example, destructive utopias such as the Islamist fantasy of a perfect
caliphate). Given modern conditions, further reflection on the differ-
ence between the finite subject and the ‘theoretical subject’ of science
casts light on the issue. In Work on Myth, Book I, chapter three, enti-
tled ‘Significance’, Blumenberg examines the function of significance.
Significance, which has ‘its own relation to reality’, familiarizes a world.
Blumenberg describes the ‘valences’ for attention and for ‘vital differ-
ence’ in the world of culture, which differs from that of the world of
things studied by the exact sciences. ‘The theoretical subject is only able
to strive for indifference because it is not identical with the individual
subject and its finitude ... . “Significance” is related to finitude’ (1985,
pp. 67–68). Striving for total efficiency eliminates the circumstantiality
necessary for preserving meaning and vital distance, increasing the diver-
gence between ‘material exigencies’ and the possibility of intervening
by decisions, of keeping a ‘feel’ for the texture of a situation. Only an
awareness of human limits resists turning all meaningful objects into
technical ones (1983, pp. 238–239).
Rhetoric – and ethics as a kind of rhetoric – today is, among other
things, human resistance to increasing acceleration. ‘Education and
culture, whatever else they may be, have to do with [the] delaying of
the functional connections between signals and reactions to them ... .
Cultural goods ... are figures, required exercises, obligatory detours
and formalities, rituals, which impede the immediate utilization of
man and obstruct (or slow down) the arrival of a world of the shortest
possible connection between any two given points’ (1988, p. 447).
This is neither positivist reduction nor simple culture conservatism.
Values are preservative; they ‘are specific functional forms of signifi-
cance’ (1985, p. 76). During periods characterized by high rates of
change, reflection on values and goods retards change by compli-
cating meaning. Some conflicts about values arise from the dissonance
88 Vida Pavesich
between the high rates of change and the values and goods that evolve
more slowly.14
An implicit anthropological countermyth informs Blumenberg’s narra-
tives. Based on a theory of anthropological limits, the human is a mean
between the two extremes of objectification and self-aggrandizement, just
as human existence is a mean between the absolutism of reality and the
ideal life-world. Envisioning anthropological requirements means imag-
ining and discovering the means of retardation. Specifically human qual-
ities, such as respect and dignity come more fully into view by isolating
the anthropological question implicit in all of Blumenberg’s work: what
are the conditions of leading a human life? The answer to this question,
however, depends on the answer to the question of what makes human
existence possible. Hence, the old connection between conceptions of
human nature and ethics is preserved and transformed, and philosoph-
ical anthropology becomes a mode of ethical reasoning. Ethical practice
is thus dependent on asking what supports human life while considering
the challenges posed by the historical situation in which one lives.
Blumenberg’s philosophical anthropology, in addressing how human
existence is possible, makes the following set of interrelated claims: it
describes the formation of the constants that emerged in anthropogen-
esis whose function is to ‘distance’ our species from a lethal contin-
gency; these constants include resilience, time saving, rationality, and
consolation; rhetoric, which includes ritual, myth, reason, and institu-
tions – culture – is the sum of the means by which the species stabilizes
itself and copes with the fact that it operates on a principle of insuffi-
cient reason; rhetoric is a ‘detour’ – it is about delay and self-restraint, a
deceleration of change that might be inimical to the ‘human’; ethics is
about the self-preservation of the human and about improving prospects
for humanity; and consolation is an achievement of vulnerability. To
diminish resilience and to fail to curb certain types of change could be
fatal to the species. These are not in themselves moral claims. However,
14
In Lebenszeit and Weltzeit, Blumenberg calls the shortness of time the root of
evil. He means that evil is the denial of the disproportion between lifetime and
worldtime, an awareness of which is constitutive of human experience. He cites
Hitler’s millennial fantasies as an example of attempted denials of the gap. Karsten
Harries (1987, pp. 516, 518) compares the discussion of the gap to Nietzsche’s
‘spirit of revenge’, the ‘ill will against time and its ‘it was’’. Blumenberg proposes
a one-sentence myth: ‘The Devil’s Time is Short’, which implies that ‘the power
that is bent on causing harm to humans is itself operating under the pressure of
time’ (1997, pp. 92–93).
within the context of such facts a tension between what is and what
ought to be can emerge such that different better and worse courses of
action can come into view.
Given that Blumenberg’s anthropology is also rhetoric and it meditates
on all of the above, it too is a form of ‘retardation’ or delay, a ‘detour’,
an existential catching of the breath, that aims to raise consciousness
lest we take our species for granted. If anthropology assesses what was
functionally serviceable in mastering risk, then it illuminates the possi-
bility of availing ourselves of solutions that perform similar functions.
The emphasis on function is important, because historical beings inherit
institutions that may no longer solve the problems that have been inher-
ited along with them. Thus, ethics also requires a historical analysis of
their formation and function in order to consciously choose to revise or
form new institutions. Meditating on the conditions for human life and
the preservation of the human in the contemporary world is an ethical
act. For example, can we slow down climate change, pollution, and
environmental degradation, and if so how? What ‘rhetoric’ will improve
prospects for humanity (which, of course, would also entail preserving
and stabilizing habitats of other species)?
Where does consolation fit in? Blumenberg means much more by
consolation than a mere soothing pat on the back, as the Amery example
illustrated. It is a fundamental anthropogenetic achievement that: is
intersubjective; involves empathy and sympathy and the capacity to
vicariously suffer another’s pains; depends on trust and respect and the
recognition of the other as like oneself yet different; creates emotional
distance from brushes with extreme contingency; allows for the
processing of anxiety and emotion (2009, p. 627); originates ontogeneti-
cally in the crucible of early childhood relationships within an extreme
power imbalance; is an elementary and deeply rooted anthropological
and ritual safeguarding of members of a species that cannot definitively
flee its existential helplessness; connects us to others – it is the glue
that holds the species together (2006, p. 621); and it makes coopera-
tion possible. In short, it is about how the species cares. Consolation, as
Blumenberg defines it, makes preserving the ‘human’ in the face of
anthropological risks possible by acknowledging the irreducible subjec-
tivity of each individual’s suffering while rendering it emotionally bear-
able. Consolation manages emotional processing for the being prone to
being overcome by impulses, excess stimuli, and purely self-interested
behavior. Individuals do learn to console themselves, manage their own
emotions, and exercise self-restraint, but the root of consolation is inter-
subjective. Clearly this cultural adaptation has great value. Above all
90 Vida Pavesich
else, consolation depends on the attachment systems that became the

basis of morally rich capacities for care.
Can our species adapt without preserving what is presupposed by this
account of consolation? Of all the primates humans are most invested in
sharing emotional cues, facial expressions, tones of voice, and intentions
of others as evidence of ongoing commitment. Given the ‘prolonged
dependency and highly contingent commitment set up in infants,
who, unlike other apes, lack the same guarantees’ as other primates, our
species is particularly vulnerable (Hrdy, 2011, ch. 7). As historical beings,
humans do not inherit ‘attachment styles’, which result from accumu-
lated learning that is passed on culturally. Secure attachment in young
children provides the ‘underpinnings for inter-individual communica-
tion and cooperation. Children cared for by responsive others exhibit
a high potential for collaboration’ (2011, p. 291) – just as those infants
who were best cared for and fed had the best survival chances early in
our evolutionary history. Given that attachment styles are cultural adap-
tations, it is also true that human plasticity is potentially ‘derailment’.
Hrdy notes the large increase in numbers of children with what is
called ‘disorganized attachment’ in our individualistic, postindus-
trial, consumerist society with its high rates of dislocation. As many as
‘80 percent of children from populations at high risk for abuse grow
up confused or even fearful of their main caretakers’. Fifteen percent of
children in what are described as “normal middle-class families”, chil-
dren not ostensibly at special risk, are also unable to derive comfort
from or to constructively organize their emotions around a caretaker
they trust’ (2011, p. 289). We cannot draw reliable conclusions about
whether such patterns are permanently changing, but Hrdy says that
prior to about 15,000 years ago this would not have been ‘compatible
with [a] child’s survival’. A child in the Pleistocene – despite whatever
other difficulties he or she faced – acquired a sense of emotional security
by ‘default’ (2011, p. 290). This is no longer true. ‘If the empathic capaci-
ties of infants find expression only under certain rearing conditions,
and if natural selection can only act on genetic traits that are actually
expressed in the phenotype, perhaps we need to be asking how even the
most useful innate predispositions can persist if their development is
not encouraged?’ (2011, p. 292).
Like Blumenberg, Hrdy views our species as no more static than any
other, and she links certain behaviors with the persistence of what we
take to be species identity. She also points to research by anthropolo-
gists John Hawks and Henry Harpending, who date acceleration pres-
sures on our species back to about 40,000 years ago – not just since the
Enlightenment, when it became more visible – as ‘human activities and

population pressure transformed local environments and as an exponen-
tially expanding population generated many more mutations for selec-
tion to act on’. Some of those mutations involved disease resistance as
well as digestive mechanisms for coping with novel diets, but there is no
reason why ‘cognitive and behavioral traits would be any less susceptible
to ongoing selection’ (2011, p. 292). It will not matter ‘how spectacularly
well prosocial tendencies served humans in the past if the underpinnings
for such traits remain unexpressed and thus can no longer be favored by
selection’. The removal of ‘an agent of selection can sometimes bring
about rapid evolutionary consequences’ (2011, p. 293). Will compas-
sion and the need for emotional connection fade away? Hrdy wonders
whether what we think of as human – its empathic behavior and curiosity
about others, shaped by ‘our ancient heritage of communal care’ – will
disappear. The need and capacity for consolation, which imply respect
and recognition of the other, were made possible by our upright gait.
Face to face activity during infancy and the upright posture gave us the
ability to gaze into the ‘human face with its incomparable situational
meaning’ (Blumenberg, 1997, p. 84). However, as Blumenberg reminds
us, the species may be overwhelmed by impulses, look away from the
challenge, and fail at its task. The ethical ought implied in Blumenberg’s
writings is to be vigilant and mindful of the distance between our species
and what the absolutism of reality in all its manifestations represents.
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4
Naturalism, Pluralism, and the
Human Place in the Worlds
Phillip Honenberger
In 1863, Thomas Henry Huxley published a set of lectures entitled

Evidence as to Man’s Place in Nature. In that text, Huxley appealed to
evidence in primatology, comparative anatomy, taxonomy, embry-
ology, and paleontology, to argue against many traditional and popular
beliefs about human beings’ origins and taxonomic status. Huxley’s
phrase ‘man’s place in nature’ gives expression to an image with a
long history – namely, that of human beings’ mediate status within
a ‘great chain of being’ spanning from inanimate nature, through
plants and animals, to the angels and God Himself (compare Pico della
Mirandola, 1956 [1486]; Lovejoy, 1936). Through its use of this phrase-
ology, Huxley’s text participated in and continued this tradition. At the
same time, however, it implied a drastic restriction and qualification
of its validity, insofar as Huxley argued – drawing on Charles Darwin’s
recently published Origin of Species (1859) – for a greater similarity and
connection between human beings and non-human organisms than
had previously been assumed, and suggested a common, wholly mate-
rial origin for the whole set.
Soon after the publication of Evidence, discussions of ‘man’s place
in nature’ sprang up in a diverse range of publications, many of these
engaging with Huxley explicitly and extensively. For instance, Hugh
Doherty’s Organic Philosophy; or, Man’s True Place in Nature (1864); Ludwig
Büchner’s Die Stellung des Menschen in der Natur in der Vergangenheit,
Gegenwart, und Zukunft (1869), and Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison’s Man’s
Place in the Cosmos and Other Essays (1897) all discuss Huxley’s views
explicitly and extensively. Indeed, locutions of the form, ‘man’s place
in nature’ (and close analogues such as ‘man’s place in the world’ and
‘the place of human beings in the cosmos’) may never before have had
the currency in intellectual endeavors that they acquired after Huxley’s
94
The Human Place in the Worlds 95
publication of these lectures.1 The rhetorical influence of Huxley’s

title may even extend to some of the twentieth century’s most influ-
ential works of philosophy: for instance, Max Scheler’s Die Stellung des
Menschen im Kosmos [The Human Place in the Cosmos] (2009 [1928])
and C.D. Broad’s The Mind and Its Place in Nature (1925).
A moment’s reflection on the phrase ‘man’s place in nature’, however,
reveals some troubling ambiguities – to say nothing of the antiquated
androcentrism of the gendered term ‘man’ (due to which, the gender-
neutral term ‘human’ will hereafter be preferred). Among the most
significant of these ambiguities is that surrounding the term ‘place’.
In particular, is the ‘place’ in question here a physical one, a place in
physical space and time? Or is it rather a place in a series, structure, or
process – a ‘functional’ rather than (or rather than only) a physical place,
something more like a role than a location? And how does the distinc-
tion between these senses of place, as well as perhaps relations between
them, bear on the central issue of ‘the human place in nature’?
In what follows, I distinguish and comparatively evaluate four strate-
gies by which the question that Huxley raised – ‘what is man’s place in
nature?’ – has been addressed in the now 150+ years since the publica-
tion of Evidence. Not all pairings of these strategies are mutually exclu-
sive per se, but they tend to draw theorists in divergent analytical and
methodological directions. Naturalism, exemplified here by Huxley’s
own view, treats the ‘human place’ as co-extensive with a certain ‘place
in nature’, so that a full map of natural places and spaces would include
and exhaust all possible human places. Non-naturalism, for which I
take Max Scheler’s philosophical anthropology as an example, posits
non-natural or more-than-natural spaces, places, systems, or proc-
esses, within which human beings also or primarily have their place.2
Pluralism, such as that of the contemporary philosophers Huw Price
and Helen Longino, posits a non-coextensive or ‘incommensurable’
variety of ‘human places’. Finally, emergentism, expressed here in some
suggestions from Lenny Moss and Helmuth Plessner, agree with the
pluralists in rejecting some monistic tendencies of naturalism and
1
A WorldCat search for publications with such phrases in the title, from 1700
to 1910, reveals almost nothing before 1863, and a dozen or more such titles
after 1863.
2
Readers familiar with the views of Huw Price (for instance, 2011) will recog-
nize his construal of ‘object naturalism’ and ‘object non-naturalism’ in my
description of the first two strategies.
non-naturalism (as here defined), yet seek to trace the ‘emergence’ of

plurality from monistic (or monistically articulated) conditions.
These four strategies might best be understood as philosophical
‘research approaches’ or ‘attitudes’ (Longino, 2012, p. 15; p. 138, respec-
tively), rather than definite positions. A deepened appreciation of the
relative strengths and weaknesses of the strategies are the primary goals
of the essay, though I do express some preference for emergentism in
the final section.
The human place in nature
Huxley begins the second of the three chapters comprising his Evidence
as to Man’s Place in Nature with a paean to the central question of the
text itself: ‘The question of questions for mankind – the problem which
underlies all others, and is more deeply interesting than any other – is
the ascertainment of the place which Man occupies in nature and of
his relations to the universe of things’ (Huxley, 1901a [1863], p. 77).
Huxley’s aim, he writes, is to outline and argue, on the basis of new
evidence and theory arising from ‘the extraordinary growth of every
department of physical science ... within the last fifty years’ (p. 79), for
an alteration to key features of traditional and popular understandings
of the account of ‘man’s place in nature’:
[I]t will be admitted that some knowledge of man’s position in the

animate world is an indispensable preliminary to the proper under-
standing of his relations to the universe; and this again resolves itself,
in the long run, into an inquiry into the nature and the closeness of
[those] ties which connect him with those singular creatures [the non-
human primates] ... Brought face to face with these blurred copies of
himself, the least thoughtful of men is conscious of a certain shock,
due perhaps, not so much to disgust at the aspect of what looks like
an insulting caricature, as to the awakening of a sudden and profound
mistrust of time-honoured theories and strongly-rooted prejudices
regarding his own position in nature and his relations to the under-
world of life. (Huxley, 1901a [1963], pp. 80–81)
Huxley’s Evidence is composed of three chapters. In Chapter 1, Huxley

reviews the main behavioral and physiological characteristics of the
four known families of non-human primate, the Gibbon, Orangutan,
Chimpanzee, and Gorilla (pp. 37–71), as well as providing a highly
critical review of the evidence regarding these creatures (pp. 1–33
and subsequently). In Chapter 2, immediately following the prefatory

remarks quoted above, Huxley describes the parallels between the early
stages of human and non-human vertebrate embryological develop-
ment (pp. 81–92). He then conducts a series of comparisons between
human and non-human primate species-typical physiology (pp. 92–146)
aimed at elucidating the relative ‘place’ of human beings and non-
human primates within the standard taxonomic groupings of kingdom,
subkingdom, class, order, family, genera, and species (pp. 92–97). Here
Huxley considers the proportion of the limbs (pp. 97–100), the struc-
ture and composition of the vertebra and ribs (pp. 100–105), the skull
(pp. 105–111), the teeth (pp. 111–116), the hand and foot (pp. 118–130),
and the brain (pp. 130–144). Huxley’s aim in this section is to argue
that the measurable differences between human beings’ species-typical
physiological characteristics, and those of various non-human primates,
are less than those between members of at least two different families
of non-human primate. This allows Huxley to conclude that while
‘[t]he structural differences between Man and the Man-like apes certainly
justify our regarding him as constituting a family apart from them;
though, inasmuch as he differs less from them than they do from other
families of the same order, there can be no justification for placing him
in a distinct order’ (p. 145). In Essay 3, Huxley reviews the existing fossil
evidence regarding early human or humanoid forms (pp. 157–208).
Here Huxley argues that, because the difference between the skeletons
of these humanoid forms, and one or another contemporary human
skeleton, is not greater than the difference between one contemporary
human skeleton and another, we ought to conclude that these fossils are
indeed ancient remains of members of our species, and that the antiq-
uity of the human race is much greater than traditional and popularly
held accounts would have us believe (p. 208).
Near the end of the second chapter of Evidence, Huxley gives a clue to the
overall conclusions towards which he takes this evidence to drive: namely,
that, in accordance with Charles Darwin’s recently proposed theory of
natural selection, humankind can be assigned an entirely material origin,
and one that involves a common ancestor with the non-human primates
(pp. 146–156). Huxley stresses the extraordinary coherence that the adop-
tion of Darwin’s hypothesis would lend to the accumulated evidence from
many different areas of research, writing that
Mr. Darwin’s hypothesis is not, so far as I am aware, inconsistent

with any known biological fact; on the contrary, if admitted, the
facts of Development, of Comparative Anatomy, of Geographical
Distribution, and of Paleontology, become connected together, and

exhibit a meaning such as they never possessed before. (p. 149)
And, summarizing his conclusions, Huxley’s writes,
[T]he whole analogy of natural operations furnishes so complete and

crushing an argument against the intervention of any but what are
termed secondary causes [that is, non-divine causes], in the produc-
tion of all the phenomena of the universe; that in view of the intimate
relations between Man and the rest of the living world, and between
the forces exerted by the latter and all other forces, I can see no excuse
for doubting that all are co-ordinated terms of Nature’s great progression,
from the formless to the formed – from the inorganic to the organic – from
blind force to conscious intellect and will. (p. 151, emphasis added)
In comparison with many of the popular and traditional views that

Huxley sought to replace – for instance, the sort of special creationism
that rejects organic evolution – it seems clear enough that Huxley has
the upper hand. Yet there are at least two weaknesses of Huxley’s argu-
ment, in Evidence, that are highly instructive regarding the general limi-
tations of similarly ‘naturalistic’ strategies of articulating the ‘human
place’.
First, the expressions ‘intimate relations’ and ‘great progression’, like
the earlier ‘place in nature’, ‘position in nature’, and ‘bonds which
connect’, are ambiguous. On the one hand, they call to mind rela-
tions within physical space, an interpretation strengthened by Huxley’s
conclusions regarding ‘secondary causes’. However, the immediate
meaning of Huxley’s physiological and embryological comparisons is
functional or structural, articulating proximity and distance not within
physical space, but rather within a theoretical system or series. In his
discussion of comparative physiology, for instance, he argues from a
comparison of similarities and differences of physiological structure
between human beings and non-human primates, to conclusions about
their ‘place’ within the Linnaean taxonomy, and from there (with the
assistance of Darwin’s posited mechanism of natural selection as an
additional premise) to the postulation of common material or natural
origins (‘against the intervention of any but what are terms secondary
causes’ [p. 151]). In this argument, ‘place’ and ‘position’ mean something
more like ‘role’ than ‘physical location’. Likewise, ‘bond that connects’
and ‘intimate relation’ would here signify ‘relation’ or ‘connection’
primarily in a structural, functional, or logical, rather than a locational
or physical spatio-temporal sense. This ambiguity between ‘place-as-

location’ and ‘place-as-role’ is one about which neither Huxley, nor the
traditional and popular views he sought to replace, appears to have been
sufficiently clear.
Even if we attempt to rescue the strength of Huxley’s argument by
appeal to his epistemological and methodological self-clarifications –
as expressed perhaps most clearly in his essays on Descartes and Hume
(see Huxley, 1893–1894, Vols 1, 6) – it is hard not to conclude that
Evidence overstates the extent to which the possible operation of ‘non-
secondary causes’ (of whatever metaphysical kind) has been ruled out.
Huxley’s epistemology is thoroughly empiricist, in the sense of that
term associated with Hume: he explicitly withholds full assent to any
proposition that cannot be demonstrated through direct experience.
Huxley is aware that this policy requires skepticism regarding not only
such controversial entities as God and ‘occult forces’, but also the
seemingly scientifically respectable notions of causality, matter, phys-
ical objects, space, time, and the self. Speaking with the vulgar, and
bolstered by gestures towards the constraints of conceptual coherence
(or what one might call ‘consistency with the evidence’), Huxley is
quite comfortable speaking of everyday objects, and recommends the
expansion and making-more-precise of the account of them through
the following-out of scientific inquiry to the maximum possible
degree. Under the surface of such ‘reasonable’ common sense conces-
sions, however, lies the same metaphysical agnosticism that Huxley
so scandalously contributed to theological discussions of his time and
since (Huxley, 1893–1894, Vol. 5).
We can better appreciate this limitation of Huxley’s strategy in Evidence
by considering that strategy as an instance of what Ernst Cassirer
argued, in Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff [Substance and Function]
(1923 [1910]), was the characteristic operation of all natural-scientific
reasoning: namely, the construction of correlated series that compose
and order the objects of experience (Cassirer, 1923 [1910], pp. 3–26).
Huxley’s premises are structural or functional, yet his conclusions are
presented as having substantive import. If Cassirer is right, however,
then all knowledge of nature is functional, even in those cases where it
appears to be or claims to be substantive. Cassirer writes,
[A]ll construction of concepts is connected with some definite form

of construction of series [eine bestimmte Form der Reihenbildung].
We say that a sensuous manifold is conceptually apprehended and
ordered, when its members do not stand next to one another without
relation but proceed from a definite beginning, according to a funda-

mental generating relation, in necessary sequence ... [A] series of
contents [eine Reihe von Inhalten] in its conceptual ordering may be
arranged according to the most divergent points of view ... Thus we
can conceive members of series according to equality or inequality,
number and magnitude, spatial and temporal relations, or causal
dependence (Cassirer, 1923 [1910], pp. 15–16 [19–20]). ... [T]he field
of application of this [series-theoretical, functional] form of logic is
not confined to mathematics alone. On the contrary, it extends over
the field of the knowledge of nature; for the concept of function consti-
tutes the general schema and model according to which the modern
concept of nature has been molded in its progressive development.
(Cassirer, 1923 [1910], p. 21)
Cassirer proceeds to suggest a crucial limitation of approaches based on

either common-sense ‘substantivalist’ or empiricist presuppositions –
designations that apply to the two sides of Huxley’s epistemological
position, as well as his procedure in Evidence. According to Cassirer,
these common-sense substantivalist and empiricist views are functional
idealizations that are (unlike Cassirer’s own functionalist and idealist
view) unaware of their constructed character. Even in their postulation
of the sensory or ‘substantive’ (material or objectual) elements to be
ordered, they have already construed and ordered these elements in a
certain (and not the only conceivably or equivalently justifiable) way. As
part of his argument for this conclusion, Cassirer proposes an account
of the cognitive and epistemological status of scientific reasoning in
general, within which the validity of such ‘common sense’ views are
relativized:
What lends the theory of abstraction [a characteristic feature of

empiricism] support is merely the circumstance that it does not [as
it claims] presuppose the contents ... as disconnected particulari-
ties, but that it tacitly [that is, unbeknownst to its adherents] thinks
them in the form of an ordered manifold from the first. The concept,
however, is not deduced thereby, but presupposed; for when we
ascribe to a manifold an order and connection of elements, we have
already presupposed the concept, if not in its complete form, yet in
its fundamental function ... There are two different lines of considera-
tion in which this logical presupposition [common to many empiri-
cist and ‘substantivalist’ views] is plainly evident. On the one side, it
is the category of the whole and its parts; on the other, the category
of the thing and its attributes ... [T]he ‘given’ is not thereby merely
described, but is judged and shaped according to a certain conceptual
contrast. But as soon as this is recognized it must become evident that
we stand here before a mere beginning that points beyond itself. The
categorical acts, which we characterize [bezeichnen] by the concepts
of the whole and its parts, and of the thing and its attributes, are
not isolated but belong to a system of logical categories, which more-
over they by no means exhaust. After we have conceived the plan of
this system in a general logical theory of relations, we can, from this
standpoint, determine its details. On the other hand, it is not possible
to gain a view of all possible forms of connection from the limited
standpoint of certain relations emphasized in the naïve view of the
world. (Cassirer, 1923 [1910], pp. 17–18 [22])
From a Cassirerean perspective, then, we can wonder about the legiti-

macy and sufficiency of Huxley’s strategy of laying-out and analyzing
some series (developmental series, taxonomic series, comparative physi-
ological series, and so on) as a means to making arguments about ‘nature’
or ‘the human place in nature’ as such.
The second regard in which Huxley’s account is arguably problematic
is an unjustified narrowness not in its epistemology per se, but rather
in the limited range of the characteristics of human beings and non-
human primates it adopts for comparison. For instance, Huxley’s essay
lacks any sustained comparison of human and non-human primate
behavioral characteristics. These are arguably as important a part of the
‘nature’ that Huxley claims to describe as the more physiological features
he does discuss; and human characteristics are arguably quite distinctive
here, along certain lines of comparison (for instance: linguistic ability
and culturally induced and culturally relative behavioral modification).
If these comparisons were followed out, the overall picture of the human
place in nature might have been rather different from that which Huxley
proposed. Compare, on this matter, Büchner (1972 [1869]), who follows
Huxley in arguing for the material origins of humankind and human
beings’ close taxonomic connection to other primates, but who supple-
ments this discussion with an account of technological and cultural
development – extending, in Büchner’s treatment, into the imagined
future. As is often noted, the more that naturalistic strategies restrict
themselves in their portrayal of ‘nature’, as in Huxley’s account, the
more they risk leaving out some features of ‘the human place’. The more
they expand this portrayal (as does Büchner), the more they risk their
classifiability as ‘naturalistic’.
The human place in the world
Projects of a similar form to Huxley’s – and with similar (arguable) over-

sights and limitations – characterize much naturalist literature from his
time to our own. Yet Huxley’s essay and the naturalist followers and
correctors that it inspired, also motivated the rise of a radically opposed
counter-literature on the question of ‘the human place in nature’, which
sought to annul the apparently materialist and anti-humanist implica-
tions of Huxley’s argument, or arguments of a similar form. This literature
is often presented under titles referring to the human place in the world or
cosmos, rather than ‘nature’, revealing its authors’ suspicions that human
beings are incompletely understood when approached from a naturalistic
perspective alone. In the terms borrowed from Cassirer above, one could
say that these authors insist on an analytical ‘placement’ of human beings
within series ranging over non-natural as well as natural elements. Because
of the debate with Huxley-type arguments that constitutes the cultural
context of this literature, however, an articulation of natural series and
their limitations is one of its major characteristic features. In ‘Man’s Place
in the Cosmos: Professor Huxley on Nature and Man’ (1897), for instance,
Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison argues explicitly against Huxley’s agnosti-
cism and naturalism, positing (in its stead) a teleological cosmology in
which human beings and their increasing moral perfection are the goal of
the universe itself (Pringle-Pattison, 1897, pp. v–33).3
Max Scheler’s Die Stellung des Menschen im Kosmos (1928) is consider-
ably more sophisticated than Pringle-Pattison’s account, and yet, like
Pringle-Pattison’s and unlike Huxley’s, it rejects the naturalistic reduc-
tion of the ‘human place’ question implied by Huxley’s strategy. We
may review the basic features of Scheler’s account by asking the ques-
tion: What does Scheler mean to do in taking up the question of the
human ‘place’ [Stellung] in the cosmos? In particular, what does he mean
by ‘place’ in his formulation of this question? The answer will be given
in three parts:
(1). A demonstration that Scheler acknowledges a diversity of series,

including non-natural series, which imply the insufficiency of strat-
egies such as Huxley’s.
3
Pringle-Pattison’s immediate target in that essay is Huxley’s ‘Ethics and
Evolution’, but his title and prefatory remarks indicate his familiarity with
Huxley’s Evidence as well.
(2). An elucidation of Scheler’s methodology regarding the ‘intui-

tion [Anschauung] of essential contents [Wesensgehalten]’ (Scheler,
2009 [1928], p. 26), which is prima facie a crucial yet contestable
condition of possibility of the coherence of Scheler’s efforts to artic-
ulate the ‘place’ of human beings in the cosmos.
(3). A consideration of Scheler’s remarks on human spatial perception,
which point the way to an alternative and in some ways more satis-
factory strategy of response to the main question.
(1) Near the outset of Die Stellung, Scheler notes that ‘the term and
concept of “human being” contain a tricky ambiguity’ between its scien-
tific and its everyday meanings:
On the one hand, the term [‘human being’] is supposed to give us

specifications which, morphologically, characterize the human
being as a subclass of vertebrates and mammals ... [I]t is quite clear
that the human being is here not only subordinated to the concept of
‘animal’ but also occupies a very small corner of the animal realm.
This also remains the case if we, with C. v. Linné, refer to humans
as a ‘peak’ of all vertebrates and mammals [die «Spitze der Wirbel-
Säugentierereihe»] ... because a peak of something still belongs to that of
which it is the peak. Entirely independent of such a concept – which
establishes the unity of the human being in terms of his upright
posture, a transformation of the vertebral column, the equilibration
of his brainpan, the large increase of the relative size of the brain,
and the organic changes ensuing from his upright posture (such as
grasping hands with opposable thumbs, the recession of jawbone and
teeth) – the term ‘human being’ also signifies in everyday language
something totally different, especially among civilized peoples. ... In
this second sense, the term ‘human being’ signifies a concept of
something which is completely opposite to the concept of ‘animals in
general’, including mammals and vertebrates, and is opposed to the
latter to the same degree as that of the infusorium stentor; although it
can hardly be denied that living beings called ‘humans’ are morpho-
logically, physiologically, and psychologically incomparably more
similar to a chimpanzee than humans and chimpanzees are to an
infusorium. (Scheler, 2009 [1928], p. 6)
Scheler’s mention of the relative similarity or difference of human

beings from chimpanzees and infusorium stentor shows his familiarity
with discussions following the form of Huxley’s 1863 essay. His claim
that there exists an everyday meaning of the term ‘human being’

according to which the series (to use the Cassirerean terminology) that
connects human beings to non-human organisms is constructed differ-
ently – namely, as an opposition, as things ‘completely opposite’ [aufs
schärfste entgegensetzt], rather than as a continuum – shows his aware-
ness of a potential limitation of those discussions (p. 6). His claim that
this second concept is ‘[e]ntirely independent’ [vollig unabhangig] from
the first, that it signifies something ‘totally different’ [etwas total anderes]
from the first, while contestable (see below), demonstrates at least the
logical significance of such distinctions, on Scheler’s view (p. 6). Finally,
when Scheler traces the ‘sequence of levels of psychic powers and abili-
ties’ [einer Stufenfolge der psychischen Kräfte und Fähigkeiten] (p. 7)
through impulsion, instinct, habit, and intelligence (all of which are shared
between human beings and the members of one or more non-human
species, on Scheler’s account), to the point of explicitly asking what, if
anything, distinguishes human beings from the organisms that display
one or more of these ‘psychic powers and abilities’, he breaks with the
series constructed up to that point by affirming the presence, in human
existence, of a ‘new principle ... opposite [entgegengesetztes] anything we
call life, including life in the human being’, and which is therefore not (like
the previously described four abilities) a ‘function ... of the psychic and
vital spheres’ (p. 26). This principle is what Scheler calls ‘spirit’ (Geist),
a principle that encompasses ‘the thinking of ideas, ... an intuition of
primordial phenomena and essential contents, and ... a specific class of
volitional and emotive acts such as kindness, love, repentance, awe,
states of wonder, bliss, despair, and free decision-making’ (p. 26).
However, in its manner of making a case against the sufficiency of
naturalistic accounts, Scheler’s strategy reveals a limitation of its own.
As with the earlier-made distinction between a Huxleyan physiological-
taxonomic series, on the one hand, and the everyday human-vs.-animal
series, on the other, Scheler emphasizes the complete discontinuity of
the principle of spirit [Geist] from the vital powers he had classified and
analyzed in detail in the preceding pages:
[I]t would also be a mistake to imagine this novel phenomenon –

which makes human beings what they are – to be an addition to
the psychic levels of impulsion, instinct, associative memory, intel-
ligence, and the capacity to make choices; an addition which would
belong to functions of the psychic and vital spheres, the study of
which would, of course, lie within the competence of psychology and
biology. ... The new principle is, first of all, opposite anything we call
life, including life in the human being: it is a genuinely new, essential

fact which cannot at all be reduced [zurückgefürt] to the natural evolu-
tion of life. (pp. 26 [31])
This independence thesis raises the question, however, of the unity of

Scheler’s own account. In what way has he articulated the ‘place’ of
human beings in the cosmos, by the tracing of this organic series followed
by the introduction of a term that, by his own insistence, breaks with
the terms of the series? This ‘place’ could be neither a physical location,
nor a role within any yet specified narrative or postulated structure.
(2) A response to this challenge can be mounted on the basis of
Scheler’s text. That response turns on recognizing that Scheler articu-
lates the human ‘place’ neither in terms of physical space, nor in terms
of any organic series, but rather in terms of the relation of human beings
to the ‘ground of being’ itself:
If reducible [zurückfällt] to anything at all, this new principle [that is,

spirit (Geist)] leads us back to the one ultimate Ground of all entities
[Grunde der Dinge] of which life happens to be one particular mani-
festation (p. 26 [31]). ... The center ... from which the human being
acts out his acts and from which he objectifies his living body, his
psyche, and the space and time of the world, cannot itself be a ‘part’
of the world and cannot have any ‘where’ and ‘when’: this center can
only lie in the supreme Ground of Being [obersten Seinsgrunde] itself.
(p. 33 [38–39])
Human beings occupy a special ‘place’ in comparison with non-human

organisms when considered from the standpoint of their relation not
to the psychic, vital, and living world alone, but rather to being (or
‘the Ground of Being’) itself. The ‘space’ within which Scheler identifies
a ‘place’ for human beings, is thus not solely the ‘whole bio-physical
structure of the world’ that is the starting point of Scheler’s analysis
(p. 7), but more generally Being [Sein] and the ‘Ground of Being’. Human
beings are the beings in that series (or, perhaps better, plane – see below)
who can intuit essential contents – simply put, those beings who can
be aware of things as they are. This awareness is a condition of possi-
bility of the perception of objects and of a world: the “world-openness”
(Weltoffenheit) for which Scheler’s text is perhaps most famous.
As is well-known, Scheler holds that the ‘intuition of essences’ is
the core of phenomenological method. He employed it in the descrip-
tion of many objects and orderings between objects, both ‘natural’
and ‘non-natural’ – for instance, the order of rank of value modali-

ties [Rangbeziehungen zwischen Wertmodalitäten] in his work on ethics
(Scheler, 1973 [1913, 1916], p. 104); the series [Stufenfolge] of ‘psychic
powers’ in Die Stellung (recounted above); and the binary series of world-
openness and world-closedness, in Die Stellung, which distinguishes the
‘place’ (in the sense of place-as-role) of human beings from that of all
known non-human organisms, within the context (or, one might say,
the plane) of their relation to being itself.
Describing the simultaneously open-ended yet coherence-responsive
character of philosophical thinking, as traditionally conducted, Deleuze
and Guattari write,
Philosophical concepts are fragmentary wholes ... [T]he philos-

ophy that creates them always introduces a powerful Whole that,
while remaining open, is not fragmented ... [I]t is a plane of consist-
ency ... Concepts pave, occupy, or populate the plane bit by bit,
whereas the plane itself is the indivisible milieu in which concepts
are distributed without breaking up its continuity or integrity ... The
plane is like a desert that concepts populate without dividing up. The
only regions of the plane are the concepts themselves, but the plane
is all that holds them together’. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994 [1991],
pp. 35–36, emphasis added)
Adapting Deleuze and Guattari’s expression and concept to our own

purposes, we could say that the human ability to intuit essential contents,
which Scheler posits in Die Stellung, is both a component within, and a
partial principle of generation for (one might even say a ‘condition of
possibility of’) the deeper plane of consistency between human beings
and non-human organic life, that he seeks, in Die Stellung, to lay out.
This plane of consistency is constructed in terms of access to being
itself, where being is understood as more expansive and inclusive than
‘nature’, ‘life’, and whatever the natural sciences can claim mastery over,
as theoretical objects.
The very notion of a ‘plane of consistency’ puts pressure on Scheler’s
many independence claims, however, both in Die Stellung and elsewhere.
Where discontinuities are affirmed, an equivalently deep continuity must
(on pain of incoherence) be postulated. A similar point might be made
regarding Cassirer’s increasingly pluralistic analysis, in the course of his
work from 1910 to 1944, of the variety of series and systems of series – or,
as he later came to call them, ‘symbolic forms’ (Cassirer, 1923b [1921],
1955a [1923], 1955b [1925], 1957 [1929]). In the course of this period,
Cassirer’s study of such series moved far beyond the mathematical and
scientific cases that were the focus of Substanzbegriff und Funktionsbegriff,
to include mythical, aesthetic, religious, and historical series, among
others. Yet in each claim of independence of one series from another,
the same question can be posed as to that of Scheler’s transition from
the last term of a ‘sequence of levels of psychic powers and abilities’
(p. 7) to the ‘new principle’ of Geist: how, on these accounts, is the logic
of the analysis to be understood? Where, if at all, is the common plane
within which these series can be compared and contrasted?
(3) In his discussion of several ‘specific monopolies of the human
being’ – that is, species-specific features of human beings – such as the
recognition of the categories of thing and substance (p. 31), perception of
a unified space (pp. 31–33), and existence of the person as a pure actuality
(rather than as objectified) (p. 34), Scheler seeks to trace each monopoly
to ‘the structure of the human being, that is, ... his givenness to himself
[and] his ability to objectify his environment and his own psychic and
physical being with all of their mutual causal relations’ (p. 31, emphasis
added). The origin or source of these monopolies, in Scheler’s account,
is thus structural, where the elements of the described structures include
(among other things) human bodies, minds, environments, and causal
relations between these. In discussing the human perception of space,
for instance, Scheler takes pains to distinguish this perception from that
of non-human organisms. In particular, the uniquely human perception
of a spatial manifold as homogeneous (p. 32) depends on existing in a
condition of perpetual lack of satisfaction of drives:
These empty forms [of space and time] can only occur in a being
having spirit and whose lack of satisfaction of its drives is always
more than its satisfaction. We call “empty” what remains unsatisfied
in the expectations of our drives – the primary “emptiness” which
is, as it were, the emptiness in our hearts. ... It is only in the human
being, when expectations in the drives, which are transformed into
kinetic impulses, outweigh all factual drive-gratification in a percep-
tion or a sensation, that we can find the extraordinary and rare
phenomenon of a spatial “void” and, analogously, a temporal void,
both antecedent and as the “foundation,” of all possible contents of
perception and of the entire world of things as their foundation.
Without suspecting it, the human being thus looks into the void
of his own heart as the infinite void of space and time as though
these voids would have existed had there been no things at all!
(pp. 32–33)
At the same time, the experience of this lack does not depend on the
experience of particular sensory contents, but is rather constitutive of
the human bodily (‘kinesthetic’) mode of being in the world itself:
The root of the human intuition of space and time, which precedes
all external sensations, resides in organic, spontaneous possibilities of
moving and doing and following a definite order. The fact is that – as
one was able to prove in certain cases of pathological defects – tactile
space is not directly coordinated to visual space, but when a coordina-
tion does take place, it is by way of mediations of kinesthetic sensation;
this state of affairs also shows that the empty form of space, at least
taken to be still unformed “spatiality,” is experienced among humans
prior to becoming aware of any sensations at all[,] on the basis of the
experiences of motor impulses and of the capacity to produce the
empty form (for it is kinesthetic impulses which effectuate kinesthetic
sensations). This primitive kinesthetic space – this awareness of nearby
surroundings – even persists when visual space with its continuous and
simultaneous manifold of ‘extension’ has been taken away. (p. 32)
Thus, on Scheler’s view, the perception of an extended, homogeneous

spatial manifold (the series that underlies the notion of ‘place’ in
the sense of physical location) can be traced back to the structure of
human existence itself, including the environmental and causal aspects
mentioned above.
Scheler’s specific genetic account of human spatial perception is both
suggestive and highly questionable. Whatever its ultimate status as an
explanatory hypothesis, however, its strategy of explanation is notably
distinct from any provided by either Huxley or Cassirer – or, as we will
see, the pluralisms of the phase that follows. Here Scheler has proposed
a genetic account (or, perhaps better put, an emergentist account) of
the production and producibility of a series that Huxley has employed
without noticing or describing, and Cassirer has noticed and described but
not explained in terms of its genesis.4 This strategy of Scheler’s – which
seeks to get behind the series in terms of which worlds are constructed
or described, and articulate their source and genesis rather than merely
their objects (as in Huxley) or the structural laws according to which they
4
Cassirer fares somewhat better on this matter in Cassirer (1957 [1929],
pp. 142–161), but even there, the genetic account is considerably thinner than
even Scheler’s brief proposal in Die Stellung.
(the series) operate (as in Cassirer) – is among the fundamental original

insights of the tradition of ‘philosophical anthropology’ that Scheler’s
text helped to found (compare Plessner, 1928 and Gehlen, 1988 [1940]).
A similar strategy is discernable in Merleau-Ponty (2012 [1945]), who
brilliantly follows a procedure close to Scheler’s and the philosophical
anthropologists on this point.
The human place in the worlds
The history of ideas since 1863 is marked not only by the attraction of
naturalism, but also by that of pluralism and relativism. This latter trajec-
tory is exemplified in Friedrich Nietzsche’s and Max Weber’s affirmations
of value relativism; in Scheler’s struggle to accommodate cultural diver-
sity in his ethics and epistemology (1973 [1913, 1916], 1980 [1926]);
in Cassirer’s efforts to relate myth to the modern scientific worldview
(Cassirer, 1955a [1923], 1955b [1925]); in the advancing hold of rela-
tivism within the discipline of cultural anthropology; and, eventually,
in the pluralistic if not relativistic turn in the history, philosophy, and
sociology of science. Huxley and Scheler share an attitude that places
them on one side rather than the other of these developments. Coining
a pair of terms, we could say that Huxley and Scheler share a monocar-
tographic, rather than a pluricartographic, approach to the question of
‘man’s place in nature’ or ‘the world’. Briefly put, they assume that the
‘best’ answer to this question would articulate this place in a single, self-
consistent way, as well as that all possible answers to the question can,
at least ideally, be ranged on a scale from better to worse – which is also
a scale from truer and more complete, at the better end, to less true and
less complete, at the worse. Their imagined ideal answers thus take both
a monistic and a representational form.
Recently defended philosophical pluralisms, however, such as those
of Helen Longino (2012) and Huw Price (2011), do not adhere to such
monocartographic assumptions. They therefore imply a challenge to
monistic naturalisms and non-naturalisms like those of Huxley and
Scheler. ‘Why suppose’, the pluralist demands, ‘that there is only one
human place in the world? Why not suppose there are rather many
human places in many different worlds?’ Perhaps the ‘human place in
the world’ is a many-valued function, better expressed as ‘the human-
x’s place-y in world-z’, where for every change of x, y, and z values, the
meaning of the complete expression changes. Furthermore, perhaps this
function cannot be mapped: perhaps the values taken by one or more
variables cannot be ordered according to any single principle or series
(as is the sequence of real numbers, for instance), but are rather incom-
mensurable, one to the other.
In her recent text, Studying Human Behavior: How Scientists Investigate
Aggression and Sexuality (2012), Longino conducts an ambitiously wide-
ranging yet close and critical study of the aims, methodological proto-
cols, and theoretical assumptions of a variety of contemporary research
programs into human behavior, including neuroscience, behavioral
genetics, molecular genetics, and developmental systems theory (DST).
Longino notes both that each of these ‘research approaches’ (p. 15)
exhibits characteristic limitations and oversights, and that researchers
in different traditions define their objects of study (such as ‘aggres-
sion’) differently from one another. In contrast to views that respond
to this divergence by seeking common definitions or a unifying stand-
point, however, Longino argues that a diversity of individually incom-
plete, limited, and mutually non-integratable approaches to the study
of human behavior may actually be preferable to any more integrated
alternative. Longino thus defends a ‘non-eliminative’ and incommensu-
rabilist pluralism:
Ineliminable plurality is plurality that results either from the avail-

ability of models at different levels of analysis or organization or from
the incommensurability of equally empirically adequate approaches
at the same level of analysis. Non-eliminative pluralism is the view
that some plurality is of the ineliminable sort and, importantly, of
the second, incommensurable-approaches sort. Non-eliminative
pluralism is an attitude toward that plurality of incommensura-
bles, an attitude focusing on the different kinds of knowledge each
approach can offer rather than assuming that one, at most, is correct.
(Longino, 2012, p. 147)
This position obviously contradicts the aspirations of at least some

advocates of individual research approaches. It similarly contradicts the
monocartographic assumptions of Huxley and Scheler, as previously
described.5
5
Compare Scheler (2009 [1928], p. 5). Huxley’s view is monocartographic
insofar as he depends on coherence arguments to convince his opponents that
the accumulated data contradicts traditional and popularly held views. In prin-
ciple, a pluralist could distinguish scientific and non-scientific views and not
require consistency between them, and thus protect the traditional views from
Huxley’s attack.
Another form of pluralism is described and defended by Huw Price

(2011). Price identifies a type of problem that appears within many
contemporary discussions of ‘naturalism’ (for instance: in analytic meta-
ethics and philosophy of mind), which he calls ‘placement problems’:
If all reality is ultimately natural reality, how are we to “place” moral

facts, mathematical facts, meaning facts, and so on? How are we to locate
topics of these kinds within a naturalistic framework, thus conceived?
In cases of this kind, we seemed [sic] to be faced with a choice between
forcing the topic concerned into a category which for one reason or
another seems ill-shaped to contain it, or regarding it as at best second-
rate – not a genuine area of fact or knowledge. (Price, 2011, p. 187)
In brief, Price’s placement problems concern whether and how the

apparent objects of aesthetic, ethical, religious, and other non-natural-
istic discourses can be granted a respectable ontological status consistent
with naturalistic commitments. The problem is that they apparently
cannot, insofar as they do not clearly ‘fit’ (that is, do not clearly have a
‘place’) within the domain of purely natural objects.
Price’s fell-swoop solution to these ‘placement problems’ is to reject the
requirement that all human linguistic utterances represent their (apparent,
prima-facie) objects, and instead to construe human linguistic behavior
(when viewed ‘anthropologically’ [Price, 2011, p. 11; pp. 30–31]) as
serving a great variety of purposes, only one of which is to represent
anything at all. At the same time, Price refuses to countenance the exist-
ence of ‘non-natural’ objects in any substantive sense, for the same reason
he is suspicious of the requirement that all legitimately ‘naturalistic’
discourse somehow refer to natural objects: namely, the representation-
alist assumptions that motivate this requirement.6 Price describes himself
as a ‘deflationist’ about representational vocabulary – and indeed, about
metaphysics and ontology in general (Price, 2011, ch. 13).
Like Longino, Price explicitly avows pluralism (Price, 2011, chs 2,
10). He treats ‘natural’ vocabulary as just one vocabulary among others,
albeit one that is privileged within projects of naturalistic explanation:
Science is only one of the games we play with language. Each game
privileges its own ontology, no doubt, but the privilege is merely
6
Price thus breaks both with naturalisms like Huxley’s, and non-naturalisms
like Scheler’s, for the same anti-representationalist reasons.
perspectival. Science is privileged ‘by its own lights’, but to mistake

this for an absolute ontological priority would be to mistake science
for metaphysics, or first philosophy. (p. 31)
Price denies that there is any master vocabulary within which all local
vocabularies can be employed or understood, nor that there has to
be, nor that any one vocabulary is intrinsically privileged vis-à-vis the
others. In all of these respects, Price self-avowedly follows Rudolf Carnap
who (following to some extent Cassirer – see Friedman [1999]) posited a
plurality of linguistic frameworks and denied that existential questions
made sense except relatively to one framework or another. An integral
part of Price’s view is likewise the rejection of all extra-linguistic (or,
non-framework-relative) existence claims. Anything that is said to exist
is only said to exist within the domain of one or another framework.
The objects of ethical discourse and religion are as real as the objects of
natural science – which is to say, not real at all, except by the lights of
the discourse itself (Price, 2011, ch. 13).
Having surveyed contemporary pluralisms this far, however, we
can productively raise again a question that first arose in connection
with Scheler and his insistence on the ‘complete independence’ of
one series from another: namely, how is such ‘complete independ-
ence’ coherently conceivable? Is the analyst who stresses the diversity
of series, ‘research approaches’, or ‘language games’, not obliged to
relate the items within these pluralities in some way, in order even
to have grounds for distinguishing them? And, if so, is not this plane
of consistency itself at least a relative monocartography, and one of a
higher order (in the sense at least of being more inclusive) than any
view that retained the content only of one or the other of the suppos-
edly incommensurable views, each of which the pluricartographic
thinker seeks to accept?
We can better appreciate this limitation of pluralism through consid-
eration of Longino’s critical evaluation of DST as an approach to the
study of human behavior.7 Despite their valid demonstration of the
limitations of behavioral and molecular genetics, advocates of DST
nonetheless often reveal their own monistic assumptions, Longino
argues, when they argue that genetics research must be flawed if it does
not consider all causally relevant factors in organism development,
7
Longino’s discussion builds on several earlier controversies, notably that
between Kenneth Waters (2006, 2007) and Karola Stotz (2007, 2008).
including (say) inter- and intra-cellular processes and the organism’s

external environment:8
Even as [Stotz (2008)] seeks to rise above the nature-nurture

dichotomy/debate, she recreates a reductionist/DST dichotomy.
Unless one is prepared to accept the multilevel, omnifactorial
approach of DST, one is committed not only to reductionism, but to
“preformationism.” To accuse geneticists and philosophers of prefor-
mationism in this context is to construct a straw man and to be in the
grip of the monist conviction that only one approach can be correct.
In addition to collapsing the alternatives to create another problem-
atic dichotomy, Stotz is collapsing metaphysics and empirical inves-
tigation. (Longino, 2012, p. 143)
This is an ironic result, insofar as advocates of DST are likely to consider

themselves enemies of reductionism. Longino, if correct, has shown
that, though perhaps enemies of reductionism in one sense, advocates
of DST are often nonetheless defenders of a different kind of reduc-
tionism: namely, the belief that when two research approaches describe
and explain objects within the same domain in incommensurable ways,
one of these must be right, and the other wrong.
Longino’s word on this debate cannot be the last, however, simply
because neither the practice of science (Longino’s focus), nor the analysis
of the practice of science (Longino’s project), are matters wholly distinct
from organic development and behavior, nor from the diverse set of factors
that cause, constrain, and affect that development and behavior (the focus of
DST). There are planes of consistency that connect these various topoi as
well, and one of those is anthropology.
Longino presents her pluralism as epistemological rather than meta-
physical. In fact, she even concedes that ‘DST offers a picture of the
complexity of the organism that is probably correct from a metaphysical
point of view’ (pp. 143–144). However,
[f]rom an empirical point of view, what we know is piecemeal and

plural. Each approach offers partial knowledge of behavioral processes
8
In Longino’s terminology, ‘monism’ means ‘contend[s] that if a given subarea
[of science] is characterized by multiple incompatible approaches, this is a tempo-
rary phase; there must in the end be one complete comprehensive account of any
given phenomenon or phenomenon type’ (Longino, 2012, p. 137).
gleaned by application of its investigative tools. In applying these

tools, the overall domain is parsed so that effects and their potential
causes are represented in incommensurable ways. We can (and do)
know a great deal, but what we know is not expressible in one single
theoretical framework. (p. 144)
Yet metaphysics and epistemology are arguably not so easily separable

as Longino’s analysis suggests. They are related, among other ways,
through anthropology, insofar as knowing subjects are part of the world
they seek to know. One might ask, for instance, about how the partiality
and plurality of forms of scientific practice and knowledge emphasized
by Longino is possible, consistently with the content of what we think
we know through those forms of practice. This question suggests an
argument in favor of approaches and attitudes such as those exempli-
fied by DST – suitably pluralistically-tempered and anthropologically-
enriched – over those of the reductionist genetics to which Waters and
Longino seek (on some level) to attribute equivalent epistemological
standing, as well as over the restrictedly epistemological plane of consist-
ency of Longino’s pluralist approach itself.9
A similar challenge might be proposed to Price’s ‘deflationary’
pluralism. The problem in this case could be stated as one of identifying
the plane of consistency through which Price identifies the various
naturalistic and non-naturalistic vocabularies or ‘language games’ whose
ontological commitments he takes to be equivalently valid. If these are
treated as ontologically equivalent, does this not reveal the analysis of
language as the plane of consistency of Price’s own analysis? And what
gives this plane its analytical priority within his philosophical practice?
At the same time that Price’s analysis (arguably) inexplicitly privileges
a certain linguistic standpoint, it may also privilege another, naturalistic
and anthropological one. Though Price claims to deny ontological privi-
lege to any discourse, naturalistic or otherwise, he nonetheless stresses the
promise (for resolving, or rather dis-solving, the ‘placement problems’)
of a position he calls ‘subject naturalism’: ‘the philosophical viewpoint
that begins with the realization that we humans (our thought and talk
included) are surely part of the natural world’ (Price, 2012, p. 5). Here
9
Some other pluralisms on offer in the literature may already have moved
some distance in this direction – ironically, through their willingness to confront
metaphysical implications and interpretations more directly. See, for instance,
Cartwright (1999).
human linguistic behavior is interpreted naturalistically, in terms of its

role within environmental and social interactions, as a means of under-
standing how these language games are situated within and related to
the rest of nature. Yet, as we have noted, Price’s construal of the rela-
tionships between language games – including between the naturalistic,
anthropological game of subject naturalism, on the one hand, and the
non-naturalistic games that have traditionally presented a puzzle to natu-
ralists, on the other – is self-avowedly a pluralistic one, wherein no vocab-
ulary or language game is privileged. Under the plausible conjecture that
connections of a genetic or logical sort could be established between these
vocabularies, or their objects, or that objects of one language could appear
within (or be shared with) another, could these connections and inter-ap-
pearances put pressure on the ‘independence’ thesis that is a centerpiece
of Price’s view? Could not the shifting distributions of dependence and
independence between vocabularies, or the objects within them, which
plausibly already reveal themselves in the course of scientific research,
philosophical analysis, and cultural change more generally, be traced
to any origins or planes of consistency that, at least relatively speaking,
provide more unifying and thereby illuminating perspectives on these
distributions, than Price’s linguistically founded pluralism? Is not Price’s
own appeal to an anthropological perspective (his so-called ‘subject natu-
ralism’) that analyzes discourse in terms of its use and its role in practices,
itself an acknowledgment of this possibility?
A human place
Thus far, I have distinguished three approaches or attitudes to the ques-

tion of ‘man’s plane in nature’ in late modernity. I have noted charac-
teristic insights, strengths, and weaknesses of each. In my concluding
remarks, I will sketch the outlines of a fourth, emergentist alternative,
which traces series or planes of consistency that relate the natural to
the non-natural and the monistic to the pluralistic. In describing such a
view, I draw on two proposals with which it resonates – namely, those of
Lenny Moss (2014) and Helmuth Plessner (1928). I present the view in
the form of five criteria that (I propose) hold for any approach to articu-
lating the ‘human place in nature’ that could satisfy us today.
First, we must accept the diversity of series and planes according to
which this ‘human place’ and aspects of this place may be understood.
Along some dimensions of comparison, the diversity may appear ‘empir-
ical’ and commensurable; along others, it may appear radical and incom-
mensurable. The diversity of conditions affecting human cognition
and agency, as acknowledged in the post-Kantian tradition inclusive of

Marx, Nietzsche, Scheler, Plessner, and Merleau-Ponty; the diversity of
appearances due to research standpoint (as acknowledged in Longino);
and the diversity of objects and rules of construction of symbolic forms
(Cassirer) or language games (Wittgenstein, Price) in which we partici-
pate, are among the pluralities we are obliged to acknowledge.
Secondly, however, we cannot compellingly affirm a total separability
of any of these elements, planes, series, or factors, from any of the others.
This is the point made in contrast to Scheler’s ‘complete independence’
claims, as well as Longino’s and Price’s (apparent) understanding of their
own pluralisms, a point made by appeal to the plane of consistency as
condition of possibility of coherent experience, discussion, thought, or
analysis. Summarizing the first and second points: there is no such thing as
complete and total separability, nor complete and total connection. Moss
(2014, pp. 94–104), for instance, describes various stages of relative separa-
bility or ‘detachment’ among entities comprising what we experience and
conceptualize as nature.10 He stresses the impossibility of complete separa-
bility (the necessity of ‘attachment’ and, in some cases, ‘compensation’):
[A]utonomy in reference to the state of autopoietic systems and the

like is very much a relative matter, a state of affairs best depicted by
a continuum of levels of detachments that can be distinguished by
various criteria. ... [D]etachment is always relational. Other than the
universe as a whole (as best we can tell) there are no absolute states
of detachment, only deeper or shallower wells of relative detach-
ment, relative autonomy, nested inside higher-level wells of detach-
ment and within the larger fabric of nature. In this sense stories about
‘detachment’ are also always stories about ‘attachments’. (p. 95)
Both the logical point, and Moss’s emergentist analytic of detachment

that supports it, imply that the boundaries separating one series from
another are not absolute. Drawing on and extending Plessner’s notion
of boundaries [Grenzen], we may further conjecture that all boundaries –
whether in thought, life, nature, or culture – are subject to qualification
10
Moss articulates detachment-phenomena in terms of ‘degrees of freedom’
within ‘state spaces’ (pp. 94–95). Discussion of how such state spaces relate to
other kinds of space – such as physical, quality, logical, embodied, and political
space – must await another discussion.
and negotiation, including those boundaries defining the external limits

of the ‘whole’ itself (see the fourth point below) (Plessner, 1928).
The third point is that the proposal or identification of series, planes,
and factors described in the first two points is itself a part (inevitably
partially and non-exclusively) of the ‘human place’ that those series,
planes, and factors are sometimes appealed to in order to describe or
explain. They are thus subject to reflexive inquiry or analysis (see Moss,
2014, pp. 92–93; p. 104). An understanding of the ‘human place’ is
bound (in the sense that the question can always be posed, even if it
isn’t posed actually and explicitly in one or another context) to give
coherent expression to this production of the various series out of the
elements of some of those series themselves – not in the empiricist
or atomist sense criticized by Cassirer (1923 [1910]) in the passages
quoted in Section 1 above, but rather in the holistic, reflexive, transcen-
dental, and anthropological sense stressed by Marx, Bergson, Scheler,
Plessner, and Merleau-Ponty (albeit with specific problems and limi-
tations in each case). Retaining the insights of pluralism, we should
remember that genealogies, groundings, and reflexive elucidations
can be conducted in a variety of fashions and directions (for instance:
ontogenetically, phylogenetically, phenomenologically, and so on).
This plurality neither prevents such anthropological series from being
genealogies, groundings, and reflexive elucidations, nor from being
related to one another (that is, sharing planes of consistency) from one
or more points of view.
Fourthly, the question of the boundaries and plane of consistency
governing the entire system of such series, planes, and factors cannot
itself be avoided either. Nor can it be definitively answered, inasmuch as
such boundaries and planes are always negotiable. Metaphysics reveals
itself as (still) one of those questions that ‘human reason ... cannot
dismiss, ... but which it also cannot answer’ (Kant, 1998 [1781], p. 99).
Metaphysics, in this sense, might be understood as whatever stand-
point lends coherence to the totality of those factors, series, and planes
acknowledged within an experience, discourse, or analysis, after (one
imagines) all relatively ‘immediate’ pertinent questions have been asked
and answered. It is a plane of consistency, and is comprised in part of
those ‘presuppositions that both enable and constrain even our most
fundamental scientific views and yet are generally insulated from them’
(Moss, 2014, p. 92). (Given the especially contestable and negotiable
character of this boundary, the fourth requirement only gestures towards
a kind of question that can always be asked, without aiming to provide a
definitive formulation of that kind of question.)
Fifthly, we must attend not only to the meaning of the expressions

‘place’, ‘nature’, and ‘world’ in the expressions, ‘the human place
in nature’ and ‘the human place in the world’, but also to that of the
initial qualifier: the human. In doing so, the object of inquiry to some
extent guides our construction of series and correlations between series,
including genetic and material groundings and planes of consistency,
in an emergentist direction. The human is plausibly not restricted to the
organic bodies of human organisms, but extends throughout humans’
artifacts; their institutionally, socially, and ecologically mediated tradi-
tions; their time- and space-perceptions; their normative commitments
and hopes (Moss, 2014, p. 93); and their acts of imagination – all of
which interpenetrate their organic bodies (compare Plessner, 1928, ch.
7). According to variously constructible genetic and structural series that
connect that which is material and natural with that which is (variously)
immaterial and more-than-natural, as well as what is (relatively) one-di-
mensional with what is (relatively) multidimensional, the human (in this
broad sense) is a uniquely productive birthing place and transition point
between these qualities. Perhaps this transition point is best conceived as
an ‘ex-centric positionality’ (Plessner, 1928): a deepening of possibility
space (in comparison with that of non-human organic life) that passes
from the uni-dimensionality of drive-based life, through the three dimen-
sion of physical space, to higher dimensional possibility spaces no longer
expressible in strictly material or vital terms. Or perhaps (following Moss,
2014, pp. 97–104) it should be conceived as the continuously evolving
and negotiated product of two historically localizable detachment events:
first, the co-emergence (in evolutionary history) of species-typical human
developmental plasticity and an especially robust social organization (or
‘hominid super-organism’ [p. 100]) that is contingent and variable in the
norms it institutes, while being species-typically supplemental to indi-
vidual human beings’ development and behavior; and second, a counter-
detachment of the thought- and behavior-patterns of human individuals
from such social super-organisms, such that individuals and historically
variable social entities come to mutually enable and constrain each other’s
behavior, due to the powers each invests in the other (pp. 101–103).
By all appearances, the human place in the world is one that is
(1) highly diversely conditioned and constituted (due both to the variety
of factors conditioning or constituting it, and the variety of analytical
points of view that may be taken regarding it); (2) neither completely
unified nor completely disunified; (3) genetically embedded and
involved in those processes that it also sometimes reveals and explicates
(that is, reflexive); (4) subject to questioning and placement within a
project of articulating a completely understood and closed system, while

plausibly not ever fully adequately or finally ‘placed’ in such a system;
and (5) to some extent, a special kind of place, through which hetero-
geneous elements that might otherwise push the limits of conceivable
integration may be drawn and transformed.11
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trans. by R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Cassirer, E. (1955b [1925]) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume Two: Mythical
Thought, trans. by R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University Press).
Cassirer, E. (1957 [1929]) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms. Volume Three: The
Phenomenology of Knowledge, trans. by R. Manheim (New Haven: Yale University
Press).
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1994 [1991]) What Is Philosophy?, trans. by
H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press).
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University Press).
11
I thank audiences at the American Philosophical Association, Eastern
Division, 2013, and Hans-Peter Krüger’s Colloquium at the University of Potsdam,
Summer 2014, for opportunities to present early drafts of this paper. I also thank
Babak Ashrafi, Scott Davis, Abe Gibson, Nabeel Hamid, Gary Hatfield, Hartmut
Krech, Hans-Peter Krüger, Joseph Margolis, Flavia Padovani, Sami Pihlström,
Lynnette Regouby, and Rob Tye for comments or discussion that helped bring
the paper to its current form. All errors are my own.
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Explanation’, Journal of Philosophy, 91 (6), 277–304.
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(11), 551–579.
5
Plessner’s Conceptual
Investigations of ‘Life’: Structural
Narratology
Scott Davis
Neither biological research nor speculative philosophy, Plessner’s efforts,

like those of Wittgenstein, were devoted towards conceptual investiga-
tion, in this case of the concept of ‘life’. The results of such investiga-
tion, I propose, amount to a structural narratology. ‘What do we mean
when we talk of “life”’? ‘What are “humans”’? Answers to these ques-
tions involve narrative.
Biology has been a different kind of intellectual undertaking from the
classical sciences previously used to model the history and philosophy of
science. In its early period of development, biology, in contrast to physics
or chemistry, had been considered a marginal activity of collecting odds
and ends from the world of living things, and anecdotes about its prac-
titioners’ observations. It can be said that anthropology now is viewed
in a similar way, as collecting mankind’s curiosities and miscellan-
eous anecdotes about anthropologists’ adventures (Lévi-Strauss, 2013).
Emphasis on the individuality of its objects of study marks the life and
human sciences alike; this requires an adequate conceptual foundation
as these disciplines develop scientifically. Reflection on the individuality
of these sciences’ objects is crucial for re-conceptualizing vital projects
of human understanding.
Now a robust science, biology takes individuals as its objects, unlike
the objects of physical or chemical sciences concentrating instead on
recurring types of phenomena. Ernst Mayr insisted on the primacy
of individuals in biology, whether by stressing the special conceptual
character of knowledge of individuals, or by arguing for the primacy
of the individual’s role as key unit in the two-step process of variation
and selection. As a result, Mayr also recognized that much biological
121
122 Scott Davis
knowledge is narrative in nature (for example, 1988, p. 149). It is not

only that ‘historical narrative’ constructs likely scenarios for adapta-
tions, but also that in biologists’ encounters with individual organisms,
in the course of their lives, there is a spectrum of narrative possibilities
in play to understand their behavior in terms of purposes and means,
constituting at least a rudimentary story of sorts.
Mayr’s writings on the philosophy of biology clarify the differences
between on the one hand physical, planetary and chemical sciences,
which mostly deal with general laws to regulate over types of phenomena,
and on the other, the life and human sciences, which do not proceed
in terms of laws so much as they make progress through conceptual
analysis of ways of knowing individuals organically (1988, pp. 11–12).
Conceptual analysis, resembling in purpose the philosophical inves-
tigations conducted by Wittgenstein, is similarly the way Helmuth
Plessner approached his philosophical anthropology in the Die Stufen
des Organischen und der Mensch [The Organic Array and Humans].1
These questions underlie Plessner’s attempts to provide philosoph-
ical orientation to our knowledge of the world such that living things,
particularly human lives and cultures, can be treated following just the
same orientation as one follows in knowledge of nature. As humans
take their places in nature according to idiosyncratic cultural-historical
schemes, Plessner’s analyses of the nature of life and human beings
should be characterized as ‘structural narratology’. This essay traces
the devices constituting this practice in textual iconicity (the way the
text models the reflexivity of its own project), positionality of informa-
tion (intensifying information about structural positions), the method-
ology of structural analysis (how knowledge of objects is tantamount
to modeling constructs about the objects), narrative temporalities (the
ways that life is lived directly although mediated by relations outside of
itself and therefore lived ahead of itself) and thus the complex articula-
tion of mediated immediacy (the virtual processes that are real without
being actual and ideal without being abstract).
Plessner’s text
For Plessner, his work was a demonstration of different modalities of

being addressed by life and human sciences. This means that Plessner
1
Assonance aside, the term ‘array’ describes an operational matrix and thus
avoids decisions about whether to use the flat-sounding ‘levels’ or teleological
expressions such as ‘steps’ or ‘stages’ to translate Stufen.
Plessner’s Conceptual Investigations of ‘Life’ 123
examined and established the different characters involved when we

encounter plants, animals, and humans. His text is not a narrative,
but established frameworks in an array in which narratives and other
discourses might take place concerning the characters introduced as
modalities of being.2
Plessner argued for a new construal of knowledge in life and human
sciences, providing them with a proper foundation insofar as the
position and role of the observer could be built reflexively into the scien-
tific activity along with the observations and results. One might say that
Plessner envisioned a new kind of culture, a post-Cartesian culture to
accommodate insights beyond the positivities of biological research and
frame these insights in ways directly applicable to human sciences. This
new culture required new notational expression, in ‘vertical’ (as in the
Organic Array, where the kinship with life and natural sciences is posi-
tioned) and ‘horizontal’ axes (as in comparative studies of the range of
human sense and expression). The literary framework Plessner created
to accomplish the transformation accordingly has textual features
reflecting these goals.
Regarding the text, Plessner says as much himself, in parenthesis at
the end of one section:
(All fundamental features of life unfold as the counterpart of the

body’s properties that grow from the essence of the boundary. This
development makes use of stratum after stratum, because it is not
given to thought to lay out the fullness of the essential relations one
next to the other and to survey them in one glance. At the same
time, the passage from stratum to stratum means the pursuit of the
conditions for the unifiability of the essential traits of life with the
essential traits of physical thinghood. It is therefore not indifferent in
which stratum the considerations find themselves at any given time.
If here what is being spoken about is the openness of the organism
through its organs, then this rests upon organization as an essential
property of the living body overall [which Plessner has presented as
fundamentally closed against the surroundings], and means only a
consequence from its premises, not a conflict with them.) (Plessner,
1928, p. 192)
2
As Hénaff (1998, p. 160), says in connection with structural analysis of myth-
ological narratives: ‘The narrative is, in a way, a dramatization of these logical
operations’.
124 Scott Davis
The title of The Organic Array and Humans clearly displays the model-
making goals of its author. The text therefore presents us with a literary
phenomenon also encountered in several important twentieth-century
works such as the ‘topographical’ treatment of philosophical conun-
drums (like walking along different sectors of an old and complex city)
in Wittgenstein, and the complex topological explorations of mytho-
logical thought that are read, map-like, in Lévi-Strauss’s Mythologiques.
The contents of particular regions of the text are to a high degree given
their significance by the positions they occupy in the texts. It should
be noted that this iconic property of their textual organizations makes
these authors particularly difficult to cite, as it is necessary to construct
the extended surroundings and demonstrate the corresponding indica-
tors of the contents in question; this has certainly contributed to the
difficulty of reading the authors with understanding, and the subsequent
scholarship on all three authors has noticeably suffered accordingly.
It is to be expected that a text so devoted to positionality would
express itself in this way.3 Plessner iconically laid out the Organic Array
to investigate our conceptual understanding of life, including our obser-
vation of and participation in it. The investigation begins as a quest to
find true, irreversible double-aspectivity in the world, and to explore
whether the double-aspectivity may not be subsumed under some form
of unification. This is the first task Plessner sets himself in modeling the
array, a demonstration that both starts and frames it.
Consideration of our experiences with objects gives Plessner the occa-
sion to establish a true double-aspectivity of objects. Conceptual analysis
of our experience of objects gives sensed aspects of the thing on the one
hand, and awareness of a core that is unavailable for the senses on the
other. One might recall Whitehead’s aspects of ‘presentational imme-
diacy’ and causal efficacy. Husserl and then Piaget made us familiar with
these ways of dealing with things by unifying the presented aspects
around the object’s center – not a spatial center, but a way our inten-
tions work with unified things that reveal their existence by hiding the
cored totality ‘behind’ or ‘inside’ their aspects and properties.
3
Compare Hénaff (1998, pp. 127–128), ‘Moreover, what is determining in
symbolism is not only that one sees what is intelligible appear on the same level as
sensible elements but above all that these elements are not primarily ... supposed
to deliver a message: they perform an operation; they ensure a performance . ... In
fact a symbolic system organizes elements into an operating mechanism . ... What
is important is not the meaning of the elements but their position’.
Plessner now will develop this true, irreversible double-aspectivity of

object perception through the organic array from first to last. He offers
his insightful term positionality in order to motivate this demonstra-
tion. We will examine the term soon, but for now think of it as a way
to approach the living configurations of the biological world as living
things; a way to set up the organic array in terms of our intuition of how
things take up their positions in spacetime. Through the development
of the organic array as a matrix of essential double-aspectivities, the
text builds up step-by-step a model of very considerable sophistication
and reciprocal logical constraint. The inanimate thing shows a kind of
double-aspectivity in the core-aspect constellation. The animate thing
of whatever type mediates itself to itself through its boundary [Grenze],
and thus has a kind of double-aspectivity to the effect that it is in some
ways over beyond itself [über ihm hinaus] and in other ways set back in
(deposited or posited) into itself [in ihm Hineingesetztsein; ‘against itself’
ihm entgegen]. Plessner develops the discussion through use of conven-
ient vectors running from the inside of a thing to its limit and then back
into itself, part of his structural apparatus to arrange his textual account
iconically. He is trying to show how the double-aspective configura-
tions belong to a reiterative series: the living body is the next step in
the array of double-aspectivities nature articulates to us. Physical things
appear ‘through’ double-aspectivity, but not ‘in’ double-aspectivity as
living things are. The core-aspect double-aspectivity is not only there,
as with an inanimate thing, but actually, the double-aspectivity actively
appears as one of the attributes of the animate thing. Plessner will try
to bring to equilibrium the requirements of being a physical thing with
those of being a living thing, processing information, using the directed
pathways with reference to the living thing’s boundaries; at each step
the restraints of the physical thing and the organic thing are balanced,
which motivates the reiterative unification of various steps of the array.
A living thing appears as an individual, as a physical form, and as a
representative of an abstract biological type announced and represented
through the typical formation of its physical shape. This consideration
shows how a living thing must balance its physical formation with
requirements incumbent on animate objects.
At each step of the discussion, Plessner aims to support structural
analysis of the world of animate objects as different formations of being.
He reviews the characteristic qualities of life processes and reveals their
systematic relations in terms of vectors and boundaries, nodes and
edges, which he has derived. Plant and animal types of positionality
are opposed as open and closed configurations. As relatively closed off
126 Scott Davis
from and running counter to the environment (unlike the way plants
are optimally ‘built into’ the environment in their growth and func-
tions), animals thereby open the positional field and generally develop
systems of locomotion that transform the experiential ranges of the
individuals into discrete infinities. Animal types once again repeat a
bifurcation into non-centralized and centralized types (analogous to
invertebrate and vertebrate). Various organic configurations and cycles
are posited in antagonistically running programs. At some point ‘being,
as it were turns around into consciousness, and an aspect center appears
from a core’ (1928, p. 243), and many features of animal behavior and
mentality are considered profoundly and with great success with these
models. And out of the centric type discussed in the penultimate chapter,
the last chapter is the type of eccentric positionality, for humans; and
Plessner will use the procedures demonstrated thus far to give a pene-
trating structural analysis of the conditions in which ‘human beings
consider themselves as subjects of a cultural-historical reality, as moral
persons with consciousness of responsibility, in just the same direction as
that through which their physical, phylogenetic history and its place in
the natural totality are determined’ (1928, p. 6).
We will see in more detail how this modal framing of the organic
analogies works, but presently the point is to give just the barest outline
of the organic array, to comment on its textual design. For Plessner builds
the demonstration from object perception to object perception: animals
do not live in a world of self-standing objects as we do, but with signals,
releasers, periodic routines that suit drives, and do not treat the world
objectively. Only humans are equipped to do so, in our mediated imme-
diacy, and only we get the aspects and non-appearing core of coherence
of the thing. Thus the textual progression of the argument forms a kind
of ring and joins itself at beginning and end: this is not petitio principii
but is a textual icon for how being turns around in consciousness. This
is a kind of phenomenology of object-awareness that works textually by
motivating a recursive, iconic structure of symbolism.
By formulating a vector and boundary notation and by graphing out
double-aspectivities and mutual relations within each aspect of each
step of the array, Plessner takes us on a deep exploration of material
bases of organic process, and eventually, going in the same direction, to
cultural behavior. This is done with a very neutral structural review with
an eye for organic design and processes, looking to find feature pairing,
oppositions and syntheses, and generally tracing out qualitative intensi-
ties of energy or information flows and interrelations in life processes
that belong together structurally as expressions of each step along the
array. Plessner’s text ideally would be something like the Mandelbrot set
that simultaneously expresses its procedures geometrically and operates
its procedures dynamically in differential equations.
Positionality
The key to Plessner’s vision starts with positionality, a brilliant innov-

ation in analytic terminology. It is a qualitative intensifier that operates
over the display of positions on Cartesian axes, the scientific ‘view from
nowhere’. Descartes’ grid established a scientific approach to objects in
terms of their positions (with the residual difficulty concerning who it
is observing these positions). Plessner offers more intensively treatable
objects, with different degrees of double-aspectivity, to acknowledge
living things both are positions in spacetime and have these positions as
their own bodies. Rather than a dualistic treatment of alternatives taken
as fundamental to inquiry, double-aspectivity is thereby made operable,
so the intensifying term ‘positionality’ makes discourse about organic
modals much easier to conduct.
Positionality is like other terms with -ality suffixes: for example, ‘func-
tionality’ is the quality of having functions, and ‘morality’ the quality
of being moral. Thus, ‘positionality’ must be the quality of having a
position (being with position). Something can have a position when
the position itself (as position) counts as information for further activity.
Positionality can be thought of as what makes possible that there is
salient information pertaining to some bodily position.
The relation of Descartes to Plessner here might be analogous to that
between Saussure and C.S. Peirce in structural analysis. That is, instead
of a dyadic relation between signifier and signified, Peirce established
signifying as a triadic relation by adding interpretants. The meanings
negotiated in Peirce’s system of notation have the advantage of being
open-ended and ongoing. They introduce gaps in signifying cycles to
motivate processing of the information that can construct recursive
series of qualitative differences.4 Compared to, for instance, the equi-
librium of opposing forces of radiation and gravitation inside a star,
which simply establishes a threshold position (registered to us scientifi-
cally), life processes present information across an articulated distance,
4
Mayr recognized the unique position of the life and human sciences as
dealing with programmable operations, which furnished the proper views to
disarm many confusions produced by teleological thinking in Western tradition.
128 Scott Davis
as evoked by Plessner’s vectors and boundaries, so that the information

works as information: it is about something.
A conceptual analysis of life processes demonstrates that our engage-
ment with the natural world is about organic modals – that is, that the
framework of our interaction with these processes is distributed on levels
in terms of configurations of plant structures and animal structures.
These positionalities are real without being actual, ideal without being
abstract. These clusters of our conceptualization distribute distinctive
features or affordances of the natural world, formalized by the intensi-
fying operator called ‘positionality’, which means the way positions in
spatiotemporal existence are treatable, indifferently for the purpose of
life process or life scientific analysis. Configurations of animate posi-
tionality mediate themselves to themselves in many ways capturable by
investigations of their positional stance. As the study of ethnobiological
classification systems confirms, plants and animals (characterized by
Plessner as ‘open’ and ‘closed’ forms of positionality) are basic, distinct
and opposed ideas of positional organization.
On the basis of further application of this intensifying device, it is
moreover evident that human beings themselves live on a plane of exist-
ence removed from the plant or animal configurations. The ‘distance’
of this removal is structurally derivable from the ways life plays with its
spatiotemporal positions in positionality, the ways in which animals are
differentiated from plants, and the ways (roughly speaking) invertebrate
animals are differentiated from vertebrates. In other words, in series one
can construct an analogical table for the distribution of the structural
features in such a way that human life and culture are included in the
spectrum of positionalities, in a way that must be possible inasmuch as
we are the agents of this reflective, classificatory effort at outlining posi-
tionalities in the first place. When one addresses the human modality
of positional operations, it becomes evident that, whereas plants and
animals find ways of relating their life to their own borders and thus
entertain processes of positionality, and of course humans likewise main-
tain centralized, closed processes as well, nevertheless the modality of
human positionality follows eccentric pathways. Unlike animals oper-
ating a closed form of positionality, a form that becomes centered, in
vertebrate organization, in its relation to the animals’ own organs and
boundaries, mainly through the development of the nervous systems,
humans are capable of extensive relations to themselves through media-
tion taking place outside themselves. In their cultural existence, human
beings’ positionality takes place eccentrically and outside direct rela-
tions of the organism’s life to its borders. This is a treatment of culture
allowing cultural analysis to proceed as much as possible in the same

direction as life science analysis.
The treatment of positionality is conducive to cultural analysis of social
action in terms of information structures that are richly life-oriented and
biotic. Plessner’s efforts not only resemble the conceptual investigations
of Wittgenstein5 or the structural icons of Lévi-Strauss; the concern to
model ‘distance’ in an intensive dimension resembles the ‘topological
psychology’ of Kurt Lewin. Similarly his work recalls the models created
by Braitenburg in Vehicles, an array of circuit types that reveal the struc-
tural underpinnings of behavior. His fundamental reliance on vector
notation furthermore connects Plessner’s efforts with the organic, process
philosophy of Whitehead.
Methodology of structural analysis
Plessner’s structural method is made very clear throughout The Organic

Array and Humans. As he builds the steps of his array with directed path-
ways, he articulates an armamentarium of ideas for understanding living
processes. There will be path operators (‘to’, ‘through’, ‘transit’, ‘lifting
away’, ‘set [stuck] back into’, ‘positionality’, and so on), locatives (‘in’,
‘beyond’, ‘at’, ‘node’, and so on), and more complex relational terms
(part/whole, being/having, direct/indirect and so forth). His considera-
tions of physical and living things in terms of directed pathways and
boundaries is ontological, morphological, sometimes mereological,
sometimes topological, in part phenomenological and often dialectical.6
These indications lead us through an array that is being hypothesized
for modeling purposes. As Wittgenstein also knew, from his study of
Goethe,7 the challenge Plessner will accept in his conceptual investiga-
tion will be to found a series of organic analogies in this common nota-
5
Wittgenstein’s favorite thought-problems themselves were highly involved
in considerations of double-aspectivity, such as the duck-rabbit, or the capital
letter F whose horizontal components are extended leftward in a way that can be
‘seen as’ a reversed F or a proper F. Aspectivity for example plays a critical part in
the rejection of internal visual representation as a foundation for mental proc-
esses in Philosophical Investigations.
6
His treatment of biocycles should be compared with views of traditional
cosmobiological systems, such as Traditional Chinese Medicine.
7
Remarks on the Philosophy of Psychology I, §950; also cf. Wittgenstein (1971,
p. 34); Baker and Hacker (1980, pp. 532–541); Lévi-Strauss (1976, pp. 18–19).
130 Scott Davis
tional network; if the analogies can be established satisfactorily thereby,

then the dispositif can be to that degree justified.
It starts from a fundamental circumstance, the reality of which is

treated completely hypothetically, and proceeds step by step from the
determination of one characteristic to another. The determinations
of essential characters follow one from the other, order themselves by
levels, and disclose themselves as a large context, which thereby is for
its part conceived as manifestation of the fundamental circumstance.
(Plessner, 1928, p. 115)
The procedures are structurally founded because they are middle-level

theory making models or modals for organizing a structural form of expres-
sion. The project of model-making is conceived as hypothetical because
the model will require adjusting as the exploration continues.8 The
hypothetical character of the investigation resembles the gap of deferred
meaning due to inclusion of interpretants in information cycles.
At first, everything remains hypothetical: if it is correct that living

bodies are specifically distinguished in intuition through the moment of
double-aspectivity, then it is also correct that in distinction to nonliving
bodies they have a relation to their own limits as described in Case II
[the case of the living body with vectors going out to and returning
back into the body from the boundary]. (Plessner, 1928, p. 105)
The characters identified as occurring in his notational networks are

not abstract, theoretical concepts, neither first principles nor occult
things in-themselves that let each individual case be deduced. Rather,
they are characters known from ordinary experience of living beings. As
principles, they are arrived at through a priori considerations, but their
full meaning is unknown pending an a posteriori elaboration of facts
demonstrably following from them.9 Were the facts different, incon-
sistent with the ideal constructions Plessner has adduced, then the
8
As Krüger points out (2009, pp. 146–147), the modeling along the two series –
‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ – must be mutually independent, and a successful
modeling outcome will show how they are able to interact in terms of actual
observational data.
9
‘Only, no one can say ahead of time what is a purely empirical and what is a
categorical part of the phenomenal groups ... what is an a posteriori and what is an
a priori determination’ (Plessner, 1928, pp. 116–117).
investigation would be unsuccessful. This is evidently the same proce-

dure as followed by Lévi-Strauss, who explained, ‘In anthropology as in
linguistics, ... it is not comparison that supports generalization, but the
other way around’ (Lévi-Strauss, 1963, p. 21): a priori a table of possibili-
ties is drawn, but their realization is kept hypothetical. They are open,
‘stenographic’ markers for investigation (compare Wacquant, 1989,
pp. 50–51; Bourdieu, 1977, p. 76). Then the phenomena are studied
to test, through a kind of abductive operation like ‘curve-fitting’, the
degree to which the logical configurations are substantiated. If they are
not, then reject the notation. If the notation can be applied consist-
ently to the phenomena, then it justifiably gives the logic of the struc-
tures realized and operating in that particular case: the phenomena
are interpreted as instantiations of logical possibilities in play during
the action in each case. Unlike a deductive procedure, dealing with
phenomenal types under regimes of general law, the method’s abduc-
tive aspect corresponds to the unique individuality of the objects under
study.
As Plessner states, his explorations are not primarily deductive. That is
to say, the investigation proceeds, not as deduced from some ideas about
boundaries, but in the light of their realization.10 Again, the conceptual
analysis is a kind of interpretation based on construing the individual
phenomena as realizations of complex networks of structural possibili-
ties, which Plessner calls ‘ideas’:
Ideas are not concepts, applying experience to the reference

of smaller or larger circles of relatedness on the scale of lower or
higher abstractness. Rather, ideas form a discontinuous manifold
of opposing supersedings, without the possibility of one stage
succeeding on to the next according to a principle of continuous
progress. Not constructed from ideas, but indeed understandable in
respect to ideas, the concrete living thing corresponds hereby to the
ontological connection between being and form, which is character-
istic for life. Between the physical and the form, there remains free
space for play. (1928, p. 236)
10
‘A deduction of categories or modals of the organic of this kind – note well,
not from the factual relation of the realization of the boundaries, because they
are not given for themselves, but rather under the viewpoint of their realization –
forms the central part of the philosophy of life’ (Plessner, 1928, p. 122).
132 Scott Davis
The conditions of possibility for a physical thing to exhibit a character

of positionality, as encountered and interpreted in the modal qualities
of the living body, will thereby be understood as essentially necessary
for life’s realization. The investigation accomplishing this understanding
will be taken as confirmation of the validity of the reading and notation
of double-aspectivity as shown by living things, and will thus demon-
strate the unity underlying the appearance of double-aspectivity. The
realization of the positional character in the living body is also its concre-
tization and its complication in the indirectness of physical relations.11
Although Plessner’s table of organic analogies must be unifiable by
demonstrating a chain of transformations at each level linking it to the
next emerging step, still the operation of the organic array is not rigidly
deductive; it has ‘free space for play’, something that is a major interest
throughout his work. With this flexibility, Plessner’s results appear more
as ‘structural narratology’, because the modals and ideational subcom-
ponents of his organic array are discontinuous. They map routes or
embody possible narrative and discursive actions but do not determine
them. Nor, however, are these directed pathways simple metaphors. The
relationship of a living thing out of and back into itself is captured by
our directional language; these relations do run in these dimensions,
as can be seen by the way Plessner’s array hangs together overall. They
furnish a framework for organic processes, one of which is the interpre-
tation of life itself by life itself, part of the project in which the life and
human sciences participate.
Narrative knowledge
Mayr (1982, pp. 21–82) emphasized that a characteristic feature of

biological science is its objects are, and must be, ‘individuals’: thoroughly
unique, variable, discrete objects. This feature – the necessary introduc-
tion of qualitative differentials into the range of possible objects – in
turn, given the super-fertility of nature, will be the grounds for the oper-
ation of selection as a fundamental relation in life and social science.
The relation of selection or selectivity is analytic to the framework of
individuals as these sciences’ objects.
11
As Whitehead emphasized, ‘The true philosophical question is, How can
concrete fact exhibit entities abstract from itself and yet participated in by its
own nature?’ (Whitehead, 1978, p. 20).
Selectivity means the application of vertical or equivalency relations,

such that items may be selected one against the other in order to be
positioned at the selection point. Selection operations bring into play
discourses of value (fitness, meaning, goal, intention and so on) func-
tioning as selection criteria. An axis of selection, called a paradigmatic
dimension in Jakobson’s (1960) structural linguistics, therefore provides
narrative time with a reversible orientation (operations over categories)
to counterbalance the axis of combination or a diachronic, regulatory,
irreversible orientation. Life and human sciences work with these axes
of time as well as with these features and operations.
Selectivity in a world of individuals (who are not only temporal, but
also ‘time-having’ zeithaft) is a particular kind of temporal configuration
of necessity and contingency, as Plessner observed:
In consequence, the becoming individuum turns out to be in a

doubled mis-relation to the capacity of form, which gives it free
space of play – as well as, therein, the frames giving the possibilities
that are necessarily missed – and the fullness of its own potentialities
permitted it of realizing the available possibilities. It is just in this way
that each factual development at any time, in whatever direction it
goes, no matter how many leaps it makes, maintains the character
of an individual development, which could also have run other-
wise, even though development in a determined line is necessary to
the individuum. However, the road taken in fact must necessarily
be accidental. Over real development, in spite of the general sense
settled on in a certain way overall, there rules contingency, that it just
must be this and no other. The continual capacity of the individually
becoming form, and the capacity that ‘properly’ conforms to it, of
its own continual potentiality, take nothing from the law whereby
the individuum realizes a certain possibility; however, the necessity is
indeed taken from the result of the realization, letting the individual
appear as sacrifice of a blind fate. Life means, in-itself, blindly being
already selected, being chosen. Life is the necessary passing by of its
possibilities, and for this reason, selection. (Plessner, 1928, p. 215)
Risk occurs under these complex conditions of selectivity, individual

focus and narrative relations. Equivalently stated: to experience risk,
one must live under certain forms of destiny, the destiny of individuals:
Youth, maturity and aging are the forms of destiny of life, because
they are essential for the developmental process. Forms of destiny are
134 Scott Davis
not forms of being, rather for being; being appears under them and
bears them. Next to the regularities of ‘what’ [there is] (essentiality)
and the regularities of process (causality), as a third kind there appears
the necessity of destiny. According to the first kind, everything that is
something is determined. According to the second kind, everything
that runs off in time is determined. According to the third kind, all,
and only, living things are determined. (Plessner, 1928, p. 154)
One necessary feature of living forms is that they will experience certain
predefined changes as contingencies, including maturation and death,
forms of risk for living individuals. And human beings are further
characterized by awareness the destined forms will in fact come to be
fulfilled, through contingently occurring events. The idea of destiny
here is not that specific events are predestined to happen in our futures
like fate, since the events are contingent, but rather that, because life is
dependent upon its future, forthcoming chance events will occur within
forms related to it already in a destined way. For instance, there is a sense
that if an organism loses its life in a violent accident, it did not fulfill
the possible life ahead of it, as its individual potential. The death has a
character of being premature, marking the narrative of this individual
life as unfulfilled in certain respects.
Narrative properties of risk reveal the way life is lived ‘ahead of itself’
[ihm selbst vorweg], as Plessner observed. Risk therefore factors not only
in human life, as projections of human care or will, but also constitutes
the life-worlds of any biological objects, particularly animals. Although
human beings experience and transform basic qualities of being ‘thrown
projects’ [Geworfen-Entwurf] in the Heideggerian sense of culture
(Heidegger, 1962), this characterization fails to capture the shared narra-
tive modalities across the domain of the life sciences. For this reason, it is
necessary to take full account of the implications of the narrative notion
of risk as applicable in all the life sciences, as well as the special senses in
which narrative is developed reflectively in human instances.
The biological concept of habitus, as Bourdieu (1977, p. 76) has appro-
priated it for sociological analysis, well illustrates the way risk analysis
shares with narrative analysis a common configuration of temporal
axes:
It is, of course, never ruled out that the responses of the habitus may be
accompanied by a strategic calculation tending to carry on quasi-con-
sciously the operation the habitus carries on in a quite different way,
namely an estimation of chances which assumes the transformation
of the past effect into the expected objective. But the fact remains
that these responses are defined first in relation to a system of objec-
tive possibilities, immediately inscribed in the present, things to do
or not to do, to say or not to say, in relation to a forthcoming reality
which – in contrast to the future conceived as “absolute possibility”
(absolute Möglichkeit), in Hegel’s sense, projected by the pure project
of a “negative freedom” – puts itself forward with an urgency and a
claim to existence excluding all deliberation.
Like Plessner’s concept of positional field, Bourdieu’s formulation illus-

trates the heterogeneous character of the concept of risk, as something
simultaneously ‘internal’ and ‘external’ to the agent, as it stems from
the agent’s perspectives and actions, but is measured through the effects
upon and from the environment. At the same time, Bourdieu’s articula-
tion of cultural systems as a type of habitus enables us to conceptualize
risk as a constitutive feature in animal environments, due in part to the
temporal character of such an environment. Risk is a narrative concept
due to the temporal configuration of the habitus.
Calling risk a narrative concept emphasizes the way significance func-
tions in a dimension of reversible time; otherwise said, narrative is the
way of making interpretation of previous phenomena dependent on
subsequent events and developments. If we think of our experience
in responding to any simple story, we will realize we can appropriate,
organize and understand many subtle relationships, identities, inten-
tions, motives, and other narrative processes in the account, such as
voice, foreshadowing and plot development – often through very indi-
rect (nonpropositional) means – as a result of the reversible interplay of
detail throughout the story from beginning to end. A commonplace of
narrative experience is to have concluding information entirely recon-
figure the perceived texture of relationships set up through the story.
This is also why it is said that history must be re-written for each genera-
tion, as the latest developments reinterpret the ‘past as prelude’: we may
be through with the past, but the past is not through with us.
Narrative concepts acknowledge the forthcoming dimension of time,
focusing on and determining the form and outcome of present actions.
Risk is one way we realize a future outcome alters the significance of what
we are doing now.12 The manifestation of risk in life processes cannot be
12
As Kierkegaard put it (variously in various sources), ‘Life is lived forward but
understood backward’.
136 Scott Davis
dealt with exclusively in a framework of scientific causal-functionality,

let alone of covering laws, but is readily understood in ordinary terms in
a narrative frame. There will necessarily be narrative processes involved
in presenting the significance of objective processes as risks, measured
for example by discrepancies between narratives of desired and probable
outcomes.
When Plessner characterizes living things as ‘preceding themselves’
[ihm selbst vorweg], or describes the phenomenology of memory in struc-
tures of agonistic directed pathways (‘unity of residuum and anticipa-
tion’) and concludes that the memory system is equivalent to the ability
to forget, his interpretations imply deeply narrative characteristics of
life and our contact with it. Comprehension of circumstances of risk is
narratively mediated (which is why they are so direct). The positional
stance of living things occurs in terms of risk; life presents a ‘frontal
attitude’ towards the oncoming future in anticipation. In framing these
narrative properties of life, Plessner was articulating a narratology of the
life and human sciences.
Mediated immediacy
To accomplish the organic array, Plessner relies on a device he calls

‘mediated immediacy’ [vermittelte Unmittelbarkeit] appearing promi-
nently throughout the book. Mediated immediacy is cited in the means-
ends schemata of organ-mediated organization.13 As explained by Kai
Haucke (2000, p. 89):
Through the function of the organs to enclose the surrounding

field, they ‘have turned the relations to the organism inside out’
(Plessner, 1928, p. 194). The antagonistic unity in the form of
13
‘The whole is, in all its parts, present in all its parts through the agreement
to the whole given in divergent specializations; the parts serve the whole. Or,
more briefly understood: the real physical body is in each of its factually reached
phases the goal in itself’ (Plessner, 1928, p. 169). ‘Only life is means to itself and
goal of itself: a being mediated in itself; however, fallen accidentally to itself in
its means, which sets away from itself the being lifted over and beyond itself
of organization: mediated immediacy of the whole. It becomes possible for the
physical organism to be a means to itself, without thereby sacrificing the self-
adequacy of its inner teleology, when it, the living thing, is means to life, i.e.,
implements in itself, physically, the differentiation between itself, the living thing, and
life’ (Plessner, 1928, p. 190; also compare p. 229).
mediated immediacy works out, because the apparently direct

substance becomes a part of a mediation through the organs
themselves – the life cycle –, so that directness and mediation do
not form mutually exclusive oppositions anymore, but rather a
contested difference.
It is also dealt with in centered organization at the animal level, insofar

as that section of the text treats the brain as a center of consciousness.14
Mediated immediacy, closely entailed from the positional structure of
life itself, is also characteristically human:
Eccentricity of position can be defined as a situation in which the

living subject stands with everything in indirect-direct relation. A
direct relation is given where the members of the relation are bound
together without an intervening link. An indirect relation is given
where the members of the relation are bound together through an
intervening link. An indirect-direct relation is what that form of
binding is to be called, in which the mediating intervening link is
necessary in order to restore or ensure the directness of the binding.
Indirect directness or mediated immediacy therefore presents no
meaninglessness, no simple, self-destroying contradiction, rather
a contradiction that solves itself, without thereby becoming null,
a contradiction that remains meaningful, even if analytical logic
cannot follow it. The analysis so far has tried to make it clear that
what is living as such possesses the structure of mediated imme-
diacy. It is yielded from the essence of really posited boundaries.
Because its real positing forms the constitutional principle for all
organic formation, so the eccentric form of organization also partici-
pates in the structure. The specific meaning that the structure has
for the individual levels of organization is to be distinguished from
such ‘abstract’ participation of each organization in the structure of
14
‘This peculiar relation of an indirect directness, mediated immediacy
between organism and world, which is already expressed in the essence of closed
form, and is deeply grounded in the structure of being of life, does not detract
from the reality-character of the given sensations and intuitions; it does not
simply make them into signs of a reality which is entirely foreign to it and of an
alien type from it; however, it restricts them and their correlates: colors, forms,
noises, tactile, vibratory, qualities of taste and smell, etc., which manifest with
the character of absoluteness – it restricts them to the meaning of objective givenness’
(Plessner, 1928, p. 260, italics added).
138 Scott Davis
mediated immediacy essential for what is living in general. The fact

that the levels are differentiated according to the principle of open-
ness and closure already produces a difference in the relation of the
organic body to other bodies. (Plessner, 1928, p. 324)
These discussions of mediated immediacy, scattered throughout the text

at key points, make it plain that this device plays a critical role in struc-
turing the parts and the whole of the organic array. Clearly, Plessner
regards mediated immediacy as a deeply motivating character of our
expressive life, for it forms the second anthropological ground law in his
treatment of the human form of life.
Adequacy of the expression as a living excitation which really

brings the inner towards the outer, and its essential inadequacy
and brokenness as transposition and formation of a living depth
which never itself comes out – this evident paradox can be under-
stood as the law of mediated immediacy as well, and be shown
to be binding for human existence just as the evident paradox of
reality consciousness on the ground of immanence. Each living
excitation in which the mental [geistige] act-center or the person
participates must have expression. That is, it is for-itself, in the
aspect of the subject, an immediate, direct intention to its object,
and finds its adequate fulfillment only insofar as the intention of
the drive, urge, the yearning, the willing, the view, the thought and
the hope, stand in no direct relation with what factually follows
and forms the finally satisfying result. The factual inadequacy
of intention and real fulfillment, which rests upon the complete
difference in type between culture, mind and corporeal nature,
therefore does not just become fate for intention thereby, and does
not just condemn it to eternal unfulfillment thereby, and sentence
belief in its fulfillment to be a mere subjective illusion, because
the connection between subject and object as a relation of indirect
directness captures, legitimates and requires this breach. (Plessner,
1928, pp. 333–334)
An expression is the adequate manifestation of something that never

can be adequately expressed; it is broken in appearance but, because we
live in an environment already in adjustment to our form of life, it does
not fail, but succeeds thereby. Expression in the face, open and inac-
cessible to one’s own view, is the way meanings are revealed by being
hidden, because their reality is not actual but virtual.15 Our intentional
relation to the surroundings is also broken in completion (‘The compro-
mises which subjects conclude with reality – in order to fashion success
for their wishes and to make harmless the breach of the intentional rays
in a medium with its own will, of mind and body – these are therefore
not the presuppositions, not the means, but rather themselves already a
compromise of genuine fulfillment’ [Plessner, 1928, p. 336]). As well, our
cognitive world is filled with objects broken between core and aspects.
By insisting on the virtual and immanent qualities of the real, Plessner
strives to counteract the Kantian doctrine of, on the one hand, the screen
of phenomenal appearance as opposed to the unknowable thing in itself
on the other; we have direct experiences with the world, yet we know to
what degree these things we experience transcend and are totally medi-
ated to our consciousness and action.16 These are all indication of a kind
of resonance created throughout the organic array, such that the eccen-
tric positionality of humans is highly isomorphic to organic and central-
izing characteristics at more fundamental levels of the array.17
The second anthropological ground law pertains to expression and to
mediated immediacy. There are three ground laws corresponding to the
three worlds: the outer world (law of natural artificiality); inner world
(law of mediated immediacy); and We-sphere of the mutual world (law
of utopian standpoint). These are entirely interrelated of course; for
example, the question of how our artificial surroundings acquire their
own counterweight or second nature, in the process of their creation,
involves all three. Plessner’s sketch of each domain’s ground law provides
many incisive insights into the features of cultural and social organization
15
‘Appearance is not, indeed, to be thought of like the leaf of a page, like a
mask, behind which the real adheres and which one can detach from it; rather it
is like the face which conceals in that which it reveals. In such concealing revealing
lies what is specific of existence in appearance itself – and yet ‘not entirely’ exist-
ence, rather still existing-behind-it, the hidden, the existent for-self and in-self.
A reality can be in relation to a subject in no other way as reality; so from itself
it is as that which is thrown against the subject, as object, i.e., as ap-pearance-to,
manifestation-of ... ; as mediated immediacy’ (Plessner, 1928, p. 329).
16
‘Everything which they experience, they experience as contents of conscious-
ness; and therefore not as something in consciousness, but rather existents
outside of consciousness’ (Plessner, 1928, p. 328).
17
In Laughing and Crying (1970, p. 42) Plessner directly says, ‘the framework of
mediated immediacy, i.e. of the eccentric position’.
140 Scott Davis
making possible narratives of our human lives. Here, we concentrate on

the entailments in the formulation of mediated immediacy.
Focusing on mediated immediacy is tantamount to delivering the
human form of life to narrative processes of action – ‘Humans live only
in that they lead a life’ (Plessner, 1928, p. 310); ‘Humans have to make
themselves into what they already are’ (1928, p. 309) – within a habitus
fundamentally, always-already in harmonious, categorical adjustment
to the human form of life. He tempers the array with this resonant,
eccentric feature temporalizing the model and opening it to deferral of
meaning, or negotiation of changing circumstances, through action in
the (pre-adjusted) world.
Moreover, as the structural core of expressive human life, mediated
immediacy gives narratological solutions to issues of object-percep-
tion, expressiveness, creative invention/discovery, and the diversity of
languages and cultures. Because mediated immediacy is about contested
and obviated mediation, it founds phenomena such as broken inten-
tional relations that form a compromise of authentic fulfillment, due
to the lucky intervention of structures from outside; and linguistic
divergences (‘a language – could say nothing’) that essentially reflect
the friable nature of intention. A structure is thus the way intentions
break in realization, just as intentionality itself is a narrative not psycho-
logical circumstance. The fracturing of meanings supporting differing
cultures and languages is thereby what entails the integrity of any given
language or culture. In this way, Plessner’s analysis repeats one of the
central tenets of Lévi-Strauss’s: the motivation for structural arrange-
ments within cultures derives fundamentally from the borders between
cultures, which drive variations in cultural patterns.
Contemporary applications and assessments
The result of Plessner’s model-building is to provide an organic array

constructed with reference to distinctive features of life that not only
accommodate plant and animal worlds as moments of positionality, but
also treat human life and culture in ways deeply resonant and linked
with the organic worlds presupposed by them. The array’s characteristics
are structured in such a way as to distribute narrative features across the
places of the model, and to construe them as giving rise to narratable
occasions at each step of each level. Completion of the table of analogies
throughout the organic spectrum enhances the usefulness of Plessner’s
efforts in the context of anthropology, where the registers of the model
are rediscovered, varying within each culture’s classification systems.
Animate/inanimate, plant/animal, nature/culture are cognitive univer-

sals organizing the cultural behavior of whatever people we happen to
study.
It is these framework structures that furnish indigenous accounts
of the cosmos for each discrete culture that builds a complex in the
differentiated habitus of human groups. The series of organic analogies
elaborated by Plessner is fundamental to myth and ritual expression, to
narratives of all sorts; to construct their symbolisms, they make use of
the array of organic features and modals he formulated. Therefore, the
project of conceptual analysis of life, along a ‘vertical’ axis, works along-
side ethnographic and ethnological research in a ‘horizontal’ frame. In
particular, structural analysis in anthropology continues investigation
into material conditions of human life by assembling matrices of signi-
fying features of such central symbolisms in society as, for example,
life/death, fire/water, sky/earth, day/night, man/woman, voiced/voice-
less, high/low, consonant/vowel, and a manifold of matching attributes
expressive use of these items supports.
This match-up of physical and biological features for structural anal-
ysis in philosophical anthropology and structural anthropology should
certainly not be taken as naturalistic determinism. Plessner saw philo-
sophical anthropology as an opportunity to turn around the relations of
biological and human sciences:
Therefore, not naturalistically argued: because humans are the highest

developed beings on the rungs of the ladder of organisms, and are the
most recent to accede to their present form of being, and because all
their living, intellectual expressions stem from their physical proper-
ties, so an anthropology must be founded upon a biology; but rather:
because the construction of a philosophical anthropology has as a
presupposition the investigation of such facts which concentrate
around the circumstances of ‘life’, so the problem of organic nature is
opened up. The initiative to construct a concrete natural philosophy
is not an outcome of the experience of the natural sciences – not to
mention their absolutization – [but] of the experience of the human
sciences. (Plessner, 1928, pp. 76–77)
Plessner stresses that unless suitable ideas of ‘life’ are given notation in
a carefully considered philosophical anthropology, the phenomena of
life will continue to lead to paradoxical construals of configurations he
has tried to resolve in the difficult concepts of mediated immediacy and
eccentric positionality.
142 Scott Davis
It seems Lévi-Strauss and Plessner saw biological information in very

similar ways, as treatable in the same direction with which one analyzes
culture:
[F]ar from being an amusement for sophisticated intellectuals, struc-

tural analysis gets going in the mind only because its model already
exists in the body. ... By following a path that is sometimes wrongly
accused of being overly intellectual, structuralism recovers and brings
to awareness deeper truths that have already been dimly announced
in the body itself; it reconciles the physical and the moral, nature
and man, the mind and the world, and tends toward the only kind
of materialism consistent with the actual development of scientific
knowledge. (Lévi-Strauss, 1985, p. 119)
As presented here, Plessner’s work in the Organic Array establishes eccen-

tricity in, among others, at least the following five ways. Textually, it
manifests a thought process returning upon its own pretext, in inves-
tigating object awareness: making a textual icon of how consciousness
operates. With the intensifying operator of positionality, it opens up
vectors of virtual, interpretant dimensions supervenient upon positions
of Cartesian space. Methodologically, structural analysis places its models
in abeyance, pending a preliminary execution of its modeling of an
object – for instance, such as the table of organic analogies – because it is
testing not only the fidelity of correspondence to objects but also simul-
taneously the coherence of its notational system. With the device of
mediated immediacy, Plessner invokes a kind of virtual process, an extru-
sion of the inner upon a collapse of the outer, something real without
being actual and ideal without being abstract. In these ways, he prepares
a mode of narrative interaction between human beings and their environ-
ment whereby the former have direct relations to themselves through
the complex mediations of the latter, or an eccentric positionality, due to
the suspended, reversible and anticipatory structure of narrative time.
Plessner’s philosophical breakthroughs in structural narratology now
can find even more productive use alongside recent biological thought.
For instance, Mary Jane West-Eberhard’s important book, Developmental
Plasticity and Evolution, is noted for its reconsideration of the role of
individual experience in the context of evolution, and for its re-charac-
terization of the role of environment in selection:
The neglect of the environment as an agent of development within

evolutionary biology, like the nature-nurture problem in general, is
related to the emphasis on selection and gene-frequency change at

the expense of attention to development. If one focuses on selection
and genes alone, the environment is readily cast as the enemy. The
environment is the red-and-raw in tooth-and-claw of natural selec-
tion, the challenge to the survival of the fittest. Seeing the environ-
ment as an agent of selection – environment as enemy – can obscure
the image of the environment as a collaborator in normal develop-
ment. (West- Eberhard, 2003, p. 499)
She therefore emphasizes the importance of the individual phenotype,

which stands intermediate to the genotype on the one hand and the
environment on the other. Thus, both the latter factors are operative,
equivalently and interchangeably, in the phenotype’s fate.18 West-
Eberhard calls our attention to the roles developmental plasticity and
phenotypic accommodation play in introducing variation into evolu-
tionary process. ‘Responsive phenotype structure is the primary source
of novel phenotypes’ (p. 503).
An emphasis on the phenotype accompanies a keen interest in
behavior. ‘Although it is still possible to distinguish between the
genome and its environment, the distinction gets difficult as soon as
the genome begins to act. This is exactly the same moment when the
genome becomes of biological interest’ (p. 328). Due to its structure,
the action of living beings guarantees them a stake in evolutionary
outcomes. ‘Perhaps the distinguishing feature of behavior is that in
many organisms it is highly, and reversibly, combinatorial during a
single life stage or lifetime’ (p. 181). Variations introduced by behavior
will, through developmental plasticity and phenotypic accommoda-
tion, reconfigure the material basis of selection:
[G]iven sufficient genetic variation in morphology, a recurrent

behavioral response to the environment can affect the evolution of
the structures affected or employed as a result. Thus, behavior being
especially plastic, behavior must often take the lead in evolution.
(p. 180)
18
‘[T]he developing phenotype responds to both internal and external stimuli
in much the same way. As a result, genomic and environmental factors are
interchangeable during evolution. If genetic and environmental influences are
equivalent and interchangeable, they are not properly seen as opposed or even as
complementary factors’ (West-Eberhard, 2003, p. 99).
144 Scott Davis
With so much prominence given to phenotypes and behavior, it is

not surprising West-Eberhard’s book features intensive investigation of
learning. She writes of the ‘mimicry of selection by learning’ (p. 341);
this is due to the way learned individual differences often rapidly intro-
duce wider variation and possible speciation (p. 344). In the course of
learning, the environment plays a characteristic role, like ‘a collaborator
in normal development’ (p. 499):
In development and evolution, the environment is a source of

building blocks and cues, not just an agent of selection. So environ-
ment does, as Darwin perceived, take an active role in the “program-
ming,” informational side of change. (p. 192)
Due to the way the body’s systems mediate the environment to the
phenotype, ‘Devices such as hormones and nervous systems mean that
phenotypic alterations that directly involve the selected genes can origi-
nate from the outside in’ (p. 499). The environment and individual are
in a dialogue that respects the importance of the individual’s experience,
so that action carries consequences for subsequent evolution, as well as a
second-order variability – evolution of evolution – of the phenotype: ‘[T]he
universal properties of phenotypes – modularity, flexibility, and the hier-
archical organization of development by genetically complex switches –
contribute to evolvability, the ability of organisms to evolve’ (p. 182). As
learning simulates selection and evolution governs evolvability, narrative
qualities of life are profoundly involved in organic temporalities.
In this way, the best efforts of biology, anthropology and philosophy
can be turned towards one of the breakthroughs in conceptual orienta-
tions of the twentieth century:
We are looking for consciousness in the wrong place if we look for

it in the brain. We need to widen our conception of the machinery
of consciousness beyond the brain to include not only the brain but
also our active lives in the context of our worlds. This is what the
biology of consciousness now teaches. (Noë, 2009, p. 65)
A coordinated effort against psychologization and intellectualization of

cognitive science depends on re-characterizing the role of environment
in thinking, to recognize essential aspects of habitual patterns of actions
in the life world in supporting the ‘user’s illusion’ of private thinking
inside the head (see Dennett, 1991). These efforts at reforming our
philosophy and cognitive science draw on resources long established
during the twentieth century. Wittgenstein was a key player in this, by

such remarks as ‘An “inner process” stands in need of outward criteria’
(Philosophical Investigations, §580) and ‘The only correlate in language
to an intrinsic necessity is an arbitrary rule’ (PI, §372). By offering the
formulation concerning the Mutual-world, ‘the We-form of the private
I’, Plessner analyzed the social activity of thinking. In this he joins efforts
of structural anthropology, such as Lévi-Strauss’s work, to contribute to
the social apperception, ‘It is society which thinks in me’ (Dumont,
1970, p. 5). Latour has observed how inanimate ‘furniture’ of society
is a kind of social action that continuously enforces status and power
arrangements, in his chapter ‘Objects too Have Agency’ (Latour, 2007,
pp. 63–86): ‘It’s the power exerted through entities that don’t sleep and
associations that don’t break down that allow power to last longer and
expand further – and, to achieve such a feat, many more materials than
social compacts have to be devised’ (2007, p. 70).
The present configuration of knowledge at the intersection of culture
and biology (where there is far more going on than causal-functional
explanation) must be characterized as, in part, narratological, since
biological experience and its risks are already narrative or narratable due
to the characteristic focus on individuals with a stake in evolutionary
processes – which provides means of real knowledge and understanding
that nonetheless are not deduced as typical outcomes under general
laws in the style of physical sciences, and involves complex media-
tion, negotiated interpretations and reversible narrative temporalities.
Plessner’s array helps us to envision forms and parameters of narrative
knowledge deployed in biological discourse. In view of his efforts, we
foresee one further contribution to the complexity of this interface. The
Chinese have a helpful saying, ήᏁਇᚑᦠ (wuqiao bucheng shu, literally,
‘no coincidence, no make book’): coincidence is essential for narrative.
A narrative view of life includes a role for the environment in providing
narrative coincidences that, because the organism is already in categor-
ical coincidence with the habitus, furnish the pretext for narrative and
possibly adaptive action. Therefore a synchronistic quality is included
as an integral feature of the organic array. When the habitus articulates
and determines elements of the individual’s narrative, it shows opera-
tions not only of causality, but also of synchronicity.
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6
Gehlen’s Philosophical
Anthropology: Contemporary
Applications in Addiction Research
Sally Wasmuth
While it has been argued that addiction is not a unified concept (Karasaki,
Fraser, Moore, and Dietze, 2013), perhaps the most widely used defini-
tion by medical professionals and addiction researchers is drawn from
the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (DSM). This
manual has undergone numerous revisions that reflect changes in how
addiction is defined and understood. Drawing on the current DSM criteria
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013), for the purpose of this chapter
the term ‘addiction’ will connote problematic and compulsive engage-
ment in an activity. The activity to which one is addicted may be drug use,
and the harms may be apparent.1 However, the activity may be something
less stigmatized such as work, sex, internet use, or eating,2 and (even in
the case of drug use) it may be more difficult in some cases to decipher the
degree to which the compulsion is problematic or ‘harmful’.
Arnold Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology, which characterizes
human life as compensatory for a unique biological precariousness
1
For example, in the case of an addiction to alcohol – characterized by compul-
sive alcohol use, chronic intoxication, ongoing physical problems induced by
excessive alcohol consumption, and conflict with family, friends and employers
about drunkenness interfering with roles and responsibilities – it would be rela-
tively easy to pinpoint the inherent ‘harms’.
2
While the most recent version of the DSM added a heading ‘addictive behav-
iors’, this heading only currently includes disordered gambling. Hypersexuality
and internet addiction were relegated to the appendix with the suggestion for
more research, and numerous studies are being undertaken to examine other
addictive behaviors such as to food (American Psychiatric Association, 2013;
Ifland et al., 2009).
147
148 Sally Wasmuth
inherent in the human organism (Gehlen, 1988 [1940]), provides a

conceptual starting point that brings fresh insight to understanding
problems of addiction. More specifically, a normative scale3 rooted
in Gehlen’s notion of humans as exaggeratedly vulnerable life forms
depicts addictions’ gains and harms in a way that may positively alter
how addictions are approached in treatment.
Why is fresh insight needed? First, addiction continues to be a signifi-
cant and global public health problem. Drug and alcohol abuse makes up
5.4 percent of the global burden of disease (World Health Organization,
2015b), and according to the Global Information System on Alcohol
and Health (GISAH), 3.3 million people die each year as a consequence
of alcohol use (World Health Organization, 2015a). In the United States
alone, tobacco, alcohol, and illicit drug abuse costs over $600 billion annu-
ally due to the expenses of deaths (which have more than doubled since
the 1980s), associated crimes, healthcare expenses, and costs related to lost
work productivity (National Institute on Drug Abuse, 2012). One can infer
that in cases of addiction to these substances, such problems are height-
ened.4 Moreover, these problems are multiplying despite the exorbitant
amount of funds spent researching addiction and the ongoing develop-
ment and implementation of new treatments and recovery programs.
3
It is worth noting upfront the irony that Gehlen’s work is criticized for its
disastrous ethical implications (Joas, 1997), yet here it is being used to inform
a normative scale of human action. Gehlen’s theory of institutions illustrates a
human need for participation in sociocultural institutions to compensate for the
precariousness of the human organism. However, in citing the benefits gained
from participation within the guidelines provided by institutional structure,
Gehlen only goes as far as freeing humans from biological precariousness. What
is also needed is freedom from the consequences of what could be referred to as
‘over-compensation’ – that is, rigid or inauthentic participation within strict insti-
tutional bounds. This critical stance toward over-compensation is based on the
well-known conception that adaptive flexibility is beneficial for human psycho-
social wellbeing and health, and that rigid participation in strict institutional
sects may constrain this capacity. While Gehlen would not endorse this (he in
fact distinctly criticized the move toward subjectivism and the move away from
strict adherence to traditional institutional values) (Berger and Kellner, 1965), his
theory nonetheless provides a useful conceptual starting point for delineating a
normative scale of compensatory action.
4
To avoid conceptual confusion, it is worth acknowledging the importance of
avoiding conflation of drug ‘use’ versus ‘addiction’ while nonetheless citing some
statistics of the potential burdens of drug addictions; drug addiction entails drug
use, and thus drug addiction’s harms can be inferred from problems associated
with drug use.
Gehlen’s Philosophical Anthropology and Addiction 149
Second, despite the established effectiveness of many current treat-

ment interventions, relapse rates of persons recovering from addiction(s)
are as high as over 80 percent (Marlatt and Donovan, 2005), and as many
as 60 percent of persons in recovery are dissatisfied with treatment and
discontinue services (Laudet and Humphreys, 2013). While some will
argue that these statistics simply underscore the nature of addiction as
a chronic, relapse-prone disorder (McLellan, Lewis, O’Brien, and Kleber,
2000), a stronger case may be made that such outcomes are unaccept-
able and may in fact indicate that many current treatment strategies are
insufficiently addressing problems of addiction.
Third, predominant conceptual models may lead clinicians to target
superficial aspects of addiction in treatment. While many treatment
methods aim to replace addictive behaviors (such as drug use in the
case of drug addiction) with ‘healthier’ activities (such as exercise or
employed work), underlying addictive patterns often remain. It has been
posited by researchers and 12-step programs that, more fundamentally,
addictions entail a number of phenomenological characteristics (such as
rigid attitudes, controlling personalities, and impulsive behavioral styles)
that can be described as an addictive way-of-being – one that persists
even when individuals abstain from engaging in their addiction(s)
(Alcoholics Anonymous, 2001; Shaffer et al., 2004). Thus even with the
removal of recognizable addictive behaviors such as compulsive drug
use, these underlying phenomenological characteristics of addiction
often continue to trouble individuals, and their persistence often leads
to replacing old addictions with new ones (Shaffer et al., 2004).
While some treatment models have begun to focus on these more
fundamental phenomenological aspects of addiction and have started
to develop more recovery-based interventions (Salyers and Tsemberis,
2007), more work is needed to ground these approaches in an under-
standing of human nature and biology, and to further elucidate why
many approaches to addiction treatment do not seem to produce desir-
able outcomes. This application of Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology
is a response to this need.
Addiction
Shared presumptions, varied intervention targets

While evidence-based practices for addiction span many disciplines,
including but not limited to medicine, psychology, and social work,
these varied approaches share biological, anthropological, and sociolog-
ical presumptions about humans and about addiction. Most apparent,
150 Sally Wasmuth
perhaps, is that prevailing models view addiction as a problem to be

removed; in other words, the goal of treatment is to eliminate the addic-
tive behavior.5 Whether by targeting physiological cravings (Bart, 2012),
maladaptive interpersonal or coping skills, problematic thinking and
behavior, or risky social environments (Drake, O’Neal, and Wallach,
2008), the philosophy behind addiction treatment is that if enough of
these problems are addressed the individual will be able to eradicate the
addictive behavior and experience wellness.
Minimizing factors that contribute to or exacerbate problems inherent
in addiction may improve recovery outcomes, but current approaches
appear to have little to no effect on long-term change. For example,
the use of opiate agonists and antagonists to reduce the problem of
cravings in persons trying to abstain from drug and alcohol use have
been reported to only slightly improve duration of abstinence and/or
percentage of abstinent days over a given period of time (Rösner et al.,
2010). Motivational interviewing – a common evidence-based interven-
tion for substance abuse that targets the problem of motivational barriers
to change – elicits a significant effect on substance use following the
intervention but produces minimal effects at short- and moderate-term
follow-up assessments and no significant effects on long-term change
(Smedslund et al., 2011). Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) combined
with contingency management (targeting problematic thoughts and
learned behaviors) has been shown only to reduce but not eliminate
cocaine use (Petitjean et al., 2014), and some have found that newly
learned strategies in CBT interventions do not tend to transfer well when
individuals face real life challenges (Blagys and Hilsenroth, 2002).
These empirical findings suggest that interventions targeting discrete
aspects of addictive disorders (such as cravings, learned thoughts and
behaviors, and motivational barriers) fail to adequately address the
problem of addiction or result in lasting satisfactory changes to overall
function. This is evidenced by exorbitant relapse rates (Marlatt and
Donovan, 2005), dissatisfaction with treatment (Laudet and Humphreys,
2013), and the overwhelming increase in instances of addiction (National
Institute on Drug Abuse, 2012) despite implementation of combined
evidence-based strategies.
5
This is in line with Christopher Boorse’s argument (Boorse, 2013) that health
is the absence of disease, although Boorse specifically excludes mental health
from his conversation.
Targeting wellness
That a combination of treatments targeting different problems to be eradi-
cated is not sufficient for addiction recovery has not gone unrecognized in
mental health services. This is apparent based on the recent shift toward
more recovery-based interventions that focus on outcomes such as ‘hope,
social connection, personal responsibility, meaningful life activities, a
positive identity, full life beyond the illness, and personal growth’ (Mueser
et al., 2006). Recovery-based treatment models have been more readily
adopted for the treatment of severe mental illness than specifically for
addiction recovery. Nonetheless, some models that combine addiction and
mental health services such as the Integrated Dual Disorders Treatment
(IDDT) model emphasize the importance of engaging clients in devel-
oping positive life experiences. This is accomplished through services such
as vocational training, supportive housing, and harm reduction, which
are provided with the goal of facilitating wellness rather than eliminating
problems (Drake, Mercer-McFadden, Mueser, McHugo, and Bond, 1998).
Additionally, for decades, occupational scientists have argued that
human health entails not just removal of problems (the extrication of
disease) but also active participation in a meaningful, rewarding life
(Clark et al., 1991). Engaging in occupations has been observed to help
structure time through the development of roles and routines, shape
identities and help individuals establish personal values, and allow
for mastery experiences and opportunities for social participation
(Kielhofner, 2008). This seems particularly important to recognize in
the context of addiction recovery due to the nature of addictive disor-
ders, which have been defined in terms of the degree to which they
interfere with participation in other meaningful occupations (American
Psychiatric Association, 2013).6 When one is deprived of occupational
participation, as in cases of addiction, problems such as identity confu-
sion, social isolation, lack of temporal structure, and deficits in mastery
or self-efficacy often emerge (Chelton and Bonney, 1987; Gizewski et al.,
2013; Greene et al., 1999; Wasmuth et al., 2015). Given the importance
of active, meaningful participation in life for wellness, the turn toward
more recovery-oriented interventions for addiction seems promising.
However, it is common in addiction recovery to replace one addictive
habit with another (Shaffer et al., 2004) and, recognizing that addictive
6
‘Occupations’ here refer to activities people do to structure time and create
meaning and an identity, rather than referring just to employed work (Kielhofner,
2008).
152 Sally Wasmuth
behaviors now span to non-stereotypically ‘bad’ activities such as eating

(Ifland et al., 2009) and love (Burkett and Young, 2012), it is becoming
increasingly difficult to ensure that new occupations are not just going
to become new addictions. An important question becomes: how can we
provide opportunities to engage in new occupations while preventing
the phenomenon of replacing one addiction with another? In other
words, how can we gauge whether one’s engagement in a particular
occupation is healthy or problematic?
It is here that guidelines rooted in philosophical anthropology can
arguably help recognize and distinguish addictions from ‘healthy’ occu-
pations. A broader concept of how something shows up as an addic-
tion in the context of human lives may: (1) help assure that addictive
patterns do not remain despite the adoption of new activities, and
(2) warn against certain engagements that do not at face value appear
to be problematic. While diagnostic criteria provide a description of
some recognizable indicators that something might be an addiction, a
normative scale rooted in philosophical anthropology contextualizes
these criteria in a broader theory of human nature, and may enlarge our
description of what addiction is and means for human lives.
Contemplating a new target: compensatory action
Philosophical anthropology
Approaching addiction from a philosophical anthropological perspective
draws attention away from the treatment of discrete aspects of addiction
and instead calls for a broader investigation of how and why various
human engagements compromise or facilitate wellbeing. In order to
assess how human engagements relate to wellbeing, some specific philo-
sophical, anthropological, and biological assumptions (rooted in empir-
ical evidence and philosophical anthropological theory) are adopted
from Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology.
A common aim of philosophical anthropologists is to detail an account
of human experience (social, psychological, spiritual, and otherwise)
that is rooted in biology but that does not attempt to reduce human
phenomena to biological mechanisms (Fischer, 2014). This is accom-
plished by taking into consideration the ways in which the human
organism is divorced from the natural world due to a proposed biolog-
ical underdevelopment and a reduction of biologically determined,
environment and species-specific instincts. The human mind (Geist)
and human culture are viewed by philosophical anthropologists as
emerging from this proposed gap between humans and their biological
surroundings (Gehlen, 1988 [1940]). In this way philosophical anthro-

pologists propose a naturalistic view of human evolution to the extent
that they draw their theories from observed biological changes; but
these changes are not linked to specific traits or behaviors undergoing
a process of natural selection as Darwinian Theorists might propose.
Instead, the biological changes proposed to have led to the evolution
of the human organism are described together as a process of slowed
maturation and overall underdevelopment, paired with a reduction of
biologically defined instincts (Fischer, 2014).
For Gehlen, slowed maturation and a reduction of instincts are
viewed as leaving humans ill-equipped to survive the pressures of the
natural world. He therefore refers to humans as ‘deficient life forms’
(Mängelwesen) (Gehlen, 1988 [1940]). Ultimately, Gehlen suggests that
human culture and society are compensatory for this biological and
instinctual deficiency (Berger and Kellner, 1965).
While humans are not generally considered ‘deficient life forms’ by
contemporary biologists, a number of current neurobiological studies
support the notion of delayed maturation and development in humans
(Falk, Zollikofer, Morimoto, and Ponce de Leon, 2012). Additional
studies suggest that human cognition has evolved through a process
of increasing genomic flexibility and in some areas, underspeciali-
zation (Barry, 2013; Moss, 2006; Sherwood, Bauernfeind, Bianchi,
Raghanti, and Hof, 2012). These findings from contemporary work in
neuro- and evolutionary biology (Barry, 2013; Falk et al., 2012; Moss,
2006; Sherwood et al., 2012) as well as the earlier works in compara-
tive anatomy (Bolk, 1926) cited by Gehlen (Gehlen, 1988 [1940]) merit
the adoption of a philosophical anthropological view of the human
organism as an acceptable point of departure for exploring problems of
addiction. Taking into account the limited success of current attempts to
understand and treat addiction, the adoption of alternative conceptual
approaches is especially warranted.
Empirical support in classical philosophical anthropology

Morphological comparisons and instinctual deficiency
Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology details some specific biological
suppositions informed by the empirical findings of Bolk, von Uexküll,
Portmann, and Buytendijk (Berger and Kellner, 1965). Perhaps most
fundamentally, Gehlen discusses implications of the morphological
comparisons between human and non-human organ development
undertaken in Bolk’s comparative anatomy. Bolk illustrated that human
organs (and humans in general) were underspecialized, comparable to
154 Sally Wasmuth
the organs (or organisms) of developmentally younger members of other

primate species (Bolk, 1926). Specifically:
Orthognathism, (the jaws aligned beneath the brain with the lower
jaw neither projecting nor receding); the lack of hair; loss of pigment
in the skin, hair, and eyes; the shape of the auricle, the Mongolian
eyefold; the central position of the foramen magnum; high brain
weight; persistence of the cranial sutures; the labia majora in females;
the structure of the hand and foot; the form of the pelvis; the ventral-
ly-directed position of the vagina ... All these characteristics are primi-
tive in a special sense: they are fetal states or proportions which have
become permanent. In other words, “Characteristics or proportions
of form that are transitory in the fetus of other primates have been
stabilized in man”. (Gehlen, 1988 [1940], p. 94)
Emphasizing the vulnerability and weakness that stems from the unique
biology of humans, Gehlen notes:
Human skin [which] has avoided any sort of specialization, in terms of

self-protection (against weather, for example), of self-defense (armor,
spines, fur), or of attack (horns, hooves). Man’s skin is the least special-
ized of all; we could say that it is a giant sensory surface. (p. 98)
While human skin clearly provides some degree of protection for the
human organism, it is less specialized and protective than that of
humans’ evolutionary predecessors.
Observations that endocrine function markedly slows maturation in
the human organism compared to other hominids support Bolk’s find-
ings. Gehlen discusses how these observed endocrine changes slowed
the process of development such that where earlier hominid ancestors in
the evolutionary lineage moved through a fetal period, humans retained
fetal characteristics as adults (Gehlen, 1988 [1940]). Furthermore, in
humans ‘when normal hormone function is impaired, the retardation
effect is reduced with the result that once latent characteristics now
surface or functions that have been slowed down now proceed at an
accelerated rate’ (p. 100).
In line with observations of underdevelopment, Gehlen identified
humans as having an instinctual deficiency. Where other organisms
were born with instinctual drives attuned to a species-specific environ-
ment, humans, he said, did not have a specific environment for which
they were biologically suited. Thus where most organisms were born into
specific relationships with their surroundings, equipped with anatom-

ical features to defend themselves and instincts to guide their actions
(Gehlen, 1988 [1940]), humans were born with an unprecedented
degree of world-openness (Weltoffenheit), a concept first introduced by
Max Scheler to describe humans’ ontological structure (Scheler, 1973).
Contemporary empirical support

Detachment
Advancing the notion of humans as instinctually deficient, philosopher
of biology Lenny Moss suggests that ‘nature explores greater and greater
levels of detachment’ (Moss, 2009). In Moss’s detachment theory, ‘detach-
ment’ refers to a degree of autonomy from an environmental surround.
Living organisms, he says, even a single cell, possess(es) an internal organ-
ization that introduces a degree of flexibility in terms of the way that
organism or cell responds to and interacts with its surroundings. While a
single cell is contextually dependent upon bidirectional interactions with
environmental influences, it possesses an internal structure that allows it
to maintain its dynamic but consistent and separate (detached) identity
in the face of varying external conditions (Moss, 2009). Moss posits that
detachment expands as cellular complexity increases (Moss, 2009). The
more complex an organism is, the more it is able to maintain its organiza-
tion in the face of environmental perturbations – that is, the more adap-
tive it is. Thus where the simplest living cells respond to environmental
stimuli in relatively prescribed ways, more complex multicellular organ-
isms gain degrees of freedom from this tight coupling between stimulus
and response patterns. In other words, as cellular complexity increases, so
does the range of possible responses to environmental cues.
In addition, it has been observed that genomic flexibility increases
along the hominid evolutionary lineage as organisms become more
‘detached’ (Moss, 2006). Genomic flexibility in the human genome
is characterized by increased dispersion of coding regions and, due to
increased regulatory controls, more reshuffling and recombination of
these coding sequences, allowing the capacity for greater variability in
gene expression (Moss, 2006). Barry (2013) echoes this claim, noting
the implications these genomic changes have for neurocognitive
evolution:
Although some neural protein coding genes have undergone some

positive selection ... it is the expansion in the dynamically regulated
non-protein-coding regions of the genome that display the most
striking parallels with human brain progression. (p. 1)
156 Sally Wasmuth
In other words, less specialization but increased flexibility in regulation

of gene expression is proposed as critical in contributing to the evolu-
tion of the human brain. This flexibility is thought to result in higher-
order cognition and adaptive plasticity (Barry, 2013).
Supporting Gehlen’s claim that humans are underdeveloped, Moss
too reports evidence suggesting that the human genome has fewer
genes associated with specialization and maturation (Moss, 2006).
Relating underdevelopment and cognitive evolution in humans, Falk
et al. pinpoint another developmental delay in humans – the compara-
tively late fusion of the metopic suture of the human skull, allowing
for extra-uterine brain growth in humans (Falk et al., 2012). Sherwood
et al. importantly point out however, that increased brain growth (made
possible by this delayed skull suture fusion) cannot fully account for the
complexity of human experience. Rather, it is argued that:
Even if brain size can be understood as a major contributor to human

cognitive uniqueness ... it would still be necessary to learn more about
how this single large variable translates to smaller-scale differences
that can be interpreted in terms of the development of connectivity,
the integration and signaling of neurons, and the flow of informa-
tion within the central nervous system. Further, advances from
modern behavioral neuroscience and clinical neuropsychology show
that dramatic differences in behavior, including social cognition and
language, can be mediated by subtle microstructural and molecular
changes in brain organization, most often in the absence of any major
difference in brain size. (Sherwood et al., 2012, p. 238)
Most relevant to the case at hand, researchers have found increased

pyramidal cell size and dendritic branching, particularly in the temporal
lobe and prefrontal cortex, which are areas associated with specifi-
cally human capacities. By contrast, brain regions more involved with
connecting the organism to the external environment – specifically, the
primary visual cortex – have been shown to have a reduction of mass,
neuronal complexity, and specialization (Sherwood et al., 2012).
Adopting the notion that humans are increasingly detached from the
natural world (and increasingly flexible and adaptive) has implications
for how we think about wellness.
Benefits and liabilities of detachment

Moss describes human detachment as having both benefits and liabilities
(Moss, 2009). The benefits of detachment include a heightened degree
of freedom from programmed responses to environmental cues, and a

lesser degree of reactivity – humans gain freedom and they gain the
ability to choose how they respond to various cues in their worlds. In
other words, this ‘detachment’ from any prescribed way of being in the
world allows a new degree of behavioral and psychological flexibility.
Additionally, it has been argued that, because of their overall decreased
reactivity to and preoccupation with environmental cues, humans are
able to socially connect in ways that were not available to their evolu-
tionary ancestors (Donald, 1991).
However, Moss also points out that detachment is a liability; it is desta-
bilizing and increasingly requires compensation. As others have argued,
the vulnerability of the human organism in the natural world required a
different kind of sociality – and a dependence on sociality (Fischer, 2014;
Gehlen, 1988 [1940]). As Tomasello (1999) has discussed at length, taking
into account their increased vulnerability in nature, humans could not
have survived without forming social groups for mutual protection.
While other animals (from ants and termites to recent human ances-
tors such as bonobo chimpanzees) develop and depend upon intricate
social networks as well, they also are born into more biological stability;
they have instincts to guide their behaviors and responses both to each
other and to the natural world. By contrast, humans, it is argued, have
a surplus of biological drives with no environment-specific, biologically
determined instincts. Thus humans not only required social support to
survive environmental dangers, but in addition, without the develop-
ment of new, more tightly coupled trigger-response patterns that mirror
those biologically defined behavioral repertoires of more developmen-
tally ‘finished’ organisms, humans were at a loss for how to live. Their
behaviors were less defined and they were left with a degree of world-
openness that demanded compensation. Thus, to survive and to have a
basis for action humans developed ‘cultural constants that reduce[d] the
arbitrariness of human existence, ... [which included] habitual patterns
of thought and behavior and mundane forms of social organization ... ’
that became ‘so routinized that they have become analogous to instinc-
tual behavior’ (Pavesich, 2008, p. 429) and thus make up for humans’
underdevelopment and lack of instincts.
Gehlen’s theory of institutions

Drawing on observations of human underdevelopment and instinctual
deficiency, Gehlen built his theory of institutions. In this theory he
claims that, because humans are underdetermined and divorced from
any natural place in the world, they must create their own environment
158 Sally Wasmuth
through sociocultural institutions (Berger and Kellner, 1965). Institutions,

according to Gehlen,
Produce a stable ‘background’ for human activity (Hintergrundserfuel-

lung). The institutionalized sectors of conduct then permit ‘sponta-
neous,’ barely reflective, almost automatic actions. Only if this
‘background’ has been produced can there be a ‘foreground’ for delib-
erate, reflective, purposeful actions. In other words, the burden of
human living would be too heavy without a ‘background’ of routi-
nized activity the meaning of which is taken for granted. (p. 112)
According to Gehlen, humans must find a sense of constancy through

the background of culture by adopting specific cultural attitudes and
ideals and/or through participating in various ways of life deemed
appropriate by a given culture or society (Berger and Kellner, 1965).
For Gehlen, it is not the specific ideals of a culture that matter; rather,
what matters is just that humans participate in and adopt institutional
norms. It is this stability, offered by culturally shared institutions, that
makes a ‘good’ human life possible – that is, a life in which one can enjoy
the ‘“foreground” for deliberate, reflective, purposeful actions’ (p. 112).
Engaging in institutions, according to Gehlen, fulfills an elementary
human need.
This lack of normative stance regarding some institutional norms
over others was subject to criticism. For instance, Gehlen’s philosoph-
ical anthropology was problematic for Blumenberg, who argued that it
gave humans an excuse to not take responsibility for the ethics of what
they were doing (Wertz, 2000). The normative stance that Gehlen does
take lies in his opposition to the human tendency to revolt against
institutional norms and traditions. For Gehlen, the move toward
modernization and subjectivism – the calling into question of tradi-
tional values and societal structures and the move toward attempts to
define one’s own standards and imperatives within one’s own mind or
experiences – is threatening (Berger and Kellner, 1965). It is threatening
because it compromises the very things that, according to Gehlen, save
us from our biological vulnerability and lack of defined ways of being.
He takes the position that, while our biological indeterminacy perhaps
allowed for the development of culture, language, and society, it also
required it (Gehlen, 1988 [1940]). When the sociocultural institutions
that provide structure – a structure that was lost with our biological
‘detachment’ (Moss) from the natural world – are called into question,
we lose our capacity for reflective action made possible by this structure.
Gehlen expresses this concern in his critique of modern culture and

subjectivism:
Modern cultures are viewed as ‘de-institutionalizing’ in the sense

that reflective rationality undermines the stable, taken-for-granted
traditions. Modern man appears as a highly ‘subjectivized’ being,
constantly in revolt against the institutional order and thus deprived
of stability ... exposing man once more to biological precariousness as
old institutional stabilities are lost. (Berger and Kellner, 1965, p. 113)
Instead of institutions providing the backdrop of certainty to allow

humans the freedom to engage in reflective action, in modern cultures,
subjectivism – where humans try to find within themselves the direc-
tion for how to live – compromises the stability offered from institutions
and thus in the end compromises freedom for reflective action.
Another danger, however, and one that the modern, subjectivized
person may point to, is the danger of blind, unreflective participation in
institutions to the detriment of reflective, autonomous, creative living.
Discussing his Model of Human Occupation, Gary Kielhofner warns
against strict adherence to narrow cultural norms through acceptance of
what he refers to as the ‘dominant cultural narrative’ (Kielhofner, 2008,
p. 129), which requires one to live by prescribed norms. He emphasizes
that, while these can foster a sense of competence and personal identity,
they can also be overly constraining and hinder adaptation by ruling out
possible occupational choices that may be more authentic or fulfilling for
an individual. For those celebrating the subjectivist turn, individuals can
resist conforming to traditional institutional sects and instead determine
their own personal ‘rules’ and norms through various forms of participa-
tion in occupations, sub- or counter-cultures, and/or other social groups.
It is through such participation that individuals obtain a stable enough
backdrop to facilitate ongoing reflective action in the world.
From the perspectives of both Gehlen and the subjectivists, the danger
is the loss of autonomy and freedom, although the means that allow
for this freedom are different. For Gehlen, the ‘barely reflective, almost
automatic actions’ that take place through adherence to participation
in institutional sects facilitate autonomous reflective action whereas to
subjectivists, they might be seen as inhibiting it.
Applications for understanding addiction

The dangers of both perspectives can be seen in literature on addic-
tion. Drug addiction can be viewed both as a revolt against traditional,
160 Sally Wasmuth
institutionally defined norms (such as temperance), or as a replace-

ment for rejected institutions – that is, a form of an institution itself
(Wasmuth, Crabtree, and Scott, 2014).
As an institution itself, addiction provides very specific ‘directions’ for
how to live. Addictions shrink the life world of the individual (American
Psychiatric Association, 2013), possibly to a more ‘manageable’ size and
lessened degree of complexity. The addicted individual creates very
specific, tightly coupled cue-response patterns (Carter and Tiffany, 1999).
Thus from the latter perspective of viewing addiction as an institution,
we might understand the addicted person as benefitting from having
found a replacement for the biological instincts lost in detachment.
The harms of addiction as an institution might be similar to those
articulated by Kielhofner who, as stated above, suggests that strict adher-
ence to institutional norms precludes creative, adaptive responses to life
situations.
By contrast, if drug addiction is a revolt against institutionally defined
norms, it raises the question, what kinds of compensatory action
(Gehlen, 1988 [1940]) derived in the subjective mind or through sub- or
counter-cultures can be objectively stated to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’, and on
what basis? While the harms of addiction (and thus the temptation to
label it as ‘bad’) may seem obvious, as definitions of addiction extend
to less obviously harmful activities such as food, sex, and internet use,
drawing distinctions between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ ways of compensating
for detachment and underdevelopment becomes increasingly complex.
As Rachel Cooper points out, some activities may be minor vices that
we do not want to label as disorders, where others that we do label as
disorders may in certain contexts be rational and functional responses
to a given set of circumstances (Cooper, 2013). Delineating a norma-
tive scale of compensatory action thus becomes important, not only for
clarifying how and why addiction is harmful, but also for developing
criteria for normatively assessing other occupations as compensations
for the precariousness of the human organism.
A normative scale of compensatory action
By analyzing institutions and human action from the perspective that

they are compensatory for human underdevelopment, can we draw
from this philosophical anthropology specific benefits and liabilities
that would apply to an assessment of any human engagement?
From Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology and Moss’s detachment
theory we glean that autonomy, freedom, and adaptiveness were gained
as biological underdetermination was realized during the process of
hominid evolution (Gehlen, 1988 [1940]; Moss, 2009). Because humans

were less biologically developed, they were less attached to prescribed,
instinctual responses to the natural world. To compensate, humans
formed intimate social groups and massive social institutions that
provided structure, protection, and direction for how to guide one’s
thoughts and actions. For Gehlen, it was these institutions that facili-
tated the capacity for reflective, autonomous action. For modern subjec-
tivists, by contrast, such direction and stability could (and should) be
sought and discovered within one’s mind, through one’s own actions
and experiences, and possibly through rejection of traditional institu-
tional norms (Berger and Kellner, 1965). Both perspectives, however, value
reflective, autonomous action and flexibility – the ability to adapt – and these
phenomena continue to be cited as critical for human health by philos-
ophers of medicine, biology, and medical scientists today (Amundson,
2013; Luoma, Drake, Kohlenberg, and Hayes, 2011).
From this conceptual starting point emerge two interrelated ways in
which human wellbeing may be compromised. First, human wellbeing
may be compromised when there is no cultural constant with which to iden-
tify and from which humans can find direction for how to live, interact,
and respond in the world. Second, human wellbeing may be compromised
when humans compensate for their biological underdetermination and detach-
ment via strict, rigid adherence to institutional norms such that it precludes
rather than facilitates reflective, autonomous action. Thus, whether ascribing
to traditional institutional norms, or rejecting them and replacing
them with one’s own subjectively determined norms, it is reasonable
to suggest that these norms (regardless of their source) must exist (so as
to provide the needed structure to compensate for humans’ instinctual
deficits, detachment, and underdetermination at large) while a degree of
autonomy, flexibility, and adaptiveness must be preserved.
Looking at the top half of Figure 6.1 (below), the far left depicts
the circumstance noted in which one lacks a stable social structure to
provide cultural constants and instructions for how to live. On this side
Few institutions/ Adoption of Strict, rigid adherence

lacks cultural norms cultural constants to institutional norms
Excessive world-openness Flexibility; world-openness No world-openness
Addiction Defined routines/roles Mastery of select

No world-openness Reflective, autonomous action behaviors
No mastery Mastery No flexibility
Figure 6.1 Normative scale of compensatory action

162 Sally Wasmuth
of the spectrum, theoretically, persons are overwhelmed by their biolog-

ical precariousness – they do not have a stable identity with established
habits, roles, and routines. This side of the spectrum illustrates Gehlen’s
claim that, when lacking the adoption of institutional norms and tradi-
tions, persons are not afforded the opportunity for autonomous, reflec-
tive action.
By contrast, the top of the far right side of the spectrum in Figure 6.1
illustrates the scenario in which one may subscribe to strict institutional
guidelines for how to live such as the adoption of fundamentalist ideals.
While persons on the far left of the spectrum may be compromised in
their ability to engage in reflective action as Gehlen has described due
to their lack of stable background, so too may persons on the far right
of the spectrum. In other words, the adoption of overly rigid compen-
satory mechanisms may also preclude reflective, autonomous action if
they are overly constraining. While individuals falling on this side of
the spectrum may engage in a select group of actions falling within their
narrow institutionally guided repertoire, they lack the flexibility and
freedom to move beyond these boundaries, and if participation within
their institutional bounds is made impossible for some reason, theoreti-
cally, they suffer and are impaired in their ability to find new ways of
engaging in the world.
In the center of Figure 6.1 are people who adopt institutional norms
that provide a cultural constant of the sort that Gehlen endorsed, which
offer a stable background that compensates for the biological precarious-
ness of the human condition. Participation in and acceptance of cultural
constants for these individuals provide enough stability and definition
to make room for the ‘reflective foreground’ Gehlen describes (Berger
and Kellner, 1965), upon which individuals can engage in reflective
action while maintaining autonomy and freedom to respond creatively
to changing circumstances.
The bottom of the scale in Figure 6.1 illustrates likely responses or
implications of the anthropological circumstances delineated on the top
portion of the scale. While this scale is largely theoretical, it is based
on empirical support for Gehlen’s philosophical anthropology and
the biological evidence supporting Moss’s detachment theory. Further,
the far left of the scale is rooted in empirical evidence from addiction
literature.
On the bottom far left, addictions are listed as a response when
persons lack institutional structure or cultural constancy. Because, due
to this lack of institutional structure, persons falling on this end of the
continuum experience exaggerated compensatory need, theoretically,
they are likely to adopt institutions or occupations that are over-com-

pensatory. In other words, they are likely to adopt institutions such as
addiction that provide very rigid, all-encompassing guidelines for how
to live in the world. This is not just a theoretical claim; much research
supports that persons dislocated from stable sociocultural communities
and/or who lack opportunities for meaningful occupational participa-
tion are exceedingly vulnerable to addictions (see Alexander, 2008).7
Addictions create highly salient trigger-response patterns within the
individual, perhaps mimicking the biological instincts of other, less
detached beings. In this way, indeterminacy is perhaps relieved, but
the autonomy and freedom gained in human evolution are compro-
mised. Numerous studies illustrate this claim, demonstrating the ways
in which addictions create highly salient trigger-response cues (Carter
and Tiffany, 1999; Luoma et al., 2011; Volkow, Fowler, Wang, Baler, and
Telang, 2009), and preclude reflective action (Wasmuth et al., 2015).
Furthermore, in a study of metacognition in persons with addic-
tions, evidence suggests that it is not the capacity for reflection that
addictions compromise, but rather, the capacity for reflective action.
People with addictions create circumstances that maintain the ability
for reflection but preclude the ability to take desired actions (Wasmuth
et al., 2015). This ability to use metacognitive knowledge to respond
to social and psychological problems through action is referred to as
‘metacognitive mastery’ (Lysaker et al., 2014). Persons with addictions
7
In line with this model, Alexander in his 2008 book The Globalisation of
Addiction details numerous findings illustrating a rise in numbers of persons
suffering from addictions correlating with modernization and the resulting
‘dislocation’ of persons from traditional values and institutional norms. Echoing
Gehlen’s concern with modernization, according to Alexander, while a number of
various circumstances may cause an individual in any type of society to become
dislocated, the modern, globalizing, free-market society in which we currently
live is essentially ‘dislocating’. He says, ‘Whereas individual people can become
dislocated by misfortunes in any society ... only free-market society produces
mass dislocation as part of its normal functioning even during periods of pros-
perity’ (Alexander, 2008, p. 60). He describes, ‘Free-market society subjects people
to unrelenting pressures towards individualism, competition, and rapid change,
dislocating them from social life’ (p. 3). Alexander cites a number of other factors
that can contribute to dislocation and the likelihood of engaging in addiction(s),
some related to modernization and others perhaps not. These include individual
idiosyncrasies that a society cannot tolerate, violent childhood abuse, being
ostracized as an adult, flooding a local society with cheap manufactured products
that destroy its economic basis, or voluntarily choosing to withdraw from social
life into the single minded pursuit of wealth (Alexander, 2008).
164 Sally Wasmuth
have been found to have reflective capacities but lack ‘metacognitive

mastery’. This finding is in line with Gehlen’s thinking that the adop-
tion of cultural constants through institutions is necessary for reflective
action (mastery). While addiction may be compensatory for a lack of
institutional stability, we can claim that it fails as a compensation in
that it precludes the capacity for metacognitive mastery.
Bringing attention to the far right side of the scale, the adoption of
strict institutional guidelines theoretically allows mastery over a select
group of actions falling within the boundaries of adopted institutional
norms, but may fail to allow for flexibility in the face of unpredicted or
unwanted change. It is evident that the far right and far left ends of the
spectrum mirror each other in that the ways in which they compensate
for detachment are similarly constrained and may have some similar
consequences related to autonomy, flexibility, and mastery.
Implications for treatment

Typically, the harms of addiction have been linked to bodily harms
caused by excessive drug use, and the interference that drug addiction
has on participation in other meaningful life roles and responsibilities
(American Psychiatric Association, 2013). A philosophical anthropolog-
ical approach to understanding addiction aims for a broader concep-
tualization of ‘harm’ that is described in terms of the degree to which
addiction succeeds and/or fails in compensating for human underdevel-
opment; that is, the degree to which it facilitates or inhibits reflective
action.
There are some important reasons to adopt a broader conceptualiza-
tion of the harms of addictive behaviors. First, it may be the case that in
some instances, the compensatory gains of addiction outweigh its phys-
iological consequences. For example, the value of focus and temporal
structure provided by smoking at regular intervals may offset the threat
of potential cardiovascular damage. Likewise, one may value the ability
to alter his or her mood through regular substance consumption over
the other roles and responsibilities with which the addiction inter-
feres, or may value the intensity of addiction to work over the stress
and complications of family life. A perspective that narrowly focuses on
the physiological harms or interruptions in stereotypically meaningful
life roles caused by the addiction may overlook the compensatory need
that the individual is meeting through the behavior. Such an oversight
may lead to continual failed attempts to eradicate the addictive behavior
in treatment services. Particularly in the realm of health professionals
attempting to facilitate recovery in an addicted individual, focusing on
varying degrees of physiological harm or interruptions in typical life

roles caused by drug use can create a barrier to open communication
and instead fuel a punitive approach or stigmatization of the person
engaging in behaviors perceived to be irrational and harmful.8
Acknowledging the compensatory gains of addiction, a more effective
treatment strategy may be to offer opportunities to participate in new
occupations that maintain these gains while attempting to move indi-
viduals in the direction of the middle of the normative scale proposed.
To accomplish this, new occupations will need to offer means for struc-
turing time and creating new habits, roles, and routines. They will need
to provide experiences that can facilitate the establishment of personal
values, provide enjoyment, and maximize self-efficacy and mastery.
They will also need to capture individuals’ attention; they will need to
be motivating – to elicit a degree of excitement and volition so that
individuals become invested.
Some examples in addiction literature have depicted the effectiveness
of occupation-based interventions for improving abstinence related
outcomes as well as quality of life outcomes (Caddy, Crawford, and Page,
2012; Kashner et al., 2002; Lima and da Mata, 2013). However, such
approaches are exceptions and not the norm in addiction treatment
services. Furthermore, and more importantly, it is not standard prac-
tice to evaluate whether new occupations are becoming mere replace-
ments for prior addictions. In other words, even if new occupations
consist of less stigmatized activities, these too may become addictions
for individuals. The normative scale proposed in this chapter therefore
offers an important perspective – one that underscores the necessity of
developing and implementing measures of adaptive flexibility and the
ability for reflective action as recovering persons adopt new occupa-
tions. The goal becomes implementing occupation-based interventions
that provide the gains previously acquired through an addiction while
still facilitating a desirable degree of reflective action. Measuring meta-
cognitive mastery alongside the adoption of new occupations via the
Metacognition Assessment Scale (Semerari et al., 2003) is one example
of how to assess the degree to which a new occupation is facilitating
8
Although many will argue that evidence of the suffering and inner turmoil
that persons in active addiction experience is reason enough to accept that addic-
tion is harmful, clinicians may help clients gain morale by first discussing addic-
tion as a rational compensation for human detachment with both gains and
harms, and then using the proposed normative model to help determine new
goals.
166 Sally Wasmuth
wellness. Exploring other existing or newly developed measures guided

by the proposed normative scale is also warranted.
This suggested treatment strategy differs from typical treatment
approaches, which aim to eliminate cravings and irrational or problem-
atic thought patterns assumed to be driving addictive behaviors. It is
also different from approaches that simply redirect individuals toward
more stereotypically acceptable behaviors. Instead of attempting to
eradicate problems or simply replace problematic activities with more
acceptable ones that may themselves become (albeit less obviously but
nonetheless) problematic addictions, what is suggested is the integra-
tion of occupations that can provide focus and meaning while main-
taining flexibility and enjoyment.
Conclusions
This chapter proposes placing normative standards on various human

engagements by assessing the degree to which they provide both focus
and structure on the one hand and the capacity for flexible, autono-
mous action on the other. According to the proposed normative scale,
human wellness is rooted in our capacity to take actions that main-
tain autonomy, but more fundamentally, it is recognized that humans
must be able to take action at all. Creating the cultural constants or
constraining backgrounds upon which humans can find the fore-
ground for reflective engagement in the world becomes a fundamental
prerequisite to health. A cultural background that demands rigid adher-
ence at the expense of reflective freedom is viewed as compromising
health. By the same token, constant revolt against any consistent or
stable background maintains perhaps too much precariousness and
thus precludes the ability to engage in reflective action and in this
way also compromises health. What is deemed beneficial in addiction
treatment services are opportunities for new occupations that facili-
tate reflective action, and what is offered in this chapter is a norma-
tive scale for beginning to examine whether and how new occupations
meet such standards.
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Health’, Global Health Observatory (GHO) Data. Retrieved February 2, 2105, from
http://www.who.int/gho/alcohol/en.
World Health Organization (2015b) ‘Resources for the Prevention and Treatment
of Substance Use Disorders’, Global Health Observatory (GHO) Data. Retrieved
February 2, 2015, from http://www.who.int/gho/substance_abuse/en/.
7
The Hybrid Hominin: A
Renewed Point of Departure for
Lenny Moss
The goal of this paper will be nothing short of offering a new point of
departure for philosophical anthropology (and thereby for philosophy
and the human sciences in general). The crux of this effort will be devel-
oped around a novel concept of the ‘Hybrid Hominin’ and an explora-
tion of its descriptive and normative implications. The intentions will
not be to jettison prior insights from philosophical anthropology but
rather to recontextualize them in a way that both preserves and yet
further mobilizes their insights. Indeed the very measure of the success
of this enterprise will be precisely its ability to bring the legacy of philo-
sophical anthropology to further fruition and in the context of dialogues
with some of the contributors to this valuable new collection.
Detachment and normativity
In previous work I have endeavored to extend the idea of human ‘detach-

ment’ in the direction of a general philosophy of nature in the context
of which the ‘place of humans’ could be better and more naturalistically
situated.1 The present paper will begin by moving to further specify what
this means within the spectrum of phenomena we recognize as that of
‘life’. The central claim is that ‘life moves in the direction of increasingly
being able to constitute its own norms’. A great deal of emphasis will
be placed upon the idea that it was ‘the Group’ and not the individual
Hominin that was the ‘unit’ of normative transition in anthropogenesis
1
See, for example, Moss (2014).
171
172 Lenny Moss
and, in dialogue with some of the papers in this collection, I will make
the case for how this insight offers a radically new point of departure
for philosophical anthropology. Along the way, I will also, but only at
this time in preliminary and suggestive ways, gesture toward Hegel as a
fellow-traveler in the enterprise of philosophical anthropology.
Some notion of ‘natural detachment’ has constituted a continuous
thread throughout the history of ‘philosophical anthropology’ extending
all the way from Herder’s seminal late eighteenth century work, through
Nietzsche, Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, and Blumenberg (and beyond). By
‘natural detachment’ what has generally been intended is the idea that
humans (and their ancestors), as a natural species, are born uniquely
bereft of the kinds of adaptive physiological attunements that enable
other species to enjoy a stable form of natural existence (so long as they
do). For Herder this was a double-edged sword. It meant that humans also
were granted a kind of dispensation from the unavoidable demands that
come with ‘instinctual’ attunement. Orphans of nature on the one hand,
but also those released from the beck and call of any particular frequency
of nature, on the other. Humans were those endowed with the capacity
for deliberately turning their attention ‘inward’, that is, of ‘Besonnenheit’,
and thus capable of self-constitution. The very idea of being the species
that can enjoy ‘openness to the world’ presupposes just such a rupture
and its concomitant challenge. A move in the direction of some notion of
freedom, as is implied by reference to a transition toward ‘world openness’,
has often sat in an ambiguous relationship with what has generally been a
stronger emphasis upon natural deficiency. Indeed, for Gehlen, as well as
for Blumenberg (see the preceding discussions by Schacht and Pavesich),
the question of how ‘Man’ is even possible, that is, existentially viable, is
the paramount question. I will suggest that an overemphasis on human
deficiency has been due to a misconception of anthropogenesis.
While our contemporary cosmology as a whole would seem to be
very much in flux and thus not readily lending itself to overarching
generalizations,2 at least a part of our universe, I’ve suggested, can be
said to be ‘exploring greater levels of detachment’. Detachment here
is meant to connote an increase in relative independence vis-à-vis its
surround. A sub-atomic particle, such as a photon, that lacks a rest-mass,
can be said to be less ‘detached’ than a particle with a rest mass, which
2
No attempt will be made, for example, to discuss the properties and tenden-
cies of ‘dark energy’ nor ‘dark matter’ which are currently deemed to constitute
the overwhelming majority of the universe.
The Hybrid Hominin 173
thereby constitutes a well in space-time. The formation of ‘matter’ in

this sense is already an act of ‘detachment’. At least at very elementary
levels, matter of different sizes and complexity can be described in terms
of ‘degrees of freedom’. To know the degrees of freedom of an entity is to
be able to specify its space of possibilities. The greater the number of the
degrees of freedom the richer the possibility space and thereby the more
‘detached’ is the entity. A simple hydrogen atom with one proton and
one electron can respond to a perturbation in terms of five degrees of
freedom. It can ‘translate’, that is, move in space, along three different
axes; it can rotate; or it can elevate the energy level of its electron. A
simple bi-atomic molecule, such O2 is also able to vibrate along the axis
of its covalent bond and thus enjoys six degrees of freedom. So far as we
understand, how an atom or simple molecule responds to a perturbation
is purely stochastic. I appeal here to no more than common intuition to
suggest that the ability to respond to a perturbation in two ways consti-
tutes greater ‘independence’ than that which could only respond in one
way, and ditto for six versus five. One will also notice that the cova-
lent bond that ups the ante by one degree of freedom also constrains
the two oxygen atoms from responding independently. However rela-
tively simple this example may be, the idea that increases in autonomy
always also entail constraints can be taken as a basic insight into ‘natural
detachment’ that is scale invariant.
Simple increases in the size of material entities can be seen to entail
also qualitative changes, or transitions, in properties that correspond
intuitively with degrees of relative independence and thus levels of
detachment. The molecule known as ‘butane’ is a four carbon, satu-
rated hydrocarbon. It consists of four carbons in a linear chain with all
the remaining carbon valences bonded to hydrogen atoms. It thereby
consists of four carbons and ten hydrogen atoms. If butane were subject
to a perturbation, in addition to the kinds of responses already discussed,
it could also undergo an ‘isomerization’ (or ‘mutation’) reaction
resulting in a transition to a branched structure known as ‘isobutane’.
Whereby simpler-system responses would be seen as lacking any history,
that is, subsequent perturbation-responses would be indifferent to prior
perturbation-responses, the transition from butane to isobutane (or vice
versa) would mark a new threshold whereby subsequent perturbation-
responses would no longer be indifferent to prior perturbation-responses.
The ability to speak of a material entity having a ‘history’ or following
an ‘historical trajectory’ suggests a higher level of relative distinctive-
ness, independence, and detachment than that which is nothing but a
happenstance sequence of unrelated random events.
174 Lenny Moss
While we could speak of molecules at the level of complexity, or greater,

than butane having a history, we would not be tempted to suggest that
said history was driven by any internal preferences for one configura-
tion or another. But what if an affiliation of butane molecules appeared
which interacted in such a fashion as to either inhibit or promote transi-
tions from butane to isobutane? On first pass we might be tempted to
wonder whether we are looking at the behavior of some living activity.
But what provokes that intuition? A system which acts in such a way
as to determine its own outcome appears to have seized the reins in a
qualitatively new way. Implicit in the perception of a natural phenom-
enon actively biasing its own future state is the presence of a norm,
that is, a criterion for what counts as a better or worse outcome. An
entity (be it composite or otherwise) that can act such as to be in accord
with an implicit, internal norm, is surely more relatively independent
and detached than any entity that cannot. As previously argued, even
an enzyme, a single macromolecule, can be said to enact a norm in
returning to its original confirmation after undergoing a catalysis-
inducing perturbation at its active site.
At least in a rough and ready way, life – which has never been
adequately nor consensually defined – can be identified as that
threshold of natural detachment in which nature increasingly moves
in the direction of being able to constitute its own norms. Above the
threshold of detachment marked by the onset of life, the exploration
of higher levels of detachment, just is about further normative self-
determination. To be more detached, more autonomous, is to have a
greater wherewithal to define the norms of an existence, of a way and
a form of life.
Mängelwesen and/or normative self-realization?
The story we are telling at this point would seem to run afoul of the
basic insights of Philosophical Anthropology. If Nature moves progres-
sively toward forms of norm-constituting self-realization, then where
and how can it have given rise to creatures, that the likes of Gehlen and
Blumenberg tell us, are problems to themselves? Gehlen tells us in no
uncertain terms that for the human the very possibility of existence is
a dire problem, in fact is the problem. Must we postulate some form of
radical break with the continuity of nature, as much of the rhetoric of
philosophical anthropology has often done, in order to account for the
ostensible deficiencies of the human as a ‘natural’ being? Or is there
another way of reconciling this apparent paradox?
The missing link, it will be argued, that allows us to overcome this

putative contradiction pertains to the status of what I will call the
‘Hominin Group’. By ‘Hominin’ I adopt the recent usage within evolu-
tionary anthropology of the term used to refer to all those bipedal
primates beginning with Australopithecine and culminating, at least up
to the present, in modern Homo sapiens sapiens. The appearance of the
Hominin line did indeed represent a new stage in life constituting its
own norms but only if understood at the level of the Group not the
individual. It was the Hominin Group not the hominin individual that
constituted the new unit of detachment. I have in previous work, and for
the sake of simplicity, referred to this simply as ‘The First Detachment’.
While I think the evidence for the primacy of the Hominin Group has
become more than abundant, its significance for philosophical anthro-
pology has thus far been largely ignored.
First detachment: the primordial group
A logic of progressive normative self-realization (and one would not

be misguided to hear echoes of Hegel) as the further continuation of
detachment, would anticipate transitions from more implicit to more
explicit, from weaker to stronger, and, at least eventually from some-
thing like a ‘normativity-in-itself’ to a ‘normativity-for-itself’. On such
purely theoretical, even speculative, grounds, it would make sense to
posit the emergence of a Group capable of new levels of fluidity and
flexibility in constituting norms that are even further detached from the
dictates of any particular ‘natural frequencies’. That said, both empirical
psychology and phenomenology have provided evidence, extending
from late nineteenth century and now into the twenty-first century, of
the deep roots of group behavior and orientation, in the ‘archeology’
of the human brain/mind. This evidence has seldom, if ever, been
used to ‘excavate’ the ‘primordial group’ but that is exactly the present
intention.
Curiously, almost dramatically, the most fundamental premise of
philosophical anthropology, the idea that humans have become bereft
of instinct, is fundamentally, if inadvertently, contradicted by the emer-
gent talk of late nineteenth century inquiries into the nature of group
psychology. Consider the following introductory remarks by Gustave Le
Bon from his influential The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind:
Crowds, doubtless are always unconscious, but this very unconscious-

ness is perhaps one of the secrets of their strength. In the natural
176 Lenny Moss
world beings exclusively governed by instinct accomplish acts whose

marvelous complexity astounds us. Reason is an attribute of humanity
of too recent date and still too imperfect to reveal to us the laws of
the unconscious, and still more to take its place. The part played by
the unconscious in all our acts is immense, and that played by reason
very small. The unconscious acts like a force still unknown.3
Le Bon finds in the behavior of crowds a universal human propensity

to assume a different, distinctive, less individuated state of conscious-
ness, that appears to hark back to an early ancestral state of existence,
with instinctual response patterns that had adaptive value. When philo-
sophical anthropologists spoke of ‘instinct’ what they had in mind was
response patterns to ‘natural’ not social stimuli. Might it be that Le Bon
has in some sense anticipated insights into the deep sociality and socia-
bility of humans that only twenty-first century (see below) psychology
has begun to empirically elucidate?
In his seminal work on Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego,
which began with a discussion of Le Bon, Freud eventually asserts that:
Thus the group appears to us as a revival of the primal horde. Just as

primitive man survives potentially in every individual, so the primal
horde may arise once more out of any random collection; in so far as
men are habitually under the sway of group formation we recognize
in it the survival of the primal horde. We must conclude that psych-
ology of groups is the oldest human psychology; what we have isolated as
individual psychology, by neglecting all traces of the group, has only since
come into prominence out of the old group psychology, by a gradual process
which may still, perhaps, be described as incomplete. (Freud, 1959, p. 55,
emphasis added)
Where our experience (and I do mean our experience) of crowd behavior

may provide a most conspicuous window onto our groupish ancestry,
evidence for the primordiality of the Hominin Group can also be found
in what is most common and mundane in human behavior. While it
was certainly not the case that Heidegger, in his characterization of ‘Das
Man’ or ‘the They’, intended to recover the lineaments of an ancestral
hominin in his existential phenomenology, would this not be exactly
the best explanation for what he very aptly exposed as the nature of
3
Le Bon (1820 [1985], p. x).
the ‘everyday’ man and woman? Proximally and for the most part, as
Heidegger would say, in the course of our everyday rounds, we lose
ourselves in the behavior and implicit norms of the mass, of the gener-
alized others amongst whom we dwell. Out of the corners of our eyes,
as it were, we tacitly measure the distance between ourselves and others,
in how we walk, how we stand and sit, how we adorn ourselves, how
near and far, how loud and soft, we are in engaging others, in relation
to which we adjust, we cleave to an average, we fall in line with implicit
behavioral norms as they are being enacted. What would it mean for
humans or pre-human Hominins to be constituents of a highly-norm-
atively integrated Group? Heidegger’s characterization of how, in the
absence of forces to the contrary, we fall into ‘the They’, we should
notice, need not presuppose the acquisition and use of language. Could
it be that Heidegger has inadvertently found a window onto the life of,
for example, Homo erectus who sustained a highly social, encampment-
based, existence for over a million years prior to the advent of spoken
language?
For something like a ‘Hominin Group’ to constitute a radical new tran-
sition in levels of detachment, as characterized by a qualitative change in
the degree to which ‘nature’ has become capable of constituting its own
norms, the Hominin Group must have represented a leap forward in the
capacity for flexible and adaptive responses to environmental contin-
gencies along with mechanisms for rapid internal dissemination, inte-
gration and stabilization of de facto adaptive norms. Le Bon and Freud
conceived of a kind of ‘unconscious mental life’ characterized by: (1) a
sense of ‘invincible power’ through group identification, (2) a suscep-
tibility to emotional contagion, and (3) susceptibility to suggestion.4
For Freud, hypnosis provided a clear window onto our Group ancestry
because the fact of hypnosis just is an isolated instance of Group behav-
ior.5 Curiously, it is not until recent and current work conducted by
cognitive psychologist Michael Tomasello that motivations and unique
cognitive capacities specifically for cooperation have become the focal
point, and yet these now mark what are arguably the most empirically
robust studies in favor of the Hominin Group model.
Michael Tomasello6 tells us, somewhat controversially, that if an ape,
even a human-acculturated ape, is looking for food, and a human points
4
Freud (1959, pp. 6–7).
5
Freud (1959, p. 47).
6
See especially Tomasello (2009).
178 Lenny Moss
toward food that can be found, the ape will not understand. The ape, as it
were, doesn’t ask herself why someone is pointing. When an ape points,
it is always, or almost always, an imperative, that is, meaning ‘Go and
get that for me’. The concept of pointing for the sake of providing infor-
mation in response to a recognized need is foreign to apes but appar-
ently universal in even pre-linguistic infants. Interestingly, and perhaps
tellingly, infants but not apes will cooperate in pulling a platform that
brings forth a single allotment of food that therefore would need to be
shared. Apes, by contrast, will cooperate to bring forth food, but only if
the portions are separated into allotments that are only accessible to each
so that no requirement for sharing is needed. The prospect of sharing a
bounty for apes defeats the interest whereas for infants it is no deterrent at
all. What Tomasello wants us to understand is that infants, but not apes,
who may well be able to solve practical problems individually as well or
better than the infants, have a cognitive capacity for ‘we-intentionality’
that apes lack. We know that you are looking for food and we understand
that I am trying to help you find it. We know that we want that food
and we know that we can share it. Tomasello has gone to some pains to
show that helping behavior in human infants is spontaneous and not
predicated upon parental rewards and that infants will even forego an
individually enjoyable activity to engage in helping behavior. There are
two general observations about human sociality that can be made on the
basis of these studies and it is the second upon which I want to elaborate.
The first is that human infants, even prior to language, possess a cogni-
tive infrastructure, a cognitive capacity for ‘we-intentionality’ that so far
as we know, no other species possesses. This breakthrough understanding
by Tomasello surely must be one of the most significant achievements
of contemporary experimental psychology. The second, I think less
explored and developed observation, is that infants are deploying these
capacities in cooperative acts as ends-in-themselves, and I would refer to
this as pertaining to the affective infrastructure of human sociality and
sociability. How and why are cooperative acts in-themselves attractors
for human infants? And have we uncovered another window onto the
origins of humanity in the primordial Hominin Group?
Although a thorough discussion of the affective infrastructure of the
Hominin Group can’t be addressed here at this time, there are important
new insights, wholly consistent with the Hominin Group hypothesis,
provided in recent work by the evolutionary behavioral ecologist Sarah
Hrdy. The capacity to cooperate is based upon what we would call both
cognitive and emotional factors although it’s not clear that these are
ultimately distinguishable.
Whereas one might imagine that hominin cooperativity is an

outgrowth of the dyadic mother–infant relationship, exactly the oppo-
site appears to be the case: it is the loss of the exclusive relationship
between mother and infant and the distribution of affective ties amongst
the members of the larger group, beginning right after birth, that is
distinctive of the Hominin line. Hominins and ultimately humans in
particular could only have evolved as cooperative breeders. Prior to the
detachment of the Hominin Group, as a rule the larger the baby the
longer the delay between the next birth. Humans are the exceptions
with the largest, slowest maturing, and most costly babies but also the
species that breeds most frequently amongst primates.7 Chimpanzee,
orangutan, and gorilla mothers are more single-mindedly devoted to
their progeny than human mothers are and for a much longer time, and
whereas other ape mothers protect and covet their neonates uncondi-
tionally, human mothers will inspect and reject them if they are defi-
cient or if the circumstances are not right for raising them.8
The evidence of evolutionary behavioral ecology is wholly consistent
with the idea of a radical transition in hominin evolution in which
the Group emerges as the functional unit, or in other words, the unit
of detachment. Hrdy concurs that already a million and a half years ago
African ancestors of Homo sapiens (that is, Homo erectus) were already
emotionally very different from the ancestors of any extant ape.9
Second detachment: the hybrid hominin
I began this essay with the promise of providing a new point of depar-
ture for philosophical anthropology based upon a new or revised
‘Wissenschaftlich’ philosophy of nature. It’s time now to start making
good on that promise.
The hominin Homo erectus flourished for well over a million years. The
expansion of brain size from that of Australopithecines to that of Homo
erectus (80 percent of the modern human brain size) marked the largest
single expansion of brain capacity in anthropogenesis.10 The progeny of
Homo erectus would have also been born with pre-mature brains subject
to ‘an extra-uterine year’ of rapid growth and structuration, and, as
7
Hrdy (2009, p. 101).
8
Hrdy (2009, p. 71).
9
Hrdy (2009, p. 67).
10
Discussion of Homo erectus has been derived from Donald (1991,
pp. 112–114).
180 Lenny Moss
Sarah Hrdy tells us, would have been ‘emotionally modern’ in the sense
of having developed foundational affective ties with multiple members
of their community. Homo erectus lived a social existence in permanent
encampments warmed by the domesticated use of fire. They had the
wherewithal to engage in organized giant-mammal hunts that required
a differentiation of roles and they produced hand axes of sufficient
sophistication as to require practices of apprenticeship and pedagogy
for transmission across generations. Long before Homo sapien animal
trackers left Africa and established root-stock populations throughout
the world, Homo erectus left Africa and colonized all the contiguous
land masses of the Eurasian continents.
Homo erectus did not have the benefit of spoken language, but without
question constituted a pervasively normatively structured world. Homo
erectus, in all likelihood, exemplified the idea of the Hominin Group
that’s been proposed. The idea then would be that Homo erectus repre-
sented a radically new expression of nature constituting its own norms,
but at the level of a tightly normatively integrated group and that Homo
erectus coped with the insecurity of its detachment from nature largely
as a group and not at the level of individuals. What this means then,
is that the proper point of departure for philosophical anthropology is
NOT that of the emergence of a physiologically challenged being ‘in
nature’ but rather that of the partial and perhaps progressive detach-
ment of hominin individuals from the primordial Group resulting in
what I’ve referred to as the ‘Hybrid Hominin’.
Much of the ‘natural deficiency’ thematized by philosophical anthro-
pologists would have already been well in place in Homo erectus, but to
say that Homo erectus was a problem to herself would seem to be a bit
rash if not ostensibly absurd. The loss of physiological pre-specialization
combined with the gain of the affective and cognitive capacities for coop-
erative ‘we-mode’ were the very conditions of possibility for nature to
explore new dimensions of normative autonomy. The supposition here
is that the further enhancement of the capacities of individuals to opti-
mally participate and respond to the normative dynamics of the group
led to something new under the sun. Nature discovered a new opening for
further detachment, for a new transition toward even greater normative
self-constitution, when, to borrow some language from Hegel, normativ-
ity-in-itself began to become normativity-for-itself. Normativity enters a
new level of autonomy when individuals begin to constitute themselves
as normative subjects who can take stands as individuals based upon the
normative resources that were always already there. Following Schacht’s
lucid account, this is, however, to turn Nietzsche’s and Gehlen’s account
of the origin of subjective interiority on its head. Subjectivity did not

arise when social existence imposed itself upon an instinctually impul-
sive animal; rather an inner-world began to arise with the partial indi-
viduation, that is, ‘second detachment’, of hominins from a normatively
dense social world in which they had been instinctually well integrated
for over a million years. Perhaps a side-bar, but this inversion would also
be consistent with the view that the emotions and instincts of which
Nietzsche and Gehlen are wont to speak of would have long since been
‘hominized’, for example, the formation of social emotions such as guilt
and shame, prior to individuation. The philosophical anthropology of
the Hybrid Hominin thus locates that ‘hiatus’, so central to the thought
of Gehlen, as not between impulse and action but between the impulse-
integrated action of ‘The Group’ and the partially individuated action-
standpoint in which normativity begins to speak ‘for-itself’. His nods
to the unavoidable sociality of the human notwithstanding, it was
Gehlen’s largely normatively poor naturalism that rendered him more
than susceptible to authoritarian ‘solutions’.
Blumenberg’s anthropology, as it is very well represented in this
volume by Vida Pavesich, can also be productively analyzed in terms of
two detachments. The ancestral Hominin Group can be seen as providing
the requisite orientation that first detachment made necessary. Again, it
is the onset of second detachment that raises the stakes by unsettling
the mute consolations that provided stability over eons. With second
detachment, itself likely to be concomitant and co-extensive with the
appearance of spoken language, myth and rhetoric became the compen-
sation for the destabilization of the orienting functions of The Group.
Through new cracks in the quasi-absolutist totality of the normative
in-itself, a ‘nature’ not subject to instinctual response must be re-tamed
through rhetorical means. Blumenberg’s hypersensitivity to the pain of
the in-itself de facto absolute that we have lost, manifests itself in his
eternal vigilance against any new pretender to that throne.
Pavesich’s very sensitive portrayal of the affective infrastructure neces-
sary for effective consolation (and its vulnerability to forces of capitalist
modernization) should be supplemented by acknowledging that that
consolation which traditionally takes place within the confines of a
group identity has also been the source of invidious distinctions and
sectarian violence between groups.11 In this light, the significance of the
11
For a discussion, from a neuro-science of cooperativity point of view, of the
relationship between consolation and xenophobia see Moss (2013).
182 Lenny Moss
more universalistic possibilities of a normativity that has, reflectively

and critically, become a ‘normativity-for-itself’, perhaps by way of an
anthropologically reconstituted orientation toward a new Sittlichkeit,
can be properly appreciated.12
An anthropology of the Hybrid Hominin offers some surprising sugges-
tions for a rereading of Heidegger as well. As previously suggested, with
respect to his discussion of Das Man, the phenomenology of Division One
of Being and Time can be seen as inadvertently recovering insights into the
nature of the ancestral Group. Provocatively, the transition to the existen-
tial concerns of Division Two, with its arguable disjunction from Division
One, can be reviewed as a move from the first to the second detachment.
Temporality emerges as individuation, as the radically new subjective
consciousness of finite individuality. At the boundary of Group enclo-
sure and subjective confrontation with the arbitrary finitude of private
mortality, Heidegger’s existentialism counsels one to own the inevitable
anxiety of detachment and embrace one’s possibilities, albeit still within
the context of the Group, but as an individual with resolution.
References
Donald, M. (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind (Cambridge MA: Harvard University
Press).
Freud, S. (1959) Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, trans. by J. Strachey
(New York: W.W. Norton).
Heidegger, M. (1962) [1927] Being and Time, trans. by Macquarie and Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row).
Honneth, A. (2014) Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (New
York: Columbia University Press).
Hrdy, S. (2009) Mothers and Others: The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
Le Bon, G. (1896) The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (London: Macmillan).
Moss, L. (2013) ‘Moral Molecules, Modern Selves, and “Our Inner Tribe”’, The
Hedgehog Review, 15 (1), 19–33.
of Biosocial Becoming’, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 40, 91–105.
Tomasello, M. (2009) Why We Cooperate (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press).
12
In his recent major work, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic
Life (2014), Axel Honneth has revisited the Hegelian conception of a ‘Sittlichkeit’
in a way that lends itself well to bringing an anthropology of the Hybrid Hominin
into a productive encounter with an irreducibly social conception of freedom.
8
Intentionality and Mentality as
Explanans and as Explanandum:
Michael Tomasello’s Research
Program from the Perspective of
Hans-Peter Krüger
The approaches of Michael Tomasello and of philosophical

anthropology: quasi-transcendental naturalism?
From the perspective of Philosophical Anthropology, one can only

welcome the situation, when a grand and paradigmatic project is devel-
oped in the empirical sciences, which is capable of making contribu-
tions to both anthropological orders of comparison. The specification of
the human requires not only the horizontal comparison of socio-cultures
of Homo sapiens sapiens among one another, but also the vertical compar-
ison of human with non-human life forms.1 Both orders of comparison
can reinforce as well as correct one another, as we know from Helmuth
Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: the European self-conception
of the human is ethnocentric and cannot be made its measure simply
as a matter of course.2 Michael Tomasello’s research program conceives
important excerpts from both orders of comparison. It enables the
Many thanks to Daniel Smyth for the English translation of my first draft and
to Phillip Honenberger for corrections of my final version.
1
Compare Plessner (1975 [1928], p. 32; p. 36). (The English translation of this
book is in preparation by Fordham University Press for 2016.)
2
Plessner demanded the opening of the European Mind step by step even to
unfathomability. Plessner (1981, pp. 160–161; pp. 181–182; pp. 188–190).
183
184 Hans-Peter Krüger
comparison of language acquisition between human children in

various socio-cultures as well as the comparison of the ontogenesis of
preschool-age human children with that of other primates. Whoever
can achieve such ambitious and from the outset transdisciplinary
comparisons can neither heap up empiricisms that are different in kind
nor lag behind in the autonomy of historically developed disciplines.
He must display the new mode and manner of explanation theoretically
and methodically, and even if this succeeds, he must reckon with much
misunderstanding and opposition.3
In keeping with the theme of both orders of comparison, Tomasello
challenges the customary dualistic division of labor between philosophy,
the human sciences, and the natural sciences. Within widely assumed
dualistic frameworks, the following misidentifications of methods with
objects have become customary: the Mental can only be understood
[verstehen], therefore one must avoid, for whatever reasons, explana-
tions [Erklärungen] of its Nature. Conversely, whoever claims to be able
to explain Nature will have to evade his Mental problems of under-
standing. And if this mainstream dualistic division between explaining
Nature and understanding Mind is not merely to appear as a social ques-
tion of power, its exponents must give it a normativity, which naturally
may not be made dependent upon facts, but rather intended philo-
sophically. This dualistic division of functions blocks anthropological
questions, in the sense of the correction-loop of both orders of compar-
ison. How Mental forms of life could so much as exist in the face of the
division of Nature from Mind remains fantastical from the outset. The
activities of human beings, with regard to both orders of comparison,
do not allow themselves to be thematized, except to the extent that the
necessary achievements of understanding and explanation can both
be distinguished and brought into an interconnection. According to
Tomasello, knowledge of, for instance, genetic features of individuals
who speak a certain language, has long since been brought together
with knowledge of the language’s history and present geographic distri-
bution, so as to draw conclusions regarding aspects of human prehis-
tory. Similarly, he continues, one could connect the investigation of
contemporary linguistic development in children to historical proc-
esses of grammaticalization and the genetic and neural foundations
3
Therefore, I proposed that the city of Wiesbaden (Germany) award its
Helmuth Plessner Prize for Philosophical Anthropology to Michael Tomasello,
which happened in September 2014.
Tomasello and Philosophical Anthropology 185
of language.4 Here Tomasello approaches a ‘classical theme of research

in the human sciences’ – namely the ‘social and cultural activities of
man and their role for human cognition’ – anew with methods ‘from
the natural sciences’. These are not, however, restricted to quantitative
methods and laboratory experiments, but also include social-historical-
empirical access to cultural phenomena at the level of the community
[Gemeinschaft] (as opposed to society [Gesellschaft], COHC, pp. 9f.G).
Tomasello employs an interdisciplinary strategy of ‘naturalistic (but not
reductionistic) investigation’ (COHC, pp. 8f.G).
Here is a welcome reshuffling of the cards – even new rules of play – in
contrast to the old dualistic division. It thus promises to be especially
rewarding to run through this research program with an eye to whether
the old tasks of philosophy – to uncover the limits of knowledge for
the personal leading of one’s life – can here be fulfilled in a new way.
Philosophical Anthropology not only elaborates anthropological ques-
tions and answers in contrast to the traditional dualistic division (that
is, as an integrative, generalizing Anthropology). As the Philosophy of
Anthropology, it also reconstrues the enabling conditions of anthropo-
logical questioning and answering, which for their part can no longer
be posed and answered anthropologically. Only by running through the
distinction and the interconnection between understanding and expla-
nation in the anthropological orders of comparison can we bring out
the limits of those comparisons, without having to act like free-riders
and alarmists of earlier, erstwhile institutionalized customs.5 Even the
interdisciplinary, integrating capacity of the Leipzig Max Planck Institute
for Evolutionary Anthropology, to whose group of co-directors Tomasello
belongs, will hardly be able to obviate philosophy, now or in the future.
The philosophical limit-question of the anthropological contribution
in Tomasello’s research program will, in the following, be discussed in
terms of the fundamental concepts of Intentionality and Mentality. Not
in place of, but rather in addition to shared biological as well as cultural
primate inheritance, human beings are characterized by a biological
4
See Tomasello (1999, pp. 7f.G). References to this book will appear in the
text in parentheses with the abbreviation COHC. [Translator’s note: Many of
the quotations cited in this article stem from a Foreword added to the German
edition of Tomasello (1999). I have been unable to find an English version of this
Foreword and have therefore simply translated from the German. Whenever this
is the case, I cite the German edition and indicate this with a ‘G’: for example,
COHC (p. 7f.G.) as opposed to COHC (p. 7f.DS)].
5
Compare Krüger and Lindemann (2007, pp. 29–38).
adaptation, which may be the result of particular genetic occurrences

and of a particular selective pressure on their early African ancestors. For
Tomasello, the hypothetical assumption (compare COHC, p. 2G) that,
due to time limitations, there is one such adaptation is sufficient. This
first evolutionary period of a bio-social adaptation consists in the transi-
tion from ‘Individual Intentionality’ to ‘Joint Intentionality’.6 It has, as
its result, led to a capacity that makes it possible to explain everything
else in a primarily socio-cultural-historical manner (in a reestablishment
of the tradition of G.H. Mead and L.S. Vygotsky). This second evolu-
tionary period of a socio-cultural adaptation consists in the transition
from ‘Joint Intentionality’ to ‘Collective Intentionality’ (NHHT, p. 140).
Individual Intentionality is still alive in wild groups of Great Apes. It is
performed in social contexts of competition by intentional commu-
nication (NHHT, ch. 2). Joint Intentionality among early human beings
appears in dual-level collaborations by cooperative communication (for
instance, in ‘joint goals with individual roles, along with joint atten-
tion with individual perspectives’, NHHT, p. 137, ch. 3). This led to
‘second-personal thinking’ without culture or language (NHHT, p. 138).
Collective intentionality among modern human beings (using ‘modern’
in a biological sense here) is performed as a group-minded culture by
conventional communication via a language (NHHT, ch. 4):
This meant that different cultures created, on top of their species

wide cognitive skills of individual, joint, and collective intention-
ality, many culturally specific cognitive skills and ways of thinking
for their own local purposes. Importantly, these culturally specific
skills build on one another over historical time within a culture in
a kind of ratchet effect, leading to cumulative cultural evolution.
(NHHT, pp. 141–142)
Mentality as collective intentionality is built on the infrastructure of

sharing intentions, that is, on joint intentionality in cooperation.
What Tomasello calls the ‘ratchet effect’ (COHC, p. 202), through which
a generation-spanning social accumulation of culture accrues, such that
the ontogenetic niches are forever building up from it and need no longer
to begin from scratch, recalls the distinction between Environment [Umwelt]
and World [Welt] from Philosophical Anthropology. The socio-cultural
6
Tomasello (2014, p. 140), hereafter NHHT.
‘environment’ is institutionalized in the form of roles with artifacts and

inserts itself between the genotype and phenotype of Man in the biolog-
ical sense (as in COHC, p. 250G). The enabling of historical change and
the establishment of a socio-cultural environment is here understood from
within the framework of a world of and for persons.7 Persons have a distance
from their concentric unity as organisms with environments insofar as they
are ex-centering their concentricity. Each person ex-centers away towards
relations with fellows who share a world (a co-world: in German, Mitwelt).
These relations between persons are taken as a categorical subjunctive of
a future world, that is, as a ‘utopian standpoint’ (Plessner, 1975 [1928],
ch. 7). From there, one re-centers the vision of world into new roles to be
institutionalized as a new socio-cultural environment. In the life process
of persons, there is the need to balance these ways of ex-centering and
re-centering. Otherwise, either direction may be short-circuited or torn
apart from the other. Usually, the foregrounded here-and-now situation
(the environment) is taken from a background of long-term relations
between persons and what is beyond them (the world).8
Apparently, there is an equivalent to this enabling in Tomasello’s view,
insofar as he conceives of Intentionality and Mentality as types of under-
standing that function as common ground for cooperation and communi-
cation. His explanation leads from ‘The View from Here and There’ (joint
intentionality) to ‘The View from Nowhere’ (collective intentionality)
(NHHT, p. 76; p. 120). For Tomasello, the distinction between the animate
(or agentive) and the inanimate belongs to our primate heritage and is
accessible to humans even in infancy. The understanding of conspecifics
as ‘intentional agents’ appears in humans after nine months, very clearly
after about one year. This ‘includes an understanding of both the goal-
directed behavior and the attention of others’ (COHC, p. 179). It begins
as, and differentiates into various kinds of, ‘sharing intentionality’.9 The
understanding of other persons as ‘mental actors’ appears in human chil-
dren at four years of age. This means ‘that other persons have not just
intentions and attention as manifest in their behavior, but also thoughts
7
The introduction of a distinction between personal World and socio-cultural
Environment should enable, among other things, the extension of interpreta-
tions of Wolfgang Köhler’s experiments with chimpanzees beyond the distinc-
tions, internal to biology, between organism and environment and their varying
forms of interaction. Compare Scheler (1995 [1928], pp. 28–46), and Plessner
(1975 [1928], pp. 245–260; p. 270f.; p. 293ff.; p. 309ff).
8
See Krüger (2010).
9
Tomasello (2008, ch. 4), hereafter OHC.
and beliefs which may or may not be expressed in behavior – and which
may differ from the ‘real’ situation’ (COHC, p. 179). This distance from
the foreground here-and-now is enabled by a background of common
conventions in culture and language (see OHC, pp. 78–79).
The interesting double distinction of intentional agents from animate
agents in general, and again of mental agents from intentional ones,10
apparently plays a two-fold role in Tomasello’s writings. On the one hand,
it is treated as a biotic and social adaptation within natural and cultural
evolution. From this perspective, it must be explained as the result of proc-
esses of variation and selection toward a kind of institutionalization. Here
it would appear to be in need of explanation, that is, to be the explanandum.
Yet, on the other hand, Tomasello treats the double distinction as enabling
of socio-cultural achievements. It is striking how often Tomasello speaks
of ‘enabling’ in the pragmatic sense of that which is functional in commu-
nication, as he has developed this notion in his previous work.11 From this
perspective, the aforementioned biological adaptation does not determine
but rather enables (COHC, p. 13, compare also p. 9; p. 15; p. 212). In all
theories of double – that is, biological and cultural – inheritance, there is,
hidden in the biological adaptedness of the species to its environment,
an a priori dimension, which makes experience possible for the individ-
uals of a population of that species (CL, p. 189; p. 283f).12 As an enabling
structure, the biological adaptation is a ‘capacity’ for ‘understanding’ –
precisely, a capacity for understanding the intentional and mental under-
standing of one’s conspecifics. Even other primates ‘understand’ then; they
understand, in particular, ‘relational categories’ and how they ought to
behave, though not ‘false beliefs’ (COHC, pp. 19–22). As soon as biological
adaptation has been turned into a structure that enables understanding,
10
For Plessner, we cannot take the distinctions between inorganic and living
bodies and between a-centric, pre-conscious and centric, conscious life for
granted. See his reconstruction of these presuppositions in Plessner (1975 [1928],
chs 3–5).
11
Tomasello (2003, p. 283), hereafter CL.
12
Similarly, Plessner distinguished between the adaptedness (primär
Eingespieltheit or ‘primary practicedness’ which is a priori) and the ongoing
actual adapting (which is a posteriori) in the interaction between organism and
environment. This distinction is a reconstruction which revises hasty evolu-
tionary-theoretical conclusions. Plessner (1975 [1928], pp. 200–211). The evolu-
tionary-theoretical distinction between mechanisms (of variation and selection)
suggests that there is a malleability (plasticity) among life-possibilities, that is, a
‘categorical conjunctive’ (pp. 216f.). Otherwise there would be nothing which
could be varied or selected.
however, it appears to play the role of that which explains. The under-
standing of conspecifics as intentional and mental actors presents itself as
the explanans, which explains the facticity of socio-cultural achievements.
This certainly isn’t reductionistic, but is it still a naturalistic explana-
tion? Can there be a naturalistic explanation of functional achievements
through enabling structures which do not determine?
Tomasello does not himself distinguish these two roles of explanans
and explanandum. We will further pursue the development of both roles
and thereby see whether this duality reveals limitations for Tomasello’s
program. Even if he cannot, as a natural scientist, rest content with the
explanation of levels of understanding through enabling, one cannot
deny that there have been forms of what one might call a transcendental
naturalism, a philosophical strategy or approach to the development of
new methods of explanation, with which Tomasello’s new, transdisci-
plinary research perspectives may resonate. Classical pragmatism has,
in fact, similarly to Philosophical Anthropology, posed anew the tran-
scendental question regarding the enabling conditions of human expe-
rience. The primary reference-point for both classical pragmatism and
Philosophical Anthropology, regarding this question of structural-func-
tional enabling, was no longer (as it was for Kant or Husserl) the relation
of self-consciousness to consciousness, but rather wandered through
the levels [Stufen] of interaction of animate beings, among them socio-
cultural Nature. These strata of interaction became, among themselves,
non-homologous or unstable, hence a foundation of the socio-cultural
achievements of humankind in need of integration or limitation. The
entire distinction between that which life-experience enables (a priori)
and that which results from it (a posteriori) came to be understood as
itself a historically alterable function, thus placed into natural and cultural
history. Nature enables itself in time. I have called this philosophical
reorientation, which emerged in parallel yet independently in clas-
sical pragmatism and in Philosophical Anthropology, a quasi-transcen-
dental naturalism, on the one hand to distance it from reductionistic
naturalisms, which propagate the old play within the Cartesian divi-
sion, and on the other hand to prevent confusion with the classical
philosophies of consciousness, which are still ruled by the primacy of
theory of knowledge instead of the historical-practical leading of a life.13
13
Compare Krüger (2001, pp. 88–93; p. 144f.; p. 203f.; p. 209; p. 289;
p. 320f.).
Plessner proposed a new, open-ended combination of explanation and

understanding.14
Tasks of explanation in three temporal horizons: against

politically popular pseudoexplanations
Today it is common evolutionary-historical practice to estimate the

ancestors of humanoid apes and humans at six million years ago, the
emergence of the species Homo at around two million, that of Homo
sapiens at about a quarter million years ago, and that of ‘modern’
humans (in the biological sense of Homo sapiens sapiens) at around
50,000 (sometimes 100,000) years ago. The biotic speed of evolution, in
the sense of the probability of genetic mutations and changes of habitat,
is not, Tomasello claims, sufficient to explain the cognitive progress of
modern human beings up to the nowadays well-known high-cultures.
For that there has been, seen purely biologically, simply not enough
time. Tomasello thus inserts a specifically socio-cultural development of
‘ratchet effects’ into the biological interconnection between phylogeny
(species evolution) and ontogeny (individual development) at the popu-
lation level. This alters the interconnection qualitatively and acceler-
ates developments within it enormously. His hypothesis distinguishes
between three temporally distinct processes, which, under particular
conditions, can intertwine and reinforce or inhibit one another:
Phylogenetically: modern human beings evolved the ability to “iden-

tify” with conspecifics, which led to an understanding of them as
intentional and mental beings like the self. Historically: this enabled
new forms of cultural learning and sociogenesis, which led to cultural
artifacts and behavioral traditions that accumulate modifications over
historical time. Ontogenetically: human children grow up in the midst
of these socially and historically constituted artifacts and traditions,
which enables them to (a) benefit from the accumulated knowledge
and skills of their social groups; (b) acquire and use perspectivally
based cognitive representations in the form of linguistic symbols
(and analogies and metaphors constructed from these symbols); and
(c) internalize certain types of discourses’ interactions into skills
of metacognitions, representational redescription, and dialogic
thinking. (COHC, p. 10)
14
Plessner (1981, p. 202; pp. 225–227; pp. 229–231).
To me, this three-fold temporal distinction makes sense for two reasons,
which go beyond what Tomasello says, but which are to that extent
bound up with questions directed to him. First, the distinction strikes me
as plausible because it is suited to the reassessment of problems of time
not only in twentieth-century philosophy, but also in recent genetic and
brain research. The initial false assessment that, by sequencing the DNA
of many species, a fundamental insight had been achieved (rather than
some empirically important grunt-work), has again given way to the
question about the temporal rhythms in which genes are activated and
deactivated, so that they can be relevant to behavioral functions (epige-
netics). Even in neurobiological brain research, the insight has grown
that the topological (spatial) organization of the brain is insufficient as
a physical correlate for the explanation of the intentional and mental
behavioral functions of humanoid apes and humans. Researchers such
as W. Singer and others, for instance, are attempting to solve the connec-
tion problem through a synchronization of neural activity in various
regions of the brain, against background noise.15
The question of at what rhythm and during which ‘time windows’
these various processes are capable of reinforcing or hindering one
another, becomes, however, even more important. The metaphor of the
‘ratchet effect’ (COHC, p. 39f) is, as yet, insufficient – however perspic-
uous it may seem to be on a social-psychological group level and however
richly promising it seems to be for the empirical sciences on account
of its mechanical character. Hidden behind it lurks a difficult double
question, namely, about a socio-cultural environment which stabi-
lizes against relapses behind what has already been achieved through
collective habituation, and about an openness to the world, which goes
beyond the established socio-cultural environment in a manner that is
alien and therefore also capable of handling conflict. For Plessner, there
is no extra-historical mechanism that could secure a socio-culturally stable
environment which was, at the same time, open to the world. Neither
is there a macro-subject of the species (assumed from Rousseau to Marx)
capable of finally abrogating that recurrent alienation. Since the human
life form must be centered in a socio-cultural environment in order to be
functionally comparable with other mammals in living nature, but can
only achieve this artificial condition through an ex-centric openness to
the world, it remains in need of history. The human temporal form of
15
See Singer (2002, pp. 150–169).
future historicality exceeds the attributability of expressions and events

to a particular mechanism or to a particular subject.16 From a philo-
sophical-anthropological perspective, what is also at issue is the thema-
tization of the (historically not uncommon) extinction and collapse of
human life forms through their ethnocentric over-closure or ex-centric
over-openness.17
Second, I find Tomasello’s argument for a temporal restructuring of
the problem of a universal grammar for modern human beings (Homo
sapiens sapiens) particularly sensible. He removes this problem from
the context of the brain and places it convincingly in the recursive
symbolism of a historical process of interaction. By ‘grammaticalization’
or ‘syntactical schematization’, he means the process whereby ‘free-
standing words develop into grammatical marks and free and redundant
organized speech structures solidify to syntactic constructions that are
stable and less redundant’ (COCH, p. 56.G). Structural linguistic changes
are thereby made possible within relatively brief timespans (for instance,
centuries). From this perspective, one can discuss neurophysical corre-
lates without supposing that the problem of language is already solved
in the genes of the brain. If the latter were the case, no human would
need to speak, because symbolic interaction would be a mere add-on,
or at best an activator of something inborn. I have never understood
what is supposed to force us to regard the phenomenon of a univer-
salizable grammar, as found in around 6,000 human languages in the
last millennia we are aware of, as inborn. Why shouldn’t and couldn’t
the universalizable grammar be explained just where it appears, namely
in the symbolism involved in interactions external to the organism
itself? Evidently this way of re-presenting the problem follows from the
primacy of internality, which persists even after the secularization of
Christendom in the form of the primacy of genes and of the brain.18
Now, it is clearly the case that, for linguistic behavior, as for all centric
behavior, there must be sensory and motor powers in place, and that
these cannot develop without genes. Yet the conception of a universal
grammar (N. Chomsky) was surely one of syntactical functions for struc-
tures in behavior. How one could bring such syntactical functions down
to the level of particular physical channels, regions and semantics and
16
Compare Plessner (1975 [1928], pp. 336–341). For an elaboration, see Krüger
(2009, part II).
17
Plessner (1983 [1965], p. 277).
18
Compare Krüger (2004, pp. 183–193).
still assume that we must find a one-to-one correspondence with these

functions in the brain, in the sense of representation, had little to do
with humans and a great deal to do with computer science. Rather than
physical channels, regions (spatial structures) and semantic one-to-one
correspondences, one actually finds prostheses, Yerkes-signs (in chim-
panzees), computer science or other functional equivalents – and, in
these phenomena alone, not necessarily self-reference in the neocortex.
The latter, to my mind, must be accepted as the correlate of self-refer-
ence in language. What is at issue in such functional correlations of
self-references is no longer the representation of current perceptual situ-
ations, in order to be able to behave in them, that is, to answer the
sensory with the motor; rather, what is at issue are ‘metarepresentations’
(W. Singer) which functionally correlate with a potential for behaviors
that are unnecessary in current perceptual situations.
Although Tomasello’s critique of the endless, because fruitless, search
for cognitive ‘modules’ in the brain and its genes is convincing (summa-
rizing CL, ch. 8), he does not yet seem to take seriously the manner in
which the brain functions as a correlate for self-reference in linguistic
behavior.19 Viewed from the perspective of the empirical sciences,
however, we know of no Mind without some (not necessarily this
particular one and no other) neurophysical form of realization, which
precisely does not split neatly into hardware or software. One can then
understand the ‘modules’ otherwise than as the genetically programmed
pseudo-solution of the problem of the particulars of human cognition:
thus viewed, they would rather be the result of individual-historical
formations of memory through participation in semantic-syntactic
forms of utterance. In the context of mammals – which must of course
be recursively augmented for primates – Plessner already spoke of the
‘interruption, restraint, pause (between stimulation and reaction)’
which ‘makes up the Being, mediated through self-performance, of a
conscious life form’:20 thus behavior could be funded by the future, and
the past could be deposited as though strained through a sieve. If this
is true of intentionality (conscious behavior), how much more so of
mentality [Geistigkeit] – that is, linguistic behavior in the first instance.
Thus understood, language enables the interruption of interruption, the
restraint of restraint, the pause from pausing in the flow of behavior. As
19
Compare Krüger (1993, pp. 22–26; p. 56f.; pp. 69–75). See also Krüger (2010,
ch. II).
20
Plessner (1975 [1928], p. 260, p. 284).
an ‘expression to the second power’ [Expression in zweiter Potenz] it estab-

lishes a conjunctive distance from the sensory-motor perceptual situa-
tion. Thus the broad spectrum of applications of language in behavior,
which reaches from the ‘idiomatic’ (performative) performance here
and now to the ‘utterance meaning’, which calls upon a ‘placeless and
timeless position’ and hence must always first be conditioned, in order
to be able to affect behavior.21
The human ontogenetic contribution to a conception of a

horizontal comparison
In order to conceive human ontogenesis as interculturally compa-

rable, Tomasello proceeds from the biologically and culturally common
inheritance of primates, which is then supplemented and restructured
in accordance with specifically human communicative functions. The
dualistic division between Nature and Mind is thereby discarded in
favor of a series of distinctions that enable the establishment of inter-
connections between primate inheritance and the specifics of human-
kind appropriate to each ontogenetic stage. Doubtless, this has the
advantage of not beginning solely with a ‘Mind’ that, so to speak, floats
above a purportedly unchanging Natural mechanism and, out of fear of
contact, can engage in no stadial interpenetration with differentiated
Natural phenomena. The Mind thus separated from Nature easily leads
to a dramatic overestimation of the differences between human socio-
cultures, as though these were from the very outset incomparable – as
though every socio-culture hung fast in historical self-creation in the
untranslatable linguistic prison of its epoch, its own hermeneutic circle.
This incomparability cannot be asserted of ‘every peculiarity’ without
self-contradiction and requires the picture of at least a small God, who
creates Himself. But irrespective of this, one could say that such a jealous
and self-contained ‘Mind’ is utterly incapable of living. One betrays
‘Mind’ if one understands it as closure rather than as openness. Instead
of immediately making it ontologically independent over against life,
it is worthwhile first to situate it in the expressions and interactions of
primate living Nature. Through work in this direction, Philosophical
Anthropology can only support Tomasello’s research program.
Tomasello summarizes the common cognitive primate inheritance in
four kinds of ‘pattern finding’, which, he says, consist in the following
21
Plessner (1975 [1928], p. 340).
capabilities: (a) primates can form ‘perceptual and conceptual categories

of ‘similar’ objects and events’; (b) they can form sensory-motor schemata
out of patterns which recur in perception and action; (c) they conduct
various kinds of analyses of perceptual and behavioral sequences, which
could be described as ‘statistically based distributional analyses’; and
(d) they build analogies, in the sense of a ‘structure mapping’, between
two or more complex totalities, based upon the functionally similar role
of particular elements in these totalities (CL, p. 4).
The most difficult thing to understand in this enumeration is (a) – in
particular, the talk of ‘perceptual and conceptual categories’ of similar
objects and events. What is meant by similarity is more than could be
based on association through trial and error, on the one hand, yet less
than is to be understood under ‘language’, on the other. What is at
issue are not linguistic categories, in accordance with which things are
perceived as and conceived of as similar, but rather schemata. Plessner
speaks of ‘thing-constants’ [Dingkonstanten] (for similar objects) and
‘domain-behaviors’ [Feldverhalten] (for similar events) in contradistinc-
tion to ‘objects’ and ‘facts’, whose formation is undertaken in language.22
While (a) seems more to pertain to how what is confronting one from
without is taken up, (b) transpires from the schematization of one’s own
perception and action. The analysis of one’s own action and the distri-
bution of the attained elements according to statistical probability links
up with (c), while (d) again pertains more to that which, now newly
taken up, confronts one. These four lynchpins for learning possibilities
in the structure of behavior are thereby conceived of recursively, that
is, in a manner which feeds back into the behavioral cycle. The unity
of ‘signal field’ and ‘action field’23 characteristic of lesser mammals get
differentiated among the higher mammals in the sense of the above-
mentioned interruptions (pauses).
The human specification of the common primate inheritance, within
human ontogenesis, occurs through five communicative peculiarities
of linguistic symbols. Linguistic symbols are (a) socially learned, in the
sense that they are learned through the imitation of others. Imitation
does not only mean the acquisition of a conventional form, but also
of this conventional form in acts of communication with the learner.
Since they are learned from others through imitation, linguistic symbols
are (b) understood intersubjectively by their users. This means that the
22
Plessner (1975 [1928], pp. 252–258; pp. 272–277).
23
Plessner (1975 [1928], p. 252).
language users know that their partners share the convention, and thus
each can potentially produce and receive the symbols. Next, (c) linguistic
symbols are not used dyadically in a direct manner (as in social regula-
tion), but rather in utterances triadically, that is, in a referential manner.
Through them, ‘attentional and mental states’ of others are aimed at
outward entities. Also, (d) linguistic symbols are occasionally used declar-
atively, simply in order to inform others, without the expectation of an
answering behavior. Finally, (e) linguistic symbols are in a fundamental
manner perspectival in the sense that a speaker may refer to one and the
same entity as a ‘dog’, ‘animal’, ‘darling’, or ‘irritation’, or to one and the
same event as ‘running’, ‘fleeing’, ‘moving’, or ‘surviving’, depending
upon his or her communicative goals with respect to the interlocutor’s
attention (CL, p. 12; compare COHC, p. 9). Many present-day philoso-
phers can agree with these five aspects of linguistic symbols, perhaps
cum grano salis with regard to Tomasello’s communicative-functional
brackets between the aspects.
The difference between pre-linguistic primate cognition and the
communicative-linguistic human specification is, however, not simply
generally asserted by Tomasello, as is usually the case, but rather precisi-
fied for various stages, so that, in every stage, both distinguished sides
can interpenetrate, that is, their interconnection can be reconstructed
as learnable. These stages build off of one another in an order, which
is not reversible. The preceding level enables the following level and
each later level restructures the earlier ones in accordance with higher
functions. Each later level of interaction does not replace the preceding
ones, but rather reproduces them. Tomasello criticizes those teleological
conceptions that project the later results of high cultures – for example,
written language and a grammar book – onto the earlier stages of
ontogenesis or even cultural history. The genome sums up the results of
organic evolution in phylogenesis, not in cultural history. But if neither
genes, stemming ‘from below’ out of natural history, nor a telos, coming
‘from above’ out of the intellectual history of high cultures, can suffi-
ciently bridge the gap between pre-linguistic primate cognition and the
linguistic symbols later employed in their ontogenesis, one wonders,
then what can?
Here, in the statement of the specific mediating link and its stadial
realization, lies the most conceptually tendentious, because decisive,
point in Tomasello’s program: What lies between the living thing as
such and the linguistic-mental behavioral level is an understanding of
conspecifics as intentional agents, which, though possessed by many
mammals and birds in some aspects, is particularly characteristic
of primates. Accordingly, if the human is to be specified through

Tomasello’s strategy, intentionality must be further particularized for
the human species. Tomasello calls the first human mode of intention-
ality ‘commonly carried’ or, for short, ‘shared intentionality’:
We propose that the crucial difference between human cognition

and that of other species is the ability to participate with others
in collaborative activities with shared goals and intentions: shared
intentionality. Participation in such activities requires not only espe-
cially powerful forms of intention reading and cultural learning, but
also a unique motivation to share psychological states with others
and unique forms of cognitive representation for doing so. The result
of participating in these activities is species-unique forms of cultural
cognition and evolution, enabling everything from the creation and
use of linguistic symbols to the construction of social norms and
individual beliefs to the establishment of social institutions.24
Tomasello proposes an ontogenetic pre-stage of shared intentionality,

which occurs during the so-called revolution of human children around
their ninth month:
It is widely believed that what distinguishes the social cognition of

humans from that of other animals is the belief-desire psychology
of four-year-old children and adults (so-called theory of mind).
We argue here that this is actually the second ontogenetic step in
uniquely human social cognition. The first step is one year old chil-
dren’s understanding of persons as intentional agents, which enables
skills of cultural learning and shared intentionality. This initial step
is ‘the real thing’ in the sense that it enables young children to
participate in cultural activities using shared, perspectival symbols
with a conventional/normative/reflective dimension – for example,
linguistic communication and pretended play – thus inaugurating
children’s understanding of things mental.25
In view of the importance of the task of interlacing between pre-

linguistic primate cognition and the linguistic-communicative human
specification, we cannot spare ourselves the trouble of venturing a brief
24
Tomasello et al. (2005, p. 675), hereafter USI.
25
Tomasello and Rakoczy (2003, p. 121), hereafter WHCU.
summary of Tomasello’s conceptual framework for ontogenetic stages

(compare as overview, CL, p. 14; elaborated in OHC, ch. 4):
(a) Infants understand how to bring others into view as living beings
in contrast to inanimate things (COHC, p. 210). From birth until
nine months of age, they take part in so-called protoconversation
with adults, that is, in face-to-face emotional exchanges, including
looking at one another and kissing. Protoconversation is, for the
infant, dyadic rather than triadic. Participation in it pertains to
emotions and to behavior (USI, p. 689).
(b) Between 9 and 12 months, babies begin to participate in joint attention.
The perceptual situation is drawn from its environment, becoming
a frame for joint attention between baby and adult. This is at first
supported through the adult’s pointing activities. The child partici-
pates for the first time in a symbolic, that is, triadic relation between
its own perspective, that of the adult, and the external entity, to
which the joint attention is directed and to which the adult has
made linguistic reference (CL, p. 26; USI, p. 682). For the child, the
relation becomes triadic to the extent that the infant’s attention no
longer merely includes the adult and intends the interaction with
him or her, but rather intends to share in an attention, which can
be directed from the adult as well as from the child toward external
things (compare CL, p. 29).
(c) The third stage begins between 12 and 14 months and, from a
linguistic perspective, concerns the learning of holophrases. These
each consist of a unit, for example, a word, that paradigmatically
functions as an individual speech act. The small child’s utterance
‘more’ is understood by the adults in a given vicinity as ‘I would like
to have some more juice’. Although for the young child a symboli-
zation of the scene (demand and response) already takes place here,
it clearly does not occur as it does for adults within the purview
of linguistic distinctions, which one can abstract from the frame
of the currently perceived object. The child no longer shares the
intended goal and the intended perception of the adult (compare
(b)), but rather proceeds to actively participate in the realization of
the total goal through intermediate steps of the plan of action. It
participates in the negotiation of goals and the exchange of roles,
where a ‘role’ is understood as a plan of action (USI, p. 682f.). It
does not imitate the sensory-motor behavior of the adult, but rather
the activity (interconnection of goal and means), in particular,
the stages of activity (as means), which lead to the common goal
through joint attention. Thus begin ‘dialogic cognitive representa-

tions’: The child understands the intentional actions of the adult,
and now in particular those that are directed at it. As it simultane-
ously experiences its own psychic state, it comes to understand the
interaction between second- and first-personal perspectives called
‘Second-Personal-Thinking’ (NHHT, pp. 68–76). It thereby forms
an elementary kind of ‘bird’s eye view’ on the collaborative work,
which brings both perspectives into a single format of representa-
tion (USI, p. 689; p. 691).
(d) Beginning at 18 months or earlier, the child comes to distinguish, with
respect to events and to partners in play, scenes that originate in joint
attention towards perceptible objects. This involves schematization
of perceived ‘pivot and reference points’ in scenes of joint attention,
and comes to linguistic expression in pivot schemas – for example, in
‘more’ plus something, ‘I’ plus something, ‘it’s’ plus something. At this
stage, children do not yet generalize across pivot schemas. Rather,
each scheme constitutes a constructed island for the symbolization
of particular kinds of scenes that might be perceived. The child is
not yet in possession of a syntax. The child’s understanding of the
need for complementary roles in achieving a common goal in joint
attention (for example, in play) marks the initial stages of learning
the roles of speakers and listeners. The negotiation of meanings, in
particular, is part of this learning process (USI, p. 683).
(e) At 22 months children begin for the first time to express perceptible
scenes syntactically. In particular, they employ symbolic markers
for their play-partners. Tomasello calls this new kind of linguistic
expression ‘item-based construction’. Among these, he emphasizes
verb-islands, which consist in using a verb (throw, run, give, fall,
break) and filling the place corresponding to that verb. It belongs to
verb-islands to have constitutive places for the thing that is associ-
ated with the verb’s activity in a pictorially imagined function (who
throws, runs, falls, what breaks or is given from one to another;
compare CL, p. 120). These item-based constructions go beyond the
pivot schemas in that they display a syntactical marking as an inte-
gral part of the construction. If one uses, for example, a reversible
transitive, everything hangs on the syntactical ordering, if one is not
to mix up the order of the activities described by the verbs and the
filling of their respective places – for example, between bunny and
horse: ‘make the bunny push the horse’.
(f) The paradigmatic categorization of scenes which might be
encountered in the course of life begins in the child’s fourth year.
Object- and activity-words provide the language learner with crea-

tive possibilities to use newly learned information without direct
previous experience. Linguistic utterances and constructions that
serve the same communicative function get grouped together in
a category (compare CL, p. 301). Thus one can, depending on the
communicative goal, refer differently to a perceptually identical
experience – for instance, as ‘exploding’ or as ‘an explosion’. In
western languages, object words are generally used to construe an
experience as a ‘limited entity’ (like an explosion), while verbs are
used to present an experience as a process (like exploding). Here
we come to an intercultural comparison of the various possibilities,
in respect to communicative functions, of structuring language
in terms of syntax and formal semantics. Communicative func-
tions can explain (sticking with major Western languages as an
example) ‘why nouns are associated with such things as deter-
miners, whose primary function is to help the listener to locate
a referent in actual or conceptual space, and verbs are associated
with such things as tense markers, whose primary function is to
help the listener to locate a process in actual or conceptual time’
(CL, p. 170f., compare CL, p. 241). The roles of play-partners are
marked in generalized symbols as active and passive combinations
of classes of object- and activity-words. The appropriate linguistic
expressions consist in symbolically unlimited generalizations
of constructions with object- and activity-words. The so-called
errors, in which children symbolically overgeneralize the use of
such expressions, bring out the tension between the potentialities
of the paradigmatic categorization and the historical customs of
the speech community.
(g) Beginning in the fifth and sixth years of language learning, children
themselves (and no longer only adults) begin to repair their conver-
sations and stories. These repairs are the best test for the degree to
which the child has integrated the adults’ roles ‘into the relation of
the child to itself’ (CL, p. 244). Conversation includes the appropriate
alternation between speaking and listening. Stories require that the
narrator master certain means for the listeners, which provide for
a good story with respect to coherence and cohesiveness through
the ordering of sentences. The most important set of means consists
in anaphora. Through them, reference is made to linguistic symbols
previously used in the conversation, in lieu of going back directly to
extra-linguistic objects and events in the perceptual situation (that
is, joint attention):
For example, definite reference and pronouns (the boy, he) must
somehow make contact with something the child has already said
in the narrative if the listener, who was not there for the event, is
to successfully identify the intended person (the pronoun and defi-
nite article in true narratives are thus anaphoric, not deictic). Also,
telling stories involves a constant monitoring of (1) which aspects
of the event should be foregrounded and emphasized (such as plot
line) and which should be backgrounded and deemphasized (such as
onlookers if they do not play a central role in the plot); and (2) what
is given and what is new for the listener. These effects are achieved
by a wide variety of devices, ranging from verb tense and aspect (plot
line is most often conveyed with perfect tense) to complex construc-
tions (backgrounded information is often in one or another kind of
subordinate clause). (CL, p. 271)
Summarizing the acquisition of language, Tomasello speaks of a gradual

process from (c) to (g) that is enabled (species-specifically) for humans
through (a) and (b). First, in each stage, the child’s expression takes
place in interpersonal relations. Then, each learnable level of interper-
sonal relations gets ‘internalized’, that is, integrated into the child’s
relation towards itself. Dialogic cognition, which is thereby attained
in interpersonal relations, becomes transformed into an intrapersonal
relation for the child. It thus comports itself to itself, hence reflexively.
This reflexivity is thereupon brought to expression anew, and a new
cycle begins (WHCU, p. 136f.; p. 139). The results remain, however,
qualitatively distinguishable between stages. Shared intentionality is
not the same as mentality, insofar as the latter consists in the mastery
of linguistic expression for mental actors as mental actors. If one does
not confuse the expression of propositional attitudes with their ascrip-
tion to oneself or others (in particular through sentential comple-
ments), then ascription, in the sense of passing tests in independent
self-corrections (to ward off misunderstandings and false attributions),
first occurs in (g) (after plus or minus a half year, in all individuals and
cultural variants):
In mature linguistic communication speakers monitor two main

things. First, they monitor what they want to say, the basic who-
did-what-to-whom they want to report (the proposition). But second,
they also monitor the knowledge and expectations of the listener and
so formulate their proposition in ways appropriate to the immediate
speech situation. (WHCU, p. 137)
The interesting dispute that Tomasello has inspired with his shared inten-
tionality thus pertains to four ontogenetic levels, reaching from (b) joint
attention through (c) the common learning of holophrases and (d) the
common schematization of perceived pivot schemas to finally (e) the
common learning of item-based constructions, through which syntactic
structure is first achieved. According to the customary theory of mind,
which begins with belief-desire excerpts from (f) – that is, paradigmatic
categorialization in western languages – and is supported by corre-
sponding excerpts from (g) – that is, conversations and stories in western
cultures – the four ontogenetic phases lack, until the fourth year of life,
that common shared intentionality, which makes this specific ‘mind’
possible in the first place. This is related to the question of whether
the four stages of shared intentionality could not perhaps enable other
forms of mentality, which is empirically found to be the case in the
comparison of languages and cultures. As of the fourth year of life, that
is, the pre-school phase, there could occur in us a functional selection
of structural potentialities, which ensures that with the beginning of
school, in western languages and cultures, a particular system of general
education and instructions reaches into adulthood. This particular selec-
tion was first instituted in the nineteenth century, even in the West.
It would not be very convincing to make this selective ‘Mind’ and the
mentalities built up from it into the measure of humanity.
In order to grasp this question conceptionally, we must reconstruct
the ‘speech community’ correlate of what Tomasello understands by
‘processes of grammaticalization’. The speech communities in question
extend beyond the small groups and successions of children that domi-
nate ontogenetic models. From a social perspective, cultural-historical
processes of grammaticalization make reference to ‘collective intention-
alities’ – that is, to adopt G.H. Mead’s terminology, not only to ‘signifi-
cant others’ but to a ‘generalized other’ (WHCU, p. 133; p. 139). Since
Tomasello uses ‘grammaticalization’ synonymously with ‘syntacticaliza-
tion’ (CL, p. 8), it cannot occur without, but only on the basis of a para-
digmatic categorialization (f) and the fundamental ability to participate
in conversation and narration in the first place. A difference between
the potentialities of the paradigmatic categorialization and the customs
of the speech community already appears linguistic-syntactically in
the so-called errors of overgeneralization in (f). Yet such a difference
would only be relevant to communication to the extent that it pertains
to participation in conversations and narrations, or to the ‘false’, and,
in particular, to different participations therein, depending on socio-
cultural roles such as those associated with sex, heritage, and future
opportunities. A cultural-historical process of grammaticalization under-

lies all ontogenetic stages, but it first contains mentally [geistig] relevant
potentialities for conflict after the paradigmatic categorialization and is
only communicatively effective after conversation and narration. With
respect to the inner-mental realm, the potential for conflict would not
lie in the fact of syntacticalization, but rather in how, and in which
historically contentful semantic, this syntacticalization took place. In
this respect, the ontogenetic contribution to processes of grammaticali-
zation consists in individual variations, which can only be evaluated
historically (for instance, not every departure is an improvement on the
prior standard), and which are able to permeate beyond groups and into
the greater speech community. This approach is universalizable not only
in the sense that it is supported by primate cognition, but also in that it
is supported by universals of specifically human interaction – in particular,
the four forms of shared intentionality. Without them, no child would enter
into socio-culture or language at all. They exist in all socio-cultures,
including those beyond the West, although this is often overlooked with
respect to the mental. Certainly, even their outward formation varies,
but not to the extent that they cease to exist, or as though they could be
skipped over. The – possibly conflicting – overlap between ontogenesis
and processes of grammaticalization begins in conversation and narra-
tion, with respect to the assessment of mental competencies and the
semantic contents of the respective cultural and speech communities.
Since Tomasello understands grammaticalization as syntactic schema-
tization, his theory, so far as I can see, prescribes no assessment in the just
mentioned sense, nor any highest syntax. He follows T. Givón on two
points: ‘Today’s morphology is yesterday’s syntax’ and ‘today’s syntax
is yesterday’s discourse’ (CL, p. 14). Reformulated for the future, as I
understand it, this means that today’s discourse can condensate syntac-
tically in the next generation, and appear as morphological sediment in
the generation after that. What becomes established depends on which
communicative functions are more likely to have the linguistic construc-
tions that subserve them reproduced. The more probable it is that some
construction will be reproduced, as determined by its communicative
function, the (probably) sooner it will be abbreviated syntactically and
then morphologically. The examples of ‘resultative construction’, ‘rela-
tive clause construction’, ‘sentential complement construction’, and
‘infinitival construction’ which Tomasello gives are of this kind (CL,
p. 148). These syntactical schematizations exist in all languages, insofar
as one takes their histories into account, which Tomasello’s conception
enables us to do through the communicative functions of languages as
symbols. Against false (because for their own part historical or merely
differently ethnocentric) criticisms of Eurocentrism, Tomasello writes
summarily:
Of course there are language universals. It is just that they are not
universals of form – that is, not particular kinds of linguistic symbols
or grammatical categories or syntactic constructions – but rather they
are universals of communication and cognition and human physi-
ology. (CL, p. 18)26
Philosophical Anthropology also favors the critique of Eurocentrism,

and from two directions. Looking up from the bottom of human
behavior one can say: members of all socio-cultures share pre-linguistic
stages that consist in mimetic and gestic expressions. Expressions are
open to social responses instead of being closed in an inner circle of
intentionality. Intentionality is directed primarily to external occasions
for action. Plessner reconstructed how human behavior is built up from
the plurality of different senses and their integrations (feeling, touching,
seeing, hearing, standing, moving, and so on).27 Looking from the top
down, on the other hand, Plessner emphasized all opportunities of using
personal and possessive pronouns in order to take over singular and
plural perspectives. In contrast to this maximally open framework, the
Western Mind selects a portion of it, privileging the ‘I’ and the ‘my’.28
The human ontogenetic contribution to the conception

of a vertical comparison
Let us begin with phenomena involving wild and acculturated humanoid

apes, which are in need of explanation, so as to locate Tomasello’s contri-
bution to the discussion. It is frequently observed that many humanoid
apes form population cultures with respect to their use of tools, their
choice and preparation of food, hierarchization in the behavior of their
group members among themselves as well as toward members of other
26
On the difference between Chinese and Turkish linguistic families, compare
also CL (pp. 133–138; p. 188f).
27
See Plessner (1980). He called this reconstruction the ‘Aesthesiology of Mind’
(p. 7).
28
See Plessner (1981, pp. 196–198; pp. 206–210).
groups of the same species and towards other species. ‘Culture’ here
means that the observed behavioral distinctions pertain to groups whose
members are conspecifics and whose environments are not far sepa-
rated from one another, which is why the distinctions can be followed
through variations in the genes only with difficulty. What is at issue are
learned behavioral distinctions that cannot be completely bound to an
individual, with whom they would die out, but rather must somehow
be socially carried on through successive generations.29 Furthermore,
there is a certain speed of dissemination of individually learned inno-
vations within one and the same generation, which is, however, not
great enough (according to Tomasello et al.) to be explainable by imita-
tion of plans of action – for instance, roles in nuce, as with humans. In
contrast to this conception of ‘culture’ in a broad sense, Tomasello uses
it more narrowly, as did Scheler and Plessner, for a network of triadic
symbols that is recursive and therefore leads to self-reference (see OHC,
pp. 335–340).
Second, there is, for enculturated humanoid apes – that is, those that
have grown up among humans – an additional phenomenon in need
of explanation: namely, that they manifest intelligent behavior, as we
have known for nearly a century, ever since Wolfgang Köhler’s exper-
iments with chimpanzees. What used to be discussed under the title
‘intelligence’ is today redescribed as ‘creative inferences and insightful
problem-solving’ (COHC, p. 16). The problem of ‘insight’ is nested in
both terminologies, lest one err in supposing intelligence is here meas-
ured by quotients.
The distinction between intelligence and associative memory is plain
as day: the situation that is to be grasped and practically coped with in
behavior is not only new in kind and atypical, but first and foremost
also ‘new’ to the individual. Such objectively sensible behavior happens
suddenly, temporally prior to new experimental attempts and independent
of the number of previous attempts.30
Max Scheler calls this (doubtlessly present) intelligence of chimpanzees
a ‘practical-organically bound intelligence’, because it remains within
the framework of practical fulfillment of organic-behavioral openings
of drives to learning (where ‘drive’ here contrasts with inherited and
rigid ‘instinct’), and is thus not freed from the organic, as Mind [Geist]
29
For a broad understanding of ‘culture’ in primatology, see Paul (1998,
pp. 227–235).
30
Scheler (1986 [1928], p. 33).
is. One could understand the ‘insight’ of chimpanzees to, for example,
stack crates on top of one another, or slide staves together in order to be
able to reach some fruit, as follows: a ‘transfer’ of its ‘causality for drive-
impelled activity’ into the ‘surrounding things’ so that it can achieve a
‘perspicuous adjustment of the environmental conditions themselves’.31
This connection of intelligence with the fulfillment of drives would also
explain why chimpanzees have great difficulties setting aside complex
hindrances, although they create comparably complex tools them-
selves.32 Povinelli, who has called chimpanzees the true inductivists,
concurs that chimpanzees are not lacking in ‘positivities’ in comparison
with humans.33 What they lack, according to Plessner, is the ‘sense of
the negative’, of empty space and silent time as the world-framework
for expectation of absence, of nothing as the contrast to something and
someone.34
Tomasello has always appreciated the problem-solving ‘insight’ of
humanoid apes, but understood these as individual achievements of
learning, as Scheler did, which do not belong, as they do in humans, to
a specific cultural learning process propagated through imitation, or, as
Scheler puts it, which do not come into being through participation in
the Mental [geistig]. As for Scheler, what is at issue for Tomasello is the
pre-symbolic and non-reflexive but still intuition-schematizing inten-
tionality of action in the sense of the interconnection of means to the
attainment of drive fulfillment. The goal is intended in various percep-
tual situations, each of which excludes direct fulfillment through any
previously learned action-schema. Hence this form of intelligence must
be anticipatory in some way, according to Scheler. The goal does not
symbolically lift itself out among symbols for possible perceptual situa-
tions, however, but rather remains bound to the dynamic of drives of the
individual organism in its interaction with the environment. Its medi-
ated fulfillment is not provided by any intentional plan of action, capable
of being symbolically lifted out by this and other apes, but rather occurs
in the transferal, adjustment and new connection of schema for action
and perception. Thus a lot depends on individual mnemonic achieve-
ments, because there is no participation in a socio-cultural ‘memory’
for intelligent new connections. Since what is at issue are individual
31
Scheler (1986 [1928], p. 35).
32
Scheler (1986 [1928], p. 42; p. 45).
33
Povinelli (2000).
34
Plessner (1975 [1928], pp. 270–272).
achievements of intelligence, which can vary incredibly from individual

to individual, the question of their social propagation remains open. Or,
it is precisely this sort of intelligent insight that cannot be handed on
socio-culturally. The spectrum of intelligences among humanoid apes
would then result from the spectrum of their behavioral drive-openings
into the environment, in order to there achieve an intelligent response
and thereby a conclusion of their behavior.
Tomasello has no conceptual equivalent for this ‘causality for drive-
impelled activity’, as Scheler calls it, which is one of many shapes of the
living body. Scheler and Plessner developed the conception of a living
body (in German: Leib) differing from the physical body (Körper); Maurice
Merleau-Ponty took it over from them.35 Here, even with regard to great
apes, Plessner understands the living body as the organic body living in
con-centric interactions with its environment, which he calls ‘centric
positionality’ and which includes ‘intelligence’ via ‘memory’.36 In this
way of life, drives are open to be fulfilled in the environment by intelli-
gence that can fail. The center is not so much the center of the organism,
but rather more the fulfillment in behavior that can be imagined and
memorized in modes of temporality. Doesn’t this organism-bound
drive-dynamic occupy the same place for humanoid apes that the high
motivation for sharing in all its forms occupies in human children? And
couldn’t the achievements of the enculturated apes, which diverge from
those of the wild apes, first be made possible by the fact that, during
the play-phase of the especially plastic offspring, the fulfillment of their
drive-dynamic in the human environment is fundamentally secured
and symbolically laden?
On this question, the attempts to teach humanoid apes living among
humans (with or without special training) human language with the
help of a Yerkes-keyboard seem to signify a breakthrough. In this
context one must not forget – contrary to all sympathetic projections,
which, on account of the evolutionary historical relatedness in expres-
sion, are especially tempting with regard to chimpanzees – that the
mastery of language is to be bound to the passing of tests of linguistic
self-reference, and thus to the use of anaphora rather than constantly
falling back upon deictic actions. Even chimpanzees do not cross over
into conversation and narration in the above-mentioned sense, and it
is debatable whether they syntactically generalize with respect to aspect
35
See Krüger (2010a).
36
Plessner (1975 [1928], pp. 272–287).
at all. On the other hand, it is certain that they schematize and can
attach symbols to schema. It is, however, again debatable whether and
how they move from individual symbols (semiotic triangles) to signifi-
cation of perceptual possibilities (depending upon their very individual
capacity for memory) and on into symbolic networks, which can set
themselves free from schematized perception. Do they, in comparison
to human children’s achievements, quit the language learning process
at a point corresponding more to the beginning, or more to the end of
the third year of a human child’s development? To pose the question
in this way implies that, fundamentally, intentionality is to be ascribed
to humanoid apes. It only remains to be seen which forms. Evidently,
even under favorable conditions of acculturation, these do not include
mastery of linguistic-mental self-reference.
Tomasello acknowledges (since 2003) that large humanoid apes can
understand intentional action ‘in terms of goals and perception’ (USI,
p. 684). They follow the gazes of conspecifics and humans to distant
action-goals. They understand how to distinguish good from mean-spir-
ited intentions, even those belonging to humans and directed at apes, on
the basis of humans’ expressions. They also differentiate between the lack
of an intention, and the mere sensory-motor clumsiness of humans – or
something like a sensory-motor accident in the execution of an action –
to bring them something good (p. 684). But all this, Tomasello maintains,
does not mean that they symbolically share the intentions of others them-
selves, that is, go down the path of specifically human forms of sharing
intentionality and cooperatively negotiating meanings and planning
action (see summary also in OHC, p. 108). The behavioral contexts in
which they recognize and take account of the intentions of others (in the
sense of whether the other has or has not perceived something) are those
of dominance versus subordination (within a single group), the hunt, or
assault of outsiders (whether smaller apes or, as for chimpanzees, area
competitors of the same species). These recognitions do not develop into
any extension of roles for a common cooperative activity in accordance
with plans of action, or even an exchange of roles that presupposes a social
division of labor (USI, p. 685). Great Apes remain in an ‘individual inten-
tionality’ (NHHT, ch. 2) and associated ‘intentional communication’; their
social contexts remain primarily competitive rather than cooperative (see
OHC, p. 13; p. 53). Even enculturated humanoid apes refer their imitation
primarily to alterations of the state of the environment in accordance
with their intended goal, rather than to plans of action, which open up a
distinction between goal and means for another interrelation of goal and
means. Through socialization on the part of humans and the interactive
symbolic human environment, enculturated humanoid apes admittedly

become ‘more like humans’ than their wild conspecifics, but even they do
not become human (USI, p. 686, compare COHC, 47f.).
To explain even the most humanlike instances of humanoid apes’
behavior, it is sufficient to assume a ‘social-cognitive schema enabling
them to see a bit below the surface and perceive something of the inten-
tional structure of behavior and how perception influences it’ (WHCU,
p. 142). Would a social cognition on the level of schemata (that is, pre-
symbolic, but for types of recurring action and perceptual situations)
suffice to render the facts Tomasello mentions explicable in the following
way?: ‘primates, but not other mammals, understand something of the
third-party social relationships that hold among other individuals; for
example, they understand such things as the kinship and dominance
relations that third parties have with one another [and] many different
instances of the relationship ‘mother–child’’ (COHC, p. 17). Here we
indeed appear to enter the realm of triads of triads, which could become
symbolically loaded inside a concentric overlap of different living
bodies. The dynamic of drives in their intelligent fulfillment, and the
understanding of relations among relatives and of associated relational
categories could shape social emotions. Yet I think Tomasello’s program is
overly cognitivistic and not sufficiently a grammar of social life in terms
of emotions. He presupposes G.H. Mead’s identification with a concrete
and a generalized other, but, this conception needs an elaboration in a
grammar of socially emotional life.37
Irrespective of Tomasello’s own empirical interpretations, the ques-
tion remains, of what he offers conceptionally to render explicable
the socio-cultural transmission of learned behaviors among humanoid
apes, without calling upon specifically human ‘sharing’. For Tomasello,
the three following learning mechanisms are not sufficient to explain
population cultures: (a) exposure, (b) stimulus enhancement, and
(c) mimicking (COHC, p. 26). Therefore, the imitative learning specific
to humans must be brought into play at an elementary level as (d):
‘young animals reproduce the behavior or the behavioral strategies
of a leader with the same goal that the leader has’ (p. 26). In order
37
Tomasello (2009, p. 41) (reference to Mead), p. 43 (guilt and shame as
examples of the co-evolution between human biology and culture). For Scheler’s
grammar of love, hate, empathy, shame, guilt, ressentiment, see Krüger (2009, ch.
7). For Plessner’s grammar between laughing and crying, passions and addictions,
see Krüger (1999, chs 4–6).
to be able to empirically determine whether (d), imitative learning, is

present or not, without falling back upon (a) through (c), Tomasello
has provided two further distinctions: between emulation learning
and imitative learning; and between the ontogenetic ritualization of
gestures, on the one hand, and the lesson for the learner in imitation,
on the other. In emulation learning the learner concentrates upon ‘the
changes of state in the environment that the other produced – not on
a conspecific’s behavior or behavioral strategy’ (p. 29). While human
children imitate the methods of the leader early and often, chim-
panzees undertake various things in order to attain their object. Yet
this distinction does not hold for enculturated chimpanzees, insofar
as they can, like two year old human children, imitate and learn
near-linguistic symbols (p. 35). In ontogenetic ritualization ‘a commu-
nicatory signal ... [is] created by two organisms shaping each other’s
behavior in repeated instances of a social interaction’ (p. 31). From
this follows a great variability of dyads for dyads. Imitative learning,
on the other hand, more strongly homogenizes through the teaching
of and participation in intentional structures (p. 32). There is then
an active instruction of the learner ‘from the top down’ in successive
generations. An interesting thing about the comparative experiments
with chimpanzee children raised by their chimpanzee mothers is that
these children ‘almost never succeeded in reproducing both the end
and means of the novel actions (that is, they did not imitatively learn
them)’ (p. 35). The conceptually relevant point in the comparison of
human ontogenesis with that of other primates lies in the difference
between biologically adapted ‘mimicry’ (c), which itself contributes too
little to explain even chimpanzees’ accomplishments, and the ‘imita-
tive learning’ which involves shared intentionality and thus enables
Mentality [Geist] (d). Hence, the important issue concerns what falls
between (c) and (d).
It will reinforce Tomasello’s decisive posing of the problem, but also
extend it, to draw upon Plessner’s distinctions between three phenomena
that are frequently confused with one another: ‘the phenomena of
responding to an expression, the co-performance of movements, and actual
mimicry’.38 While response to expression means something like Tomasello’s
ontogenetic ritualization, the co-performance – also known as ‘taking part’
in contrast to ‘following suit’ – pertains to everyone in the social band,
38
Plessner (1982, p. 398).
and thus in ‘co-relations’39 with respect to a third (things, events, other life
forms) among living animals. Co-participation is not an action that can be
attributed to a single organism, but rather needs at least two organisms; it is
thus a social action (Mead), or as one would say nowadays, an interaction.
None of the involved animals has in the course of co-participation what
Tomasello calls a ‘bird’s eye view’ (USI, p. 681) on the symbolic triangle, in
which the co-participation occurs with at least two animals over against a
third. Each involved organism is trapped in ‘frontal position’ in dyads. It
lives in its life circle [Lebenskreis], which is formed ‘concentrically’40 to and
around its fulfillment. Nonetheless, these concentric behavioral circles
bodily overlap one another in co-participation over against thirds. It is
no longer merely as it was in expressive movement, where one organism
opens the action while the other closes it, which can occur through the
habitualization of a significant gesture (Mead). Both open and respond,
respond and open, until they close this interaction on or through the
third. These actual adaptations in co-participation only proceed on the
precondition that there is already a structurally functional adaptedness of
the population in and to this particular environment.
Plessner indicates the extent of actual mimicry (in Tomasello’s termi-
nology, [d], imitative learning), which he too holds to be specific to the
human, when he writes: ‘to mimic something someone does is not the
same as mimicking someone’.41 Plessner’s problem of mimicking someone
and not something is contained in Mead’s identification mentioned above.
Tomasello’s concept of intentionality is too narrowly aimed at something
and leaves out someone. For him, to achieve something through means
is the kernel of intentionality, and it is then terminologically attrib-
uted to a person (the adult, teacher), who is presupposed. Furthermore,
what Plessner calls ‘ex-centric positionality’, which enables imitation,
does not lie within, but rather outside of a particular symbolic triangle,
that is, waiting to be learned. It need not be a ‘bird’s eye view’ (USI,
p. 681; OHC, p. 160; p. 179; p. 266). It can also come from the side, or
from below. From the outside, the gaze of the other, which meets mine,
becomes the guiding thread for reciprocity and symmetry,42 which can
39
Plessner (1975 [1928], pp. 306–308) for the distinction between co-relation
[Mitverhältnis] and ‘environment’ [Umwelt].
40
Plessner (1975 [1928], p. 230f.; p. 240f).
41
Plessner (1982, p. 397).
42
Plessner (1982, pp. 394–396). For an elaboration of the sensible cooperation
necessary for imitation, in particular of sight, hearing voices (also one’s own) and
speech, see Plessner (1980).
be aimed at thirds thanks to symbols. This fourth point, from which

the triangles may be symbolized, cannot itself be fixed in a quadrangle,
but only actually performed in living one’s body. It is not arrived at
optically (spatially), but rather vocally (temporally), through outward
intonation, and forms a reference back to itself, since one’s own vocal
expressions are heard and can thus be brought into accord with other
voices in time (through succession, turning). Ex-centric positionality
is, viewed phenomenologically, like a camera pan-shot with voices in a
series of film sequences. In the course of this, a background of a world
framework is developed, which enables the development and posses-
sion of significant symbols in the foreground. In considering joint
attention, Tomasello admittedly begins with an adult world framework,
from which a particular stage is selected, and he thereby comes, in the
context of dialogic cognitive representations, to speak of the bird’s eye
view, which is relied upon as enabler. But he loses himself in the respec-
tive foregrounds of the possible experimental series he seeks to execute.
Nevertheless, Tomasello is right to mark the limitations of shared inten-
tionality through the theory of mind. The analogical inference from
myself to others, and the empathetic projection of myself into others,
implicitly carry with them exclusive attributions, common in western
cultures and languages, that disguise the problem.43 ‘What is at stake in
accepting the existence of other egos is not an application of one’s own
mode of existence, ... , but rather a contraction and restriction of this
original and precisely not localized circle of being, set over against the
oppositions to its localization, to “humans”’.44 Finally, ex-centric posi-
tionality is enabled by a utopian view from nowhere and never,45 to which
Tomasello refers as well (NHHT, p. 120).
Intentionality and mentality as explanans and as

explanandum: complementary tasks
Naturally, empirical scientists must explain why and how which series
of experiments and field observations are convincing. Even if the empir-
icist Tomasello were refuted in nearly all his assertions, this would not
detract from his theoretical-methodical merit in having developed a
framework in which sensible research can take place. Philosophy can
43
Plessner (1982 [1925], pp. 67–129).
44
Plessner (1975 [1928], p. 301).
45
Plessner (1975 [1928], pp. 341–346).
help extend these conceptual and methodical tasks of understanding and

explanation, and distinguish them from other tasks of understanding
and explanation. Tomasello describes his approach as an alternative to
two others, namely, efforts to specify (that is, distinguish) the human
through language and through a theory of mind. Here he too enters into
philosophical discussion. Against the linguistic approach he writes:
What could it mean to say that language is responsible for under-

standing and sharing intentions, when in fact the idea of linguistic
communication without these underlying skills is incoherent? And
so, while it is true that language represents a major difference between
humans and other primates, we believe that it actually derives from
the uniquely human abilities to read and to share intentions with
other people – which also underwrite other uniquely human skills
that emerge along with language such as declarative gestures, collab-
oration, pretense, and imitative learning. (USI, p. 690)
And, just as convincingly in regard to a theory of mind in the sense of a

belief-desire psychology, he writes that while
the understanding and sharing of intentions emerges ontogenetically

in all cultural settings at around one year of age ... the understanding
of beliefs emerges some years later at somewhat different ages in
different cultural settings, and there is very good evidence that partic-
ipating in linguistic communication with other persons (especially
some forms of perspective-shifting discourse) is a crucial, perhaps
even necessary, condition for its normal development (p. 690).
Philosophical Anthropology is in full agreement with this critique of

linguistic and mentalistic centrisms.
Returning to the beginning of this essay: the behavioral scientific
explanation would be complete, according to Tomasello, if we could:
(a) phylogenetically explain the forms of joint intentionality (first
phase) and collective intentionality (second phase) through biological
adaptation (USI, p. 687f.); and (b) use what we just explained itself as
an explanans in order to explain the ontogenetic contribution of the
accumulation of culture through the ratchet effect (USI, p. 688f.).
While we have focused on reconstructing (b) here, there must have
been a selective advantage consisting first and foremost in (a), shared
forms of intentionality enabling cooperation rather than competi-
tion (first phase) and culturally stabilizing forms of conventionalized
communication – paradigmatically through processes like grammati-

calization (second phase). Tomasello addresses (a) and (b) as hypotheses
(NHHC, chs 2–3).
But, in comparison to this succession of natural and cultural history,
the course of research taken by Tomasello et al. is inverted – for instance,
when he expresses his insight as follows:
My hypothesis is that concrete collaborative activities of the type we

see today in young children are mostly representative of the earliest
collaborative activities in human evolution. They have the same basic
structure as the collaborative hunting of large game or the collabora-
tive gathering of fruit in which one individual helps the other climb
the tree and procure the food they will later share. Indeed, I believe
that the ecological context within which these skills and motivations
developed was a sort of cooperative foraging.46
Here we proceed backwards from our present understanding in an

effort to explain what happened in earlier times. Even if one were to
understand Tomaello’s research as a quasi-transcendental and non-
reductive naturalism, in the sense mentioned at the beginning of this
chapter, the philosophical anthropologist must ask what Tomasello
and his colleagues invoke as the enabling conditions of the envisioned
achievements of their research. At the very least, what is at issue is a
modern world with frameworks of persons (with basic rights) in a written-
linguistic subculture, who share a cultural-historically developed common
sense. Within such a framework, one can therefore distinguish between
inter alia biotic and socio-cultural environments. All this is presupposed
as an enabling condition under the title ‘the adult’ or ‘a person’, who
recognizes and conducts a protocol involving joint attention and coop-
erative work between experimental subjects and experimenters. With
respect to this condition, which is tacitly taken on as self-evident, and
which is not explained by the strongly ontogenetic model with ratchet
effects, I would like to name a few limitations of Tomasello’s research
program. Whatever may have happened 200,000 years ago in Africa,
we cannot begin anew there and then, without abandoning the high
cultures of personality that emerged in the ‘Axial age’47 and therewith
46
Tomasello (2009, pp. 74–75).
47
Bellah and Joas (2012).
later on a modern society, including the Sciences and Humanities. Our

origin must include what enables the future plurality of modernities.
Certainly, enculturated humanoid apes highlight the significance of
a socio-cultural environment in which active informing and symbolic
interaction takes place from the beginning, and this even in young
chimpanzees’ earliest phases. Elsewhere, I have discussed this as a test
case for the possibilities and limits of what I have described as importing
a centric form of organization (inner differentiation of the organism
with a brain), which is pre-adapted to a centric positionality, into an
ex-centric form of positionality. In an ex-centric form of positionality,
the center of behavior formation is shifted away from concentric fulfill-
ment and into forms of symbolic-recursive interaction. These interac-
tions can understand themselves through further symbolic recursion on
themselves against the exit-organism – that is, they offer great potential
for further ex-centering the center. Through this ex-centering a problem
of reverse-coupling back onto the organism arises, that is, a problem
of re-centering the behavior around the concentric fulfillment of the
organism.48
When one asks oneself which interlacings are required so that the
tension between ex- and re-centering behavior does not break apart into
an unlivable division, one must, in my opinion, first take account of
the erotic and symbolic transformation of primates’ drive-dynamic into
playful modes of behavior. Such an account belongs to the conception
of living body (mentioned above) and eventually leads to playing in and
with roles as socio-cultural bodies. One can, on account of the reversal of
play-behavior (of mammals – specifically, of primates) in the behavioral
games of homo ludens, distinguish between the animal dominance of the
centric form of positionality (over the form of ex-centric positionality)
and the human dominance of the form of ex-centric positionality (over
the form of centric positionality).49
Second, one needs a functional answer to the question: under which
structural conditions are the individualization of the person and the
personalization of the individual possible? All scientific communities
that engage in both anthropological orders of explanation presuppose
individuated persons and personalized individuals for their own rules of
play. These are hardly self-evident. The philosophical-anthropological
48
Compare Krüger (1999, pp. 88–98). For the framework of Philosophical
Anthropology in the vertical direction see Krüger (2014).
49
Compare Krüger (1999, pp. 98–116).
theory of roles begins where Tomasello’s ontogenetic model ends (with

school children) – that is, to speak with Mead’s collective games, in
‘generalized others’.50
Thirdly, one must consider what lies beyond the legitimate self-limi-
tation of Tomasello’s research program to the level of the group. ‘Such
group-mindedness in cooperation is, perhaps ironically, a major cause
of strife and suffering in the world today. The solution – more easily
described than attained – is to find new ways to define the group’.51 It
would be too good to be true if the species members of Homo sapiens
sapiens could remain entirely in the potentiating forms of sharing inten-
tionality and cooperative mentality. This becomes clearer as soon as one
reconstructs the (already mentioned) structural enabling conditions of
a historically ever-renewed differentiation of forms of community and
society. A community consists in interactions along a shared value set,
while a society enables interactions without a common ground among
people who may remain others and strangers to each other. Otherwise,
they become enemies, and society is reversed into war. There are
enabling conditions for conflicts between community forms and society
forms, as well as for the integration of both forms of socialization into
civilization, which is constantly to be sought for, but is only sometimes
accomplished in the course of history.52
Fourth, these reconstructions can only be accomplished if one proceeds
with a different method than that of a dualism between the first- and
third-personal singular perspectives, which is typical in the theory of
mind. Is there – viewed precisely from an ontogenetic perspective –
anything more important than the You (philosophically, in the whole
range from Karl Jaspers to Jürgen Habermas), including the pre-symbolic,
symbolic, and post-symbolic You? Does one not proceed from there to
‘We’ and then to the difference between ‘We’ and ‘You (all)’, that is, to
the problem of judgment in the perspective of the third person plural?
At least in his recent book, Tomasello makes the You a salient point,
though still restricted to the first evolutionary phase of early humans,
in their ‘Second-Personal Thinking’ (NHHT, pp. 68–76). If one looks
back from the larger framework of possibilities enabled by personal and
possessive pronouns, onto the first- and third-personal singular perspec-
tives, these perspectives face tasks of interweaving the physical with the
50
Krüger (1999, chs 4, 5).
51
Tomasello (2009, p. 100).
52
Compare Krüger (1999, ch. 6).
experienced body [Körper und Leib]. These tasks cannot be articulated in

the usual dualism, which separates personal experience (as first-person
perspective) from scientific observation (as third-person perspective).
Such a separation cannot be lived, neither in the first-person nor in the
third-person perspective. Persons live insofar as they interlace different
perspectives in different ways in their performances. Blocking this living
change of perspectives can lead to illnesses.53 Seen philosophically, one
must above all distinguish between thirdness (for example, C.S. Peirce’s
full sign), the third (as neutral and medium), and the third person as a
perspective and position in singular and plural.54
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9
Biology and Culture
Joseph Margolis
I’m persuaded that, among the master categories of Western philosophy,

the question of the relationship and difference between biology and
culture must count as one of the most instructive and strategic for any
systematic understanding of ourselves: especially, of our unique form of
being; and yet, it’s also one of the most neglected and laggardly devel-
oped notions among them. I’m also struck by the cannibalizing tendency
of both categories to incorporate as much as each can – of the popula-
tion of whatever belongs to the other’s world – as in subsuming the
whole of the mental and the cultural within the span of the biosphere
or of bare physical nature; or, contrariwise, as in construing the whole
of nature as a construction of cognizing mind. The paradoxes each such
tendency engenders should, however, serve to warn us against hurrying
to settle the boundaries of such judgments prematurely. Neither a
literal-minded disjunction nor a conjunction of realism and Idealism
will do: both idioms are heuristic conventions by which we articulate
the relative advantages and limitations of our conceptual pictures of
the relationship between worldly cognizers and cognized world, where
such pictures (rather than ‘the world’ itself) are constructed. Though
we cannot address the world directly except through the constructed
channel of ‘addressing the world directly’, our ‘picture’ of the encoun-
tered world as independent of our encounter is itself a construction,
a posit, that cannot be confirmed (except in a benignly circular way).
Nevertheless, I think we can count on some unforeseen gains as well.
Biology and cultural studies remain, as aspirant sciences, still remark-
ably young, hardly well-rounded enough without (say) the contributions
of the last 60 years, possibly not yet sufficiently informed about their
essential resources even now. (Speculation, here, must be prepared to
accommodate discoveries it cannot possibly anticipate.) Even the most
219
220 Joseph Margolis
informal pass at any summary of the modern history of either inquiry

is likely to pause prudently before it comes to rest among the disputes
of our own day, at at least two particularly fruitful moments: one, the
interval spanning the first flowering of cultural studies (very nearly in
their own name), roughly from the mid-eighteenth century to at least
the first third of the nineteenth, to include the pioneer work of figures
like Herder, Humboldt, Goethe, Vico, the new historians and herme-
neuts, Kant (at his most problematic), Hegel, and the German idealists;
the second, from 1859, spanning the publication of Darwin’s theory of
evolution and coursing down, more or less open-endedly, through at
least the beginning of the twentieth century but before the fateful year
1953, when Watson and Crick defined the groundbreaking directive of
molecular genetics, to include such figures as Wilhelm Johannsen and
Thomas Morgan regarding early genetic theory, the provocative responses
of the ‘philosophical anthropologists’ to Darwin’s claims, notably well-
informed philosophers like Ernst Cassirer and George Herbert Mead, the
ethologists, primatologists, embryologists, and paleoanthropologists, all
centered, however formally or informally, on the puzzles of biological
inheritance and organismic development or (alternatively) on ontogeny
and phylogeny, and the defining features of selves or persons.
I claim that neither the invention of language nor the functional
emergence of selves or persons, nor the creation of the immensely
developed reflexive and agentive competences of persons or the public
conversations of verbally apt creatures (ourselves) can be satisfactorily
accounted for solely or primarily in biological terms or in terms that do
not admit the artifactual (hybrid) transformation of biological gifts by
enlanguaged cultures. In this sense, Darwinian evolution must itself be
transformed when it addresses the evolution of Homo sapiens up to the
appearance of functional persons.
This is a huge, decidedly de-centered, hardly unified conceptual
space, understandably drawn (or torn) in disparate ways by the execu-
tive concerns of entirely reasonable autonomous intuitions regarding
fruitful research within well-entrenched disciplines. Nevertheless, if our
focus is primarily philosophical, then I, for one, confess I find no concep-
tual schema promising if it does not feature, at the very least, the two
achievements that belong, uniquely, to the career of our own species,
Homo sapiens sapiens: that’s to say, the invention and mastery of true
language (which I call ‘external Bildung’) and the matched emergence of
those novel functional competences that depend on linguistic fluency
(‘internal Bildung’), that we treat as essential to defining ourselves as
selves or persons. (See my Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, a
Biology and Culture 221
Touch of Prophesy [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2012], ch. 3.) I

hasten to add that I’m entirely prepared to concede incipiencies in the
direction of natural language and of the reflexive aptitudes of functional
persons (within the range of encultured learning accessible to monkeys,
chimpanzees, dolphins, elephants, even crows, if the evidence proves
favorable); but I take that sort of laxity to be already implicated (and to be
entirely benign) in the inherent informality of the requisite inquiries.
In any event, even this very slim beginning leads quite promisingly
to the following minimal propositions bearing on the distinction and
continuity between biology and culture: (i) that, paradigmatically, the
invention and mastery of language and the Bildung of selves or persons
are no more than the obverse sides of the same ‘second-naturing’, essen-
tially cultural (or enculturing) transformative process, applied to the
infant members of Homo sapiens, by which such primates become effec-
tive persons; (ii) that the attribution of a ‘culture’ or ‘cultures’ to specifi-
cally sublinguistic or languageless animals depends primarily on what
we regard as the effective scope of socially induced or socially enhanced
forms of ‘learning’ (communicative skills that animals learn or learn
to perfect, or the mastery of more complex agentive skills by way of
socially enabled learning: the grizzly bear’s ability to fish for salmon,
for instance); (iii) that language and linguistically or ‘lingually’ quali-
fied phenomena – that is, phenomena that, though they presuppose
linguistic mastery, need not actually issue in explicit linguistic utterance:
hence, persons, actions, products, creations, artworks, technologies,
institutions, traditions, in addition, of course, to speech and linguistic
practices themselves – exhibit a sui generis form of emergence unique
(as far as we know) to societies of human persons, and cannot therefore
be rightly characterized in terms of the reductive (or ‘inter-level’ theo-
retical) identities thought possible in principle among the ‘things’ of
the emergent macroscopic material world said to be explained (instead)
under covering or causal laws, or in terms of micro-theoretical events
(the identity, say, linking different levels of discourse and incommen-
surable vocabularies, as of a bolt of lightning and a congeries of ionized
particles); (iv) that enlanguaged phenomena exhibit any of a great
variety of properties and structures that we variously collect, conver-
gently, as significance, signification, meaning, semiotic or symbolic
import or the like, utterable and discernible (as such) only by selves
or persons suitably gebildet – for instance, expressive, representational,
assertive, linguistic, signific properties treated as capable of supporting
claims of realist standing, in the same world in which selves or persons
have realist standing – which I call ‘Intentional’, read as a term of art
222 Joseph Margolis
(and written with capital ‘I’), which designates the artifactual, hybrid,
indissolubly complex, second-natured, transformative presence of what
is culturally significant in the enlanguaged or lingual way; and (v) that
Intentional things and properties, thus characterized, are fundamen-
tally different from the material things and properties of the natural
world (which, lacking language, completely lacks Intentionality); so
that the Intentional obtains or exists only as indissolubly incarnate or
embodied in the properties and things of the natural world – complexly,
diversely, problematically, since the functional integrity of such systems
remains something of an empirical mystery, though conceived gener-
ously enough to include all the forms of intentional (or agentive) life
and intentional import normally involved in admitting linguistic and
linguistically informed behavior.
Some schema of this sort, I suggest, will be found to be needed, to
provide a reasonably adequate contrast between the biological and the
cultural applied at that level of human functioning at which we speak of
persons and selves. But the ‘cultural’ sans phrase, applied to sublinguistic
animals (applicable, therefore, by some marginal abstraction, among the
infant members of Homo sapiens as well), is, not infrequently, opportun-
istically, quarrelsomely, and usually quite loosely, subsumed under the
biological – most notably, in recent years, in E.O. Wilson’s notion (1998)
of the ‘consilience’ of the causes of ‘all tangible phenomena [as Wilson
argues] ... reducible to the laws of physics’ (p. 291), on the strength of
which Wilson treats cultural processes (of the specifically human sort) as
assuredly falling under the auspices of a nomologized biology or physics.
To be candid, I regard this is a conceptual mistake – in any event, a claim
impossible to confirm, as we now understand matters. In fact, nomo-
logical universalism and necessity are themselves under serious chal-
lenge at the present time as conceptually unnecessary in the support of
a viable science and themselves deliberately heuristic (if not fictional)
constructs from more limited observations and controlled experiments.
(See Cartwright, 1999.)
Such dicta (as Wilson’s) are profoundly unreliable – not merely
premature – because of the contested standing of the would-be ‘laws
of nature’. Of course, if the Intentional has realist standing, if it plays a
causal role of a distinctive sort (unlike the causal role of mere physical
events), if it is artifactually emergent relative to the material world,
and if it exists only as incarnate or embodied in the biological or
physical order of things, then we can already guess that there cannot
be any necessary, universal, or exceptionless nomological regularities
involving the Intentional. Even algorithmic regularities (fitted to the
Intentional or the virtual Intentionality of animal life) are likely to

be more heuristic than not. In any event, we cannot fail to see how
the conceptual complexities of linguistic and lingual phenomena are
bound to complicate what we might otherwise insouciantly count as
the inclusive biology of the human being. Either genetics straddles the
biological/cultural divide (which, as with Aristotle, would have to go
functional rather than yield to chemical analysis) or the function of
genes and DNA, restricted to molecular chemistry, is unlikely to capture
all the operative factors in the formation of the putative ontogenic and
phylogenic effects of animal evolution and development. (Wilson’s
view is too simplistic.)
So the compartmentalization of the biological and the cultural (or
at least enough of it to make sense of the discovery of the molecular
structure of DNA and our speculations about the nature of the role of
DNA in heritable and developmental biology) is essentially dictated (or
influenced) by our recognition of the sui generis, culturally artifactual,
seemingly irreducible emergence of language and its lingual manifes-
tations, inexplicable (apparently) in anything like genetic or chemical
terms, despite the likelihood of its playing a significant causal role in the
generation of ontogenic and phylogenic traits.
The decisive question here, if I understand correctly the careful doubts
advanced by Johanssen, persuasively seconded by Lenny Moss (2003),
revolves around the strong claim that posits the indefinitely extend-
able ‘decomposability’ (or ‘segregatability’) of an organism’s traits as
‘Mendelian units’, so that the complex molecules we know as genes
may be shown to be ‘causally responsible for a piece of the phenotype’ –
possibly then for the entire phenotype itself (Moss, 2003, pp. 38–39).
Johanssen departs from Morgan’s genic confidence in a way that
opposes any wholesale disjunction between the strictly heritable and
the contextually (or environmentally) developmental.
I have no technical competence on the biological matters here
broached. But my philosophical conviction favors the probable unten-
ability of all forms of invariantism, necessitarianism, universalism,
monism, materialist reductionism, regulism, determinism, apriorism,
and strict systematic closure (conceptual, causal, emergent, historied) –
intended to disallow, in principle, any concession to the adequacy of
instrumental, improvisational, ad hoc, transient, irreducibly diverse,
potentially incompatible and incommensurable alternative lines of
analysis and reasoning regarding whatever is phenomenologically
reportable (without privilege) as what we encounter in the world. On
the philosophical side, it’s quite apparent that the advocates of fixity
224 Joseph Margolis
have, until very recently, largely dominated the Western tradition, from
Parmenides to Plato and Aristotle, to Descartes and Kant, to Frege and
Husserl, to Cassirer, to the unity of science movement, down to contem-
porary players (whether philosophers or scientists) of the standing of
E.O. Wilson – Carl Hempel (2001), for instance. All that is changing
now, as much for reasons of philosophical temperament and conviction
regarding what should count as the form of a rational understanding
of a given field of inquiry, as from the continual need to retreat from
would-be empirically motivated fixities that we cannot easily distin-
guish from synthetic apriorist truths.
I find the same conceptual tension operative within the efforts of biol-
ogists to settle the lines of demarcation between heritability and develop-
ment. What seems to be determinative for biologists like Johanssen and
Morgan is the improbability of genetic preformationism as a strict rule
and the need to concede a causal role (affecting heritability) to diverse
factors affecting the definition of the phenotype itself, which cannot be
restricted to chromosomal input (a fortiori, to the genic when confined
to molecular chemistry), which may well involve developmental factors
that bear on manifested ontogenic and phylogenic features, from which
(especially the latter) genotypic inheritance may be inferred (or provi-
sionally constructed) – however approximatively or informally.
In any event, these complexities suggest that there may not be a
completely satisfactory disjunction between inheritance and epigenetic
development (hence, between biology and culture). Preformationism
cannot then take on more than an ‘instrumental’ (somewhat ad hoc,
even opportunistic or heuristic) role. Accordingly, biology itself – or that
part of it that concerns evolution and inheritance – may prove to be
a complex discipline that cannot be reduced, in principle, to molec-
ular chemistry (or something close). Accordingly, I find the following
summary of the outcome of Johanssen’s and Morgan’s main efforts
both trim and convincing (however provisional) – and helpful to my
attempt to define (from the philosophical side) a disjunctive model of
the cultural at its most important and complex level of manifestation.
Here is the resultant summary – in Moss’s words:
Following Johanssen’s vision, the genotype as a whole confers the

potential for a wide range of phenotypes with an ability to adapt
to the needs of the particular circumstances of existence ... . [G]iven
the holistic nature and pluralistic potential of Johanssen’s genotype,
the achievement of the phenotype must be the result of an epigen-
esis within which chromosomal, cytoplasmic, and environmental
constituents become mutually and reciprocally causal, instructive,

and determinative of the outcome. (p. 43)
Concede that ‘environmental constituents’ may indeed include factors

that are culturally learned, whether prelinguistically or linguistically;
if so, then biology (at least evolution) is likely to be something of a
mongrel discipline.
What philosophy offers here is a clear sense of the unanticipated
informalities and laxities of science – a fortiori, of biology and physics –
in particular, of a plausible picture of reality along such lines, that
happens to be perfectly capable of functioning adequately for our
running purposes. The point is logically elementary but philosophi-
cally momentous. What we are drawn to realize is that there simply
is no known way to show that we must proceed, in the sciences, in
accord with demonstrably necessary, universally binding, exceptionless,
apodictic, ‘constitutive’ or ‘regulative’ synthetic truths. Either there are
no such truths or there are none to be had except by a posteriori posit.
If, for instance, you read Cassirer carefully, you soon see that, although
Cassirer is remarkably flexible in yielding to the directive import of
actual historied experience and empirical discovery (the thrust of his
‘Hegelianized’ correction of Kantian apriorism), he yields not a whit on
the rational requirement of a sort of serial ‘regulative’ apriorism (in his
Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, 1957, for instance) and effectively
claims to be adhering to the spirit of Kant’s original a priori constraint.
But I find the idea completely unconvincing – because it succeeds at the
price of being virtually vacuous. Cassirer has, unintentionally, shown
the way to retiring the essential program of Kant’s first Critique, as far
as the physical sciences are concerned – hence, as far as biology and
the human or cultural sciences are concerned. Nevertheless, he favors
the charade. I take Charles Peirce’s understanding of the method of the
natural sciences to have anticipated a similar outcome – to be, in effect,
less a German Idealist solution than a pragmatist replacement of Kant’s
apriorist requirement. Biology, it seems, favors a pragmatist policy over
the Kantian option. Bear in mind that pragmatism and Kant’s apriorism
are profoundly incompatible. They may be made compatible of course,
if Kant is himself read, as Peirce reads him, as a ‘confused pragmatist’.
The causal complexities of genetic determinism make it more than
unlikely that we could ever find nomologically invariant genic causes
of Mendelian-like ontogenic or phylogenic traits; but if not, then if
Cassirer’s retreat to a vacuous form of ‘regulative’ apriorism cannot be
seriously entertained for post-Newtonian physics, similar Kantian-like
226 Joseph Margolis
claims regarding the explanation of biological inheritance are bound to

fail as well. That’s to say, it’s the empirical history of the sciences that
defeats Kant’s apriorism – if anything does. So that the hybrid nature
of human persons contributes in an important way to the failure of the
unity of science program as well as to the failure of Kant’s account of the
apriorist features of Newtonian physics.
If what I’ve said thus far is likely to hold true for the physical sciences
in general, then it’s more than improbable that it would fail to hold true
for the human and cultural sciences. In that case, we may take it to be a
rational conjecture, almost an instinct – certainly not an a priori regula-
tive truth of any kind, not even a confirmable proposition: may I call it,
as I prefer, an ‘abductive guess’? – to suggest an improved formulation of
Peirce’s fallibilism, that begins to show the sort of conceptual flexibility
that an adequate theory of the sciences requires. It’s in this spirit that it
makes sense to avow – I won’t say, affirm or assert – that the world is a
flux rather than a closed, invariantly structured system discerned at the
level of causal law. That’s to say, I suggest – well, recommend, really –
that we construe the problem of understanding the relationship between
biology and culture as a sort of non-confirmable test – an abduction,
as Peirce maintains – about instinctual reasons bearing on the vectorial
thrust (so to say) drawn, disjunctively, to the pragmatist or Kantian spirit
of the sciences. (I’m trying to avoid giving the least impression that our
choice, here, may be construed in terms of a priori or empirical resources
or anything of the sort; our choice does have epistemological force, to
be sure, but it’s a matter that goes deeper than any ordinary cognitive
claim.) Because, of course, as with nearly all such issues, it becomes
instantly subject to the charge of a petitio or infinite regress, if treated as
a determinate claim. That’s to say, it belongs to what, post-Kant, would at
one time have been said to belong to ‘first philosophy’.
I want to suggest that the resolution of the question posed and the
adequacy of a pragmatist answer depend on abandoning (not discon-
firming) Kant’s transcendentalism (at least): partly because Kant’s apri-
orist use of reason cannot explain how to confirm its own claims, and
partly because the confirmation of cognitive claims in general cannot
(once cognitive privilege is disallowed) escape the circularity or regress of
its own adherence to the adequacy of its supposed method for mustering
effective evidence. You may also glimpse here the incipience of a strong
correction of Richard Rorty’s misguided extravagance regarding the limi-
tations of epistemology.
It seems fair to say that we are only at the beginning of a causal grasp
of the inheritance and development of ontogenic and phylogenic traits;
but the evidence to date (as far as a somewhat ill-prepared reader of

the data, like myself, is concerned) seems to suggest that a good many
of the central genetic questions may not support generalizations above
the level of the quasi-algorithmic: not merely as a result of a continuing
poverty of information but because there’s reason to believe that what’s
involved may be a strongly improvisational, ad hoc, transient, oppor-
tunistic, de-centered, endlessly original and evolving, non-uniform,
and not obviously systematizable solution of the causal questions that
arise – such as may be said to implicate more than the standard molec-
ular chemistry of particulate genes. It seems entirely possible, here, that
we shall not be able to get beyond an open-ended succession of a continu-
ally revised array of patchwork models, which should still do well enough for
our predictive and explanatory purposes, but will remain, withal, unable to
assure us, unless vacuously, that it adheres to some suitable Grenzbegriff.
You cannot fail to see that such a science will never exceed a mongrel
form, since it will be obliged to combine propositions that include claims
that are in principle physically reducible and propositions regarding the
Intentionally emergent that are not reducible in principle.
I’ve come full circle, then. If you allow the argument I’ve been sketching,
you see that it poses a mortal challenge to Kant’s transcendental approach
to the sciences: not because it attacks the inherent arbitrariness of Kant’s
epistemology – though that charge remains entirely cogent – but because
it demonstrates, by example, that the usual problems that confront the
natural sciences are, arguably, unmanageable by means of any of the usual
rigors of apriorist insight. Kant’s ‘constitutive’ and ‘regulative’ necessities
are made vacuous by the history of science itself. It may indeed be true
that the search for nomological invariances is productive of fresh discov-
eries that, themselves, fail to be nomologically invariant. But that’s an
argument for abduction, not for apriorist insight. And if language has a
causal history – a fortiori, culture and the historied lives of persons – then,
given that Intentional phenomena appear, empirically, to be irreducible
to phenomena paradigmatically thought to support exceptionless causal
laws, it is more than improbable that whatever a priori regulative constraints
may be deemed to fit the causal explanation of physical phenomena, may
also be counted on to serve among the human sciences.
References
Cartwright, N. (1999) The Dappled World: A Study of the Boundaries of Science
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
Cassirer, E. (1957) The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, vol. 3, trans. by R. Manheim
(New Haven: Yale University Press).
228 Joseph Margolis
Hempel, C.G. (2001) ‘Reduction: Ontological and Linguistic Facets’, in The

Philosophy of Carl G. Hempel: Studies in Science, Explanation, and Rationality, ed.
by J.H. Fetzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
Margolis, J. (2012) Pragmatism Ascendent: A Yard of Narrative, a Touch of Prophesy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press).
Moss, L. (2003) What Genes Can’t Do (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
Wilson, E.O. (1998) Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (New York: Vintage).
(References are paginated to the 1999 paperback edition.)
10
The Mortal Self: Toward a
Transcendental-Pragmatic
Anthropology
Sami Pihlström
Introduction
Human well-being and the good life are, obviously, regarded as vitally
important topics of research within the humanities and the social sciences
in general, as well as philosophy in particular. Philosophical explora-
tions of ‘human nature’ – that is, philosophical anthropology, as it has
been traditionally understood – may also be expected to make funda-
mental contributions to our understanding of these and related issues.
Those contributions presumably differ from those of the special sciences,
because philosophical anthropology investigates not only factual ques-
tions of human nature – what human beings are actually like – but also
normative ones concerning the ways in which human lives ought to be
led. However, clearly, the good life cannot be understood at all if we
fail to pay attention to the ‘darker’ sides of human existence, including
our experiences of evil, pain, suffering, guilt, and death. Philosophical
anthropology, in short, is seriously incomplete without investigations
of death and mortality.1 As Martin Heidegger famously maintained, our
existence is deeply characterized by ‘being-toward-death’, Sein-zum-Tode,
1
It is astonishing that some works explicitly put forward as contributions to
philosophical anthropology, such as P.M.S. Hacker’s otherwise highly interesting
Human Nature: The Categorial Framework (2007), fail to even mention these topics.
Hacker focuses on human capacities – on what we are able to do – rather than our
limits, incapacities, and finitude; the latter, of course, must be emphasized in any
philosophical anthropology examining death and mortality.
229
230 Sami Pihlström
which is inseparable from our ‘being-in-the-world’ generally, our in-der-

Welt-Sein.2
This essay will not offer any close study of Heideggerian philosophical
anthropology or existential philosophy, though. However, I do want
to extend philosophical anthropology into philosophical thanatology,
or what can be called ‘the philosophy of death, dying, and mortality’,
but simultaneously I will insist that philosophical thanatology itself
remains seriously incomplete if it fails to adopt a distinctively transcen-
dental perspective on human finitude as something that must be reflex-
ively explored ‘from within’ that condition itself. By a ‘transcendental’
perspective I mean a philosophical perspective focusing on an examina-
tion of the necessary conditions for the possibility of something that we
take as given (analogously to the way in which Immanuel Kant, in his
transcendental philosophy, explored the necessary sensible and concep-
tual conditions for the possibility of cognitive experience). Such a tran-
scendental examination is typically reflexive in the sense of approaching
the relevant conditions from within a field of experience, cognition, or
meaningfulness that is always already shaped by them. It is also typi-
cally ‘first-personal’ (as will also emerge below) in the sense that the
transcendental self itself engages in the reflection on its own conditions
and limits.
The best way to search for such a transcendental perspective is to go
through the ‘transcendental tradition’ that was inaugurated in Western
philosophy by Kant and later continued by phenomenologists like
Edmund Husserl and Heidegger, as well as by philosophers of language
like Ludwig Wittgenstein, and these thinkers’ many followers. I have
in a series of previous works argued that the pragmatist tradition can
in an interesting way be integrated with transcendental philosophy, to
the extent that both classical and contemporary pragmatists are, ines-
capably, Kantian thinkers in crucial respects.3 Hoping to move beyond
these earlier ideas and arguments, what I will here try to sketch is a
kind of prolegomenon to a pragmatic transcendental anthropology of
human mortality. The key pragmatist figure such a project should draw
upon is William James, whose relations to Kant, phenomenology, and
2
As is well known, this is a key idea in Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit (1927).
3
See, for example, Pihlström (2003, 2009, 2013). Note that while the possi-
bility of ‘naturalizing’ transcendental philosophy has received some attention,
even quite recently – see Smith and Sullivan (2011) – these discussions rarely, if
ever, take pragmatism seriously.
The Mortal Self 231
Wittgenstein are philosophically and metaphilosophically fascinating

even quite independently of the topic of mortality.4
When exploring philosophical thanatology, we should not overlook
the fact that human mortality is a strongly interdisciplinary topic requiring
the continuous creative interaction of a number of academic disciplines
(for example, philosophy, theology, religious studies, history, art and
literature, law, social sciences, gender studies, education, psychology,
and other fields in the human sciences, plus of course the biological and
medical sciences). Its interdisciplinary nature is concretized in special
problem areas or ‘grand challenges’ such as aging, the global climate
change, as well as the significance of embodiment and human bodily
vulnerability. However, even though the field itself is interdisciplinary,
the philosophical core of the various approaches to death and mortality
should also be investigated. While interdisciplinary inquiries into death
and dying are fundamentally important for human flourishing, such
inquiries presuppose philosophical reflection on the basic conceptual,
metaphysical, and ethical problems underlying these notions.
From a philosophical perspective, death, dying, and mortality raise a
number of conceptual issues that need elucidation and clarification, both
systematically and historically. These include at least the following:
● The definition and criteria of death: what are death, dying, and
mortality; what can and should we mean by these concepts and the
relevant linguistic expressions, how should we define them, and how
can we recognize that a particular phenomenon falls under them?
● The Epicurean controversy: is death and/or mortality necessarily bad
(evil) for the one who dies, or can it ever be bad (evil) in this sense;
furthermore, is it in any sense possible to die a ‘good’ death?
● The existential significance of mortality: what exactly does it mean to
speak of ‘being toward death’ or ‘living toward death’ as an ontolog-
ical feature of human existence (compare again Heidegger’s notion of
Sein-zum-Tode)?5
4
However, this chapter is not primarily intended as a contribution to pragma-
tism scholarship (even James scholarship), even though it focuses on a defense of
a pragmatic version of philosophical anthropology, transcendentally construed,
thereby both pragmatically ‘naturalizing’ transcendental philosophy and in a
way ‘retranscendentalizing’ pragmatism.
5
This topic should be connected with pragmatist examinations of the concern
with (im)mortality as a feature of purposively forward-looking human practices
(compare below) – not a standard way of approaching the matter in the context
of Heidegger scholarship.
232 Sami Pihlström
● The metaphysics of death: is it in any sense possible to survive death

(and how does the traditional opposition between materialism vs
dualism relate to this question); how is death connected with funda-
mental ontological problems regarding persistence, identity and indi-
viduation, modalities, and so on?
● In addition to these theoretical problems of death and mortality, there
are hot issues debated in applied ethics: abortion, euthanasia, suicide,
killing and dying in war, capital punishment, genocide, terrorism,
and so on. These special instances of death and dying raise difficult
ethical and political problems that need to be addressed in contem-
porary societies.6
Metaphilosophically, the crucial question emerging from the present situ-

ation in the philosophy of death and dying is whether there in the end is
anything that could appropriately be called ‘philosophical thanatology’
and, if so, what its relation to the other academic approaches to death
and mortality could, and should, be: are there fundamental, specifically
philosophical problems that will remain to be discussed even after all
the empirical (for example, medical, historical, social-scientific, and so
on) ‘thanatologies’ have completed their work (if they ever did)? While
death and mortality can be approached from a number of academic
perspectives, both interdisciplinary and more strictly disciplinary, it
can still be asked what specific role the philosophical perspective might
play in our inquiries into mortality. What, then, is philosophical thana-
tology (in addition to, or over and above, special-scientific or empirical
thanatologies)? Would, for instance, the kind of philosophical ques-
tions concerning human mortality listed above remain open even after
all the different empirical or scientific questions had been adequately
answered? Or can the phenomena of death and mortality be thoroughly
understood scientifically and/or empirically (including the results of the
humanities and social sciences), with no fundamental philosophical
mysteries remaining? Could, for instance, the metaphysics of personal
identity be ultimately resolved in terms of neuroscience? Or could the
Epicurean debate over whether death is bad be reduced to psychological
and sociological studies of well-being and mental health?
6
The present paper, however, is largely existentially and metaphysically
oriented; while dealing with fundamental ethical issues, I will mostly set aside
topics of applied ethics.
The Mortal Self 233
The metaphilosophical problem concerning the status of the

philosophy of death and mortality resembles the analogous problem
concerning the status of philosophical anthropology generally: are there
specifically philosophical questions about humanity (human existence,
human life, ‘human nature’) that only philosophical inquiry could
adequately answer – that is, problems that no empirical perspectives as
such can ever finally resolve? Philosophical thanatology can obviously
be understood as a sub-field of such reflection, although, as we saw,
some engagements in philosophical anthropology fail to even mention
the problem of mortality. In a sense, this metaphilosophical situation
raises the general question concerning naturalism familiar from other
areas of philosophy, such as epistemology and the philosophy of science.
According to naturalism, there is ‘no first philosophy’: there is no privi-
leged philosophical perspective over and above, or more fundamental
than, the various scientific and/or empirical perspectives from which,
in principle, all genuine questions about the ways the world is can be
answered.7
The limits of naturalization
Yet, the nagging question here is whether humanity is somehow an

exception – if not the human mind or consciousness (as in traditional
philosophy of mind), or human cognitive capacities (as in traditional
epistemology), then perhaps human death and mortality? Is naturalism
itself problematic or seriously limited: does the persistence of the philo-
sophical problems of mortality demonstrate that naturalism is one-sided
and must therefore be rejected as a general conception of the relation
between philosophy and the special sciences? This essay can only some-
what programmatically explore the problems and limits of naturalism in
this context, and take some tentative steps toward developing a philo-
sophical thanatology in a pragmatic yet transcendental manner. Let me
begin with the issue of naturalization.
Debates on naturalism have frequently, albeit in my view still not
sufficiently, examined the ‘limits of naturalism’ from the perspective
of transcendental philosophy. Analogous transcendental investigations
can be directed at, for example, consciousness, understanding, commu-
nication, and meaning; twentieth-century philosophical traditions, such
7
The classical reference here is, of course, W.V. Quine’s famous essay,
‘Epistemology Naturalized’, available in Quine (1969); see also Quine (1995).
234 Sami Pihlström
as phenomenology as well as Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language,

have played an important role in such developments of transcendental
philosophy. This continuously developing Kantian and post-Kantian
paradigm of transcendental philosophy provides a very important frame-
work making possible the kind of explorations of mortality and finitude
I am suggesting we ought to pursue. From the transcendental perspec-
tive, regarding the issue of naturalism and the metaphilosophical status
of philosophical thanatology, it should be examined whether there are
any fundamental issues concerning human mortality that cannot be
thoroughly reductively ‘naturalized’. Such issues, crucially deepening
the list of problems charted above, could include, among others, the
following.
First, there is what we may call the ‘first-personal’ character of death.
One may say, echoing Heidegger (1927) again, ‘I am living toward my
death’. This leads to the problem of solipsism, with death being under-
stood not as an event in the world but as ‘the end of the world’.8 Here,
the world as experientially available to us is first-personal in a funda-
mental sense: the world ‘for me’ will come to an end as my life is over.
What needs to be examined in philosophical thanatology is how this
solipsistic tendency, or its rich elaborations in the transcendental tradi-
tion, is in tension with one’s need to acknowledge the mortality of the
other human being – keeping in mind Emmanuel Levinas’s (1961) well-
known views on the ethical primacy of the subject’s infinite respon-
sibility to the other. Moreover, could, for instance, a relational theory
of the identity of a person settle the asymmetry between first- and
third-personal approaches to mortality – an asymmetry that creates
significant tensions in the historical development of the philosophical
problem of death? Yet another ‘transcendental’ question is this: when
phenomenologists following Husserl speak about ‘transcendental life’
as a horizon of objects, what (if anything) could be meant by transcen-
dental death – possibly, death as the end of the world in Wittgenstein’s
sense?
Secondly, there are more or less purely conceptual problems concerning
the meaning of death that are also difficult or impossible to fully
‘naturalize’ into empirical problems. While the concept of death can
receive, for example, a medical definition in terms of irreversible cessa-
tion of brain activity (or something along those lines, avoiding all
medical details here), is there a philosophical core to the pursuit of
8
Compare Heidegger (1927, §9), as well as Wittgenstein (1921, §6.53).
The Mortal Self 235
such definitions? Empirical perspectives can, again, be relevant here,

especially regarding the criteria of death. Increased empirical under-
standing of actual biological events and processes of death and dying
may also change our ways of employing these concepts. Thus, natu-
ralism cannot simply be neglected; it must be seriously examined. On
the other hand, conceptualization is always already needed for empir-
ical inquiry to be so much as possible. The empirical and the concep-
tual (like the empirical and the transcendental) must go hand in hand
here.
Thirdly, one may examine the relations between death and human
emotions – for example, the ways in which grief, guilt, and other inter-
personal emotions shape the frameworks of social relations in which
issues of death arise, as well as the cultural expectations in terms of
which death and dying are encountered in societies, both past and
present. These issues may be integrated with interdisciplinary topics
and problems requiring philosophical ‘coordination’, such as the ethics
and politics of memory, our duty to remember the dead, the emotions
involved in practices of remembering, and so on.
All these and many related themes can be examined both directly,
with the aim of formulating new philosophical analyses of and argu-
ments for and/or against received views, and (more indirectly) at the
meta-level, regarding their status as philosophical problems. Philosophical
thanatology can, moreover, be expected to critically reflect on the signif-
icance of such problems from the point of view of an individual mortal
human being and a community of such beings, also with applications
to more concrete social and cultural issues. For example, memory is a
philosophical topic concerning our relation to death and the dead (and
the past generally) that cannot, arguably, be simply reduced to concep-
tualizations of any non-philosophical special sciences. The philosoph-
ical discussion of memory will inevitably emphasize human finitude
and limits – and is, thus, one more piece of philosophical reflection
on the human condition generally (compare, for instance, Margalit,
2002).
The metaphilosophical thesis I want to defend is, then, the irreduc-
ibility of (at least some if not all) genuinely philosophical issues of death
and mortality to merely empirical issues. At the same time, the entan-
glement of pragmatist and transcendental methodologies in investi-
gating these topics, and their mutual entanglement, will be developed
and critically evaluated. My thesis of irreducibility should be carefully
formulated in terms of an integration of transcendental and pragma-
tist perspectives.
236 Sami Pihlström
There is, therefore, a need for a critical examination of the very

possibility of pragmatist philosophical thanatology. Turning toward the
future – conceivable expected experiences and/or results – is a key to
the pragmatic method in the task of ‘making our ideas clear’ (to quote
the title of Charles S. Peirce’s 1878 essay).9 Presumably, these expected
experiences include experiences of an individual’s most remote and
final future possibility, death, as well as all our experiences of life led
in the irremovable shadow of mortality. When considering the prag-
matic meaning of any (philosophical or non-philosophical) idea or
concept(ion), it should also be asked what that idea or concept(ion),
or its possible object, entails in terms of our inevitable death, and in
terms of our life toward death. Also the past – and memory – in this
sense gain their pragmatic significance from a relation to our open
future.
However, one should pause to reflect on whether this is an ethically
adequate approach: can we sufficiently acknowledge other human
beings (for example, victims of atrocities), if we conceptualize their
past (and their deaths) in terms of our future expectations and experi-
ences, particularly our expectation of our own death? This issue again
returns to the first-personal character of human mortality: is death, or
mortality, primarily my first-personal concern, or should we reconceive
it as, primarily, a feature of (other) human beings’ lives challenging us to
respond ethically? The first-personal transcendental issue is at the heart
of a pragmatist reflection on mortality.
Philosophical examination of human mortality proceeds, then,
from within our mortal condition: human finitude is examined from
within our finite lives themselves. This starting point can be under-
stood as yielding a reflexive, ‘transcendental’ investigation. Reflecting
on the conditions for the possibility of meaningful life is, thus, a crucial
element of this project: mortality itself can be seen as such a condi-
tion for meaningfulness (or, alternatively, for meaninglessness expe-
rienceable as a genuine lack of meaning), because we can, arguably,
only fully appreciate the requirements of ethics and/or morality from
within a perspective on the world conscious of its own finitude. An
ineliminable aspect of this finitude is the precariousness of the moral
perspective itself (or, by extension, any perspective potentially rendering
life valuable or meaningful): death and mortality threaten to make
9
Peirce’s ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’ is available, for example, in Peirce
(1992).
The Mortal Self 237
that (or any) humanly extremely important perspective illusory, with

nihilistic absurdity as the final result. Presumably, nothing ultimately
matters, insofar as we all – whatever we do, however good we try to
be, however well we try to respond to and acknowledge otherness – in
the end die. Mark Johnston (2010) has argued that death is in this
sense a threat to the ‘importance of goodness’, as it may seem that,
because we all die, morality does not ultimately matter. Yet, this fini-
tude itself and the reflection it (only) enables us to pursue may matter,
after all; hence, the specific way in which death is a threat to the moral
perspective requires further investigation. A pragmatic-cum-transcen-
dental approach to death and dying might, I hope, also contribute
to our understanding of the entanglement of mortality and morality in
this very basic sense. The meaning and significance of morality itself
as a human perspective on the world needs to be illuminated from
the point of view of philosophical thanatology. An entanglement or
(re)integration of pragmatist and transcendental approaches will,
again, be crucial here.10
A sketch of an argument
After these introductory remarks on the nature and tasks of philosoph-

ical thanatology generally, and the overall prospects of the kind of tran-
scendental philosophical anthropology of human mortality I am willing
to defend, let me offer a sketch – not a straightforward argument with
premises and a conclusion but, rather, a loose set of interrelated consid-
erations that I think need to be addressed in much more detail and
critically tested in any adequate philosophical anthropology of human
mortality.11
When developing a pragmatic and transcendental anthropology of
the mortal self, or a pragmatic and transcendental philosophical thana-
tology, we may examine and critically defend the possibility of philo-
sophical anthropology by first distinguishing (following Heikki Kannisto)
10
Philosophy, however, cannot be the (or even a) foundation of thanatological
research; the approach I am recommending is opposed to all kinds of founda-
tionalism and dogmatism. Yet, this does not mean that there would be no role
for philosophy to play after all the empirical sciences have had their say on the
problems of death and mortality.
11
For more details about some of the steps of this argumentative sketch, see
the following previous essays of mine: Pihlström (2001, 2003b, 2007, 2014,
2015a, 2015b, 2015c).
238 Sami Pihlström
between four different basic forms or ideal types of philosophical anthro-

pology: essentialism, naturalism, existentialism, and culturalism.12 It can
be argued, I believe, that no ahistorical, essentialist assumptions about
an unchanging ‘human nature’ are necessary in philosophical anthro-
pology. Even so, the problem of normativity turns out to be crucial to
this field of philosophical inquiry. A synthesis of naturalist and cultur-
alist approaches to human nature seems to be vitally needed. Death,
of course, is a universal human phenomenon essentially belonging to
our ‘human nature’ (if anything is); yet, its varied meanings in human
life seem to require culturalist (and, of course, naturalist) rather than
ahistorical and essentialist explorations. Death and mortality are prime
examples of phenomena calling for a dynamic interplay of all the norma-
tive philosophical-anthropological approaches we may distinguish. Any
philosophical-anthropological account of death should, furthermore,
discuss both the general metaphysical issue of limits as such and its
various applications, that is, examples of the different kinds of limits
12
This fourfold scheme of basic types of philosophical anthropology has been
examined by Heikki Kannisto only in his Finnish publications, for example,
Kannisto (1984). My essay, ‘On the Concept of Philosophical Anthropology’
(Pihlström, 2003b), largely indebted to Kannisto, deals with this matter in some
more detail. The basic idea is roughly the following. Essentialism (philosophical
anthropology par excellence) postulates, in various ways in different traditions,
an ahistorical, immutable, timeless essence of humanity, thus viewing human
beings as elements of an overarching cosmic system. This system is, classically,
normative and teleological (as in Aristotle’s metaphysics, for instance): our place
in such a system determines not only what we as human beings are but also what
we ought to be, not only what our (factual) place in the world’s scheme of things
is but also what our (normatively) correct or appropriate place in that scheme
is. Naturalism (understood as a negation of essentialism, especially regarding its
cosmic normativity) naturalizes this cosmic system into a system of mere natural
facts and processes, with no normativity or teleology. Culturalism, in turn, negates
naturalism by re-establishing the normative order essentialism originally postu-
lated, albeit as a humanly constructed socio-cultural system, rather than any
cosmic teleological one. Finally, existentialism emphasizes that human beings are
radically free from any normative order or structure – for better or worse. All plau-
sible philosophical anthropologies, and most historically important attempts to
deal with human nature, are situated somewhere in the area defined by these four
poles; few thinkers have represented any of them in a pure form. For example,
essentialism about natural kinds could be argued to incorporate both essentialist
and naturalist elements. Pragmatist philosophical anthropology, in particular (I
have argued), faces the challenge of critically synthesizing naturalism and cultur-
alism and of thus viewing the human being as a creature naturally engaged in
normative orders.
The Mortal Self 239
and boundaries that need to be philosophically articulated in relation to

various human practices, as well as the role such limits play, or may play,
in our categorizations of reality.13 The metaphysical issues of non-exist-
ence, non-being, nothingness, and absence need to be taken up in relation
to limits.14 Moreover, the ways in which our drawing different limits,
including the limit between existence and non-existence itself, contrib-
utes to our categorizing reality – and the ways in which such categoriza-
tions can be challenged by crossing and blurring those limits – could be
illustrated by considering the boundary between life and death.
The discussion of limits may, hence, lead to more abstract and general
transcendental issues of human world-categorization. We should more
closely focus on the transcendental tradition from Kant to Wittgenstein,
with a transition from epistemologically oriented transcendental
philosophy to more semantic (but also metaphysical) transcendental
inquiries into meaning and significance. A lot of work has been done
on reinterpretations of the notion of ‘the transcendental’, particularly
transcendental argumentation and transcendental conditions. An anti-
essentialist family-resemblance conception of these notions should, I
think, be defended.15
A pragmatic reconceptualization of transcendental conditions of
experience as inhering in normatively structured human practices easily
leads to Wittgensteinian considerations. Philosophical-thanatological
13
There are many kinds of natural (for instance, geographical) and socially
constructed (for instance, national) boundaries; there are also social and cultural
limits or boundaries between different groups of people (limits as human construc-
tions); as well as mythical boundaries between the sacred and the profane (offering
an example of human categorizations of reality in religion, ritual, and magic);
moreover, the boundary between fact and value (interestingly softened in some
philosophers’, including some pragmatists’, thesis about the ‘fact-value entangle-
ment’) and the traditional philosophical problem of ‘other minds’, indicating the
boundary between oneself and others, are fundamental topics to be addressed in
philosophical anthropology dealing with limits. A whole set of different sources
would in principle be relevant in this context: for example, Barry Smith’s and
other ‘applied ontologists’’ work on ‘fiat boundaries’; religious studies scholars’
and folklorists’ work on mythical boundaries maintained in religions and rituals;
recent work on the other minds problem in a (broadly) Wittgensteinian tradition;
and neopragmatists’ such as Hilary Putnam’s views on the fact-value entangle-
ment: see Putnam (2002).
14
Here one may draw on the very important work on the metaphysics of non-
existence by D.M. Armstrong (2010), as well as Richard Grossman (1992).
15
On the debate over the nature and success of transcendental arguments, see
especially Stern (1999). Compare also Pihlström (2004).
240 Sami Pihlström
discussions should therefore also quite explicitly address Wittgensteinian

issues. A transcendental, yet naturalized and pragmatic, reading of
Wittgenstein’s philosophical methodology might emerge from such
comparative investigations. Surely, Wittgenstein will have to be a central
figure in any argument for a pragmatic transcendental anthropology:
his later thought provides us with a combination of pragmatic and tran-
scendental methodologies in the service of an ‘anthropological’ project
seeking to understand the basic features of human forms of life.16
These relatively general transcendental discussions may be applied
to the most important – constitutive – limit of our human existence,
mortality, which can be examined by returning to the fourfold scheme of
basic types of philosophical anthropology briefly introduced above. The
issue of mortality, when explicitly discussed as a transcendental problem
presupposing a transcendental use of ‘limit concepts’, is also a problem
of relating oneself to the other human beings living and dying around
oneself. The problem of solipsism might be reintroduced in more detail
in this context; the strongly first-personal nature of the problem could
also open a discussion of suicide.17 The crucial question is the one already
encountered above, that is, whether death and mortality are fundamen-
tally ‘my’ problems or whether a genuinely social and cultural concep-
tion of these matters could be developed. Solipsism, though eccentric,
needs to be examined in pragmatist and transcendental philosophical
thanatology, because it is so central in our attempt to (transcendentally)
16
Furthermore, it is necessary in this context to carefully distinguish between
two concepts that are often conflated, namely, the transcendental and the tran-
scendent. Sometimes, however, a commitment to the transcendent (or to ‘tran-
scendence’) may function as a transcendental condition for the possibility of
certain kinds of human discourse or language-use. Key issues in (meta-)ethics can
be examined from this perspective, again partly with a Wittgensteinian emphasis.
Ethics (and religion) may, if we follow Wittgenstein, ‘transcend’ the bounds of
sense, or the limits of meaningful language. This is particularly the case with
ethical investigations of human mortality.
17
Albert Camus famously saw suicide as a fundamental philosophical problem
related to the significance of human life (or of anything) in general; thus it is
something quite different from a mere special problem of applied ethics. Far from
being ‘merely’ an issue in applied ethics, this issue can, then, be regarded as one of
the most fundamental philosophical worries there are, deeply related to concepts
such as absurdity and nihilism. Wittgenstein maintained, in his pre-Tractarian
notebooks (1914–1916), that suicide is an ‘elementary sin’: it is a voluntary
destruction of the world-constituting transcendental subject and thereby also a
destruction of the world (not just an ‘event in the world’) (Wittgenstein, 1961).
The Mortal Self 241
understand the profoundly first-personal nature of our mortality that

shapes all of our practices of dealing with human finitude.18
However, one of the key concepts that need to be taken up in this
context is the concept of guilt. We may, in relation to the issues of
death and mortality, distinguish between three different connections
between death and guilt, moving from the more ordinary (empirical) to
the more metaphysical (transcendental): (i) factual (empirical, ordinary,
causal) forms of guilt based on one’s causing death(s) by, for example,
killing (including causing deaths by means of omission, assuming that
omissions may be actions; with applications to special topics such as
abortion, euthanasia, and war); (ii) guilt based on one’s not having
done something with or to someone before her/his death, that is, guilt
resulting from, for instance, one’s failure to be sufficiently ‘available’ in
another person’s life (to be distinguished from the failure to do some-
thing specific, such as to save a life – which may, however, ultimately
be reducible to case [i]); and (iii) guilt based on one’s life as a whole, on
one’s life being experienced as ‘fundamentally wrong’, or misguided and
questionable in a profound existential sense.19 A critical discussion of
the concept of the transcendental subject is needed right here, because the
crucial question, ‘whose guilt are we talking about?’, inevitably arises
when our considerations move onto the transcendental level. Also,
the relation between guilt and other relevant emotions (including, for
instance, shame) would have to be discussed in this context; the same
threefold distinction between ordinary and transcendental approaches
can be applied to other emotions, too. Note, however, that the three-
fold classification of different kinds of guilt here should be understood
18
Here, however, I cannot explain in any detail why in my view the issue of
solipsism itself – along with its applications in philosophical thanatology – must
be formulated as a transcendental problem instead of a ‘first-order’ epistemo-
logical or metaphysical problem. Clearly, my emphasis on the problem of solip-
sism here should not be misunderstood: I am definitely not a solipsist, and I am
not proposing to approach the issue of death in terms of solipsism in the sense
of endorsing that doctrine. However, there is a ‘methodological’ and (thereby)
transcendental element of solipsism in my investigation: we do have to start by
considering how our finitude affects our own – that is, my – life and challenges
its meaningfulness. Solipsism will arise in a way or another in any transcendental
examination of human finitude and its meaning-threatening nature.
19
Compare Heidegger’s notion of Dasein’s Schuldenwerdenkönnen, developed in
Heidegger (1927): the human Dasein is guilty ‘authentically’. The differentiation
between the three (or, possibly, more) concepts of guilt that can be taken into
account here must also refer back to Karl Jaspers’s (1945) similar distinctions.
242 Sami Pihlström
as heuristic. Clearly, these different forms of guilt can be placed on a

spectrum, ranging from the ordinary (the factual and empirical) to the
metaphysical and transcendental. I am not suggesting that the classi-
ficatory principle postulating such a spectrum is somehow metaphysi-
cally pre-given to us; it is itself a pragmatic scheme that may be used
for certain purposes, such as the purpose of understanding the quite
different ways in which we may be guilty in relation to our common
human mortality.20
Finally, we should also somewhat more closely investigate the very
possibility of a pragmatist philosophy of death, dying, and mortality.
William James’s pragmatist views on death, mortality, and immortality
might, in particular, be critically examined as an example of the need
to consider the ethically vital tension between one’s own mortality
and that of others. Pragmatism is my proposed reaction to the need
to integrate transcendental philosophy with its (non-reductively) natu-
ralistic alternatives in philosophical anthropology and philosophical
thanatology. This integration can be independent of the classification
of the different types of guilt (or other moral emotions) according to
the scheme or spectrum proposed above; however, a pragmatist inter-
pretation of what I am calling transcendental guilt may also be part of a
transcendental-pragmatic development of philosophical anthropology
and thanatology.
In brief, the above-described sketch of loosely related philosophical
ideas could yield the following argument. First, we may argue that the
tasks and basic approaches of philosophical anthropology can be char-
acterized in terms of the fourfold scheme of essentialism, naturalism,
culturalism, and existentialism. We may then suggest that philosophical
anthropology should critically integrate what is viable in these different
approaches and especially focus on limits and finitude; it then turns
20
Furthermore, in addition to asking whose guilt we are talking about, we may
also ask who assigns the (different kinds of) guilt we are talking about here. In the
case of transcendental guilt, this is of course very different from the assignment
of ordinary empirical (causal, factual) guilt, which can be done, for example,
by an external legal or moral authority. Transcendentally speaking, it is (only)
the transcendental self or the transcendental subject her-/himself that can assign
(transcendental) guilt. Only empirical guilt can be assigned from the outside, so
to speak. In this sense, a transcendental approach to death and guilt must remain
ethically solipsistic: one’s own guilt is primary to anyone else’s. However, this
clearly does not mean that solipsism would have to be embraced in any ‘ordi-
nary’ sense of the term.
The Mortal Self 243
out that the transcendental method – in some form, at least – is a key

to philosophical anthropology, yielding what we may call ‘transcen-
dental anthropology’. By then applying the general idea of philosoph-
ical anthropology to philosophical thanatology, we will be led to apply
the transcendental method to the investigation of death and mortality
and thereby to consider the problem of solipsism, which may seem to
follow from such applications (especially in the ‘existentialist’ tradi-
tion focusing on the first-personal character of mortality). The concept
of guilt can then be argued to be inevitably involved in any properly
transcendental investigation of the ethical aspects of human mortality,
because a reflexive – critical and above all self-critical – reflection on our
mortal state (‘from within’ that state itself) inevitably raises the ques-
tion of whether our lives are, or have been, fundamentally ‘wrong’.
Finally, pragmatism integrated with the transcendental method may be
proposed as a plausible synthesis of culturalism and naturalism in philo-
sophical anthropology and philosophical thanatology. This also yields
a non-reductively naturalized version of the transcendental method –
hence, a pragmatic transcendental anthropology of human mortality
and finitude.
Meaning and limits
Yet, what is truly distinctive about the pragmatic transcendental philos-

ophy of death and mortality, as it has been tentatively formulated here?
What are the main novelties such an approach may promise as responses
to the irreducibly philosophical (not reductively naturalizable) issues of
human mortality generally described above?
A quick answer is that the approach I am defending takes fundamen-
tally seriously the need to investigate the (lack of) meaning of the human
(life)world from within our finite subjectivity – that is, from within our
mortal condition ‘limiting’ and thereby profoundly shaping the world
we live in.21 In contrast, mainstream philosophies of death today, mostly
based on an ‘objective’, third-personal, broadly naturalistic approach
that seems to rely on the prior assumption of metaphysical realism,
adopt a ‘God’s-Eye View’ even when trying to examine the subjective
meaning of death. Such examinations typically assume a relatively crude
form of consequentialist ethics which hardly captures the existential
21
Compare this to Wittgenstein’s famous comment (late in the Tractatus)
about the world and life being ‘one’.
244 Sami Pihlström
dimensions of the problem of death in the sense emphasized here. In

short, the pragmatic-transcendental synthesis of the various types of
philosophical anthropology distinguished above offers an essentially
richer philosophical thanatology than mere naturalism that seems to
define the paradigm in contemporary philosophy of death and dying.
Moreover, the transcendental philosophy of death and mortality
that needs to be developed should not be just another version of tran-
scendental philosophy committed to, say, original Kantian ideas, but,
crucially, a pragmatically ‘naturalized’ and, hence, ‘anthropologized’
one. My pragmatic transcendental anthropology – an anthropology of
human finitude and mortality analyzing those aspects of the human
condition ‘from within’ our human practices and replacing the tradi-
tional concept of a transcendental subject by a historicized, social,
and dynamically practice-embedded transcendental subjectivity – is
motivated by and developed through philosophical diagnoses of, first,
human finitude in general, taking up different perspectives on the
notions of a limit and a boundary, and secondly, our mortality as the
key dimension of that finitude. The upshot ought to be a metaphysical,
or philosophical-anthropological, account of humans as limited and
bounded – mortal – beings.
As such, the philosophical approach tentatively articulated here should
constitute a thoroughgoing exploration of human limits, our finitude,
and the ways we continuously seek to transcend that finitude and trans-
gress our inevitable, yet historically changing and never essentialisti-
cally fixed, limits. Death, of course, is not a limit we can ever transgress.
However, we may be able to transgress the ways in which its meaning
to us is currently constituted. That is, there is a sense in which we may,
and constantly do, transgress – or at least rearticulate, reconceptualize,
or transform – the historically and culturally contextualized meaning
and significance we associate with our mortality. And the same goes
for the possibility of transgressing the fundamental boundary between
oneself and others (that is, the ‘truth in solipsism’ that Wittgenstein
speaks about in the Tractatus). One starting point and basic philo-
sophical idea to be developed in more comprehensive investigations of
transcendental-pragmatic philosophical anthropology and thanatology
is the insight that human life is constituted by the continuous tension
between the need to acknowledge our finitude and the temptation to reach
out for transcendence (that is, the infinite), exemplified by such issues as
death and solipsism. This tension – its irresolvability – is itself a limit for
us, constituting the very special kind of finite life we must lead. More
metaphilosophically, one may argue that philosophical anthropology,
The Mortal Self 245
transcendentally explored and developed, is itself essentially an inquiry

into limits and finitude, particularly the limit and finitude constituted
by our mortality, which is also a key to our common humanity.22
Any transcendental engagement with limits must recognize as
its main historical precursors Kant’s transcendental account of the
limits of humanly possible cognition or cognitive experience and
Wittgenstein’s equally transcendental account of the limits of sense
or meaning (or meaningfulness) – even though transcendental inter-
pretations of Wittgenstein are, admittedly, highly controversial. Here
I want to suggest that the kind of limit that human mortality sets us –
our mortal finitude – is transcendental in a similar sense. Analogously
to the Kantian and Wittgensteinian transcendental limits of cogni-
tive experience and linguistic meaning (respectively), it is a transcen-
dental limit of something more general: of human life as we know it,
or again, of ‘our common humanity’. That is, if (in a science fiction
scenario) modern medicine succeeded in overcoming death, making
us immortal, we would in a sense lose the kind of human form of life
that currently defines us. This does not mean that we would suddenly
become entirely different creatures, but it does mean that we would
be at a very basic level challenged to rethink some of our most funda-
mental ethical and ontological commitments. Everything would be
changed, and even if such a change is in some sense possible for us,
we would not be able to go through it without redefining “us” in a
crucial way.
One of the open questions that need to be considered in transcendental
philosophical thanatology is the one familiar from recent controversies
over interpreting Wittgenstein: is this limitation a genuine limitation in
the sense of invoking an ‘inability’ of some sort, that is, something that,
while being in principle a meaningful goal, we human beings, as the
kind of beings we are, are incapable of achieving (in the sense that we
just cannot live forever, although it would make sense to live forever), or
rather something that is not even meaningful to aspire to, that is there-
fore not a ‘real’ limitation at all (and hence no failure of ours), and that,
therefore, needs therapy instead of philosophical theorization, some-
what like our temptation to cross the bounds of sense by talking phil-
osophically sophisticated nonsense, which does not point toward any
meaningful possibility of transgressing certain boundaries that simply
22
I am adopting the expression, ‘our common humanity’, from Raimond
Gaita’s intriguing book with the same title: see Gaita (2000).
246 Sami Pihlström
contingently cannot be transgressed?23 I do not have any clear, definite

answer to this question, and I am not sure that there ever will be, but
the question would at least have to be illuminated from various angles
in a richer account of the mortal self. I am tempted to defend a ‘middle
ground’ position: the limitation is genuine – our mortality does set limits
to our life, or our humanity, precisely in the sense that it cannot be trans-
gressed just as some other boundary might be (compare above) – yet it is
no ‘failure’ or ‘inability’ on our part, a matter of our necessarily failing to
do something that we in some sense should or even could do.
A pragmatic-transcendental investigation will, hopefully, also (at
least indirectly) deal with and respond to the question of why mortality
is a problem for us (or, specifically, why it might be regarded as some-
thing bad or even evil – though I do not want to pose this question,
let alone answer it, in the traditional Epicurean terms, which tend to
mislead rather than illuminate). Here, the problem of nihilism emerges
in its many versions: our mortality may be seen as depriving human life
of any (possible) meaning and value whatsoever. This absurdity of life,
ending with death, was discussed by the existentialists in mid-1900s and
was taken up in more analytically oriented philosophical thanatology
by Thomas Nagel in the 1970s, yielding an active debate still going on in
what may be called ‘analytic philosophy of death’.24 Some philosophers
23
The relevant references here include especially the growing literature on
‘New Wittgensteinianism’; for a now classical collection of interpretive essays,
see Crary and Read (2000). One of the best constructively critical discussions of
these problems in Wittgenstein scholarship is Wallgren (2006).
24
Nagel’s ‘Death’, first published in 1971, reprinted in his influential collec-
tion, Mortal Questions (Nagel, 1979, ch. 1), is the modern classic here. In any
event, while Nagel to a large extent gave rise to a debate within what I am calling
‘mainstream’ philosophy of death and mortality, he seems to have recognized
the existential – and what I am calling the transcendental – dimension of the
problem, as he connects it with the human search for meaning in life and the
threatening cosmic meaninglessness. Other (very different) philosophers who
have emphasized this existential dimension include, for instance, Heidegger
(compare above), Levinas (whose critique of Heidegger’s apparently solipsistic
and too strongly first-personal approach is famous), Merold Westphal (see below),
J.J. Valberg (2007), who not only explicitly discusses the issue of transcendental
solipsism but also illuminates the phenomenon of death through a comparison
to the also philosophically interesting phenomena of sleep and dream, and Mark
Johnston (whose theory of survival I will briefly comment on below). While
Heidegger is certainly a key figure here, not to be neglected in any philosophical
investigation of death, I am not a Heidegger scholar, and my brief remarks are in
any case restricted to Heidegger’s early views, as put forward in Sein und Zeit.
The Mortal Self 247
have also been worried about the challenge that everything is, after all,
permitted because we will all die. It makes no difference whether we
are good or bad. As Mark Johnston (2010) puts it in his very important,
recent work on the topic, death is ‘the great leveler’: the good and the
bad seem to be equally vulnerable to death and mortality, and therefore
there does not seem to be any special motivation for being good, if we
view things from a cosmic perspective; hence, death is a threat to ‘the
importance of goodness’, to the significance of the moral perspective
itself.25
Similarly, William James seems to have maintained that death, in the
absence of the religious hope for immortality or survival, would be a
threat to our being able to find our human condition meaningful, or
our life worth living, at all; in the absurd situation of mere existence
blindly unfolding toward annihilation, we would not be able to ‘make
a difference’ to the world through our actions in any genuine way.26 In
Merold Westphal’s (1984) terms, inspired by Leo Tolstoy’s famous The
Death of Ivan Ilyich, the problem of death is in the end the same problem
as the problem of guilt (compare above): in my mortality, I encounter
25
Johnston (2010) insightfully, albeit controversially, challenges this nihilistic
outcome in his naturalistic theory of survival. By developing a new theory of
personal identity, he seeks to offer a naturalistically acceptable version of the view
that the good, but not the bad, survive their deaths. In my view, Johnston’s work
is of great interest primarily because he is asking the right kind of question (what
happens to the seriousness of morality if we fully acknowledge our mortality and
finitude?), which is in effect a transcendental question about the meaning of finite
life (especially morality), given the fact of mortality, rather than because of his (in
itself highly elaborate even if problematic) positive theory. Even so, for a prag-
matist, there might be ethical and/or pragmatic reasons for endorsing Johnston’s
metaphysical theory of personal identity, because it is a theory enabling us to
maintain the view that the morally good survive. Johnston’s argument could
perhaps be spelled out in terms of ‘holistic pragmatism’ (compare White, 2002):
metaphysical (including theological), factual (scientific, naturalistic), and ethical
beliefs may be considered as a holistic totality, a ‘seamless web’, and may thus
be holistically ‘tested’ against both ordinary and scientific experience and our
experience of moral demands. All these beliefs can, then, be ‘weighed’ together
instead of being evaluated individually. By revising some of our standard ideas
concerning personal identity, we may thus (according to Johnston) defend
survival (of ‘the good’) without giving up scientific naturalism.
26
James’s views on immortality (see his ‘Human Immortality’, 1898; avail-
able in James, 1982) could be analyzed in terms of an analogy to Johnston’s: a
relational theory of personal identity enables us to endorse (some kind of) survival
together with naturalism. Ethical contexts and values thus set demands for meta-
physical theorizing.
248 Sami Pihlström
the question of whether my life as a whole is, or has been, ‘wrong’ in a

fundamental sense. This is the problem of guilt seen under the aspect
of the problem of death – again, perhaps, calling for a pragmatic adop-
tion of religious grounds for something like immortality or survival.
Moreover, the experience of guilt as a core of our mortal existence may
be intensified when we realize that our life is not merely dying but also
killing. Even vegetarians must kill plants, or at least living cells. What is
more, we consume parts of the world that someone else could have consumed.
It is by no means clear that we have the right to do this, that is, to
consume the bits of the world we do consume. We kill the food we eat,
and we may indirectly kill our fellow human beings by eating food they
could have eaten.
These ‘first-personal’ explorations of death, killing, and mortality
as ethically fundamental aspects of our being in the world also,
again, lead us to appreciate the significance of the problem of suicide.
Wittgenstein famously pointed out, in his Notebooks written before
the Tracatus, that suicide is an ‘elementary sin’;27 more ‘existentially’
oriented thinkers like Albert Camus and Jean Améry have later regarded
suicide as not merely a special problem of applied ethics but as a major
philosophical problem of our time, epitomizing fundamental philo-
sophical issues of freedom and individuality.28 The Wittgensteinian
conception of suicide as an elementary sin becomes understandable
in the absence of any dogmatic religious background beliefs when we
pay attention to the transcendental context of this position: suicide
not only removes the subject from the world; by removing the tran-
scendental subject to whom the world is given, it removes the world
itself.
My hope in developing a transcendental philosophical thanatology
enriched by pragmatism is not to settle these issues by formulating a
foundational philosophical theory that would once and for all ‘solve’ the
problems I have very briefly described above. Nor do I find any comfort
in the Epicurean pseudo-solution according to which ‘death is nothing
to us’, because such a view basically ignores the problem of death as a
serious first-personal problem. Instead, I am trying to encourage philo-
sophical reflection – from within our mortal condition, from within our
finitude – on this mortal condition itself, the ways in which it ‘colors’
27
See Wittgenstein (1961). These are among the very last entries in the note-
books, written early in 1917.
28
See especially Améry (1976).
The Mortal Self 249
our lives, especially our ethical lives in relation to other mortals.29 It is

exactly in this sense that mortality is a transcendental problem, invoking
issues of (in)conceivability and solipsism as much as issues of existential
and religious meaningfulness (or meaninglessness).30 In this sense, it
is also clearly a ‘philosophical-anthropological’ problem and can, from
the point of view of pragmatically ‘naturalized’ (‘anthropologized’) tran-
scendental philosophy, be enriched not just purely philosophically but
also with reference to empirical – for example, medical, historical, socio-
logical, psychological, educational, anthropological, and many other –
perspectives. The recognition of there being genuinely philosophical
approaches to death thus leads to the recognition of the philosophical
relevance of various empirical approaches, too, and of the need to avoid
reducing the topic of death to any of those approaches.
One particularly important philosophical-anthropological concept in
our reflections on mortality, also briefly mentioned above, is memory,
recently examined by leading philosophers like Paul Ricouer and
Avishai Margalit (see again, for instance, Margalit, 2002). Even if our
philosophical (transcendental) anthropology is pragmatic in the sense
of being ‘forward-looking’, seeking to understand our present life – with
the concepts we use – in terms of conceivable future experiences and
practical results, we inevitably prepare for the future on the basis of
the past. On the other hand, the value of our different interpretations
of the past lies in the future expectations associated with them. Hence
the politically hot debates on historical memory, often concretized
29
Compare here Levinas’s concept of the Other – and of ethics as being prima-
rily about our relation to the mortal and vulnerable Other that should always
be seen as primary to our own well-being – as well as James’s reflections on the
deep and inevitable relationality of our individual identities in the field of ‘pure
experience’.
30
In addition to the phenomenology of religion developed by Westphal (1984),
see J.J. Valberg’s (2007) very interesting struggle with solipsism. As noted in a
previous note, Valberg also deals with the notions of sleep and dream in relation
to the topic of death. This important comparison deserves further reflection (as
pointed out by an anonymous referee). It can also be connected with the topic of
ethical vigilance, traced back to ‘insomnia’, in Levinas’s philosophy – as recently
interestingly discussed in Craig (2010). If ethics requires ‘staying awake’, and if
sleep and death are analogous, our ethical insomnia – our inability to fall asleep
in a world demanding continuous ethical attention – might be a certain kind of
(metaphorical) immortality. This thought, which might make our mortal exist-
ence meaningful in a very special way, must be developed in much more detail
in the book. Regarding the questions of meaning and meaninglessness, compare
further Schumacher (2010).
250 Sami Pihlström
in our – or others’ – rights and duties to remember certain historical

facts (for example, atrocities such as the Holocaust) in certain ways. In
memory, especially in our remembering the long gone past, as well as
the experiences of those that are very different from us, we are ulti-
mately responsible for what we are, and are doing, in the present in the
field of experience – the world – we share with other human beings. We
are responsible for and to the other, even when remembering ‘the third’.
The ethics of memory is a crucial aspect of our philosophical attempt to
understand our limits and finitude in our relation to the past (and to
the future).
Conclusion
By offering philosophical reflections on and insights into these first-per-

sonal, and therefore deeply transcendental, issues surrounding human
mortality, pragmatic-transcendental philosophical thanatology seeks to
contribute to our understanding of the human condition in a funda-
mental way. A transcendental-pragmatic anthropology of the mortal
self will seek to articulate what is distinctive about the transcendental
approach to death and mortality, yet in a way that is sensitive to the
special problems related to developing any ‘transcendental’ position
in contemporary largely naturalistic philosophy. Even within a ‘natu-
ralized’ transcendental approach, this approach will clearly define a
contrast to the mainstream analytic philosophy of death that fails (like
mainstream approaches in other fields as well) to adopt a truly transcen-
dental perspective. The final result of a project like this, if it ever could
be completed, would, I hope, be a sound philosophical anthropology,
both pragmatically and transcendentally structured, with its focus on
human finitude that reaches its culmination in mortality.
A final worry needs to be addressed. Critics may legitimately point out
that I have not done enough to justify the synthesis of the pragmatic and
the transcendental I am defending (and applying to the topics of death
and mortality, or finitude generally). This is undoubtedly true. I can
hardly offer a full defense of this approach, but by attempting to show
its applicability to the chosen special topic, and thereby demonstrating
its appropriateness for the project of ‘philosophical anthropology’ more
generally, I hope to be able to go at least some way toward offering a
philosophical defense of the pragmatic naturalization of the transcen-
dental. This does not mean that I would simply downplay the genuine
differences between the transcendental and the pragmatist approaches
or methodologies, as they are traditionally understood. Rather, I am
The Mortal Self 251
suggesting that there is a way of bringing them together that yields an

interesting philosophy of human finitude.31
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Index
absence, 31, 37–9, 45–6, 61, 78, 86, 117, 121, 141, 147, 149, 152,
206, 239 158, 160, 162, 164, 171–2,
see also deficiency; lack 174–6, 179–82, 183–6,189, 192,
adaptation, 19, 39–40, 43, 56, 69–70, 194, 204, 213–15, 220, 229–31,
72–3, 77–8, 82–3, 85, 89–90, 233, 237–8, 239, 240, 242–4,
122, 145, 148, 150, 155–6, 249–50
159–61, 165, 172, 176–7, 186, as field, 15–18, 22
188, 210–11, 213, 215, 224 as tradition, 1–15, 16, 18–21
addiction, 20, 147–53, 159–66, 209 philosophy in, 17
Alsberg, Paul, 19, 70–2, 73 philosophy of, 17, 185
animality, 28, 46 physical, 9
animals, 38, 42, 62, 81, 134–5, 137 structural, 141, 145
distinction between humans and transcendental pragmatic, 230–1,
non-human, 11, 18, 21, 29, 237–8, 240, 242–4,
36–43, 47, 52–3, 56–8, 60–2, 249–50
66, 71–9, 82, 90, 94–104, 123, see also naturalism, quasi-
128, 137, 140–1, 152–4, 157, transcendental; pragmatism;
172–82, 183, 194–7, 204–13, transcendental
215, 221–3 see also human nature; reduction,
distinction between plants and, 11, anthropological
94, 123, 125–6, 128, 140–1 anthropomorphism, 36
humans as not-yet-determined anti-humanism, 67, 102
(Nietzsche), 12, 15, 41, 46, 55 see also post-human
humans as sick, 45 ape, see primate
see also dis-animalization; life,
animal; primate Bergson, Henri, 3, 11, 117
anthropo-biological, 32–6, 41, 61, 62 Besonnenheit, 37–8, 46, 172
anthropocentrism, 13, 15, 36, 41, biological, see biology
68–9 biologism, 6, 58, 59
anthropological ground-laws biology, 2–3, 6, 9, 10–12, 14, 20–2,
(Plessner), 138–40, 187 28, 36, 38–47, 50, 52, 56–64,
anthropology 69–79, 97, 104, 121–2,
biological, 9, 57, 70 125, 129, 132–4, 141–5,
cultural, 9, 20, 109, 121, 131 147–9, 152–63, 185–91,
discipline of, 15, 27–8, 35–7, 41, 90, 194, 209–10, 213, 219–27,
113–15, 140, 141, 144 231, 235
empirical, 10, 71 philosophy of, 122, 155
evolutionary, 74, 82, 175, 185 see also anthropo-biological;
paleo-, 74, 220 anthropology, biological;
phenomenological, 68 biologism; ethnobiology;
philosophical, 1–22, 27–8, 36–47, evolution; life sciences;
49–58, 64–5, 67–77, 79–85, natural selection; reduction;
88–9, 95, 109, 111, 113–15, sociobiology
253
254 Index
Blumenberg, Hans, 7, 19, 66–91, 158, of God, 50

172, 174, 181 see also finitude; life, death and
body, 10–12, 40, 44, 46, 54, 56–7, 72, deficiency, 12, 19, 20, 21, 38, 56, 57,
74–5, 81, 86, 105, 107–8, 116, 62–4, 69–70, 153–5, 157, 172,
118, 123, 125, 127, 130, 132, 174, 179–80
136, 138–9, 142, 144, 164, 168, see also Mängelwesen
207, 209, 211–12, 215–17, 222, deficient being, see Mängelwesen
231 DeMul, Jos, 2, 7
living, 10–11, 105, 123, 125, 130, detachment, 19, 20–1, 30–1, 35–7,
132, 188, 207, 209, 212, 215, 39–40, 43, 73, 116, 118,
216–17 155–65, 171–82
physical Körper, 10, 136, 207, see also Moss, Lenny
216–17 dis-animalization, 52–3
Bourdieu, Pierre, 20, 131, 134–5 DNA, see genetics
brain, 69, 72, 79, 83–5, 97, 103, 137, Donald, Merlin, 76, 83–5, 157, 179
144, 154–6, 175, 191–3, 215, 234
see also mind; neuroscience embodiment, see body
empirical, 1–3, 10, 13–15, 38, 40, 45,
Cassirer, Ernst, 5, 71, 74–6, 84, 87, 71, 110, 113, 115, 130, 150,
99–102, 104, 106–9, 112, 152–3, 155, 162, 175–7, 183,
116–17, 220, 224, 225 185, 191, 193, 202, 209–10,
compensation, 39, 57, 63–4, 67, 70–2, 212, 222, 224–7, 232–5, 237,
78, 80, 116, 147–8, 152–3, 157, 241–2, 249
160–5, 181 empiricism, 13, 99–100, 117, 184, 212
consolation, 19, 66–7, 71, 75–7, environment, 8, 10–12, 20, 37–40,
79–91, 181 42–4, 47, 56–7, 63, 72, 73, 78,
contingency, 8, 13, 19, 21, 60, 64, 66, 83, 87, 89, 91, 107–8, 113, 115,
69–73, 75, 78–9, 84, 86–90, 118, 126, 135, 138, 142–5, 152,
133–4, 177, 246 155–7, 177, 186–8, 191, 198,
culturalism, 22, 238, 242–3 205–11, 223–5
culture, 5, 9, 12, 14–15, 19, 21–2, 39, social, 150, 191, 208–11, 214–15
41, 53–5, 57–8, 62, 64, 68–70, world and, 11, 39, 47, 186–7
72, 74–6, 78–9, 84, 87–90, 101, epigenetics, see genetics
109, 115, 116, 122, 123, 126, ethics, 13, 16–17, 19, 33, 66–7, 82, 84,
128–9, 134, 135, 138–42, 145, 85–9, 102, 106, 109, 111, 158,
148, 152–3, 157–64, 166, 177, 232, 235–6, 240, 243, 248,
183–91, 194, 196–210, 212–15, 249, 250
219–27, 235, 238, 239, 240, 244 see also normativity; norms
see also anthropology, cultural; ethnobiology, 128
culturalism; evolution, cultural; evolution, 12, 14, 21, 67, 71–5, 78–9,
Geist 82–5, 90–1, 98, 102, 105, 118,
Cykowski, Beth, 18, 27–47 142–5, 153–7, 160–1, 163, 178–9,
186, 188, 190, 196–7, 207, 209,
Darwin, Charles, 3, 61, 63, 71, 74, 94, 214, 216, 220, 223–5, 227
97, 98, 144, 153, 220 cultural, 186, 188, 197, 209, 214,
Darwinian, see Darwin, Charles 216, 220, 225
Davis, Scott, 12, 19–20, 119, 121–45 see also anthropology; biology;
death, 11, 19, 22, 134, 141, 148, 229–52 Darwin, Charles, evolutionism;
being-towards (Heidegger), 68–70, natural selection
229–30, 231, 236 evolutionism, 59
Index 255
finitude, 5, 22, 28, 31, 46, 68–9, institutions, 12, 13, 17, 19–20, 54,
82, 87, 182, 229, 230, 234–7, 57–8, 61, 71, 74–6, 80–1, 85,
241–5, 247–8, 250–1 88–9, 118, 148, 157–64, 185,
Fischer, Joachim, 2, 4, 5, 10–11, 187–8, 197, 221
152–3, 157 intentionality, 17, 68, 139–40, 178, 183,
185–91, 193, 196–7, 199, 201–4,
Gehlen, Arnold, 1, 3, 5–15, 18–20, 206, 208–13, 216, 221–3, 227
37–8, 40–1, 44–6, 49–51, 55–65, irrationality, 165–6
69–72, 73, 81, 109, 147–9, see also reason
152–64, 172, 174, 180–1
Geist, 11, 50, 57, 104–7, 138, 152, 184, Joas, Hans, 6, 7, 71, 148, 214
193–4, 202–6, 210
see also culture; life, spirit and; Kant, Immanuel, 4, 5, 16–17, 50, 51,
mind 66–7, 70, 74, 85–7, 117, 189,
genetics, 22, 73, 83, 85, 90, 110, 220, 224, 225–7, 230, 239, 245
112–14, 143–4, 153, 155–6, Kantian, 13–14, 22, 86, 139, 225–6,
184, 186, 190–3, 196, 205, 220, 230, 234, 244, 245
223–5, 227 see also post-Kantian
Krüger, Hans-Peter, 2, 5, 7, 11, 12, 21,
Habermas, Jürgen, 216 119, 130, 146, 183–217
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 3, 11,
14, 21, 50, 51, 172, 175, 180, lack, 18, 30–1, 37–40, 56, 61, 62, 69, 71,
182, 220, 225 72, 76, 79, 90, 107–8, 151, 154,
Heidegger, Martin, 5, 17, 18, 19, 21, 157, 158, 161–4, 172–3, 178,
27–38, 41–7, 66, 68–70, 71, 75, 202, 206, 208, 222, 236, 243
82, 134, 176–7, 182, 229–31, see also absence; deficiency
234, 241, 246 language, 19, 21, 37–8, 43, 46, 61, 62,
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 4, 37–9, 70, 71, 75, 83–4, 103, 111–12,
44–6, 85, 172, 220 114–15, 116, 132, 140, 145,
Honenberger, Phillip, 1–22, 94–119, 156, 158, 177–8, 180–1, 184–6,
183, 251 188, 192–6, 200–4, 207–8, 212,
Honneth, Axel, 6, 7, 71, 182 213, 220–3, 227, 240
Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer, 82–3, 85, 90–1, German and English sources, 4, 5, 7
178–80 philosophy of, 16, 230, 234
human nature, 7, 15–16, 51, 55, Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 20, 121, 124,
59–61, 63, 64, 67, 70, 75, 85, 129, 131, 140, 142, 145
88, 149, 152, 226, 229, 233, 238 life, 1–3, 22, 39, 44, 73, 96, 116,
essential, 16, 38, 50–1, 67, 70, 73, 121–45, 158, 171, 174, 175,
75, 85, 238 177, 182, 188, 194, 243, 248–9
Husserl, Edmund Gustav, 3, 68, 124, animal, 53, 56, 223
189, 224, 230, 234 see also animals
attachment and, 83
instincts, 56, 60–1, 72, 104, 157, 163, conditions of, 62, 64, 74, 86, 89
175–6, 181, 205, 226 death and, 141, 234, 236, 238–40,
deficiency, lack, poverty, or reduc- 245–7
tion of, 37–9, 56–7, 60–1, 71, see also death
152–7, 161, 175, 181 form of, 10–12, 18, 21, 29, 56–7,
replacement of, 61, 160 61–2, 78, 106, 138, 140, 158,
retarded, 45–7 174, 183–4, 191–2, 207, 211, 222
social, 175–6, 181 the good, 229
256 Index
life – continued mental health and illness, 147, 150, 232

human, 52–3, 58-60, 64, 86, 128, Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 109,
134, 140–1, 147–8, 233, 244 116–17, 207
and ethics, 88 mind, 9–11, 20, 81–4, 95, 107, 126,
and torture, 81 129, 138–9, 142, 152, 158,
inner, 10, 40, 59–62 160–1, 175, 177, 183–91,
leading of a, 9, 88, 140, 185, 193–4, 196–7, 201–6, 208,
189, 244 210, 212–14, 216, 219, 223,
living of, 9, 122 233, 239
meaning in, 20, 151, 164–5, 236, extended, 20, 144
238–40, 241, 245–7 philosophy of, 16–17, 57, 107,
organic, 3, 10–12, 106, 118 111, 223
see also life, animal; life, form of theory of, 197, 202, 212–13, 216
philosophy of, 131 see also Geist; mind; mental health
promotion of, 68, 72 and illness
social, 9, 57, 61–2, 163, 209 modern humans, 82–4, 175, 179, 186,
spirit [Geist] and, 35–6, 39–41, 190, 192
43–5, 47, 104–5, 194 modernity, 1, 53, 69–71, 85–7, 115,
striving for, 84 158–9, 214–15
transcendental, 234 emotional, 180
see also body, living; living thing; science in, 29, 100, 109, 245
survival society in, 58–9, 159, 163, 214–15
life cycle, 129, 137, 211 thought in, 9, 14, 15, 19, 21,
life enhancement, 55, 61 32, 220
life experience, 189, 236 see also modern humans;
life processes, 125–9, 135, 187 modernization
life roles, 164–5 modernization, 158, 163, 181
life sciences, 122–3, 127–9, 132–7 Moss, Lenny, 7, 11, 15, 19–22, 73,
see also biology 95, 115–18, 153, 155–8, 160–2,
lifetime and worldtime, 88 171–82
lifeworld, 70–1, 75–7, 85, 88, 134, myth, 19, 35, 67, 69, 74–9, 84,
144, 160, 243 86–8, 107, 109, 123, 124,
linguistic, see language 141, 181, 239
lived body, see body, living
living thing, 11, 12, 27–9, 42–3, narrative, 19–20, 77, 85, 88, 105,
46–7, 52, 56, 59–60, 62–3, 75, 121–3, 132–6, 140–5, 159,
77, 98, 103, 121–2, 125, 127, 200–3, 207
129, 130–2, 134, 136–7, 143, natural science, 2, 13, 73, 85, 99, 106,
155, 174, 188, 191, 196, 112, 123, 141, 184–5, 189,
198, 248 225, 227
living towards death, see death, being- see also biology; life sciences
towards (Heidegger) natural selection, 60–1, 63, 82, 90,
97–8, 143, 153
Mängelwesen, 12, 20, 56, 69–70, 76, naturalism, 1–3, 7, 9, 15, 19–22, 52,
153, 174–5 58, 67, 94–102, 104, 109–15,
see also deficiency 141, 171, 181, 183, 185,
Margolis, Joseph, 21–2, 119, 219–27 189, 214, 233–5, 238,
Mead, George Herbert, 186, 202, 209, 242–4, 247, 250
211, 216, 220 quasi-transcendental, 183, 189, 214
Index 257
naturalization, 18, 41, 50–5, 58, 59, phenomenology, 3, 8, 10, 12, 19, 68,
64, 230–1, 233–4, 238, 240, 105, 117, 126, 129, 136, 149,
243–4, 249–50 175–6, 182, 212, 223, 230,
nature, 1–12, 18, 21, 29–46, 52, 54, 234, 249
56, 59, 67–8, 70, 75, 85, 94, see also anthropology,
98–102, 106, 111, 113, 115–16, phenomenological
118, 122, 125, 132, 138, 141, philosophical anthropology, see
142, 152–3, 155, 157–8, 161, anthropology, philosophical
171–7, 180–1, 184, 188–9, 191, philosophy of life, see life, philosophy of
194, 214, 219, 222, 239 philosophy of mind, see mind,
human place in, 5, 18, 21, 31–2, philosophy of
35–6, 41, 43–4, 46, 49, 52, 56, philosophy of nature, see nature,
70, 71, 73, 85, 94–102, 109, 115, philosophy of
118, 122, 157, 171–2, 180–1 physis, 29–33, 35, 41, 43–4, 47
nurture and, 54, 113, 142 Pihlström, Sami, 2, 15, 17, 22, 119,
philosophy of, 13, 17, 33, 141, 229–51
171, 179 Plessner, Helmuth, 1, 3, 4–8, 8–15, 18,
see also human nature; naturalism; 19–20, 21–2, 28, 49–50, 70, 72,
naturalization; physis; second 95, 109, 115–19, 121–45, 172,
nature 183, 184, 187–95, 204–7, 209–12
Naturphilosophie, see nature, politics, 6–7, 9, 15, 53, 116, 190, 232,
philosophy of 235, 249
nazism, 6, 71, 181 positionality, 122, 124, 125, 127–9,
neuroscience, 83, 110, 153, 155–6, 132, 135–7, 140, 142
181, 191–3, 232 centric, 126, 139, 187–8, 192, 207,
see also brain 209, 211, 215
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 4, 12, 18–19, 35, ex-centric, 12, 20, 118, 126–7,
45, 49–65, 88, 109, 116, 172, 139, 141–2, 187, 191–2, 207,
180–1 211–12, 215
normative scale of action, 148, 152, post-human, 15
160–6 see also anti-humanism
normativity, 2, 20, 61, 67, 71, 118, post-Kantian, 3, 116, 226, 234
148, 152, 158, 160–6, 171, pragmatism, 3, 5, 8, 22, 189, 220,
174–5, 177, 180–2, 184, 197, 225–6, 229–40
229, 238–9 primate, 12, 21, 28, 40, 41, 66, 82–3,
norms, 11, 61, 118, 158–64, 171, 90, 95–8, 101, 154, 175, 177–9,
174–5, 177, 180, 197 184–8, 190, 191, 193–7, 203,
205, 209–14, 220–1
Pavesich, Vida, 7, 11, 19, 66–91, 157, primatology, see primate
172, 181
personal identity, 151, 161, 232, rationality, see reason
234, 247 reason, 19, 46, 68–70, 76, 78, 88, 117,
persons, 5, 11, 54, 107, 126, 138, 159, 159, 160, 176, 224–6
162–3, 187, 197, 214, 215, 217, see also irrationality
220–2, 226–7 reduction, 11–12, 14, 22, 33, 42, 44,
first-, second-, and third-, 2, 145, 50, 52, 67–8, 87, 102, 105,
186, 199, 209, 216–17, 230, 113–14, 152, 182, 185, 189,
234, 236, 240–1, 243, 246, 214, 221–4, 227, 232, 234–5,
248, 250 241, 242–3, 249
258 Index
reduction – continued structural analysis, 3, 19–20, 49–50,

instinctual, see instincts, reduction of 122–7, 129–32, 141–2
relief [Entlastung], 12, 58, 82 survival, 18, 28, 57–8, 61–4, 69, 72,
77–9, 83–4, 90, 143, 153, 157,
Schacht, Richard, 7, 9, 12, 15, 18, 176, 232, 246–8
49–65, 172, 180
Scheler, Max, 1, 3, 4–15, 19, 28, Tomasello, Michael, 21, 157, 177–8,
34–40, 43–5, 49, 68, 71, 72, 85, 183–217
95, 102–10, 112, 116–17, 155, transcendental, 1, 3, 14, 15, 17, 22,
172, 187, 205–7, 209 68, 117, 183, 189, 214, 226–7,
second nature, 74, 139, 221–2 229–31, 233–7, 239–50
social, 2, 6, 7, 8, 11, 12, 14, 17, 18, see also anthropology, transcen-
20–1, 53–5, 57–64, 70–1, 74–5, dental pragmatic; naturalism,
79, 81, 83, 86, 90–1, 118, 129, quasi-transcendental
139, 141, 145, 148–53, 156–9,
161, 163, 175–82, 183–91, Uexküll, Jakob von, 3, 38, 42–4, 153
194–7, 202–11, 214–16, 221,
232, 235, 238, 239, 240, 244 vulnerability, 19, 44, 57, 63, 66, 69,
see also modernity, society in; social 71, 73, 76–8, 79–81, 84, 86, 88,
sciences; society; sociology 90, 148, 154, 157–8, 163, 181,
social sciences, 2, 7, 13, 132, 229, 231, 247, 249
231–2
social work, 149 Wasmuth, Sally, 12, 20, 147–66
society, 58–9 141, 145, 163, 232, 235 West-Eberhard, Mary Jane, 20, 73,
see also modernity, society in 142–4
sociobiology, 61 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 116, 121–2,
sociology, 6, 9–10, 109, 134, 149, 232 124, 129, 145, 230–1, 234,
see also social; social sciences; 239–40, 243–6, 248
sociobiology world and environment, see
spirit, 9, 11, 35–6, 39–41, 43, 45–7, 54, environment, world and
59, 62, 104–5, 107, 152 world-openness, 39–40, 43, 46–7, 56,
see also Geist; life, spirit and; 63, 71, 73, 105–6, 155, 157,
mind 161, 172, 191

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Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology

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Edited by Phillip Honenberger

Notes on Contributors viii

1 In Pursuit of Something ‘Essential’ about Man: Heidegger and

2 Gehlen, Nietzsche, and the Project of a Philosophical

3 Hans Blumenberg: Philosophical Anthropology and the

4 Naturalism, Pluralism, and the Human Place in the Worlds 94

5 Plessner’s Conceptual Investigations of ‘Life’:

6 Gehlen’s Philosophical Anthropology: Contemporary

7 The Hybrid Hominin: A Renewed Point of Departure for

8 Intentionality and Mentality as Explanans and as Explanandum:

9 Biology and Culture 219

10 The Mortal Self: Toward a Transcendental-Pragmatic

The editor would like to thank three professional organizations for

Beth Cykowski is a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford. Her

Phillip Honenberger is Program Coordinator and a Fellow-In-Residence

Hans-Peter Krüger is the Chair for Political Philosophy and

philosophies of public communication. He has held fellowships at the

Joseph Margolis is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy at Temple

Lenny Moss holds a doctorate in both Comparative Biochemistry and

Vida Pavesich holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of

Sami Pihlström is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University

Richard Schacht is Professor of Philosophy and Jubilee Professor of

Sally Wasmuth is an associated health research fellow at Richard

Naturalism and philosophical anthropology: nature,

Philosophical anthropology as tradition

History of the tradition

philosophy by 1929, if not sooner. By that time, for instance, Heidegger

that philosophical anthropology was a delimitable and distinct tradi-

discussed philosophical anthropology and/or made positive use of the

Defining aims of the tradition

(a) The unity of the human being

[W]e already have a discipline called “anthropology,” with both phys-

Scheler’s, Plessner’s, and Gehlen’s articulations of this aim differ from

(b) The human being within continua of being

[F]or Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen the comparison between plants,

Similar projects have more recently been undertaken by philosophers

(c) Conditions of the epistemic and practical subject

questions. This significance derives from the recognition of at least a

Philosophical anthropology belongs to the history of the crisis

This aim is best appreciated by reflection on the state of philosophy at

and become subtler. Neo-Kantianism thus pursued an expanded ‘crit-

later notion of the ‘homo absconditus’ (Plessner, 1969), and Gehlen’s

Philosophical anthropology as field: an attempt at a

Those seeking to make contributions to philosophical anthropology as a

The field of philosophy ... may be reduced to the following questions:

The first question is answered by metaphysics, the second by morals,

I would further argue that the field of philosophical anthropology

hold (compare Plessner, 1969), it is plausible that these assumptions and

Summary of the chapters

Chapters 1–5 approach figures or texts within the tradition of philosoph-

Nietzsche resting his analysis rather on the ‘will to power’. Likewise,

itself as an icon of self-reference (with self-reference also being one of

lessons for contemporary inquires, but rather suggests a supplement to

arguing that the logics of standard biological disciplines – such as

Haeffner, G. (1989) [1982] The Human Situation: A Philosophical Anthropology,

Paveisch, V. (2008) ‘Hans Blumenberg’s Philosophical Anthropology: After

Strydom, P. (2013) ‘Mediation through Cognitive Dynamics: Philosophical

The question of the degree to which Heidegger can be counted as an

According to Heidegger, a consistent and fatal characteristic of all

The ancient conception of the human’s place in physis:

Do we know what is ‘essential’ about man? Have we ever known?