The first work to offer a comprehensive pragmatist anthropology focusing on sensibility, habits, and human experience as contingently yet irreversibly enlanguaged.

Philosophical anthropology aims to discover what makes us human, but it has produced accounts that exclude some members of our species. It relies often on a non-naturalistic “philosophy of consciousness” and locates humanity in the cognitive capacity to objectively represent things, to reason teleologically and use tools, to use symbols and language, or to be self-conscious and question existence. This work pursues an alternative, thoroughly naturalistic philosophical anthropology in the tradition of Arnold Gehlen. Combining Gehlen’s theory of our behaviorally-detached and (...) culturally-determined impulses with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s views on intersubjectivity, affect, sexuality, and social institutions, the present work locates the human within the unique structure of human feeling. This produces a truly inclusive account of “the human as the other” or Homo alter. The human is deeply and thoroughly dependent on affective, bodily, communicative bonds, in which others appear as sources of meaning, norms, pleasure, and approbation and disapprobation. This socio-biological account of the human makes institutionality central to our form of life but rejects any political anthropology that attempts to use human nature to prescribe a necessary form to institutions such as the home. Such a social and affective account of the human produces a novel approach to the affect of shame as the feeling of institutional rejection. Ultimately, this work uses philosophical anthropology to combat dehumanization. Our unique form of dependency on others and institutions is present, for example, in infants and the severely disabled who may not possess the forms of consciousness and cognition that traditionally are identified with being human. (shrink)

The article argues for the existence of an elective affinity between the systems theory of Niklas Luhmann and German philosophical anthropology, affinity that would bring to light a 'blind spot' of the functionalism of the equivalence that is placed in the antithesis of the so called anti humanism in Luhmann. The question asked by the German sociologist: which self-projection of man is behind the assumptions of functionalist thinking? He responded: the man as problem solver in a transcendental sense. As well (...) as in Goethe elective affinity of a 'new' theoretical content with pre-existing materials, in the case that concerns us, such pre-existing materials would have had a known address, so that the originality of Luhmann would be in a new composition of categories. The new luhmannian composition takes shape, at least in the following arguments: the distinction from man/environment to the distinction system/environment; the turn from contingency to double contingency; complexity and its reduction in German philosophy to complexity and its reduction in systems theory; from categories of self-reference and self-observation to the theory of the observer; the offset of the human and the world to the offset of society; the functionalism of the German philosophy to the functionalism of the equivalence. El artículo postula la existencia de una afinidad electiva entre la Teoría de Sistemas de Niklas Luhmann y la Antropología Filosófica Alemana , afinidad que traería a la luz un ‘punto ciego’ del funcionalismo de la equivalencia que se coloca en la antítesis del mentado antihumanismo luhmanniano. A la pregunta que el mismo sociólogo alemán se planteaba: ¿qué autoproyección del hombre está detrás de las suposiciones del pensamiento funcionalista?, se respondía: el hombre como solucionador de problemas en un sentido trascendental. Tesis antropológica central de la AFA. Así como en Goethe afinidad electiva dice de una ‘nueva composición’ teórica con materiales prexistentes, en el caso que nos ocupa, tales materiales preexistentes tendrían domicilio conocido, de modo que la originalidad de Luhmann estaría en una nueva composición de categorías de una tradición antropológica muy desarrollada en su época y país. La nueva composición luhmanniana toma forma, al menos, en los siguientes desplazamientos argumentales: de la distinción hombre/entorno a la distinción sistema/entorno; del giro a la contingencia al giro a la doble contingencia; de la complejidad y su reducción en la AFA a la complejidad y su reducción en la teoría de sistemas; de las categorías de autorreferencia y de autoobservación a la teoría del observador; del descentramiento de lo humano y del mundo al descentramiento de la sociedad; del funcionalismo de la AFA al funcionalismo de la equivalencia. (shrink)

Plessner not only formulates a theory of positionality here but also a principle of how to construct this theory with respect to empirical research, a principle he calls the “deduction of the categories of life”. This is described in the literature as “reflexive deduction”. With reference to Plessner’s methodology of theory construction I unfold a new understanding of his theory of the shared world. At present, there are two understandings of the shared world. The traditional understanding of the shared world (...) is primarily concerned with relativizing particular individual selves, whose boundedness to their own standpoint is devalued by the we-form. I call this SWU-1. SWU-1 is not developed in accordance with the principle of reflexive deduction. The second understanding of the shared world, on the other hand, is developed, in accordance with that principle, as a reflexive turning upon the factual state of existing in relationships of touch. This leads to a different understanding of the shared world, which I call SWU-2, or the social undecidedness relation. Such an understanding of the shared world forces us to also reconsider our understanding of the inner and outer worlds. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the links between Jakob von Uexküll’s theoretical biology and Adolf Portmann’s conception of organic life. Its main purpose is to show that Uexküll and Portmann not only share a view of the living being as an autonomous and holistically organized entity, but also base this view on the seminal idea of the subjectivity of the organism. In other words, the respective holistic principles securing the autonomy of the living being—the Bauplan, for Uexküll; the Innerlichkeit, for Portmann—share (...) an essentially subjective character. Such principles, indeed, express themselves in a centrally directed and formative way; moreover, in organisms endowed with a central nervous system, they also extend their influence on the overt behavioral sphere and on the organism’s capacity to give meaning to the surrounding reality. The conclusion of the article will show how, though starting from this common background, the two authors develop divergent positions on the issue of the anthropological difference. If Portmann emphasizes the special status of the relationship between the human animal and the world, Uexküll tends to see a substantial continuity in the biosemiotic processes through which human and non-human animals constitute their species-specific worlds of experience. (shrink)

In 1928, a German zoologist and philosopher named Helmuth Plessner published a book titled Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie. Almost a 100 years later, Jos de Mul has edited a collection of 26 new essays on Plessner’s text, titled Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: Perspectives and Prospects. The volume offers a variety of advanced discussions of its theme. In this review essay of de Mul’s collection, I provide a critical overview of the contents of the (...) new volume and some speculations on the possible motives and future directions of the current “Plessner renaissance.”. (shrink)

Axel Honneth and Hans Joas claim that Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is problematically ‘solipsistic’ insofar as it fails to appreciate the ways in which human persons or selves are brought into being and given their characteristic powers of reflection and action by social processes. Here I review the main argument of Plessner’s Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie with this criticism in mind, giving special attention to Plessner’s accounts of organic being, personhood, language, sociality, (...) and historicity in that text. I argue that Honneth and Joas’s criticisms understate the extent to which Plessner takes sociality to be a constitutive condition of human forms of life within the structure he calls ‘ex-centric positionality’. This reading of Plessner also provides resources for answering a more common criticism of his philosophical anthropology – namely, that it is problematically ‘essentialist’, paying insufficient heed t.. (shrink)

This essay argues that through a new and radical relationship with digital technologies that are oriented towards networking and automaticity, humans have become estranged from what philosopher Arnold Gehlen termed the ‘circle of action’ that expressed our ancient adaptation to tool use and constituted the basis for our capacity for reflective consciousness. The objectification of the material and analogue relationship that enabled humans to ‘act’ upon the world and to construct the basis for our collective endeavours, this paper shows, is (...) beginning to redirect the social orientation that tool use enabled, back to a form of individualism I term a ‘post-modern vanity’. Computer-driven automation on a networked and global scale is engendering a new illusion regarding our relationship with technology. Greek philosophy, later religion, and then the Enlightenment all saw our relation to technology as evidence of either our ‘specialness’ or our inherent ‘mastery over nature’. These perspectives resulted in our acquiring a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ wherein for the individual life had meaning and was ontologically tolerable—we thought ourselves to be of a realm beyond raw nature. Automation, however, to an unprecedented degree, objectifies and exteriorizes the processes of technology use, alienating the individual from the ‘circle of action’. This process is throwing us back to another form of what this essay terms a ‘reasoned self-delusion’ where we increasingly believe that we no longer need each other so much. The cult of computer efficiency and the virtual sphere of the network that it has spawned, I argue, is a largely barren sphere of radical individualism, a post-modern vanity, where we exist at a borderland closer to nature and to the animals than we have been for thousands of years. (shrink)