POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY

Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology
and
Existential Philosophy

General Editor Anthony J. Steinbock

POLITICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY

Helmuth Plessner

Translated from the German by Nils F. Schott

Edited and with an introduction by Heike Delitz

and Robert Seyfert

Epilogue by Joachim Fischer

Northwestern University Press

Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu

English translation copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Pub-

lished 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Originally published in German
in 1931 under the title Macht und menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie
der geschichtlichen Weltansicht. This translation is based on the edition published
as vol. 5 of Helmuth Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften. Copyright © 1981 Suhrkamp
Verlag Frankfurt am Main. All rights reserved by and controlled through
Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.

Support for the publication of this book was provided by the Helmuth Plessner
Gesellschaft and the Groninger Helmuth Plessner Fund.

Printed in the United States of America

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data

Names: Plessner, Helmuth, 1892–­1985, author. | Schott, Nils F., translator. |

Delitz, Heike, editor, writer of introduction. | Seyfert, Robert, editor, writer of
introduction. | Fischer, Joachim, 1951– writer of afterword.
Title: Political anthropology / Helmuth Plessner ; translated from the Ger-
man by Nils F. Schott ; edited and with an introduction by Heike Delitz and
Robert Seyfert ; epilogue by Joachim Fischer.
Other titles: Macht und menschliche Natur. English | Northwestern University
studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Series:
Northwestern University studies in phenomenology and existential philos-
ophy | “Originally published in German in 1931 under the title Macht und
menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen
Weltansicht.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020169 | ISBN 9780810138001 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780810138018 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810138025 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social sciences) | Political anthropology. | Radicalism.
Classification: LCC JC330 .P55613 2018 | DDC 320.0113—dc23
LC record available at https://​lccn.loc​.gov/​2018020169
 Contents

Introduction vii
Heike Delitz and Robert Seyfert

Political Anthropology
Helmuth Plessner

The Purpose of This Book 3

1 The Naturalistic Conception of Anthropology

and Its Political Ambiguity 9

The Path to Political Anthropology

2 The Universal Conception of Political Anthropology

with Regard to the Human as the Historical Subject
of Attribution of Its World 13

3 Should Universal Anthropology Proceed Empirically

or A Priori? 17

4 Two Possible A Priori Procedures 21

5 The New Possibility of Combining the A Priori and

Empirical Views according to the Principle of the
Human’s Unfathomability 25

6 Excursus: Dilthey’s Idea of a Philosophy of Life 31

7 The Principle of Unfathomability, or The Principle of

Open Questions 39

8 The Human as Power 47

9 The Exposure of the Human 53

v
10 Excursus: Why It Is Significant for the Question of
Power That the Primacy of Philosophy or Anthropology
Is Undecidable 61

11 The Powerlessness and Predictability of the Human 77

12 The Human Is Tied to a People 83

Epilogue: Political Anthropology: Plessner’s Fascinating

Voice from Weimar 89
Joachim Fischer

Notes 111

Glossary 123

Index of Names 129

 Introduction
Heike Delitz and Robert Seyfert

The Topic

Among German-language theories of the political, Helmuth Plessner’s

difficult, profound, and fraught Political Anthropology occupies a singular
place. Its fraught elements include Plessner’s affirmative (if not whole-
sale) adoption of Carl Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, the idea of a
“nationality” of the human,1 the thesis of an anthropologically necessary
struggle for “power,” and the sense of a German-European historical
mission. With Schmitt, Plessner shares a political realism; with Hannah
Arendt he shares a negative anthropology that emphasizes the undefin-
ability of the human and, resulting from it, a theory of the public. As in
his 1924 Limits of Community, Plessner in Political Anthropology thinks of
politics as a rule-based game, an institutional curbing of political vio-
lence, and he thinks the political as an essential sphere of all human life.
Using the terms employed in current debates, the book and its key con-
cept of “unfathomability” may be seen as a variant of “post-foundational
political thought.”2 Plessner assumes that humanity and human beings
are hidden from themselves. This concealment necessarily requires both
individual personality and particular cultures to close onto themselves
and requires all individuals and groups to differentiate others as others. A
first, central, post-foundational element is Plessner’s principle of “a lack
of a beginning” (44), familiar to readers of Derrida, say, or Deleuze and
Guattari. Societies or cultures do not possess an “extra-historical, extra-
temporal absolute position” (44) but are pure cultures of immanence. In
Plessner’s political anthropology, the delimitation of each cultural sphere
against an outside, moreover, plays as significant a role as it does in the
hegemony theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose political
philosophy is influenced by Carl Schmitt. Such an approach situates the
immanent definition of cultures always also in a differentiation from a
“constitutive outside.” As we will see, however, there are limits to such
parallels with deconstructivist approaches, namely insofar as the latter
make it possible to think only a negative definition of identities instead
of a positive, creative, institutive definition.3 Finally, the concept of un-
viii
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

fathomability also points to a thoroughly historical anthropology that

anticipates post-structuralist thought.
Published in 1931, Plessner’s Political Anthropology continues to stim-
ulate debate. This is true not only for theories of society or collective
identity, of becoming a “people.” It is also true for debates in social phi-
losophy about the relative or universal nature of human rights, for dis-
cussions in political philosophy of the concept of democratic society and
the weakness of liberal political theory, for assessments of the anthropo-
logical necessity of the political, and generally for philosophical claims
about the human.
“As with others, and with Carl Schmitt above all, Plessner wants to
remedy the sorry state of the estrangement of politics from the spirit
by attempting to show the mutual interpenetration of philosophy and
politics.”4 This complex work—Eric Voegelin goes on to admit that he
“cannot offer an adequate critique of this brilliant and very condensed
presentation”5 — is a direct continuation of Plessner’s first major work,
The Levels of the Organic and the Human of 1928. And indeed, Political An-
thropology sets in with the concept of “excentric positionality” elaborated
in the earlier book. “Excentric positionality” is opposed to the “centric”
or instinctual positionality of animals and the “open” positionality of
plants and names the specific relationship of humans with their environ-
ment and their world; in other words, the specifically human way of liv-
ing and experiencing. In Levels of the Organic, Plessner had developed the
central aspects of such an “excentric,” decentered life that distances itself
from itself against the background of a philosophy of nature and of life
(of the organic). In Political Anthropology, he spells out its radical historic-
ity. Because humans are excentric, not bound by instinct, they are highly
variable historically and culturally or, in other terms, unfathomable to
themselves: the human is homo absconditus.6 The essence of the human is
not fixed. Instead, this life only ever settles preliminarily and imaginarily.
Rather than privileging one characteristic or another, absolutizing one as-
pect or another in claims about the human, all anthropologies must thus
remain “open,” they must consider themselves “bound” by the openness
of the question of what the human is.
Binding unfathomability as a formula for human life thus joins the
paradoxical definitions from the concluding chapter of Levels of the Or-
ganic, where Plessner, following the definition of the forms of vegetal and
animal life, had articulated specifically human life in terms of its “natural
artificiality,” “mediated immediacy,” and “utopian standpoint.” Yet by
the same token, we might also say that Political Anthropology constitutes
a complement to the philosophical anthropology of 1928 by developing a
concept of the human that is not obtained from a philosophical biology
 ix
I N T R O D UCT I O N

(that is, by comparing forms of the living) but on the contrary by look-
ing at the historical and cultural diversity of human life alone—which
also includes recognizing oneself to be human in relation to animals or
God, for example. Instead of grounding anthropology exclusively in a
philosophy of organic life, Plessner now also bases it on a philosophy of
historical and political life. Or, in yet another set of terms: while Levels of
the Organic foregrounded the human as subject and object of nature and
(organic) life, the specific, singular relation of the human to itself (the
awareness not just of being a body but of “having” a body, of being able
to objectivize it), Political Anthropology thematizes the human as subject
and object of culture. At its core, “excentric positionality” now constitutes
the originary foundation of anthropology, philosophy (of life), and poli-
tics equally (73–74). Because the human confronts itself excentrically, it
must always make itself into something— endow itself with an identity,
settle. This is true on the individual as well as, and above all, the cultural
level. To make this point, Plessner discusses the philosophy of Wilhelm
Dilthey (as well as that of Georg Misch).7 The task Plessner has set himself
is to develop a philosophy of the political, a theory of political existence,
from the radical historicity of the human. The human, society, is always
also a differentiation from the other. For Plessner, this follows from the
very principle of unfathomability, which not only allows the self to en-
counter an other (for breaking out of the self) but the very “possibility of
understanding the human” (84). In the analogous space of the political,
it refers to the ethnically other, to other cultural spheres. Every identity
implies difference and therefore implies the political in the sense of de-
fining what is one’s own in delimiting it from what is foreign.
Political Anthropology thus develops, alongside its theory of the
political, a political ethics as well. Each concrete politics— the question
of how one fashions oneself and how one treats others— always depends
on an anthropology, on the contemporary philosophical (or, generally,
cultural) definition of the human. The political relation also permeates
all social relations. For Plessner, besides international relations, relations
of neighborship in the literal sense are “political,” too. With Schmitt and
against him, Plessner here advocates an ethics or a civilizing of politics.
The diversity of human possibilities results from excentric positionality
and thus from the unfathomability of human life. This diversity has a cor-
relate in the competition for political existence, in contest, in striving for
success. The political means a relationship of power. Yet from excentric
positionality also follows powerlessness and thus the possibility of hubris,
crime, and blunders.8 Human life remains tied to the body and to one’s
history. Given the potential seriousness of the political, namely violence
done to organic and mortal living beings, politics, in modern, liberal
x
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

societies, must curb itself. This, for Plessner, is the function of the state
and of the law.
In other words, Plessner’s concept of the political, which adopts but
at the same time formalizes Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction, results
from his definition of human life as an “and-connection” (81) of power
and powerlessness (excentricity and positionality). The differentiation into
friend and enemy corresponds to the formal structure of the human, “ex-
centric positionality,” thanks to which humans in their own familiarity can
also always encounter themselves as foreign. The friend–enemy relation
is to be thought abstractly. It also concerns political-existential questions,
but it permeates all social relationships. In 1931, in the face of the loom-
ing catastrophe, Plessner urges a limitation of the intensity of the struggle
for power, and he urges a playful form of the political, democracy, which
turns the struggle into a competition, an election instead of a violent
campaign. Plessner thus seeks to derive the seriousness and the relativity
of the political from the simultaneity of power (in the sense of creative
ability and genuinely political power) and powerlessness, from the fact
that the human is creative, formative of world, and a physical “thing.”
Not least of all, Plessner’s anthropology and ethics seek to engage
with the philosophy that dominated contemporary debate, the philos-
ophy of Martin Heidegger.9 As a philosophy of the human (Dasein) that
despises the sphere of the public and political, Heidegger’s philosophy
is co-responsible for the Fate of the German Spirit at the End of Its Bourgeois
Period (as the original title of Plessner’s 1935 book, Belated Nation, has it).10
It is an apolitical thinking that turns out to be indifferent toward the usur-
pation of power and racist political ideologies. When moral philosophy,
and the study of art and culture, despise the political, it is no wonder
that politics attacks cultural life “from below” (87) and becomes racist,
for example. Against existentialism, Plessner also stresses the equal status
of all forms of being human, their historical, sociocultural relativity—
which acknowledgment of relativity is at the same time genuinely Euro-
pean. Plessner thus insists, on the one hand, on relativizing all values, on
“renouncing the supremacy” of one’s own system of values (47). On the
other hand, he stresses the concomitant binding quality that each cul-
ture has for itself and the achievement of European culture (in the sense
of humanism, liberalism, the peaceful struggle for power) that consists
in having reached this idea. Relativization must not lead to giving one-
self up. Relativization cannot stop at seemingly universally valid human
rights— that would be yet another “one-sided reduction,” a “monopoli-
zation of a specific, historically become human-kind” (54)— yet neither
does it relativize its own values: it legitimizes them in particular ways,
like other cultures. Nor can European culture view humanist values as
nonbinding (74).
 xi
I N T R O D UCT I O N

Context, Author, Work

Genesis, Intellectual Context, and Historical Background

Political Anthropology entertains close relationships with Plessner’s other
major works. It refers to Levels of the Organic; it continues the defense of
the principles of bourgeois civil society developed in The Limits of Commu-
nity; and it looks ahead, in content and structure (including the debate
with Mannheim), to Belated Nation.11
In providing the theoretical framework, Political Anthropology consti-
tutes the center of his work in social theory, which also includes The Limits
of Community and Belated Nation. With all three books, Plessner seeks to
endow the political with dignity, especially in Germany— opposing an
intellectual contempt for the political (Heidegger) as much as an “idol-
ization” of power (Schmitt).12 The context of the work’s genesis is thus,
on the one hand, the contemporary resonance of Heidegger’s existential
anthropology, which, focused on a philosophy of the subject, precisely
does not develop a positive concept of the political or the public. On the
other hand, where the competing systems of political ideas and their in-
terpretation are concerned, Plessner stands in a triangular relationship
with Eric Voegelin and Carl Schmitt.
Finally, the work is also contemporaneous with a virulent debate
about the sociological analysis of systems of thought, especially of polit-
ical and philosophical knowledge. The “debate about the sociology
of knowledge” in the Weimar Republic centrally concerned the thesis
that all knowledge is tied to social systems and is thus relative.13 Plessner
reproached the founder of the classical sociology of knowledge, Karl
Mannheim, for maintaining a covertly Marxist position, that is to say, a
position that pertained to the philosophy of history and was therefore not
radically historical.14 As he suggests in the opening pages, Plessner thus
conceives Political Anthropology and its demand to maintain the concep-
tion of the unfathomability of human life throughout as an answer to
Mannheim. Within the contemporary context, Plessner seeks to respond
as well to the suspicion of being ideological that this sociology of knowl-
edge casts on every political system. The political form Plessner defends
(bourgeois civil society in the sense of political liberalism, democracy,
and humanism) certainly has a political a priori of its own. In their origin
and in the way they imposed themselves, its guiding principles are politi-
cally interested, polemic concepts. Nonetheless, Plessner considers it to
be the duty of European intellectuals to maintain humanism and to share
the “conviction” that these principles remain “viable in the future” (47).
As for the political and intellectual context more broadly, the Wei-
mar Republic was in the process of drowning in the worldwide economic
xii
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

crisis and the civil war of ideologies (between the equally radical ideas
of community on the left and right Plessner had diagnosed in Limits of
Community). Yet its future still remained open; the republic had not yet
been dissolved. Plessner in this situation placed his hopes in a “civil com-
promise” in which agreement on European values would be reached.
Europe had experienced wars of religion and the First World War; in
the “German civil war, the real possibility of a second world war” already
announced itself, a war between (European) nation-states. Only empires
stood a chance “to survive a state of exception, i.e., Carl Schmitt’s crite-
rion for political sovereignty.” In that sense, Plessner was not just con-
cerned with a compromise, not just with cherishing European values in
the sense of a lowest common denominator; he sought actively to defend
them.15 This is true in particular with respect to the concept of the people.
Plessner seeks to demystify this concept— which in Political Anthropology
has a connotation so positive it puts off some readers— the way he had
sought in 1928 to demystify the concept of life and in 1924 the concept of
community. At precisely this point, in the age of the people or “the age of
the demos and its self-determination in a nation-state,” precisely in “an age
in which dictatorship has become a living power,” the task is to outline a
political philosophy that does not substantialize the “people.” The task is to find
an anthropological concept of the political or, in other words, “to under-
stand the human necessity of politics” (5).
The concrete occasion for Plessner’s writing Political Anthopology, in
a professional and personal situation severely impacted by accusations of
plagiarism,16 was, it seems, an invitation by the publisher Ernst von Hippel
to write a volume on “Political Anthropology” in the series Fachschriften
zur Politik und staatsbürgerlichen Erziehung (Technical Papers on Poli-
tics and Civic Education), specializing in politics and civic education.
Plessner himself wrote about the project that he was now (following the
Levels) attempting the “‘derivation’ of excentric positionality as a struc-
ture that opens up the political (the ‘historical’).”17

Helmuth Plessner: Life, Work, Reception

Having studied biology and philosophy, Plessner taught philosophy and
sociology in Cologne, Groningen, Göttingen, and at the New School in
New York City. With Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, Plessner is one of
the main authors of German philosophical anthropology understood
as a specific approach within the wider discipline of political anthropol-
ogy. Among contemporary authors, there are many parallels with the
work of Henri Bergson.18 With respect to organic life, however, Plessner
primarily takes up the philosophy of life elaborated by Hans Driesch
 xiii
I N T R O D UCT I O N

and Jakob von Uexküll. Their approach is to develop a philosophical

concept of the human from a theory of organic life by comparing plant,
animal, and human as well as ape and human.19 In Political Anthropology,
the peculiar structure of the environment-position or “boundary reali-
zation”20 of the human— humans’ excentric position toward themselves,
the excentering of the way they conduct their lives, “mediated immedi-
acy” and “natural artificiality”— is the foundation of the definition of the
human as a non- fixable, historically conditioned, and, simultaneously,
profoundly variable organism that time and again views itself differently
and makes itself different.
In his three books on social theory, Plessner develops a theory of
the political to correspond to this anthropology. In his 1924 The Limits
of Community, Plessner defends the Weimar Republic (a bourgeois lib-
eral, democratically institutionalized society) against the genuinely Ger-
man, radical “idea of community” coming from both the right and the
left.21 At a time when “the alternative between community and society . . .
stands at the center of public discussion, especially in Germany,”22 Pless-
ner defends the form of life of “society” or “civilization,” the form of the
political public, of distance, play, and tact. At a time when practically the
entire intellectual public, especially in Germany, turns its back on the
idea of (civil) “society,” Plessner on the contrary criticizes all ideas of
community as equally radical one-sided fixations that do not do justice
to the human, no matter whether they fixate on a shared concern with
reason (“ideal-based community”) or on shared “blood.”23

One can express the problem of a critique of social radicalism in the

following formula: Is it possible to eliminate force from an ideal social
life of humans? Is it possible to integrate without force, restraint and
artificiality the physical dimension of man’s being with his personality
as soul and spirit, considering that the physical dimension forces man
wherever he goes to employ means of force of the basest kind? Should
and may a human being, indeed as an extra-bodily person, make the
value of sincerity exclusively into a guiding principle? Should and may
the person, indeed as a being possessing soul and spirit, be direct over-
all? Is there not value in indirectness? Is it not possible that these values
are fulfilled only in a societal form of life— no matter how specially
formed— and never in a community?24

Exiled in Groningen in the Netherlands, Plessner in his 1935 Belated

Nation explains the political genealogy of the German concept of the
“people” and its substantialist, racist conception as a fateful effect of
the specifically German history of philosophy and nationhood, including
xiv
HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

the religious energies that nourished it. In the background of this Fate of
the German Mind at the End of Its Bourgeois Period— that is, its self-demise in
National Socialism—Plessner sees on the one hand a specifically German
Protestant (Lutheran) piety.25 Unlike the lighter, institutionally bound
faith of Catholicism, its endowment of secular objects and ideas with
religious content and intensity leads to German intellectuals’ apolitical
attitude. Political Anthropology is written against this attitude. On the other
hand, the specifically German political situation (the irresolvably double
imperial tradition of Prussia and Austria) leads to a belated (compared
to Britain and France) formation of the idea of nationhood. That is why,
according to Plessner, the concept of the “people” is formed instead of
that of a “nation,” which defines itself through civil society and citizen-
ship. The concept “people” was not endowed with European values; the
German nation was defined by its shared “blood.” Political Anthropology is
also written to oppose this community of the people. In short, Plessner (like
Voegelin) seeks a genealogical and anthropological sobering of the genu-
inely German mystification of the concept of the people, which served
to legitimize a policy of exclusion, cleansing, and extermination. In this
sense, the book is a direct continuation of what Plessner had described
as the motivation behind his Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (the
subtitle of Levels of the Organic and the Human) in 1928:

Every age finds its own redeeming word. The terminology of the eigh-
teenth century culminated in the concept of reason; that of the nine-
teenth in the concept of progress; the current one in the concept of
life. . . . And yet all periods want to grasp the same thing, and the actual
meanings of the words become for them merely the means . . . for ren-
dering visible that ultimate depth of things without a consciousness of
which all human beginning would be without background and without
meaning.26

Now, in 1931, as already in 1924, Plessner pushes ahead with the demys-
tification of the “people.” This is why he speaks of the “nationality” of
human existence in an entirely formal or structural and precisely not a
substantialist sense.
Plessner was considered Jewish according to the Nazis’ racist clas-
sification and so was forced to emigrate in 1933, first to Turkey, then to
the Netherlands and the United States. There, he was one of the “ar-
gonauts on Long Island”— the intellectual community around Hannah
Arendt, Gershom Scholem, Theodor Adorno, Siegfried Kracauer, Carl
Löwith, and Max Horkheimer.27 In 1962– 63 he was the first Theodor
Heuss Professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City.
 xv
I N T R O D UCT I O N

While the reception of his work in Germany was stymied for a long time,
first by the accusations of plagiarism already mentioned, and then by
his exclusion from German academia because of an arbitrarily assigned
Jewishness, in the years since 1989 his oeuvre has increasingly become a
subject of discussion in German and Continental philosophy and related
fields (sociology, political theory, pedagogy).
Internationally and in the English- speaking world, he is known
thanks to the translations of The Limits of Community and Laughing and
Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior (1941). Written in the midst
of World War II, this latter anthropological study addresses laughing
and crying in order to “proceed” to philosophy or philosophical anthro-
pology “from man as a whole,” from “what is common to all men” and
women “and differentiates them from other beings.” In this way, “laugh-
ing and crying are revealed as genuine, basic possibilities of the univer-
sally human, despite all historical change, all varieties of jest, wit, drollery,
humor, irony, pain, and tragedy.”28 An English translation is underway
of Plessner’s first major work, Levels of the Organic and the Human, which
may rightly be considered his major work overall. In addition, there are
translations of several shorter essays.29 Among the secondary literature in
English, special mention must be made of Marjorie Grene’s work, even
if it does not concern Plessner’s theory of the political but philosophical
anthropology and biology.30 The number of studies and the range of
topics they address have increased in recent years.31

The Book

Main Theses and Argumentation

The book, of which we have already given a short summary, develops in
two parts, “The Purpose of This Book” and “The Path to Political Anthro-
pology.” In the first chapter, Plessner situates his topic within contempo-
rary debates. Referring to Weimar Republic intellectuals’ contempt for
the political, he insists on the urgency of a philosophical anthropology
of the political for practical politics itself: “The less politics is respected,
the worse it becomes” (3). The task he sets for himself is to outline a
political anthropology against this contempt, allowing for the possibility
that even this very philosophy still has a political a priori, that it is out-
lined with a political interest in mind— just as inversely, all politics is
based on a philosophical a priori, a specific philosophy of life and anthro-
pology. Both are indispensable to understanding the “seriousness” and
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HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

the “necessity” of politics (5). Plessner’s question is whether the political

(in the sense of the friend–enemy distinction) belongs constitutively “to
the definition of the human” (6) or whether it is merely an expression
of human imperfections. Might the political merely name an— in Hei-
degger’s sense— inauthentic sphere, the sphere of the public which the
human has only “fallen into” to conceal from itself what is most authentic
(namely, “Being-toward-death”)?
Yet in the next step of this opening part, Plessner first turns to a cri-
tique of biology-based anthropologies (race theories) and classical, pessi-
mistic anthropologies (Hobbes). Both approaches define the political ex-
clusively by the “biological limit function” of struggling against enemies;
in both, philosophical anthropology becomes the foundation of “pure
power politics” (10). The “path to political anthropology” traced in the
book’s second part can thus not lead via a biological, disciplinarily narrow
concept of anthropology. It must be based on a comprehensive, universal
anthropology that encompasses “all modes of being and forms of expres-
sion” of the human (13). This is why philosophy cannot be guided here
by any single discipline. It must take history itself as its guide, namely a
“historical conception that goes to extremes” by seeing the human as the
creator of different cultures and worldviews (13). For Plessner, this im-
plies a definition of the human as “a reality that is formative of world and
indifferent to religious and racial differences” (14). This reality includes,
among others, the European reality, which must therefore allow itself
to be relativized by a philosophical anthropology. If there is any “prog-
ress” of European culture vis-à-vis “non- and pre-Christian nations” at
all, then it consists in the fact that the idea of different cultures’ equal
status originates in the European conception “of the human.” This is why
the “affirmation of our culture and religion . . . means renouncing its
absolutization” (14). On this point, Plessner explicitly prefers Nietzsche’s
radicality to Scheler’s anthropology of Christian and Platonist inspira-
tion. A “universal doctrine of the essence of the human” (16) will not be
attained until the human is thought as creator of truths. In other words,
philosophical anthropology properly understood must envision the es-
sence of the human so broadly that it includes all factually existing and
even all conceivable cultures. At the same time, it must be as reflexive as
possible and think of itself as an invented doctrine, as one possible an-
thropology among others.
The human is the subject but also the object of culture. Humans
invent their worlds and their truths, and they are formed by them and
conceived of differently. Accordingly, Plessner at this point raises the
methodological question of whether philosophical anthropology should
“proceed empirically or a priori.” The answer: neither one nor the other.
 xvii
I N T R O D UCT I O N

No “essence” of the human is to be found empirically (in the individual

sciences). And defining such an essence a priori amounts to ontolo-
gizing one’s own concept of the human (19). Of these two variants, a
material and a formal positing of human essence, Plessner’s discussion
focuses on the second, on Heidegger’s definition of being- human as a
self- knowledge of human individuality, personality, and freedom. This
establishes one human possibility (the European one) as the “authentic”
one. To the extent that other cultures have not invented these values,
such a philosophy can really consider them to be human “in appearance
only” and “only in a state of latency” (23). The political consequences of
such an anthropology are evident, as is the fact already mentioned that
this anthropology considers the political and the public to be inauthen-
tic insofar as they precisely do not concern the individual, the personal,
one’s own existence.
What the human is must, on the contrary, “remain open.” Philo-
sophical anthropology must hold on to unfathomability. What Plessner
writes here is paradoxical: the concept of unfathomability, the choice
of starting with the historicity of the human, is an absolutization of one
(namely a negative) concept of the human, of a historical anthropology.
In this respect, incidentally, Plessner’s thoroughly historical anthropol-
ogy resembles the post-structuralism of Michel Foucault or Gilles De-
leuze, whose choice of starting from the becoming-other of the human
he anticipates.32 What is important for Plessner is to show that such a
negative or historical anthropology is the only way of giving up the Euro-
pean “position of supremacy over other cultures” (26). He adopts this
key term from Dilthey and immediately gives it a political turn. Only an
anthropology which assumes that the human is always becoming an other
can grasp the “seriousness” of politics. It alone conceives of the human
as a deeply “historical and therefore political being” (45). For Plessner,
the unpredictable variety of human life is not a purely empirical fact.
Instead, each historical fact also amounts to a “decision about the essence
of the human” (26), a political statement, an assertion in the “competi-
tion with other possibilities of being-human” (54). And precisely because
each possibility is only one among many, what is our own must be al-
lowed “nonetheless [to] be real,” our own view of the world must be as-
serted to be binding for ourselves. This relativization amounts to “releasing
one’s own essential possibilities to evolve under the auspices of political
autonomy and national self-determination” (28).
In an excursus on “Dilthey’s philosophy of life,” Plessner dem-
onstrates that this philosophical “revolution” is Dilthey’s doing and, in
the central chapters that follow (“The Principle of Unfathomability, or
The Principle of Open Questions,” “The Human as Power,” and “The
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HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

Exposure of the Human”), he lays out the foundation and the conse-
quences of his own political theory. In its relation to historicity, European
culture paradoxically relativizes itself in the very move by which, for itself,
it asserts this view of the world to be the only one that is “correct.” It sees
itself as one among many possible cultures past and present, it becomes
aware of “its own relativity”— and yet it is deeply convinced that a way
of thinking that accepts “unfathomability as binding for any knowledge
of the life of the human” remains “viable in the future” (47–48). In ac-
knowledging the indeterminacy of the human or the contingency of each
and every cultural form, the human now conceives of itself as a political
being— as power, as ability, as an open question that must be answered
anew time and again. Historicity here is, first of all, a “theoretical” power,
a power over history, the power of again and again letting history become
anew (54–55). Yet it is also “practical- political power” (45). The past is not
only re-actualized or instrumentalized politically; all creation, all making
of history is a political act. In this respect, the human is “a historical and
therefore political being” (45).
Here, too, Plessner engages with Heidegger, specifically his “abso-
lutiz[ing] our own Western position” (50). This is the most important
backdrop to Plessner’s foundation of the political in the sense of a
struggle about familiarity and foreignness, about one’s own culture and
that of others, about integration and exclusion— even if these formu-
las are introduced in an entirely formal or abstract way. “As power, the
human”— and not just a given society or culture—“is necessarily engaged
in a struggle for power, i.e., in the opposition of familiarity and foreignness,
of friend and enemy” (53). Why is the other always uncanny, why is the
other structurally more enemy than friend, why is the foreign the danger-
ous, and why does this institute a political situation? The friend–enemy
distinction is an effect and consequence of the “essential constitution of
the human” (53), its excentric positionality. Precisely because the human
perceives itself to be indeterminate, encounters itself as an open ques-
tion, a horizon appears in the human world that separates the famil-
iar from the unfamiliar. The friend–enemy distinction begins in being-
oneself: “the human does not see ‘itself’ only in its Here but also in the
There of the other” (54). This horizon traverses excentric positionality
(the individual) as much as it does the cultural sphere or the nation. It
is culturally and historically indeterminate. There can thus be politics
concerning just about anything— wherever a horizon separates the fa-
miliar from the unfamiliar, within one’s own self as much as “between
man and woman, master and servant, teacher and student,” or different
cultures (55). “Unfathomability” entails that cultures determine them-
selves. Accordingly, they determine themselves differently historically. Un-
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I N T R O D UCT I O N

fathomability here means for Plessner (referring to Freud) that the other
appears as uncanny, as an alterity. This uncanniness is not explained by
some “detrimental effect the foreign might possibly have on the sphere of
familiarity” (54) but paradoxically by the familiarity of the foreign: “The
foreign is that which is one’s own, familiar, and homely in the other” (54).
Such structural foreignness (which pervades the self as much as it does
cultures) is radical and cannot be resolved by universal values, not even
by the idea of human rights, which absolutizes one conception of being-
human (54). Plessner stresses throughout that “horizon[s] of uncanni-
ness” differ in each culture and that the friend–enemy distinction shifts
constantly (55) and exists on many levels (thus also, for example, in the
relations between the sexes or between classes).
This is where he now defines the political. The political is the “con-
stant of the human situation” that is concerned with “securing and in-
creasing one’s own power by restricting or annihilating the foreign do-
main” (55). Plessner immediately ties this definition to the institution
of (always specific) law. The political relation is changeable, it is never
clearly delimited. Between what is one’s own and what is foreign, there
is instead an “unstable front line on which, in a thousand ways, what is
needed for life must be won from the opponents, it must be wrought from
them, they must be prayed to for it, cheated out of it” (57). These oppo-
nents may include nature, or the extraterrestrial, or Ebola, or some other
entity, yet what Plessner is aiming at is the essential non-securedness or
“exposure” of the human. This is the reason for an always artificial institu-
tion of the law, of a meaning that denies the “randomness, corrigibility,
and one-sidedness” of all modes of being-human (59). Law, as Cornelius
Castoriadis would say, is grounded in a culture’s central imaginary, which
itself needs no further foundation, in the “empty signifier.” In appealing
to God or to human rights, in instituting an in their eyes “‘natural’ order as
the just order,” in inventing for themselves “what is right and what is just,”
cultures establish it as, precisely, not unfounded. “The human does not
invent anything it does not discover” and vice versa.33 In this imaginary,
unfounded-founding enforcement of statutory law lies the meaning of
the organization of power, including the state (59).
Following a further excursus on the “nondecidability of the pri-
macy of the philosophical or anthropological view of the human,” Pless-
ner brings in the second paradox, that of the power and powerlessness
of the human. Human facts such as the formation of collectives testify
to human power, to creative ability, to the imagination of worlds. At the
same time, this form of life, too, remains tied to the body, it is subject to
the laws of nature “like a head of cattle” (80). As a body, the human is an
other to itself, the body determines the human “down to the last detail”
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HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

(81). A theory that seeks to know “what makes the human the human”
(how the human makes itself the human) cannot ignore this aspect of
human existence. As “excentric position,” the human is foreign to itself
(84). This is where we may situate the point at which Plessner could have
thematized the role of political violence.34 In terms of social theory, how-
ever, Plessner draws a different conclusion: because human existence is
tied to a body, there is no form of being-human that would not already
be “particular and partisan” and necessarily spatialized in a juxtaposition.
Plessner situates this particularity on several levels, yet on none of these,
not even on the level of the people, is there a “ground” to be found,
something substantially divided: “Belonging to a people is an essential
trait of the human like being able to say I and You, like familiarity and
foreignness, like . . . riskedness and authenticity” (86). What people one
belongs to, moreover, is contingent. For both of these reasons, it is nec-
essary to civilize politics.

The Contemporary Context in Political Philosophy:

Arendt–Schmitt–Voegelin–Morgenthau
Unlike Levels of the Organic in 1928, Political Anthropology immediately
met with lively interest. Both in the context of contemporary theories
of the political and of debates today, the triangular and reciprocal re-
views by Helmuth Plessner, Eric Voegelin, and Carl Schmitt are particu-
larly interesting. Plessner having adopted Schmitt’s 1927 friend–enemy
distinction—“the specific political distinction to which political ac-
tions and motives can be reduced is the distinction between friend and
enemy”35— as the quintessence of the political, Schmitt in the 1932 ex-
panded edition of The Concept of the Political praised Plessner’s book as
a modern “political anthropology of a grand style.” Schmitt turned to
Plessner for an anthropological foundation of his own concept of the
political. According to him, Plessner

correctly says that there exists no philosophy and no anthropology

which is not politically relevant, just as there is no philosophically irrele-
vant politics. . . . Man, for Plessner, is “primarily a being capable of
creating distance” who in his essence is undetermined, unfathomable,
and remains an “open question.” If one bears in mind the anthropo-
logical distinction of evil and good and combines Plessner’s “remaining
open” with his positive reference to danger, Plessner’s theory is closer
to evil than to goodness.36

“You must give the Devil his due” was the epigraph Plessner had chosen
for The Limits of Community in 1924.37 Both Schmitt and Plessner sought
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I N T R O D UCT I O N

a realistic anthropology to confront a political romanticism, a political

theory presupposing an anthropology of the “good” human being.38

One could test all theories of state and political ideas according to
their anthropology and thereby classify these as to whether they con-
sciously or unconsciously presuppose man to be by nature evil or by
nature good. The distinction is to be taken here in a rather summary
fashion and not in a specifically moral or ethical sense. The problematic
or unproblematic conception of man is decisive for the presupposi-
tion of every further political consideration, the answer to the ques-
tion whether man is a dangerous being or not, a risky or a harmless
creature.39

Eric Voegelin,40 as already mentioned, also reviewed Political Anthropology—

favorably but not uncritically, highlighting in particular the lack of a sepa-
ration between theories of the social and of society, the seamless transi-
tion from relations between neighbors to relations between peoples.

I would like to draw attention to only one point: that the concept of
“life” is applied without qualification to existences of all types, per-
sonal and individual human existence as well as collective existence. I
consider this breadth of meaning to be inappropriate because a whole
range of problems concerning the interhuman constitution of a supra-
personal, social existence is not considered.41

Plessner in turn reviewed Voegelin’s 1933 Race and State as a theory of

the political that showed race theory to be a political, not a scientific proj-
ect.42 The concept of race, Plessner credited Voegelin with demonstrat-
ing, was a politically conditioned “possibility of human self-conception.”43
Voegelin thus contributed to a modern philosophical anthropology that
aimed “at a concept of the human that does justice to its multilayered
existence as a physical, vital, psychic, and intellectual being, without mak-
ing one of these layers the measure and explanatory basis for the others.”
Plessner thus sees in Voegelin a comrade in arms: “The value of a state
is measured by the force of integration its ideal exercises on a physi-
cally non- homogenous population,” while, inversely, every “attempt at
subjecting the human to categories of animality” has profound political
consequences. “When, however, humans voluntarily renounce their men-
tal or spiritual essence, they will indeed turn into animals and must not
complain when they are administered according to Mendel’s laws.”44 And
Voegelin conversely refers to Plessner’s Political Anthropology.45
Moreover, there are parallels with Hannah Arendt’s political an-
thropology. Both Plessner and Arendt develop negative anthropologies,
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HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

definitions of the human as homo absconditus that lead to a political theory

of the public, of curbed conflict. Although Arendt in her 1958 The Human
Condition does not “intend to evolve an ‘anthropological’ or philosophi-
cal account of human nature,”46 she develops a similar historical anthro-
pology that, in Plessner’s terms, takes as its starting point the “power of
ability,” the practical power of doing and making something as well as
oneself differently again and again:

In addition to the conditions under which life is given to man on earth,

and partly out of them, men constantly create their own, self-made con-
ditions, which, their human origin and their variability notwithstanding,
possess the same conditioning power as natural things.47

Similarly, Hans J. Morgenthau’s 1933 definition of the political may be

related to Plessner’s 1931 definition, with which Morgenthau was familiar.
Both develop a realist theory of the political (and its difference from the
juridical).48

Current Debates about Plessner’s Political Anthropology

Time and again, Political Anthropology has given rise to new debates in
political philosophy and philosophical anthropology. These turn, on the
one hand, around the interpretation of Plessner’s philosophical anthro-
pology. Is Political Anthropology the foundational work, or is it Levels of
the Organic? Does Plessner pursue an ultimately historical foundation of
political philosophy (the philosophy of law, of culture, etc.) or does he
ultimately seek such a foundation in the philosophy of nature? Is the
relationship between Levels of the Organic and Political Anthropology such
that primacy goes to an anthropology that argues epistemologically, in
which the human is primarily the subject of nature? Or do Plessner’s two
major works instead argue for an anthropology founded on a theory of
life, which thinks the human primarily as the object of nature, as living
being? At stake is the answer to the question of whether his philosophical
anthropology is to be read as a philosophy of the organic or as a philos-
ophy of history— whether Plessner sees his philosophical anthropology
as one possibility of describing the human (emphasizing the unfathom-
ability, the indeterminability of the human) or instead seeks to account
for all human self- descriptions on the basis of the structure of organic
nature. Plessner himself writes that the task is to think the human equally
as “subject-object of nature” and as “subject-object of culture.”49 Much
can be gleaned about Plessner’s view of a philosophical anthropology
that does justice to the diversity of human life from his critique of Hei-
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I N T R O D UCT I O N

degger’s existential anthropology, a critique that takes up the kind of his-

torical anthropology implied in Dilthey’s and Misch’s concept of human
historicity.50 A similar point would later be made by Lévi-Strauss in criticiz-
ing Sartre and all evolutionist, Eurocentric anthropology: a “good deal
of egocentricity and naivety is necessary to believe that man has taken
refuge in a single one of the historical or geographical modes of his exis-
tence, when the truth about man resides in the system of their differences
and common properties.”51
Beyond these debates about philosophical anthropology (as a state-
ment about the human, negative or positive, grounded in history and the
humanities or in a theory of life), Plessner’s foundation of the political, his
theory of collective existence, remains a “hot potato.”52 Its concept of the
people, its (partial) appeal to Carl Schmitt’s Concept of the Political, the
political realism of the concept of the struggle for power, the text’s pa-
thos, and finally, the call for Germany’s political self-empowerment and
the confidence of being able to organize (at least) European civilization:
all these make for a book that is disturbing, especially for German intel-
lectuals. Shortly before German reunification, Rüdiger Kramme saw in
the book an attempt at articulating a model for providing the “preserva-
tion of individual and national identity” with a model.53 The “preser-
vation of national identity”— such a desire was outlawed in the German
context after 1945. Attributing a national-identitarian thinking to Pless-
ner (i.e., emphasizing the concept of the people in the book) amounts,
for intellectuals on the Left, to a “denunciation” of an author forced into
exile by racist policies.54 Others take Plessner’s concepts more seriously
and emphasize the “productive paradox” of his call to bear the tension
between the contingency of one’s own values and the assertion of their
universality, between the contingency of one’s own form of society and
its affirmation.55 Others again see in Plessner’s political anthropology, in
its emphasis on the equal status of all cultures in combative-playful coop-
eration and confrontation about the question of which culture allows for
the best life, the foundation for a “democracy of values.”56

Political Anthropology and Recent

International Debates in Political Theory

As for international debates, Plessner’s political philosophy speaks above

all to a theory of radical or plural democracy. There are parallels (which
are characteristic even in their limitations) with Ernesto Laclau’s and
Chantal Mouffe’s theory of the political, which picks up on Schmitt in
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HE I K E D E LI T Z AND RO BE RT S E Y FE RT

ways that resemble Plessner. Central for these authors’ definition of the
political is an “ever present possibility of antagonism”57 and the curbing
of enmity, of struggle, in the conflict about power conducted according
to democratic-parliamentarian rules. Plessner’s text can thus also be re-
lated to a general theory of collective identity, a theory of the logic of the
social as such, in addition to a theory that specifies this social logic in the
case of democratic regimes. Laclau and Mouffe think the general logic
of the social as identification via difference:

In the field of collective identities, we are always dealing with the crea-
tion of a “we” which can exist only by the demarcation of a “they.”
This does not mean of course that such a relation is necessarily one
of friend/enemy, i.e. an antagonistic one. But we should acknowledge
that, in certain conditions, there is always the possibility that this we/
they relation can become antagonistic.58

In the tradition of deconstructivist theory, to which Laclau and Mouffe

belong, collective identities or societies imply a “system of differences” or
a “constitutive outside.”59 Moreover, beside the emphasis on competition
as the quintessence of the political and the public, the idea that the con-
stitutive relationship is not one between enemies but between opponents,
we also find here the “democratic paradox” from Plessner’s book, the
tension, characteristic of modern democracies, between the universalist
idea of human rights on the one hand and the idea of the sovereignty of
a particular people on the other.60
Yet there are important differences between the two concepts of the
political that have to do with the question of unfathomability. In Plessner,
the outside, exteriority is not a constitutive necessity but a consequence. De-
limitation against an outside does not mean the same for him as it does
for deconstructive approaches. In his view, the antagonism itself has a
“reason” (53), it does not itself serve as a ground. As the uncanny, the for-
eign is a moment of one’s own unfathomability and thereby forms part of
“that which is one’s own, familiar” (54). In other words, the inside is not
constituted (negatively) by a delimitation from the outside alone but re-
quires a production of its own, a positive act of institution. Plessner’s concept
stresses the creative, institutive, positive aspect of the political. One’s own
culture and identity are the products of an immanent, creative process.
This positive emphasis on invention thus sets Plessner’s theory of
the political apart from Laclau and Mouffe— and brings it closer to Cas-
toriadis’s concept of an “imaginary institution” of society. And indeed,
both the openness to the future grounded in unfathomability and the
strict conditioning by history in Plessner recall Castoriadis’s description
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I N T R O D UCT I O N

of the imaginary institution of society as creatively “instituted” as well as

always already historically “instituted.”61 For Plessner, the human and cul-
ture are “conditioned by history” but at the same time are “conditioning
history” (50). Identities, in other words, are not constituted solely by a
delimiting “constitutive outside” (in turning other humans into others),
they are also founded in a second, a founding outside. Castoriadis speaks
of a “central or primary imaginary signification” that “denote[s] nothing
at all, and . . . connote[s] just about everything.”62 Every determination
of what is one’s own is not necessary but imaginary. In the end, it rests on
the fabulation or imagination of an ultimate signifier claimed as a ground
of existence, on social meaning, which is entirely imaginary.63 As we saw,
Plessner’s book in this respect and in the case of modern democracy basi-
cally refers to humanism.64
In short: Plessner’s 1931 book contains a differentiated theory of
the political, of the constitution of society, which emphasizes, beside the
(negative) formation of identity via delimitation, its (positive) invention
and imaginary creation. Not only are our own person and culture relative,
they are also binding. Political Anthropology offers a theory of the political
that remains complex enough today to describe our political and social
present. It insists on “acknowledging non-European cultural systems
and worldviews” while affirming “our own culture”(14), it recognizes the
agonistic character of the political without essentializing it as the core of
the political. Instead, competition with the foreign and uncanny is some-
thing with which we are always already familiar from other social spheres.
Conflict and rivalry are thus taken seriously as human relationships but
are also relativized, which makes it possible to avoid competition that
veers into violence. This allows for making connections with current con-
flicts between religions and cultures, with postcolonial debates about the
legitimization of the West and the self-affirmation of the global South,
or with the emergence of new personal, ethnic, collective, and national
identities.65 In each case, much depends on one’s view of the human; in
each case, political empowerment draws on a specific anthropology— this
is not the least of the claims made by Plessner’s complex political anthro-
pology. It is in how we ask the question of the human— does the human
owe its essence, commandments, and dignity to God or rather to its indi-
vidual rational nature, tradition, cultural sphere, people, or blood?— that
concrete politics, the way we treat others and our own, is decided.
POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
The idea wants to become a deed, the word to become flesh.
And, wonderful to relate! like the God of the Bible, man has
only to voice his idea, and the world takes shape, there is light
or darkness, the waters divide themselves from the dry land, or
wild beasts appear. The world is the signature of the word. Mark
this well, you proud men of action. You are no more than the
unwitting servants of the men of ideas, who have often, humbly
and quietly, drawn up distinct plans in advance for everything
you do.
—Heinrich Heine
The Purpose of This Book

The principal question of political anthropology is: to what extent does

politics— the struggle for power in human relations among individuals,
groups and associations, nations and states— belong to the essence of the
human?1 To many, this question seems to be only of philosophical, not
political interest. Yet this is to forget how deeply practice must be steeped
in theory to be able to make decisions. Never completely forgotten in the
government and newspaper offices of countries that have a political cul-
ture, this insight has of course been much devalued in Germany by the
methods and aftereffects of the Bismarck era.
Politics has not benefited from this devaluation. The less politics is
respected, the worse it becomes. The quality of politics is not determined
by the lucky chance of being conducted by some great individual; it is
determined by the measure of attention it receives from those strata of a
people that have no immediate material interest in politics. In Germany,
the fact, so characteristic of this disdain, that political questions are al-
lowed to slip onto the level of the economy, that the state is considered
to have been lost to finance, industry, and commerce, arises to a large
degree from the attitude of intellectuals toward the political sphere as
such, an attitude untouched even by war and upheaval. As before, the
conviction prevails among us that politics is a technology that must be
operated by the agents of groups with some sort of power; yet it must also
never be named in one breath with the great objects of science, art, the
law, and faith. And it is bad enough, in this view, that it is not even pos-
sible to avoid having something like cultural policy. The divide between
the great ideological parties’ conceptions of cultural policy renders the
calamity of the political particularly palpable to intellectuals.
Especially in the age of the demos and its self- determination in a
nation-state, it is precisely not a matter of indifference how the people
and the state are thought in purely theoretical terms. How philosophy
thinks about them is not a matter of indifference because, in order to
be clear about their own categories, legislation and jurisprudence have
to take recourse to philosophy. It is the business of philosophy, after all,
to establish strong foundations to replace the temporary structures of
functional definitions without which individual sciences and practitioners
cannot make do.

3
4
HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

This is why we shouldn’t lose patience when philosophy concerns

itself with politics. This concern is at the same time a question addressed to phi-
losophy. If it were the case that philosophy, starting with a secure stock
of knowledge, now turned to politics as to a “domain” it might so far
have neglected too much, then political anthropology would purely be a
question of application, roughly in the sense in which forensic psychia-
try or pediatric psychology are applied disciplines. Philosophy, however,
stands in a different relationship to reality, one that from the outset ex-
cludes application. It can only achieve contact with reality if it centrally
includes reality in its own foundation such that it will learn from reality
not only as a result but from the outset. Philosophy must not seek to come
to life from the top down (as claimed most recently by Leonard Nelson,
for whom politics is applied ethics) but must articulate itself as directed
toward life within the perspectives of this life itself. And this in turn is
only possible if philosophy conceives of this contact with life, conceives
of this thinking that is covariant with life, as necessary to its own essence and
not merely as necessary for the purpose at hand, the purpose of under-
standing life.
Yet what is to constitute the content of political anthropology?
First, the genealogy of political life as it derives from the basic constitu-
tion of the human as an originary unity of mind, soul, and body [Geist,
Seele und Leib]. This genealogy is to be articulated according to a theory
of drives and passions. It is, at the same time, a political theory of af-
fects and a characterology, from which political practice could benefit.
Second, a historically oriented reflection on the mutual dependence of
a conception of human nature— i.e., the interplay of physical organs,
the psyche, and the body in the hierarchy of reason, volition, emotion,
passion— and a conception of the state or the community. (The history
of organicist theory could furnish examples.) This, finally, would allow
for elaborating the idea of the human as a microcosm, an elaboration
guided by the political macrocosm, and it would allow for discovering
the political a priori that turns out to be in effect in all notions of the
human being [menschliches Wesen] in its comprehensive intertwining with
the world.
Today, we are lacking the foundation for such achievements. It has
to be established in the first place. In its current state, philosophy does
not furnish this foundation; nor does anthropology. For neither the
purely empirical anthropology of anatomists, racial biologists, and he-
redity specialists nor the medical anthropology now being developed are
able to furnish it without making antecedent naturalist decisions about
the essence and the root of the political. Here, philosophy must inter-
vene itself. And it cannot do so in such a way as to simply ask directly
 5
P O L I T I C A L ANT HROP O LOGY

about the essence of the political in order to conceive of it, allegedly,

without preconditions. Instead, philosophy in asking its questions must
pay attention to the way it asks them because in asking the question of
politics, philosophy is itself put into question by politics.
This possibility is the least it has to reckon with— in political theory,
Carl Schmitt has taken the lead in this regard— if the result is not to
be a classificatory phenomenology or ontology of political phenomena
that overlooks the possibility that its own “objectivity” is politically condi-
tioned. Do we even know that it is possible to think without preconditions
without thereby already having decided in favor of a system of political
categories? Without having decided in favor of a specific basis for political
discussion, namely liberalism, whose polemic a priori is precisely that it
naively accepts an absence of preconditions as its starting point? In an
age in which dictatorship has become a living power, in which Russia
and Italy have announced the death of the goddess of liberty, we should,
for the sake of theory, be wary of thinking about politics according to the
principles of classical liberalism. Marxism and syndicalism compel us to
develop a new kind of political reflection, a new kind of philosophizing
that, from the very beginning, is capable of confronting these possibilities
with covariant standards.
The topic of this book is thus the search for a foundation on which
to consider all things political, a foundation able to support the possibility
that there is a political a priori at the very root of philosophical reflection
itself. Out of the spirit of politics, this book seeks to motivate philosophy
in what is most its own in order to understand the human necessity of politics.
The seriousness of politics cannot be recognized in any other way. Just as
art, science, and religion became media for knowing the world because
philosophy was able to turn each of them into one of its tools, so poli-
tics will attain that same dignity only if philosophy, by turning politics
into one of its tools, liberates it from its position as an area in which the
human, which is tied to nature, acts merely contingently.
For readers, this implies a renunciation insofar as this book omits a
discussion of topics that are of immediate political interest and are, for
logical-methodological or ethical reasons, important to political scien-
tists, political sociologists, and practitioners. Yet I hope that my founda-
tion of political anthropology will open the path to the central problem
of the people, the problem that, thanks to its peculiar intermediary posi-
tion between the spheres of nature and mind, constitutes the horizon
within which political life unfolds and from out of which the human’s
compulsion and duty to power arises.
The book thus participates in the discussions concerning a science
and philosophy of politics, which in Germany are being advanced by— to
6
HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

name just a few protagonists—Hans Freyer and Theodor Litt in philos-

ophy, Carl Schmitt, Hans Kelsen, and Rudolf Smend in legal studies, Max
Weber, Max Scheler, and Karl Mannheim in sociology, and in history
by Otto Westphal, to whom too little attention has been paid. At the
same time, it is part of the debate about the problem of the relation
between philosophy and anthropology, which, once Wilhelm Dilthey set
the problem in motion to answer the challenge of historicism, has been
confronted in very different ways by Scheler, Martin Heidegger, Georg
Misch, and myself. It will not be news to readers familiar with my previous
work when I emphasize that, ever since my 1923 book Die Einheit der Sinne
[The Unity of the Senses],2 the path traced out with respect to this question
by Dilthey and Misch seems to me to be the only correct path. This new
book is to provide a philosophical foundation for what I then attempted
in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft [The Limits of Community],3 namely to provide
an anthropological explanation of the political-diplomatic constant we
find in human behavior overall and to show “the Political” to be one
way in which the relations of life are refracted (as well as to show it to
be necessarily produced by a life concerned not just with the state or the
interests of particular associations).
I hope to serve the interests of civics education and political theory
even by way of the indirect, off-track path of philosophy, a path that seems
to lead away from all the topics that are said to form part of political an-
thropology: race and state; leadership and character; drive, mind, rea-
son, and passion in political strategy and diplomacy; the psychology of
nations, nation-states, and states of power; the typology of state, eco-
nomic, social, and cultural policy; social differentiation; and ideology.
What I try to solve here is the question of whether the political sphere as
such (which, according to Carl Schmitt, is given in the primeval life re-
lationship of friend and enemy) belongs to the definition of the human
or whether it belongs only to its contingent physical existential circum-
stances, which are external to its essence; whether politics is merely the
expression of the human’s imperfection, whose overcoming, even if it
will perhaps never factually be achieved, is what the ideals of true human-
ity, what a moral education that liberates humans toward their authen-
tic essence demand; whether politics only signifies the disadvantages of
human existence, an existence into which the human as finite being has
lapsed but, precisely, only lapsed.
May those who are concerned, the civic educators, therefore not
lose patience when philosophy is mobilized to answer this question. We
cannot answer it with a ready-made philosophical set of tools. Instead,
for the sake of the cause of the human in politics and of politics in the
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P O L I T I C A L ANT HROP O LOGY

human, we have to instead reopen the entire question of philosophy itself.

To be sure, politics suffers when it is taken too seriously— something we
can sense in the ideological contamination of political parties. But false
seriousness in this game can only be fought with a ruthless insight into
the significance of the game, for which nations always have to pay with
their lives and their faith.
1

The Naturalistic Conception

of Anthropology and Its
Political Ambiguity

If we follow the usage that became traditional in the last third of the
nineteenth century, the term anthropology designates the theory of the
human that can be derived from the research of anatomists, paleologists,
and biologists of race and heredity: an empirical comparative investiga-
tion of the putative origins of the human species and the various paths
of its specification in races. In that case, political anthropology would be
the practical application of such exclusively biological knowledge to the
political life of nations.4 To the extent that knowledge of the evolutionary
history of the forms and forces of political life makes it possible to grasp
an essential part, indeed the very horizon of nations’ cultural existence
insofar as it is conditioned by nature, this application is an application
with a view to theory. And it is an application with practical use when we
consider that insight into the laws to which the political, thanks to its ties
to nature, is subject will greatly limit uncertainty in political calculations.
What could ultimately be expected from such a science would be some-
thing like a meteorological or economic forecast of political tempests
and crises. This forecast would go hand in hand with continual directions
for the statesman that would increasingly guarantee the success of his ac-
tions. In view of the fact that passions play an especially important role
in political struggles (since these struggles are conducted in the name of
a nation’s highest ideals), the idea that statesmen’s actions could receive
such an anthropological foundation appears to be a welcome aid to the
leader who has to remain sober and level-headed to begin a struggle at
the right moment and to end it at the right moment.
Aid in a double sense. The idea can become a program for rational-
izing politics, i.e., for taking it out of the sphere of passions and ideals
onto the plane of businesslike considerations, and thereby for liberating
it from all illusionary expectations that are felt no longer to correspond
to the degree of development attained today, at least by the civilized na-
tions. As a means of disillusionment, political anthropology thus consti-
tutes a demand of political enlightenment. The parties of the left hope

9
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

it will bring about the gradual civilizing of the way in which struggles in
the life of nations, both within and without, are conducted, progress in
the reciprocal understanding of classes, estates, interest groups, and, fi-
nally, nations.
Yet it should come as no surprise either to see the idea that the
political can be traced back to the anthropological defended by the par-
ties of the right, which, in a Machiavellian or Hobbesian sense, are much
too convinced of the unchangeability or incorrigibility of human nature
ever to consider a fundamental change in the relations of citizens or na-
tions to be possible. To them, the destruction of passions and illusions, of
moral arguments and cultural ambitions to reveal their biological foun-
dation appears as an unmasking that unveils the true face of the human
in its naked bestiality. Political anthropology, in their view, shows the real
driving forces, beyond their mental motivation, in the eternally identical
game that progressives think they left behind long ago when in fact it is
a constant subterraneous tension that has to be violently released from
time to time. Anthropology then becomes the program of advocates of
pure power politics, predominately pessimistic, anti- enlightenment, and,
in that respect, conservative.
These party-line conceptions are based on an antecedent decision
that is tied to a one-sided interpretation of the word anthropology. For it
is settled neither that the human is a being who can be grasped in purely
biological terms, nor is it settled, as these arguments tacitly presuppose,
that the physical aspects of the human are determinative of human exis-
tence in all the expressions in which the human makes history. Even if the
state defines itself by its monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force
against its citizens in the interest of protecting them against enemies
within and without, this biological limit function, the ultima ratio regum
[the last resort of kings, i.e., war], precisely does not exhaust the life
of politics. Until we are clear about the essence of the political and of
its bearers, we must beware of resituating the constant threat of force
(which seeks to guarantee obedience to the law and to contracts) in the
putative foundation of states and of turning the threat of force into their
determining principle.
The Path to Political
Anthropology
2

The Universal Conception

of Political Anthropology
with Regard to the Human
as the Historical Subject of
Attribution of Its World

This refers us back to the comprehensive interpretation of the word an-

thropology that was common until the last third of the nineteenth century
and is increasingly becoming so again today. As the theory of the essence
of the human with explicit regard to all modes of being and forms of
expression, it cannot in consequence bear the too-narrow frame of a bio-
logical discipline. It comprehends the psychological as well as the intel-
lectual, the individual as well as the collective, that which coexists in an
arbitrary temporal cross-section as well as the historical.
Anthropology seems to be defeated by the universality of its task.
For how could it be possible today, in the age of specialized, highly de-
veloped psychologies of the individual and of nations, the age of ethnol-
ogy, sociology, and historical studies, not to mention all the biological
and medical disciplines, to get through to something like a universal
insight into the human? How could we hope for any enduring synthesis
that would not be outdated after just a few years, here where everything
is in flux? Nothing is to be expected of a vaulting here except that it col-
lapses. The bases of individual sciences of the human in particular are
not fixed for all eternity. What we see today in physics and psychology
may tomorrow affect physiology, pathopsychology, ethnology. Sociology,
for example, has for some time now been in a permanent state of crisis
concerning its basis, as has historiography. And it is not just results that
no longer offer any support; the same is true of aims and methods. This
is why we may not hope to gain anything from a “critical” search for the
interweaving of categories in the experiential unit called “the human,”
a search whose task it would be regressively to determine the model that
precedes it, guided by the logic of research on the human.
The historical conception that goes to extremes, however, does indeed

13
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

provide directions for a universal anthropology in conceiving of the

human (also including its extra- empirical, purely intellectual dimen-
sions) as the subject of attribution of its world, as the “point” where all
supra-temporal systems emerge from which its existence derives mean-
ing. We do not have to conceive of the human this way, but we can. These
systems give rise to the wealth of cultures as they have gradually come
about on this planet in the course of history, a wealth whose overarching
unity in turn is problematic.
The human, responsible for the world in which it lives: if we accept
in the first place that it is a progress, a discovery, that we, unlike non- and
pre-Christian nations, have attained the concept “of the human” as a
reality that is formative of world and indifferent to religious and racial
differences, then the standard of this universal perspective precisely
obliges us not only to bring our culture to the “heathens” as an abso-
lute, but also to relativize our culture and our world over against other
cultures and worlds. Perhaps this is the first step toward its abandon-
ment. But we cannot get around this step if we want to hold on to our
discovery, i.e., precisely hold on to our culture of knowledge, which is
anchored religiously in the sense that everything that bears a human
face is equal before God. The affirmation of our own culture and re-
ligion thus means renouncing its absolutization; it means acknowledg-
ing non-European cultural systems and worldviews that are relative to
their bearers and thereby indirectly are relative to God, before whom,
as “humans,” they are all equal, equally legitimate, or at least equally
possible. The Christian theologian may at this point employ the cardinal
relation between non-Christians’ ignorance and their non-salvation to
establish the primacy of the Christian people; yet the obligation to pros-
elytize at the same time contains an acknowledgment of a natural com-
monality between heathens and Christians, an acknowledgment that has
long lost its theological-denominational meaning and become a root of
the life of our entire conscious position.
From this experiential position, in the universal aspect of the na-
tions covering the planet, “their” gods and cults, states and arts, legal
concepts and morals become relative. The space of nature, which for
“our” aspect comprehends them all, becomes relative to our Western
humankind and opens up the possibility of other natures. But this rela-
tivization only takes place by letting the ground on which it rests— the
equality before God of everything that bears a human face— reveal itself
as a principle. The human is discovered to be the subject, the creator
and productive “point” of the emergence of a culture. In Nietzsche’s
apostrophe from The Will to Power: “Man as poet, as thinker, as God, as
love, as power— oh, the kingly prodigality with which he has given gifts to
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P O L I T I C A L ANT HROP O LOGY

things, only to impoverish himself and himself feel miserable! That has
been man’s greatest selflessness so far, that he admired and worshipped
and knew how to conceal from himself the fact that it was he who created
what he admired.”5 In this return to super- and extra-human demands,
made by religious, ethical, juridical, artistic, and scientific realities, to the
domain of creative subjectivity— a subjectivity that can lose itself in these
realities because it has productively-obliviously endowed them with exis-
tence and validity— lies the principle according to which all of a culture’s
extra-temporal spheres of meaning become relative, within the horizon
of history, to the human as to their source.
We may certainly restrict human productivity and grant it only the
capacity for discovery, not a genuine creative power. This is the way Sche-
ler, for example, tries to escape historicism and sociologism when he
abandons “every factual, determinate, fixed, ‘inborn’ functional appara-
tus of reason, given in all men from the beginning” in favor of suppos-
ing a multiplicity of organizations of reason that in turn are themselves
relative to their (ethnic, etc.) basis of life and interests, such that we “lift
up the absolute realm of ideas and values corresponding to the essential
idea of man far above factual historical value systems . . . preserving noth-
ing but the idea of the eternal objective Logos. To penetrate the bound-
less mystery of that Logos in terms of an essential and necessary history
of mind is the prerogative not of one nation, one cultural unit, . . . but
it is the prerogative only of all of them together, including those of the
future, in the solidarity of . . . cooperation among the irreplaceable (be-
cause individual), unique subjects of the culture.”6 As if this correction
was able to assume a position that could not be exposed as Europeanism!
It is, after all, characteristic of this position that it seeks to render contexts
visible that are valid for all humans, render them visible by going half-
way in universally relativizing all religions, moralities, worldviews, in such
a way that the intellectual life distributed across the earth, its content
anchored in a super-lively heaven of values and ideas, appears as a sym-
phony of prospects onto the absolute. That is why this stance is different,
at most, in content— in the scope of the value worlds that are necessarily
possible for humans and in the extent of the functions to be ascribed to
these worlds— but not in principle from “today’s cheap philosophies of
absolute values” against which it is brought out with great fanfare.7 Both
stances do not grasp the depth of the intellectual history that makes
it possible to discern that supra-temporal values and categories emerge
from out of life, to see that this doctrine of the emergence of the eternal
from the temporal, too, is conditioned historically and socially (a secu-
larized deification of the human that might have its proto- and coun-
tertype in the Christian conviction that God has become human), and
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

both stances therefore do not see that granting human power the mere
capacity for discovery still makes use of its position, a position unable to
stand up to the danger of an ultimate self-relativization.
If, therefore, we conceive of humans not only as discoverers, whose
race and specific ethnicity, genetics, etc., equip them with various “ocu-
lars” or sense organs of the mind, who focus on corresponding trans-
subjective realities while non- corresponding realities are sorted out—
which is in fact a notion that fits the animal but not the human— if we
instead conceive of humans also as creators who are of course bound
to their own creatures and become subject to them, then we can, with
regard to this possible conception of the human, which aligns with a his-
torical conception of the world, clear the path to a universal doctrine of
the essence of the human, to philosophical anthropology.
The fundamental difficulty of philosophical anthropology immedi-
ately appears as the double difficulty of how it conceives of its object, of
the “essence” of “the human,” and of how it proceeds toward this object.
3

Should Universal Anthropology

Proceed Empirically or A Priori?

Such a theory of the essence of the human is obviously not an empirical

discipline. Learning from experience something about the idea that itself
is to be the basis of experience would amount to lapsing into an infinite
circle. Yet this theory cannot be a priori either. In that case, it would be
unable to render it conceivable how atemporal, a priori truths and obliga-
tions emerge from life within the horizon of history and its experience:
if, that is, it is to count as certain that the human is the origin of the con-
ditions of its knowing, willing, sensing, and believing, conditions whose
validity thinking cannot circumvent; if— for the reasons just named—
the meaning of the concept “the human” is to include that the world to
which it is bound is relative to its specific humanity, which varies naturally
and historically. This is a principle that endows the concept of the human
with a wide range of possible physical, spiritual, and intellectual realiza-
tions. These realizations in peoples, races, nations, and ages guarantee
the ecumenical unity of humanity even in the absence of absolutely valid
systems of reference such as God–reason–world. At this point, however,
where the a priori emerges from the foundational power of the human,
an a priori doctrine of essence would have to break with this principle of
attribution in favor of such absolute systems of reference.
Let us think through the alternative. An empirical theory of essence
is a non-entity; it contradicts the essential character. Why? Because of the
significant restriction that the “essence of a thing” signifies what, in a
thing, remains constant as distinct from merely experiential variations.
The essence of a thing is thus congruent with what is addressed when the
thing is addressed as such. When I say table, I trace the frame in which
the tableness of a “table” or its essence as table comes out. I can say table;
therefore, there is the possibility to speak of something like the essence
of this table as distinct from precisely this table. If we conceived of es-
sence differently, not in conformity with notions of conceptual generality
and ideational unity of form, but, for example, as a supporting substance
or force, as what is really significant about a function that cannot be read
off what is at issue, its secret, its hidden quality, then a doctrine of the
essence of the human would have to be eminently empirical.

17
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

Language might distinguish between entitative and essential.8 Some-

thing empirical may well be essential for the human: the heart, or char-
acter, or ancestry. What is essential for this human being, and not just for
him or her, might be an artistic talent or good looks. Yet this does not
get at essentialness. What, then, can guarantee us the objective meaning
of the discourse of essentialness and essentia and quidditas? If I see smoke
rise and I ask, what is that? then the answer to the question can take very
different empirical directions (that is steam; that is a wood fire; there is
a house burning; that is a wisp of fog, etc.). Only if the question is ex-
plicitly directed toward those conditions that the given thing such as it is
addressed obviously “obeys” in that it is thus addressed— as smoke, not as
steam, cloud, or wisp of fog— only then is the ground prepared for this
specifically a priori problem of essence. For there must be a precedent
comprehension of smoke, that is, of smokeness in play if the right word
for this impression is to come in at the right time. Applied to the prob-
lem at hand, this means that the grandiose question of the essence of the
human cannot be answered empirically only if it has been ascertained
that the question is posed in this academic sense of uncovering the previ-
ously discussed conditions of addressing something as human, i.e., in the
sense of a categorial analysis.
Yet it has also been said that the theory of essence cannot proceed
a priori if it wants to render the human conceivable as its culture’s sub-
ject of attribution, as the “point” where the conditions of an objectivity
can emerge creatively. Let us assume it proceeds a priori. What are the
consequences?
In the domain of what is called the human, the conditions of calling
it so, the moments that orient the applicability of the meaning of speech,
must become the measure of ascertaining its essence. The possibility of
addressing the human as to its humanity thus provides the doctrine of
essence with the guarantee that it will receive an answer. This already is
questionable even if, for the researcher who does not ask at random but
seeks to pose, as they say, reasonable questions, it constitutes a veritable
principle of method. It has thus already been decided that the question
can be answered by demonstrating this essence; essence “is,” and namely
it is something accessible and something to be revealed. The possibility of
designation does not simply indicate the domain of an essence but stakes
it out, namely insofar as the appropriateness of a designation is attached
to the essence itself and insofar as the conditions of living up to the
discursive intention are not only congruent or coincident but identical
with the essential characteristics. Essence therefore has something of that
generality about it that functions as the generality of designating expres-
sion in speech, in the very sense of the discursive expression. According
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P O L I T I C A L ANT HROP O LOGY

to a phenomenological principle, it cannot be otherwise: apophainesthai

as appearing and coming- into- view, coming from the direction of the
object, and apophansis as speech that reveals and brings into view, going in
the direction of the object, form a primeval unity in which expression and
thing are rooted and that breaks open in an oppositional “movement.” In
consequence, essence of the human (= that which makes the human human
“in the very first place” or on the basis of which it is human in the first
place) names what is human about it and determines its being-human
hic et nunc; method secures this humanness in advance as the foundation
of the human.
The human is to be conceived of as subject of attribution of its
culture, as creator within the horizon of its history. If its productivity
is to have anything to do with the human “itself,” however, the creative
emergence has to proceed from out of the foundation, the root of the
human’s human-kind— or else the human is not held completely respon-
sible for its actions. From the outset, then, humanness, what German
idealism called “the humanness in the human,” slips underneath as a
potent ground. An a priori approach, even if intended only as a method,
inevitably leads to a universalistic-rationalistic ontologization of human
essence.
4

Two Possible A Priori Procedures

There are two possibilities to be considered here: the possibility of defin-

ing human essence in terms of content, and the possibility of doing so
formally; or, put differently: the possibilities of positing this essence in
terms of a What and of positing this essence in terms of a How. The first
possibility leaves nothing open but exacts a concrete specification of the
essence of the human. Examples include: the poet is the true human,
Greekdom is the true human-kind, Christ alone was truly human, philos-
ophy is authentic being-human. This is the method according to which
an eschatology, a history of salvation, a church, a dogma can think, by
renouncing from the outset a profane, natural, rational openness toward
possibilities of another human-kind. The second possibility, of positing
human essence in terms of a How, from the outset creates space for
interpreting everything that bears a human face as equally legitimate
manifestations and modes of being-human. Here, there is no compulsion
concretely to specify the essence. There is only the compulsion to cover
what is authentically human with a structure. This structure must be for-
mal and dynamic enough to make the multiplicity spreading across the
entire scope of ethnological and historical experience visible as possible
modes in which this structure could become factual.
Such a structural formula is what Scheler and (although his particu-
lar methodology opposes Scheler) Heidegger are going for. Heidegger’s
work shall serve us as an example of a priori anthropology (even if it aims
for something different). The human is defined by a way of being = Da-
sein. What is at issue in the question of its essence is the conception, the
“interpretation” of Dasein. Its essence lies in its way of being, in its exis-
tence, which Heidegger conceives of as a “fundamental constitution” and
that takes place in a process [Geschehen].9 In assuming in each case the
possibility that is its own, existence individualizes itself as a being-toward-
possibilities, the human becomes free to its fate and, thereby and in the
mode of in each case itself [je er selbst], is human in the first place. This be-
coming toward being happens insofar as Dasein has become existent. Yet
this happening or process does not take place as a history that can be ex-
perienced, as the history of origins and of the upheavals that determine
the fates of humans and of nations; rather, as essentia of its historicality,
it makes that process possible. The “basic existentials” (moments of the

21
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

essence of being) make history possible in the first place. And if for that
reason the question of what comes earlier than the human (according to
Heidegger, this question no longer belongs to anthropology, which, like
Scheler’s, is said to necessarily presuppose the idea of the human) aims
for the authentic, for its radical, it will, in analyzing the Dasein that is in
each case mine, develop a method that can render the creative emer-
gence of a cultural system conceivable, a system that is relative to a certain
humanity and comes with elective affinities to that humanity’s world.10
This second possibility of positing human essence in terms of a
how and of a mode at least seems to guarantee an openness toward the
entire scope of cultures and epochs, since the formal-dynamic structure
of existence allows for variations in form of the most diverse, factually-
become types of existence or types of “being-in-the-world.” Why should
the existential form of movement of the “transcendence of Dasein,” such
as Heidegger describes it in his Kant book, “‘from- out-of itself-toward-
there...,’ so that the upon- which looks back and into the previously
named toward-there,”11 not fit just about any system of existence in its re-
lation of human and world? Conceived of each in their “world,” Indians,
Greeks, Eskimos, Polynesians, and Protestant Christians can be under-
stood according to the same schema of movement or, rather, in pro-
jection onto one and the same schema of movement. If (and here I
follow Misch)12 the “horizon” within which the significance of what we
are dealing with can be “revealed” in the mode of “originary formative
validity”— be it the horizon of a “world” for turning toward objects in
general, be it the horizon of the moral world in whose medium, to use
Fichtean terminology, I find myself to be a person in the first place13—
then this process takes place even where it must remain hidden from
those who are taking place. In a totem culture, for example, the basic pro-
cess might be hidden differently than in the European-Christian world,
“lapsedness” might be set up differently, lostness in the “they” might be
set up differently than in Christian Europe, where the discovery of some-
thing like “person” and “world” has already been made. Yet this changes
nothing about the fact that there, what is in truth human has precisely not
yet set out toward itself or has not yet become factual. And if we hold on
to the notion that the human is only if “Dasein” has become factual, the
question immediately arises: is being-human a necessary-possible “set-
ting out and breaking-through to oneself” (becoming aware and assum-
ing one’s own fate), to the personhood that is one’s own in each case?
Or might it even be tied to an actual setting out? If Indians, Etruscans,
Egyptians, each in their motherly landscape, have not made this break-
through and not made the discoveries tied to it, which have only become
possible in Christian areas (on the substrate of classical antiquity), can
they still be called humans? Or are they humans in appearance only and
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P O L I T I C A L ANT HROP O LOGY

does everything that bears a human face belong only somatically to that
area in which Dasein can become factual?
Without question, an analysis of the being “human” that is set up
like Heidegger’s is must begin with the native region of what I am myself
in each case. And on its path, such an analysis will encounter the typical
life-traits that simply dominate “our” Dasein, the Dasein of Europeans
formed by a classical-Christian tradition. Directed as it is toward a struc-
tural formula that, by linking the interpretation of one’s own Dasein
with the possible interpretation of alien Dasein, is to express everything
that is human in its possibility or its essence, to express it in terms of its
essentia and its specificum, this path, which ultimately seeks to culminate
in the formulation of the meaning of being as such, might very well pass
itself off as a mere path. Existential analysis, with its stations of care,
being-toward-death, and anxiety always has the possibility of making the
content in question relative to the method and to say: this is our approach
to human essence; only on that life-soil— to which belongs the question-
ability of what it authentically is— can a genuine analysis of essence be
performed. If it digs deep enough, it will be sure to find the points of
divergence, where, from the basic root of human-ness (Daseinness = es-
sence of Dasein), possibilities arise of getting into forms of interpret-
ing existence other than one’s own (which has set the standard for the
method chosen).
Are these other forms of interpretation not only equally possible,
as “transcendentally incidental” forms of lapsedness, but also equally
legitimate? If not, then the bearers of cultures that have no possibility of
assuming their own fate, of personality, ultimately, indeed, of metaphys-
ics in the Greco-Christian sense, are not humans or are humans only in
a state of latency. In the best of cases, they would be in a state of natural
non-redemption, but only insofar as we grant them a natural capacity for
conversion. Yet if other forms of interpretation are equally legitimate, as
legitimate as our own, then the claim to universality made by our own
interpretation of Dasein is canceled out. In that case, what existential
analysis truly comes to see in its orientation toward what is authentically
human is only our essence, here and today. And what is particularly dif-
ficult about this is not the appearance of a claim to universality within
the perspective of this one-sided form of Dasein, but the definition of
the relationship between the various forms of Dasein. What, in this case,
does the unity of the comparative perspective still allow for if I judge
them all to be forms of existence, of humanity? Only the equality of that
which bears a human face? Perhaps no more than somatic criteria of
the homo sapiens et faber as a phenomenon within the framework of sense
experience?
In the end, a priori anthropology or existential analysis, which had
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sought to remain open to the full scope of cultures and epochs by way of
conceiving of human essence formally (instead of materially), finds its
field of vision narrowed by its methodical aprioricity. Thanks to its me-
thodical directive, what is authentic about Dasein presents itself as Dasein-
ness (humanness), which makes the human human in the first place, and
the humanness in the human thus becomes the essence of the human.
The conditions of the possibility of addressing existence as existence at the
same time have the sense of being conditions of the “possibility” of leading
existence as existence. The culture in which this possibility is factual (or
only possibly factual) is thus given a privileged position over against other
cultures that do not by themselves have this possibility. This privilege can
of course be liberalized when it assumes in other cultures a mere non-
awokenness and non-redemption to the possibility-meaning of their own
existence and considers, in their case as well, a return “to themselves”
to be possible. This would, in principle, be the Christian attitude toward
the heathens, toward those of God’s children who have not yet gotten
through to understanding themselves to be such. Or it is strict and com-
pletely denies them the character of being-human, which, according to
an entire set of presuppositions, is not to be tied to characteristics such
as language or inventive activity, not to speak of physical activity.
In the last consequence, a priori anthropology one way or the other
produces an absolutization of particular human possibilities. Catholics
already, to give an example, will have to reject Heidegger’s analysis of the
meaning of existence. And what, in comparison, would the aspect of non-
European cultures and systems of Dasein look like, whose very meaning
includes an eminent “lack” of individuality, personhood, and freedom
toward possibilities, a “lapsedness into the they,” whose own life-meaning
is precisely not captured when it appears in such a perspective? Yet it is
only coherent for the same point of view that is characteristic of a priori
anthropology to respect the perspectives that are indigenous to every life
and life system and to leave it to the human— and to learn nonviolently
from the human— what it is and as what it interprets itself, no matter
whether it posits the essentia of its existence in its existence or in another
human, in an animal or a plant, in a star or in the earth, in a god or in the
elements. The latitude of the perspective won by the West demands that
it relativize its own position over against other positions. The means and
the discovery of this position are the concept of the human, are basically
all formal or formalizable categories such as life, culture, world. Our own
position has to remain aware of this relativity if, by way of the equipossi-
bility of understanding and interpreting other positions, it wants to avoid
the danger of dressing the alien in a uniform it has tailored according
to its own essence.
5

The New Possibility of

Combining the A Priori and
Empirical Views according
to the Principle of the
Human’s Unfathomability

“We noted at the outset that the concept ‘possibility’ is dangerous pre-
cisely insofar as it allows for unifying power and art and conditions of
thinking under the hegemony of a purely discursive category in order to
thereby achieve a transition from the interpretation of life to the ontol-
ogy of Dasein. . . . The existential power of interpreting the world . . . is
to be grasped in its ‘possibility’”; it is to be understood “non-Platonically,
from out of the dynamics of life, as an autonomous process whose prod-
uct . . . is not defined by a peras [limit] that lies beyond it.” Rather, “the
‘root of its own possibility’ has taken in Dasein. Yet the movement is not
set up, as we might expect in the case of ‘ability to,’ in the ground of Da-
sein but, corresponding to the relationship of conditioning, to the pos-
sibilities of thought, in the ‘ground of the essence of Dasein,’ that is, it is
already set up starting from a philosophical reflection on life.”14 “That,
according to Heidegger, is ‘the Dasein’ within it, which is defined by
finitude and which, starting from temporality, is to be constructed in its
atemporal, self-contained dynamics, while the ‘life lived by the human’
fades away into the unfathomable Where-from, whose meaning is only
defined when its own beyond, the self-contained form of an intellectual
world, is wrested from it by a concentration of forces that is always histori-
cally determined.”15
If the human is to be understood as the point of the creative break-
through of its intellectual world from out of whose values and categories
the human understands and deals with itself, its contemporaries, and its
environment, as the breakthrough point, thus, of its own a priori and of
the possibilities of thinking, willing, and feeling always already traced out
for it, then the theory that seeks to render this creatorship conceivable
can, as we saw, be neither empirical nor a priori. At the least it must not

25
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

dedicate itself to either one of the two methodological principles. It must

remain open, for the sake of the universality of its view onto human life in
the full scope of all cultures and epochs of which the human is capable.
This is why the unfathomability of the human moves to the center of an-
thropology, and the possibility of being-human that contains what makes
the human a human in the first place, that human radical, must yield to
the standard of unfathomability. Only if and because we do not know
what else the human is still capable of does it make sense to persevere
through a life of suffering on this earth. The human’s own unfathomabil-
ity is the binding principle of human life and of human comprehension
of life, binding for the sake of the seriousness of its task.
And only insofar as we take ourselves to be unfathomable do we
renounce the position of supremacy over other cultures, seen as bar-
barians and mere aliens, do we also renounce a proselytizing position
over against foreign lands, seen as an unredeemed, immature world, and
do we thereby de-restrict the horizon of our own past and present onto
a history broken up into the most heterogeneous perspectives. This is
the direction in which the idea of a unilinear progress is destructed, an
idea that transfixed the gaze of historians, sociologists, and psychologists
from the outset in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries
in the West— as if their civilization, because it liberated social research
and rational insight into history, represented the last and highest stage
of humanness. From this perspective, the only thing that can take root is
the justice of rational humanities disciplines that, free of illusions about
themselves, do away with the patronizing judgments about non-European
and past matters. Relative to their own system of values and categories,
the humanities, if aware of the achievements of this perspective, consider
these achievements a progress; they do not turn this progress into the
standard of their objects, nor do they see it as a silent process that alleg-
edly advanced the course of the mind to a final and absolute freedom
now attained.
Only in this consideration of history does the orientation of the
question of the essence of the human leave to historical facts their origi-
nary importance as decisions about the essence of the human. This is how
history is divested of its merely empirical character, of an empiricity that
is incapable of obtaining any insight into essences. This is how it is pos-
sible for philosophy, too, to derive new possibilities for insight from the
discovery of intellectual history. This is what the authors of intellectual
history wanted and what Dilthey asserted against an age of resurgent,
nonhistorical apriorism— which, even if it refuses to acknowledge it, is
rationalism resurrected and is, at its base, a reactive absolutization of
European value systems.
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There have been nations and epochs, there are nations still today,
that are not familiar with the “concept” human. To them, the similarity of
everything that bears a human face does not mean what it means to us.
There are fairy tales in which a human is still human even if it appears in
other forms. There are notions of totemism and practices of sorcery that
take the possibility of a true transformation of body and “essence” com-
pletely seriously. Are we to learn nothing from these matters of reality
and tradition? For it is they especially, not the thingness of a human
body allegedly in need of a foundation, that bring out what is problem-
atic about an anthropology guided by the physical characteristics of the
species homo. (There is nothing to be concluded about how anthropol-
ogy confronts its problem from the circumstance that a thing, an object
of experience, an occurrence among other things, a being-present, is
already dependent on a subjectivity or at least on a lively behavior for
whom something like thingness or presentness can constitute itself “in
the first place”— unless, that is, one lapses into the arguments developed
in the seventeenth century about the gnoseological-ontological primacy
of theoretical or practical subjectivity, as did even the founder of phe-
nomenology with his theory that an absolute consciousness is a horizon
of constitution, and as even his greatest student, Heidegger, did with his
existentialism.)
Only insofar as we take ourselves to be unfathomable do we provide
our own life yet to be lived, the life lived by the human, with a counter-
weight. This counterweight is the seriousness it is in danger of losing
as a result of the comprehensive relativization of its intellectual world
and of this world’s being unmasked as a beyond of its own and of its
own making. It is impossible historically and philosophically to compre-
hend that the human could have remained hidden as the author of the
transcendentals that confront the human. It is a matter of course that
the human had to lose its former balance the moment it discovered this
authorship, especially if we consider that this discovery breaks with an
age-old tradition whose effects reach down to the very last fibers of our in-
tellectual and everyday life. Experience shows that the self-conception of
the human as a conception of the self by the self, as human in the sense
of an ethnically and historically variable “idea,” is itself a product of its
history, that the ideas human, human-ness are conceptions conquered by
“humans” for which is reserved the fate of everything that is created: to
be able to perish— and not just to get lost from sight. The human must
confront this prodigious liberty with a new bond. This bond is no longer
derived from an absolute reality of whatever kind. As long as the human
holds on to itself as human, i.e., as the power to originate objectivity,
reality has once and for all lost its terror. Even the reality of history must
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

not mean more to this self-conception than an experienceable reality

whose insights depend on the human turning to history, a turn schooled
by the principle of unfathomability, a turn by a human who knows that
the principle that opens up history has itself historically become, who
knows that the human is itself an origin that has become.
Once the comprehensive relativization of its intellectual world has
cut off the possibility of gaining knowledge by going back to an absolute,
the human finds itself invested with a new responsibility: the responsibil-
ity of letting the real nonetheless be real, especially in that it can be rela-
tivized. Unlike the idealism of times past, the human must precisely not
turn a position of power it has seen through into a position of hegemony
(of whatever kind) over realities as they are in themselves. This absoluti-
zation, which turns one’s own sphere into an absolute, privileged being
(entitled consciousness, ego, soul, mind/spirit, reason, etc.) and turns
its own autonomy, whose anticipations create worlds, into the only being
that can, in truth, not be doubted, this absolutization only has meaning
where there is an absolute that can be claimed or can be refuted because
it is still valid. In such an intellectual world, absoluteness is a standard.
That is why there can be a struggle about whom to attribute absoluteness
to when, as in the German movement after Kant, the certainty that God
exists begins to dissolve. The history of idealism is none other than the
history of the gradual discovery of human autonomy as defined by the
idea of an absolute or an absolute order and guarantee of reality, an idea
then still in effect and normative. Accordingly, this history runs parallel to
the gradual overcoming of the absolute state, especially in Germany. (If
today we speak of the “return” to ontology initiated by Alexius Meinong
and, prompted by the phenomenological current, taken up by Nicolai
Hartmann, we must not overlook this essential difference from the old
ontology of the Christian era up until Leibniz and Wolff.)
It is not until it renounces the hegemonic position of the European
system of values and categories that the European mind completely un-
covers the horizon onto the originary multiplicity of historically-become
cultures and their world-aspects. Renouncing the absoluteness of the pre-
conditions that make this excavation possible in the first place leads them
to victory. In letting go, Europe wins. The same process that takes place in
releasing one’s own essential possibilities to evolve under the auspices of
political autonomy and national self-determination also leads contempo-
rary philosophy to provide an anthropological foundation for ontological
insights. The new philosophy renounces the hegemonic position of its
own epistemological conditions, the conditions that are its own possi-
bilities, to access the world as the embodiment of all zones and forms of
being. In doing so, it operates a full transvaluation of experience for the
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purposes of the insights it aims for— and it is only here that we see how
much so many of today’s philosophies, such as Scheler’s or Heidegger’s,
are tied to the old standards.
To have created this new position vis-à- vis the a priori in its rela-
tion to the a posteriori is the work of Dilthey. Because Dilthey’s work
grew from the fights about a justification of the epistemological sense
of historical experience, an exposition of Dilthey’s intention, even if it
considers only this specific problem, requires a short look at the time
during which Dilthey wrote and at the philosophical situation his work
overcame. The new anthropology begins with Dilthey. And since the idea
of the human remains attached to the historical perspective, an exposi-
tion of this idea in keeping with the meaning of politics is possible only
from the perspective of his work.
6

Excursus: Dilthey’s Idea of

a Philosophy of Life

To understand how, thanks to Dilthey, philosophy made its way to a theory

of the living human, we must first look back on the consciousness that
characterized his age. For this consciousness approaches the great ques-
tions of the world and of human life with other than just scientific stan-
dards. No age can at any moment remain oblivious of the fact that it
is confronted with tasks that precisely its generations, the old, the ma-
ture, the young, must solve. These tasks, to be sure, are of a theoretical
kind, they appeal to the means of thought, they are epistemological prob-
lems that these generations must decide according to objective criteria
such that they can cope with the demands of life. In this regard and
insofar as problems of this kind break out into the open for them at all,
ages with religious and social ties see themselves referred to the decisions
of divine revelation and religious institutions. The education of children
and the choice of a profession, professional training, and the exercise
of a profession in the community and in the public sphere may then
appear to be largely secured, and even if there is no absence of conflict
they may, because they are organized by venerable traditions and sacred
statutes, be dealt with according to fixed principles. Yet an age that has
become as religiously insecure as the late nineteenth century had, an
age exposed to the most drastic social shifts and agitations, an age that,
given a technology driven to an unprecedented development only by
the power of thought and experimentation, rightly thought of itself as
a novelty in world history, as the epoch in which the human was for the
first time left entirely to its own devices and in which it trusted only in its
own possibilities— such an age could no longer piously follow the views
on the world and on life handed down by tradition.
Thanks to its discoveries, which uprooted the prior organization of
life, modern science had become the leading power of life as a matter of
course. It shaped life into a provisional arrangement in the same sense
and at the same speed as the results and theses of science themselves
were at any moment only provisional. If today petroleum was the big
thing, tomorrow gas, and electricity the day after tomorrow, if the state
of physics, medicine, of engineering and transportation technologies

31
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and thereby the state of industry, the state of the economy continually
strove toward their own obsolescence, then the human of this age had
to feel itself to be only a transition, feel like an (in itself relative) transi-
tory state in a continual development open to endless possibilities. At
the beginning, a society will accept this loosening and relativization of its
present-constitution optimistically and as something positive, and, happy
to develop itself, it will avoid getting wrapped up in the cheerless perspec-
tives of an irretrievable loss of times past. But the counterstrike cannot
be amiss. Boom is followed by bust. One day the current state’s deprava-
tion to a mere provisional arrangement reveals itself to be a betrayal, a
betrayal of the meaning of the life of the generation tied to this present.
It is a threat to the human because it relativizes the opportunity that is
tied into this present, this and no other. Then the human will defend
itself against being cheated, time and again, out of its present by the
future and against sacrificing the reality of its existence to the ideal of
some kind of progress.
The pessimistic-heroic ethos that by nature looks back, and which
we find in the cosmology of Arthur Schopenhauer and Richard Wagner,
in the theory of decadence of Count Gobineau, in the conception of
history of Jakob Burkhardt and the young Nietzsche, thus conforms to
its age insofar as it is the necessary complement of the ethos of progress
that looks forward (the ethos of optimistic Darwinism, of Comte’s and
Spencer’s positivism). It is necessary, however, only in the restricted sense
that it is an emotional reaction to the progressive process of disillusion-
ment that gradually pulls in all of life. Once again, the age escapes from
a reality that has become provisional into images of past greatness and
seeks in history possibilities of its own existence that have been irretriev-
ably lost.
In an epoch in which the values of the bourgeoisie are victorious,
the economy expands, and reason penetrates the real world, the result is
the formation of a historical consciousness; more strongly, of a historical
ethos and attitude toward life that continues romantic traditions. Only
within the narrow confines of the conviction that all things have become
“naturally” and continually become different can this ethos harmonize
with the contemporary theory of development and its view of the emer-
gence and position of the human in nature. In turn, this ethos fights
contemporary practices of development as a banalization of everything
that is great and everything that demands perfection in life; it therefore
defends itself with all available means against the natural sciences (which
support the ethos of progress) encroaching on history, and it seeks to
keep history free of the sciences’ leveling explanations. One of these
means is the epistemology developed in historical studies, an epistemol-
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P O L I T I C A L ANT HROP O LOGY

ogy accommodated by an immediate life-interest of this age, which feels

itself to be humanly threatened.
Ernst Troeltsch has shown what lies behind this struggle of the Ger-
man historical school against the positivism of Anglo-Saxon-French coun-
tries, a struggle that was an important symptom of Germany’s intellectual
enmity toward and isolation from Western civilization until the World
War. The fact that this struggle was particularly intense and that it took
place principally in Germany is due, not least of all, to the political-social
hybridity of its unbalanced constitution, which was caught between, on
the one hand, ruler, nobility, and military and, on the other, parliament,
the urban population and, above all, industrial labor. Here a power, itself
already historically become and aware of its historicity, intervened imme-
diately in modern life without, however, being able to achieve the align-
ment (as in England, for example) of its own ethos and that of modern
life. The historical element offered noticeable resistances in present
existence and demanded its justification over against the progressivist
positivism of modern enlightenment. That is why, in the new German
Empire, the problem of history gained a currency that went beyond its
scientific and ideological- emotional aspects. At no other focal point of
industrial development did the powers of progress and tradition clash
more violently.
A specifically European question, which the political development
of the positivistically formed democracies of the West so to speak de-
cided in their favor, became the thread that was to guide Germany in
consciously overcoming its own intellectual division. Yet once this guid-
ing thread had been taken up, reflection could not but forge ahead to
the foundations of the modern faith in knowledge on which capitalism
and industrialism rest. The principles of this development themselves, its
ethos and the thesis of infinite progress, came to light.
Neither the many schools of scientific positivism (the epistemol-
ogies founded on the natural sciences and psychology) nor Marburg
neocriticism were contenders for engaging in this debate. (For neocriti-
cism, with its rigorous ties to the sciences, the validity of the sciences as
a method was beyond discussion because it was a factual validity.) Only
a critique of knowledge that, given all the demands that followed from
the claims made by the natural and cultural sciences, still dared to prob-
lematize these demands had the requisite independence. For in this case,
the one-sided bond with science, its interpolation between philosophy
and human reality disappeared; the critique of knowledge became a
realm of validity and values among other realms of culture, and the equi-
originariness of all intellectual manifestations, their equi-accessibility for
philosophy, was secured. Starting from the tradition of Hermann Lotze
34
HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

and Wilhelm Windelband, Heinrich Rickert took this significant step

from the critique of science to the critique of culture by adopting as
his guiding principle the so to speak provincial reach of the scientific
within a system of the values of culture and life. Because this situated the
sciences on one level with the other intellectual objectivations that are
art, religion, the economy, law, and so on, the transcendental subjectivity
of these objectivations expanded at the same time as did the material en-
compassed by philosophy and the horizon of philosophy’s tasks. A pure
limit of epistemic synthesis or, at most, a pure consciousness thought of
as passively perceiving where sense perceptions are concerned but as
spontaneously making rational judgments, became an organized multi-
plicity of positions concerning values, a primarily practical parameter suf-
ficiently large to no longer be all too distant from concrete human-ness.
Ethos and the thesis of infinite progress, the preconditions of the
age’s naturalistic positivism, became salient as principles of a nonhis-
torical conceptualization articulated purely in the terms of the natural
sciences. Against all positivistic encroachments à la Henry Thomas Buckle,
Hippolyte Taine, Karl Lamprecht, or Kurt Breysig, against all allegedly
exclusively scientific attempts to inquire into historical laws, the indepen-
dence of history and of historical studies seemed finally to be justified,
the uniqueness and irreplaceability of human greatness seemed to be
secured against biological/psychological/sociological explanations. Yet,
once again, this was only achieved in a manner that had to leave histo-
rians, especially, and the historical ethos unsatisfied, in two directions:
with respect to the transhistorical-timeless system of values and with re-
spect to the humans positioning themselves toward these values. Rickert
had saved history at the price of its historicity, i.e., its basic changeability
and liveliness. For the sake of a tidy separation between the categories
that constitute history and the categories of nature, history had been de-
tached from its concrete life-bond with nature and psyche, and, in its role
as a mere theater for the realization of values in themselves atemporal, it
had become a “merely” empirical (and, compared with its eternal system,
a secondary) parameter. In Rickert, what constitutes the truly unsettling
meaning of history had been reinterpreted. History is no longer the site
of the production and extermination of values, of the unproduceable,
of the inexterminable itself. The image of history as a bearer of values
turns history into a peaceful relationship between eternity and temporal-
ity, simply the stage on which bearers of nontemporal values come and
go according to some sort of context, who accomplish an albeit unidirec-
tional, unique course of dramatic exaggeration. According to their vari-
ous psychological constitutions, the positions taken by individuals (and
ages) in their factual behavior revealed now this, now that little piece of
the heaven of values.
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Rickert’s philosophy of culture probably was a philosophy in the

interest of history but not in the spirit of history. It was as if it had claimed
the nineteenth century’s discovery of history as its object merely the-
matically, without letting itself be captured and have its own means of
thought be transformed by the discovery. Rickert hadn’t understood that
history could only be approached, on the thematic level, too, if one also
learned from history for oneself, and if one drew the conclusions, in
one’s own thinking, from its insights. Rickert thus remained half-stuck
in the eighteenth century: a timeless cosmos of values that eternally re-
mained possibly valid (a Lotzean transcription of the Platonic world of
ideas) vis-à-vis a timeless transcendental subject of eternally possible posi-
tions; between them a flooding mēon, the limit of reality.
Dilthey recognized early on that the demands and dangers of his-
tory could not be confronted by simply adding such a lateral part to
the epistemological critique of the natural sciences, a transcendental
logic of history that would find its place beside the transcendental logic
of nature. Nothing was to be gained here by constructing an annex to
critical philosophy because the discovery of the historical world showed
the very ground on which the eighteenth century had built up the edifice
of critical philosophy to be moving. It was precisely the treatment of his-
tory as a domain beside nature, as a completely different domain, that
proved that Rickert and his followers failed to understand history, both
in its position as an object of scientific investigation and as a power that
supports this very investigation, i.e., that drives the investigation out from
itself and eventually reincorporates it. What is justified when it comes to
epistemic operations on things that are in themselves incomprehensible
(stone, color, water, leaf, the transcendental question of their possibility)
must not— not even formally— be applied to epistemic operations on
things that are already comprehensible in themselves (book, inscription,
sentence, word). For in that case these operations are already posited as
the very thing that was to be kept away from their essence at all costs: as
a second nature. In that case, they, too, are suspended between two tran-
scendental poles and deprived of the decisive sense of their flexibility
and liveliness.
The task, rather, was to undertake the critique of historical reason
within the perspective of history itself in order to track its own claims,
not alien claims made on it from outside. In this aspect, there is neither a
chasm between a timeless sphere of eternal states of affairs, values, truths,
and a temporal reality, nor a chasm between history and its observer on
the model of the perceptual chasm between eye and object. Values and
truths rise up from reality and for a certain time are normative and bind-
ing; the historiographer’s reflection grows from history, which is itself
shaped only in the historian’s own work. The a priori, ideal, intellectual
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and the merely empirical, material, the actualizing conditions of drives,

of blood, of power, they all form a nexus of life. In the comprehensibility
of the objectivations of history that are language, knowledge, religion,
law, etc., in their tradition from generation to generation, and in the
penetrating interpretation of tradition, this nexus supports and encom-
passes history (as an object of observation) and the historian equally. The
epistemologist, therefore, was not to ask whether this aspect of the nexus
of life in comprehending is in itself true or not and perhaps replaceable
by another; rather, this aspect exists, it is normative for the practice of
historical research, and philosophy has to comprehend its possibility.
The theme of a “critique of historical reason” articulated in anal-
ogy with Kant thus brought out problems whose solution required Dil-
they to develop tools of his own. Contemporary epistemology was either
caught up in the empiricism of the natural sciences and thus blind to the
particularity of the world of historical experience or, in the manner of
transcendental idealism, bent on positions of pure consciousness, logi-
cal concreteness, and the aprioricity of validity and thus, once again but
differently, alienated from historical relativity. The philosophy then cur-
rent was fitted generally to the experience of nature, and insofar as the
construction of the world of experience, which mediates the historical
world, was concerned, the Rickert school remained unable to extricate
itself from nature. In this elementary matter of intuition, therefore, phi-
losophy was dependent on Kant’s transcendental aesthetics— which the
naturalists claimed for themselves empiricistically, the transcendentalists
aprioristically. This was perhaps the main obstacle to capturing the spe-
cific concreteness of history and the approaches appropriate to history,
i.e., nexuses of life and structures of signification by which philosophy
was to gain an understanding that proceeds by analysis, interpretation,
and construction. Contemporary psychology, too, failed in this matter.
Its fanaticism about exactitude only admitted laboratory experiments,
and only strictly causal explanations counted as method. For such a psy-
chology, just as for epistemology, interpretation could not be a mode of
insight. In its notion of scientificity, psychology, too, was attached to the
model of the experience of natural things.
The goal, a critique that conceives of historical reason as an auto-
foundation that maintains itself within the perspective of history, thus
questioned the entire position of philosophy, split as it was into episte-
mology or theory of value and psychology. Cognition could no longer
count only as a reaching-out to the object based on sensations and intu-
ition and as a processing of the object according to forms of judgment.
For there is also interpretation, which penetrates objects that pronounce
and testify to themselves, an understanding that begins with the sensible-
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intuitive layer and pushes ahead to the essential core of a person, a type,
an age, that institutes in each phase a unity of both, of intuiting and
interpreting. Experience could no longer be just an objective context
given after the fact, a context that can be constructed formally or be cal-
culated in advance and that thereby allows for its neat separation from
an a priori sphere as just an a posteriori multiplicity; for there is also his-
torical or life experience. In this latter experience, characteristically, the
supratemporal-ideal emerges from the creative power of the historical
human, and any objectivized intellectual world perishes— the inescap-
able fate of the eternally new.
There was thus no choice left: philosophy in the sense of episte-
mology had to become more than epistemology. It had to expand into
a theory of the elements of historicity, i.e., a theory of everything that
makes history “possible,” of the individual in its reciprocal relationship
with its generation, age, and tradition; of contexts such as state, law,
economy, language, etc.; of the masses and their dynamics— but expand
in such a way that it would not look for these elements on an extra-
historical level of pure values, eternal truths, theorems in themselves,
constants of human essence. It had to expand in a genuinely critical
spirit according to the standards of history as a science by looking for the
elements of historicity there where the aspect of history demands that
one look for them: in history.
Dilthey permanently maintained a reciprocity between the analysis
of intellectual history on the one hand and, on the other, systematic stud-
ies that were at first descriptive and psychological, and, later, centered
on the problem of a theory of categories of the “life” that manifested
the historical elements historically (not metaphysically, metahistorically-
emanatistically). This is a profound procedure if we manage to see the
problem behind it (which, of course, Misch was the first to do). This
attitude seems merely irresolute and incapable of performing system-
atic tasks. Yet it amounts to the rigorous accomplishment of the critical
foundation of historical studies by way of the auto-relativization of its
elements. History, such as it comes to be understood by being conveyed
to the present that investigates it, has to be made “possible” in itself.
This is the genuine meaning of the word life, which Dilthey uses termino-
logically, a life that drives its meaning from out of itself and makes itself
understand this meaning, that manifests the conditions of the possibility
of its history in the first place, by itself and in line with its own reality that
is becoming history.
Thus, in Dilthey, critical recourse to the conditions that make his-
tory possible does not lead to an apparatus of reason or an organiza-
tion of beings and essences in a timeless realm. Instead, it just attains,
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relative to historical reality, a most extreme counter-pole in order to push

ahead once again, from this pole, to the multiplicity of historical reality.
Categories of life, therefore, are not statically conceived essential laws
of something that is really dynamic. Instead, they are dynamic concep-
tions, i.e., historical parameters that possess the power to form and to
guide history. There is a whole new kind of exchange between philosophy
and experience here: they interact no longer by means of a self-sacrifice
in favor of an inductive knowledge of probabilities or by means of any
kind of eternalization of experience in Hegel’s sense, but by means of
an ever-dynamic circulation between experience and that which makes
it possible. Taken this way, the relation between a priori and a posteriori
is itself the reason for the possibility of an intellectual history in the first
place, a history that alone allows philosophy to do its systematic work, that
alone allows philosophy to come to know itself.
It is only from this point of view that it is at all understandable how
Dilthey could at first look for the categories of historicity in a descrip-
tive psychology that, as a psychology of the experience of life, was not
to dissect anything but instead to express the pre- theoretical natural-
ness of life as it goes from human to human. Bon sens [good sense], the
empathy and fantasy of the poet, the acute sense of the physician, the
judge, the teacher, the tradesman, political reckoning with opponents,
these were the sources for a psychology such as it was decisive for the
historian, for a psychology of the human who expressed itself in its exis-
tence. Besieged by the forceful opposition of contemporary psychology,
the possibilities newly opened up by the phenomenological conception
of immediate givens led Dilthey to no longer look for these sources of
spirit or mind in the zone of the psychological, which had been artificially
isolated by particular cognitive interests. Yet the Platonizing and ideal-
izing antecedent decisions of Husserlian phenomenology, which posits
pure consciousness as absolute and articulates a principle of objective
correspondence between the meanings of general discourse and the “ex-
istent” parameters of “essences” and quiddities, prohibited him from
seeing in this possibility more than a tool for elucidation and pointed
him in the direction of his own foundation of hermeneutics, thought in
a hermeneutic spirit.
7

The Principle of
Unfathomability, or The
Principle of Open Questions

Dilthey started from Kant. He imagined a critique of historical reason

that, in opposition to a Hegelizing representation of reason in history,
was to take as its starting point the historical researcher’s work on his
material. His goal was to look, from that point, for the bases that pre-
ceded and guided the labor of historical comprehension. Such searching
regress was the model of his method as well. Nonetheless, in the course
of his work, Dilthey’s idea of method shifted so radically against Kant’s
idea of method that the chasm separating him not just from the Cohen
school but also and above all from the Windelband-Rickert current be-
came unbridgeable. His way of proceeding was reproached for lacking
logic. While his scientificity was not doubted with respect to the results
he obtained in intellectual history— his fame as an intellectual historian
expanded steadily— it was doubted with respect to its allegedly irrational
foundations. Here indeed lies a great difficulty but also the real discovery,
whose positive force Misch has brought out. This discovery was of revo-
lutionary significance, of which Dilthey obviously was aware only to the
extent that it proved itself as his work progressed. Because he was too far
ahead of his age, however, its systematic succinctness did not stand out
to him the way it has become possible for us today, thanks to Misch and
to the fact that the problems of philosophy have advanced.
We have to look back to Kant’s own methodical principle. His phi-
losophy is distinct from dogmatic philosophy, which directly inquires into
its objects (the themes that traditionally belong to it), in the intentional
indirectness of its questioning method. To secure exactitude for philos-
ophy, i.e., to ensure that its questions are elaborated and that they can
be completed, and, through an awareness of its possibilities of inquiry,
to endow it with the steady pace of a science, Kant’s philosophy connects
philosophy and exact natural science, which it takes as the example and
standard of knowledge formation. Kant connects them in such a way that
in justifying the right to proclaim such a model, he frames the model’s

39
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

inner possibility in terms of the conditions that make up the constitu-

tive elements of nature itself. The investigation of the very possibility of
natural science accomplishes the metaphysics of nature. The essence of
the object of a science is decided in the medium of the question concern-
ing the legitimacy of a science.
“Now I assert that among all speculative cognition, transcendental
philosophy has the special property that there is no question at all deal-
ing with an object given by pure reason that is insoluble by this very same
human reason; and that no plea of unavoidable ignorance and the un-
fathomable depth of the problem can release us from the obligation of
answering it thoroughly and completely; for the very same concept that
puts us in a position to ask the question must also make us competent to
answer it, since the object is not encountered at all outside the concept
(as it is in the case of justice and injustice).”16 For “one must be able to
know what is just or unjust in all possible cases in accordance with a rule,
because our obligations are at stake, and we cannot have any obligation
to do what we cannot know.”17 To be sure, “in the explanation of the ap-
pearances of nature . . . much must remain uncertain and many questions
insoluble, because what we know about nature is in many cases far from
sufficient for what we would explain.”18 Yet note that this uncertainty does
not derive from disciples’ failure to keep up with mentoring nature. It de-
rives from a materially founded disproportion between the facts available
in each case for providing an answer and the previously projected plan
of the question, in which we reach beyond the already attained status
of factual knowledge. “Those who study nature . . . comprehended that
reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own
design; that it must take the lead with principles for its judgments accord-
ing to constant laws and compel nature to answer its questions, rather
than letting nature guide its movements by keeping reason, as it were, in
leading-strings; for otherwise accidental observations, made according to
no previously designed plan, can never connect up into a necessary law,
which is yet what reason seeks and requires. Reason, in order to be taught
by nature, must approach nature with its principles in one hand . . . and,
in the other hand, the experiments thought out in accordance with these
principles— yet in order to be instructed not like a pupil, who has recited
to him whatever the teacher wants to say, but like an appointed judge
who compels witnesses to answer the questions he puts to them. Thus
even physics owes the advantageous revolution in its way of thinking to
the inspiration that what reason . . . has to learn from nature, it has to seek
in the latter . . . in accordance with what reason itself puts into nature.”19
From Galilean physics, philosophy has to adopt the research maxim
that its object is not to be treated as a mentor but as a witness. This saves
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it from the procedure of “the uncritical dogmatist, who has not mea-
sured the sphere of his understanding and thus has not determined the
boundaries of his possible cognition in accordance with principles, who
therefore does not already know in advance how much he is capable
of but thinks he can find it out through mere experiments.”20 Philos-
ophy is duty-bound to be aware of its possibilities of inquiry, i.e., of its
boundaries, which it acknowledges. Otherwise, it encounters that with
which it ends as a mere limit it resents, as an inhibiting power to which
it is subjected. Such a reckless, uninhibited philosophizing is undignified
because it contradicts the principle of morality, of a “moral law . . . based
on the autonomy of . . . a free will which, in accordance with its universal
laws, must necessarily be able at the same time to agree to that to which it
is to subject itself.”21 For the sake of its own morality, the revolution in the
way of thinking inaugurated by modern research into nature, “namely
that we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into
them,”22 has to become the model for the transformation of philosophy.
Only in this very precise sense can the limits of reason be determined
according to reasons a priori, which is to determine philosophy in its
essence— to determine its end. What enabled the successes of mathe-
matics and physics is the application of the principle of human dignity
to their own methods. “Only rationalism of judgment is suitable for the
use of moral concepts, since it takes from sensible nature nothing more
than what pure reason can also think for itself, that is, conformity with
law, and transfers into the supersensible nothing but what can, conversely,
be really exhibited by actions in the sensible world in accordance with the
formal rule of a law of nature in general.”23
If the issue is to make the empirical humanities, whose ideal of
science and exactitude is different from that of the natural sciences, fruit-
ful for philosophy, for insight into our possibilities of insight, then fol-
lowing the indirect method of questioning founded by Kant precisely
compels us to abandon his position. Under the sign of the principle of
human dignity, of autonomy, and of the idea of lawfulness (which this
principle treats as trans-arguable)— the principle that constitutes what
precedes even the concepts of natural law and moral law— the ground of
transcendental philosophy itself begins to move. The unconditional com-
mandment of autonomy turns against the one-sidedness that consists in
reducing possible experience to the experience of the natural sciences
alone. A new experience, which features less of science than it does of
the mathematics inherent to science, demands its rights if its claim to
be knowledge is to be legitimate. The standard for testing it, however,
must be taken only from itself, not from a norm of knowledge foreign to
it. And thus interpretation, which is supported by a different principle,
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joins, with equal rights, the explanations of natural science, which are
bound by the “rationalism of judgment.”
If it does not want to be dependent on chance but be exercised in
a disciplined manner, interpretation, too, can reach its goal only through
anticipations. The humanities scholar, too, seeks to learn to ask reason-
ably and not into the blue. In this anticipatory project, he secures the
answerability of the questions that arise from the objects of his experi-
ence guided by the experiential context that contains these objects. It is
precisely this anticipatory restriction of inquiry that has made it possible
to institute empirical humanities disciplines, an art picked up from the
natural sciences that liberates empirically disciplined interpretation from
the natural harmony between the one who understands and his object
(“one needs to be Caesar to understand Caesar”) or puts this already-
having-understood in a different sense in the service of the context of
comprehension of motive, character, life-circumstances, etc., a context
still objectively to be developed.
Yet what constitutes the difference in principle between the problem-
projecting anticipation of the humanities scholar and the anticipation of
the natural scientist is precisely what defines the scientist’s explaining as
a cognitio circa rem [cognition concerning the object] in distinction from
the humanities scholar’s interpretation, which is a cognitio rei [cognition
of the object]. Freely paraphrasing Kant’s conceptual couple: the a priori
put into things in the problem-projection is of constitutive significance
for the cognition of natural objects as phenomena, but it is only of regu-
lative significance in the cognition of mental objects. Because they are
narrowed down to an alternative, the questions of natural science contain
the guarantee of their answerability: the experiments thought up accord-
ing to the projected problem confirm or refute a thesis no matter how
they turn out, positively or negatively. In every case, the occurrence or
non-occurrence of a specific phenomenon is an answer to the question,
since from the outset, the reduction of the question to an alternative has
been bought at the price of a restriction to spatiotemporally determined
phenomena, i.e., phenomena that can be measured and be fathomed by
measuring. Of course, one can ask the wrong way such that nothing, or
nothing unambiguous, can be taken from a phenomenon; that, then, is
the question’s fault.
Ideally, the guarantee of answerability given by the way of posing
problems in the natural sciences thus offers at the same time the guar-
antee of questions’ being answered in the sense that a thesis is confirmed
or refuted. Science obtains this guarantee by consciously restricting its
cognitive aims to an unambiguous determination of its objects according
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to the principles of measurement. In turn, the way of posing problems in

the humanities, although it cannot renounce the guarantee of answer-
ability because it wants to ask in a way that is reasonable and allows for de-
cisions, must renounce the guarantee of problems being answered. Its ob-
jects cannot be regarded as phenomena, i.e., variables that are exhausted
by determining points in space and time. The impossibility of freely dis-
posing of its objects (as in an experiment) and the non-measurability of
their nonspatial and nontemporal consistency, however, are positively
counterbalanced by their immediate accessibility or comprehensibility.
The objects of the humanities express themselves and lend themselves to
meaning something to those concerned with them. This in turn does not
exclude that the humanities, too, occasionally succeed in posing a ques-
tion that guarantees its being answered; only, its ideal of science does not
point to that. The objects of the humanities are put into question as, in
principle, unfathomable in the sense that they can never be understood
completely. They are open questions.
To be sure, insofar as the degree of certainty of its decision is con-
cerned, an open question is inferior to the formally closed question asked
by a scientist. Yet instead it aims into the matter itself rather than aim-
ing at the rule according to which a thing can be unambiguously deter-
mined. Thus taking aim, it points into the unknown and the unfathom-
able. The inexhaustibility of its object, however, is not one-sidedly due,
as is often said, to its material consistency, as if its liveliness and intellec-
tuality flouted our concepts. Such a foundation of the openness of prob-
lems in the humanities would fall back into a precritical (in the Kantian
sense) mode of thinking, for which, in the relationship of questioning
and object, the object takes the lead and notions follow the objects. The
unfathomability of the intellectual world instead is due to the method-
ological principle that the question aims for comprehension. In freely ac-
knowledging the unfathomable to be binding, the possibility opens up of
gaining sight of something like an intellectual world and of history as a
never-exhaustible and yet graspable life-reality, i.e., one that is always to
be seen anew because it permanently renews itself in a different sense.
And not until we take the unfathomable to be binding, which from the
point of view of natural-scientific explanation appears as a renunciation,
not until this so to speak creative renunciation of ours does the intellec-
tual world come into view as a reality that is not completed in our living pres-
ent, as a reality that is at any moment dependent on being shaped by our
thought and action. The openness of its questions, which in the objects
of the intellectual world of the past appears as what is no longer com-
prehensible, buried, and lost, as the abysmal distance of eternally sealed
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enigmas, is only the other side of the fact that they are associated with
us as their products, associated in an immediate effective context that is
mediated through the gradual development of the ages.
Knowing oneself to be borne by history, knowing oneself to have be-
come out of history thus conveys insight into the originary powerfulness
of history. In acknowledging that the unfathomable is binding, therefore,
the human discovers the temporal emergence of the non- and supratem-
poral, of the intellectual; the intellectual world, the beyond of the transi-
tory human, is returned to the human as its own beyond. It is thus that
the human reappropriates, by “understanding” them, God and nature,
law and morality, art and science as systems of reality, value, and cate-
gories that sprang from its power— and thereby the human today finds
itself as human.
To conceive of something historically, in consequence, means ulti-
mately to recognize oneself and one’s world as having become out of the
power of past generations and thereby to trace one’s own present, in the
full scope of all its dimensions, back to the human behavior that unlocks
them. It does not stop at the standpoint from which this view of historical
reality breaks through by virtue of freely acknowledging the unfathom-
able to be binding; instead it destructs this standpoint onto that which is
viewed and in this historical relativization takes off its weight as an absolute
standpoint, principle, or foundation. In the historical self- inclusion of
history, sociology, ethnology, psychology, and anthropology, the concep-
tion of life that guides them documents its lack of a beginning. The phi-
losophy of this conception, which stands above it as free reflection, does
not turn this reflective Above into an argument for an extra- historical,
extra-temporal absolute position it reserves for itself. It understands it to
be a necessity given with the objective attitude, a necessity that remains
for human life when, resigning itself to objectivity, it transitions to free
rationality.
To characterize the circle thus drawn back to its historical origins
exclusively as objective reality, thereby sacrificing or ignoring the prin-
ciple that draws it, is to absolutize reality; one obtains historicism as a
result. The alleged necessity of historicism and the unavoidability of all
the relativisms that come with it (I mention only Marx and Engels’s his-
torical materialism here) is due to this neglect of anchoring the historical
world in the free acceptance of its principle as binding, a principle that
gives directions for a living history implemented by living humans. This
living implementation is only ever possible for a present, a present that,
in this precisely, stands out against the fading background and substrate
of the past and lifts itself, as that which is becoming, out of mere having-
become. The immediacy of the lived present, which, seen from the past,
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seems to be the last effect but is really already past, a past only present in
its proximity, is only to be seen and understood from out of the unfath-
omable that-toward-which of our decisions, that is, only through a break
in perspective. In this breaking of the perspective, life turns to itself to
discover itself as past life, as life that has become. In this breaking, how-
ever, it lifts itself out of the continuum of what has become and manifests,
as present, its power over the past.
This power, first, is theoretical power insofar as the conception of
the past as a context still effective even in the perspective of life, the
conception of the past as history, depends on the turning of the per-
spective. Yet, second, this power is practical-political power insofar as the
past is also shaped by the decisions of the generations that, in each case,
are struggling for their present. If primarily, the past is not a context of
objects separated from the present and thus also from its observer by a
chasm (the way the isolating observation of the scientist brings things, as
pure objects, into as pure a juxtaposition as possible), but if instead, the
past is that which gradually settles into a kind of completion and can once
again be dissolved in the living point of the present— since the past is the
genesis of this present— then the retroactive, history-creating force of the
continuity of present and past (a continuity whose pro- action is conceived
of only genetically) becomes visible as well. Every generation thus acts
back on history and thereby turns history into that incomplete, open, and
eternally self-renewing history that can be adequately approached only
in the interpreting penetration of this generation’s open questioning.
The principle of the bindingness of the unfathomable is the at once
theoretical and practical conception of the human as a historical and
therefore political being. It is Dilthey’s achievement to have been the first
to intentionally apply this principle in its theoretical function; he thereby
succeeded in elaborating a perfect counterpart to Kant’s accomplish-
ment. In Kant, we find the ethos of lawfulness, of the form of natural law
in general (to be respected absolutely), of necessity and general validity.
In Dilthey, we find the ethos of unforeseeability, of unforeseeability as
the principle of viewing past life and one’s own life, in its creative power
and at the same time in its fragility, from out of the dark horizon from
which and into which it proceeds. Just as the Kantian ethos of the cat-
egorical imperative lays the legal foundation for the legal categoricalness
of critical philosophizing and its being guided by mathematical natural
science, the Diltheyan ethos of that which is powerful beyond all possibili-
ties lays the historical foundation for philosophy’s being guided by history
as its model, its object, its frame, and its form.
In releasing itself onto the horizon of history, philosophy does not,
in a historicist manner, renounce the possibility of confronting the things
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

themselves; such renunciation assumes the wrong historical perspective,

from out of a past already absolutized as objective. Rather, it knows that
this release is possible only from out of a presentification that runs ahead
of the past, which therefore has the liberty of conceiving of itself as hav-
ing become from out of that past and as becoming past. In the history
of cultures, however, presentification is precisely what, theoretically and
practically-politically, into the furthest reaches, renders possible cultures’
reference to objects, their reference to world, their inner liberty, and
therefore their eternal refigureability or openness.
8

The Human as Power

In renouncing the supremacy of its own system of values and categories,

the European mind opens its horizon onto the originary diversity of his-
torically developed cultures and their world aspects as a diversity that is
open, unlimited, not bound intentionally by any kind of “world spirit.”
The universality of its perspective requires that the world aspect of this
very universality, too, no longer be posited as absolute. Achieved at a
late date, historical relativization finally becomes conscious of its own
relativity and, after a period of historicist despair, learns to understand
this relativity as the condition of genuine objectivity. Times that thought
ahistorically treated their pasts as prior stages to their own and later, the
discovery of historical consciousness gradually undermined one’s cer-
tainty and finally completely dissolved the consciousness of the present,
that is, the belief in genuine contact with the world and with things. Our
own time, in turn, in its perfect abandonment of “naturally accessible”
absoluteness (witness the present situation of Protestant theology!) be-
gins to bring past and present into an even relationship. It is Dilthey’s
achievement to have outlined the philosophical attitude that expresses
and practices in the medium of scientific thought what today is no longer
just a concern of scholars but a concern of all intellectual and public life
in Europe: combining the renunciation of the supremacy of our own sys-
tem of values and categories with the firm conviction that this very system
remains viable in the future.
This attitude underpins the problem of anthropology, or, rather,
this attitude is expressed in the question concerning the essence of the
human. For the concept of the human is nothing but the “means” by
which and in which the reference back to a creative basis of life executes
the value-democratic equalization of all cultures. As discussed, the refer-
ence back does not stop at any transcendence (value or reality) posited
as absolute. It thus cannot itself stop at this particular creative basis of
life and, in adopting some kind of organicist pantheism of “life,” become
unfaithful to its own principle. Otherwise, it could not reject the conse-
quence, a new doctrine of superstructure and ideology. Even historical
materialism, although it takes life in the restricted sense of economic
reality and social power structures, relativizes all cultures and their worlds

47
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to life. Yet more is needed than abandoning this restriction. Creative life
can only mean human reality, human reality as it enters our experience,
without remainder, in each case; it cannot mean even a basic source ly-
ing within creative life, a basis whose creative capacity this side of history
would be articulated or secured (if not rationally then at least intuitively)
by philosophy as an intemporally temporizing structure.
The principle of accepting unfathomability as binding for any
knowledge of the life of the human gestures at the relation between the
hapeiro, the unfathomable where-from of an intellectual world, and the
peras of this world, a world historically wrested from the hapeiro in a his-
torical crisis. To think within this perspective is to think in the direction of
life itself, which proceeds from individuation to individuation. Individua-
tion itself is effected by factors that in turn are themselves effected. This is
how the human, especially in regard to its essence, determines itself— and
not philosophy— to be the highest authority [Instanz]. This is how human
existence in its developed individuation and in defense of this effected
one-sidedness (and if it is only the one-sidedness of the Westerner who
thinks in universals) determines itself to be the authority responsible for
the question concerning its essence but not (as for example Heidegger,
continuing an old tradition, still thought) the essence of human existence
this side of and prior to all individuation. When we conceive of this self-
determination as the basic intemporal act of freely appropriating oneself,
which has nothing above it, it has nothing to do with Kantian autonomy.
In that the decision about the essence of the human cannot be sought
without the human’s concrete participation, i.e., cannot be sought in a
neutral definition of a neutral structure but only in human history as a
constantly effected decision, the decision that is to be made for a present
always opens onto a decision already made: either the present decision
holds on to the decision made or it breaks free from it. The present deci-
sion thus has history, its history, above itself.
If the relationship between the substratum of life and its in each
case effected individuation is kept clear of the image of an enduring ema-
nation, then the point of view of the human itself, such as it is accessible
to us, has become anthropology’s guide. Then the “natural” relation of past
and present has become the dimension of reflection on the human.
This relation is an open immanence in a double sense. The past,
which as concealed or conscious provenance pervades us in everything
and embraces us in the frame of tradition, opens up into the life of the
present that is yet to be lived. And the present, which embraces us in a dif-
ferent sense from out of what we conduct our lives towards, opens up into
what we in fact already are because we have become thus thanks to our
past. If we maintain reflection on the essence of the human within this
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open immanence, then we grasp the ties— in Misch’s terms— between the
ulterior-powerful (the hapeíro) and the individuation historically wrested
from it, first, in the sense of the principle of the right consideration of the
emergence of what is human “from out of” life— i.e., its being effected
by its own power— and, second, in the sense of the emergence itself. That
is why we cannot structurally grasp the effectuation but only the product,
by virtue of the significance it has for the human.
The unfathomability of life comes to the fore once more in this in-
accessibility of effectuation, an effectuation in which we place ourselves
only in our self-actualization and as if in flight. This inaccessibility does
not rely on any characteristics that would be inaccessible to a thinking
merely unable to keep up. Rather, it expresses the basic attitude towards
life that corresponds to the new life ethos. What is expressed in such state-
ments about the ingraspability of life and the inexhaustibility of human
ability is not a thinking that, in the form of negative liminal concepts,
seeks asymptotically to nestle up to life (see Bergson), but a very positive
attitude in life to life, an attitude of life that for life’s own sake enters into
a relation of indeterminacy toward itself.
In this relation of indeterminacy toward itself, the human conceives
of itself as power and discovers itself as an open question to the benefit
of its life, theoretically and practically. What it denies itself in this renun-
ciation returns as the force of ability. What it thus wins in terms of a full-
ness of possibilities at the same time allows for a resolute limitation over
against infinitely other possibilities of self-conception and world concep-
tion, which the human thereby already no longer has available.
The de-restriction of all dull lostness to some unexamined tradition
and a unilaterally fixed position toward world and life, the de-restriction
of blindness toward one’s own and toward foreign essences, the de-
restriction of the somnambulence and opaqueness of one’s own actions:
in whatever form the centrality and universality of its point de vue may
present themselves to the human, they never allow the human to abso-
lutize this point of view. If other cultures on this earth have not broken
through to their own basis of powerfulness and formed their life- position
from it, this does not mean that these humans did not know about their
human-ness, that they still interpreted themselves incorrectly, that they
did not understand themselves and the world the right way, or even that
these humans were not humans but only human animals. It does not even
mean that they had not broken through to their basis of powerfulness. In
that we acknowledge other cultures as humanly possible cultural achieve-
ments of a, precisely, particular ethnicity and cultural sphere, in that we,
nonetheless, derive this acknowledgment from their human being or
essence insofar as we precisely leave it open, determine it as a power to..., as
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

ability, we would have to, were we to abandon this openness, negate for
them, too, their human position.
Every other turn leads us to absolutize our own Western position.
Either it reserves for this position the breakthrough to a basis of powerful-
ness of one’s own (the awareness of human-ness) and makes being human
depend on this basis or, rather, equates full authentic being human with
it, or it grasps this basis as the specific Western possibility of life, discov-
ered by Greek culture and Christianity, and thereby monopolizes being
human in a specific cultural sphere. Yet if we hold on to our conception
of the human as power and open question as if it were only a historical
product, then this conception loses the sense and rank of an essential
determination, an insight penetrating to what is human. It becomes a
mere “expression” of European intellectuality.
Thus returns the fundamental difficulty of doing justice to the
claim to universality, which appears in the perspective of the European
form of existence, without for all that forgetting the claim’s relativity to
this form of existence, which has itself come about historically. For on
this claim depends the determination of the relations of the other, non-
European forms of existence to our own and among one another. “What
then does the unity of the comparative perspective still allow for if I judge
them all to be forms of existence, of humanity? Only the equality of that
which bears a human face? Perhaps no more than somatic criteria of
the homo sapiens et faber as a phenomenon within the framework of sense
experience?”
The solution to these questions is given in the very conception of
the human as power according to the principle of immanence or of un-
fathomability. It lies in this conception’s sense of a principle that opens
the view onto history. In conceiving of itself as power, the human con-
ceives of itself as conditioning history and not only as conditioned by his-
tory. The danger of a complete relativization conjured up by opening up
the perspective is thus in turn conjured within the same perspective. Yet
it is not conjured in the form that has been overcome, that is, not in the
form in which the whole of historical action (embedded in which Euro-
pean culture has, since the Greeks, produced a discipline of knowledge)
is anchored in a pre- and suprahistorical absolute spirit, or in reason, or
in the structure of the human power of creation. It takes the new form
of an immanent rootedness of this real process in the conditions it creates
for itself.
With the discovery of this solution, the process has to take a dif-
ferent direction because humans have thereby become more powerful
than they were before. Just as the discovery of the conditions of nature
increasingly put nature into the hands of the human such that the planet
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begins to be transformed according to the human’s will, so the discovery

of its historical conditions steers unforeseeable power its way with which
it will rise above the historical level it has attained thus far. As long as the
human holds on to this conception of its essence as power, it has power
and there is development. But the criterion that consists in having hit
upon, in this conception, the essence of the human in general remains
immanent to history and remains itself an open question.
In theory, the question’s solution is possible only regulatively, not
constitutively, because in accordance with the principle of unfathom-
ability, it does not want to be solved. The essential determination of the
human as power or as an open question is theoretically definitive only
insofar as it provides the rule for keeping at bay a theoretical fixation as...
of content or form, a fixation that seeks to subject the history of the
human, past and future, to an extra- historical schema of historicity. At
the same time this determination is theoretically correct (in the Kantian
sense even constitutive) because it hits upon the human’s power to be
itself and its power over itself, to which it can bear witness in deeds alone.
We just must not overlook that in this essential statement, the criterion
for the correctness of the statement has become the human’s responsibility. If
we think “being an open question,” power, as an essentia in the human,
then its truth can only be substantiated by history. Then Dilthey’s dictum
that the human can experience what it is only through history applies in
the practical sense as well.
There is no other guarantee for the possibility that cultures which
are heterogeneous from one another may encounter one another on a
shared basis of human-ness. And there must be no other if the life and ac-
tions of humans are to have the sense— the sense of history— of conquer-
ing, always anew, this basis in order to secure it; if history is to be more
than a great masquerade of coincidences behind which the immovable
face of humanity lies concealed. In this uncertainty, the human finds its
life element; from this life element, the human acquires its own life-sense
in a struggle (that is, against what is foreign).
9

The Exposure of the Human

In the principle of taking unfathomability to be binding for knowledge,

the first outlines of the human life-situation come to light. As power, the
human— risked in this generality toward what is human, and any state-
ment determining its formal character remains a risk— is necessarily en-
gaged in a struggle for power, i.e., in the opposition of familiarity and foreign-
ness, of friend and enemy.
As a fact, this means nothing we have not always already known.
Empirical research can confirm it again and again in a thousand vari-
ations. But this is not our emphasis. Here, we rather conceive of the
friend–enemy relation as belonging to the essential constitution of the
human and we do so precisely by blocking any concrete essential determina-
tion of the human, by treating it as an open question or as power. In its
indeterminateness toward itself, that peculiar horizon takes shape inside of
which everything appears to the human as known, familiar, and natural,
appropriate to its essence and necessary, [and] outside of which every-
thing appears as unknown, foreign, and unnatural, against its essence
and incomprehensible. The human cannot predetermine where the line
of this horizon runs, and this line is not determined until it is determined
by the human. Yet this determination by the human (a determination,
once again, made according to the principle of open immanence, in the
“natural” existential situation between its past and its future) is charac-
terized by holding on to a determination already made or by revolting
against it; that is, it has a historically relevant character. Any kind of com-
panionship and collectivization for the purpose of habitation, economy,
loving, religious activity, progeny, whatever form it may take, is defined
by this friend–enemy relation. A familiar circle sets itself off from what
is unfamiliar and foreign.
In the common conception, this phenomenon is interpreted as a
protective measure, to be traced back to a fear of damage, or as a primary
means of attack for the purpose of extending one’s own domain. This
interpretation, however, with the biological evidence it usually cites, for-
gets to name the reason for the primary fear and hostility, especially since
simple worrying about food and competition for a sexual partner may
very well play the decisive role in some, but it does by no means play that
role in all social-historical circumstances. The reason for the permanent

53
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

formation of the horizon of familiarity is indeed a fear or besiegement

that belongs to the essential constitution of the human’s powerfulness
and at the same time entails hostile reactions as counterstrikes. Yet this
fear is rooted in the uncanniness of the foreign and not in the detri-
mental effect the foreign might possibly have on the sphere of familiar-
ity; because the foreign is not merely an other (the way, for example, a
stone is nothing foreign to the enlightened human but, in the sober and
indifferent observation of mere difference, is something other than the
human; however, foreignness quietly gains ground in the botanic, more
audibly in the zoological in order to finally acquire its ultimate domain,
even for the enlightened human, in what is human— and, in correlation,
in the enigmatic spectacle of the universe). The foreign is that which is
one’s own, familiar, and homely in the other and as the other and there-
fore— to recall an insight of Freud’s— is uncanny. If the formulation be
permitted: the human does not see “itself” only in its Here but also in
the There of the other. The sphere of familiarity is thus not limited by
“nature,” extending (as if extra-historically) only to a certain limit; it is
open and thereby opens up for the human the uncanniness of the other
in the inconceivable interlocking of what is one’s own with the other.
Not even the conception of humanity allows the human to get away
from this uncanniness and foreignness. Although it does make the for-
mation of the general concept human possible, which comprises, as sub-
forms and cases, the differences of nations, races, states, cultures, and
individuals, this pacifying discovery of a natural commonality cannot be
secured in any absolute criteria that would not once more be tied to a
one-sided reduction of what is human and the monopolization of a spe-
cific, historically become human- kind. What follows from the concep-
tion of humanity is precisely that it relativizes itself and, with this, that it
surrenders a naturally secured supremacy over against other human posi-
tions and forms of existence; what follows is the equalization on one level
of one’s own essential sphere with foreign spheres by surrendering the
idea of a naturally secured difference in development from others and
thereby an opening of the horizon of one’s own human- kind onto a com-
petition with other possibilities of being-human. This is the conclusion
history itself draws from the age of humanity, namely in the development
of nation-state cultures, the formal Europeanization and democratization
of nations including the colonized nations, the autonomizations of cen-
ters of power independent from one another, precisely under the sign of
humanity and internationalism.
What is uncanny and foreign to the human in each case and how for-
eignness (the condition for the aggressive defensive and protective posi-
tion) takes shape for the human depends on its particular life-position
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P O L I T I C A L ANT HROP O LOGY

toward itself and to the “world.” We must not say that the world or nature
is what is proximately uncanny and hostile. Many, especially primitive
life-constitutions testify to the contrary. The famous positivist idea of a
terror- stricken primeval stage, at which everything was horrifying and
incomprehensible for the human, has long been refuted by ethnology
and ethnopsychology! The history of culture shows a relentless displace-
ment of the horizon of uncanniness and a correlative displacement
of the sphere of friendly familiarity, such that the changes in how the
friend–enemy relation manifests itself can only be investigated histori-
cally. This relation thus does not of necessity have the sense of a specifi-
cally political relation because it pervades all relationships of the human.
But the political, as a constant of the human situation and in its explicit
form of a behavior among humans that is oriented toward securing and
increasing one’s own power by restricting or annihilating the foreign do-
main, is rooted in the friend–enemy relation, and in this explicit form,
too, the political can in turn make every life-domain serviceable and just
as well be made to serve every life-domain’s interests.
{There are two things to keep in mind here. First, the political (even
in the enlightened European’s world) is indeed restricted to the sphere
of the human and is not grounded in the relations to God, nature, and
intellectual being. Yet it claims to be so broad as to penetrate all human
relationships and to counter the restriction to a so- called political sphere,
i.e., the sphere of the state. There is politics between man and woman,
master and servant, teacher and student, physician and patient, artist
and patron, and whatever other private relationship you like, just as in
the public sphere, there are, beside the politics proper of the state and
of parties, politics and policies concerning the law, the economy, culture,
and religion, as well as social policy. This is how it is possible for the say-
ing “politics is fate” to retain its deep meaning precisely if and when it
is restrictively applied— politics taken in the explicit sense— only to the
age of the human’s being discovered, i.e., to an age that ultimately ac-
knowledges only one Power, the human; if and when, however, it is then
also conceived of— politics being understood as the necessity, springing
from the basic constitution of what is human as such, to live in a for-or-
against situation and to delimit and to claim for itself a zone of its own
against a foreign zone— as insight into the secret fate of the being that
is the human.
And then, second, we should not forget: the uncanny as such is
not per se the hostile. It is only the possibility of the hostile or the ten-
sion from out of which the human is caught in hostility in ever-different
forms. That which is detrimental to the human’s interest becomes its
enemy. Only in the rarest of cases is this characterized by uncanniness.
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

On the contrary, it is the most natural and most familiar thing in the
world. But even in this familiarity and self- evidence of the opposition
of interests that gives rise to everyday quarreling and conflict about the
smallest and the greatest matters, we witness the interlocking of the One
with the Other, an interlocking that is a matter of complete indifference
to the parties of the conflict but which, as it were behind their backs, trig-
gers the compulsion to enter into conflict, an interlocking, furthermore,
in which each one is juxtaposed to “herself” or “himself” as foreign not
just in their own Here but also in the other’s There as their There. Except
for the one reflecting on it, there is nothing uncanny yet about this for-
eignness either. For it shows and constitutes an approach to something
that is more fundamental for the life-situation than are the conflicts that
occur in the field of everyday behavior, which are singular in each case:
the approach to the substrate against which the space where this behavior
can play itself out is delimited as a whole; in this delimitation, however,
this substrate simultaneously brings out the function of the uncanny.}
If, then, we seek to conceive of the political from out of the fateful
necessity that humans are unable to overcome familiarity and foreign-
ness, friendship and hostility, and to conceive of it as the framework of
life, not just as a domain of its activity best left to the makers of deals and
the lovers of quarrels, then we must look back onto this frame as onto
an ability, as the powerful, and keep it clear of any false fixation of an
ontological kind. Ability, the powerful are only expressions for the indeter-
minacy in which the subject of attribution of history— in the sense of a
thinking that accords with life and remains within the open immanence
of the interlocking perspectives of past and future—wins its determinacy
in each case differently and always anew. To think according to life, a
natural thinking within the perspectives of a life that enduringly grows
from the past and stands before an unknown future that seeks prophecy
and foresight; to dwell, thinking, in the openness of life, reflecting on
this openness; and to posit it as the elementary situation— that would be
the originary contemplation, appropriate to the human, of the human
as to its essence. In this contemplation, the human finds itself primarily
besieged, securing what is its own against something that is foreign.
So far, this point has only been made starting from the conception
of humanity that serves as the guiding thread of anthropology and is
founded in the interlocking through which every human knows each fel-
low human to be the one that one is oneself (and yet knows it to be an
other), the interlocking in which it deals with others, talks to them, enters
into agreements with them, etc.
This interlocking of perspectives in the with-one-another and the
against-one-another also becomes clear when viewed from the peculiar
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structure of time that can be (but does not have to be) conceived of as
the unity of a present open into the future from out of the past and a
present open into the past from out of the future— where the present is
precisely the break whose breaking mediates the continuity of a “time”
flowing from the back then to the then (which is why past and future in-
terlock in the present. The interlocking, however, is not restricted to
time or projected toward it. It is, rather, a constitution that pervades all
of the human’s existential circumstances). It is the present that makes
these circumstances a situation. In the situation, the human is dependent
on dealing with the situation. Its circumstances demand decisions from
the human, no matter whether or not they present themselves as having
to be dealt with by choice and resolution, by the free act of self-control
(Greeks of classical antiquity, Europeans of a humanist sensibility would
say: in the decision’s authentic essence). That is how there can be, for
the human, the right moment, the order of the day, the missed opportu-
nity and the opportunity seized. And not just in a temporal sense: there
is also the favorable constellation, the appropriate space in a literal and
a figurative sense.
There are boundaries and limits to what is possible here and now.
This narrowness of the situation makes it possible to see the present or
presence of a reality that does not exhaust itself in the perspectives of the
situation, that is always hidden from them but also opens them up by hid-
ing other possibilities that cannot be exploited. Something like “world”
does not only come into view dismissively, as Heidegger thinks, in the
deficient modes of an interruption and non-functioning of a productive
engagement with all kinds of equipment, but also in the positive surplus
and positive spreading of opportunities that cannot infinitely be pursued
because of the constraints imposed by the situation. For what is decisive
for the situation and for dealing with it is precisely that there is no rela-
tionship of precedence between a primary environment of contexts of
signification opened up in productive engagement and a world that only
secondarily signals itself— taking leave and breaking through— when it
is disturbed. Neither of the two is primary. Instead, they are interlocked,
the homely and familiar and the unfamiliar- uncanny, threatening and
abysmal. There is always already a limiting of the native sphere against
the open foreign sphere, a limiting that is artificial and yet natural, dig-
nified by tradition and at the same time constrictive, a limiting that must
permanently be drawn, renewed, changed. It only represents the unstable
front line on which, in a thousand ways, what is needed for life must be
won from the opponents, it must be wrought from them, they must be
prayed to for it, cheated out of it. In permanent breaks, the human thus
conquers its environment from the world between environment and world,
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

between the homely zone of familiar references and relations of signi-

fication that have “always already” been understood and the uncanny
reality of the bottomless world. In the interlocking, the human displays
its mastery.
Because in building a house, the brick is also already the compre-
hended incomprehensibility of stone, the beam is also already wood, the
hammer is also already iron (even if not in the particular restricted senses
in which mineralogists, botanists, chemists use these terms), because in
all paths and grounds of its activity this original urgency of what is not yet
understood interlocks with what is already interpreted to have sense and
purpose in a work-world, the situation of the human has the character
of being risked and being threatened. Thus, the very moment it anticipates
the unknown, the situation demands being secured against the unfamil-
iar, the very moment it leaps across the limit, it demands its extension
beyond the area of the leap. Every security is wrested from an insecurity
and creates new insecurity.
All characteristics of situations express this in-between position,
between the closed environment of circular references of relations that
give and receive meaning and the open world of the bottomless real, a
position for which nothing is determined without being determined and
nothing can be determined without already being determined. Earlier
times probably had this in view when they saw the human as standing
between animal and God, between the animal that lives in an environ-
ment attuned to its functions, a sphere of significance purely relative to
its existence, and God, as the will and the eye to whom the open infinite
of reality itself is actually present. In such an in- between position, the
human finds itself enclosed by horizons and finds its situation spliced
into a this-side and a beyond of the horizon in question. Both safe and
exposed, the human is thus the needful being that hopes, expects, wishes,
worries, wants, asks. This neediness, this desire, this search for fulfillment,
this living only in the running ahead of itself of leading a life constitutes
the human’s indefinite infiniteness of always having to go on, interlocked
with the actually present infinity of the open world, or: it constitutes
human finitude. But this finitude is not the pure finitude of an animal
that can bring its needs to term in its world, just as its world itself is in
itself finite. It is itself a finitude interlocked with an infinity and therefore
a finitude that manifests itself explicitly as such, a finitude that naturally
demands to be compensated for artificially. This is why the human is “by
nature” artificial and never in balance. This is why it attains any kind of
immediacy only in a mediation, any kind of purity only in a clouding, any
kind of non-refractedness only in a refraction.
What results from the life- situation’s entitative incongruence be-
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tween world and environment, which exposes nothing other than the
open powerfulness of the human, is the compulsion to the will to power
in order to furnish, in an artificial mediation, the naturally immediate
with its rights. What is right and thereby the Law does not “stem from”
power, which is always already a power won; rather, it stems from the pow-
erfulness documented by the natural artificiality of the life- circumstances
that the human variously [je] enters into and executes. Because the
human only lives when it somehow leads a life and because this Some-
how is always characterized by non- necessity, randomness, corrigibility,
and one- sidedness— for that reason, precisely, human life is historical
and not merely natural, a chain of unforeseeabilitities that make sense
afterward, of failures and lost opportunities, but is significant and worth
living precisely in what it variously is and was— the human has to insti-
tute a “natural” order as the just order. This institution of the Law is a
discovery of what is right and what is just because the human does not
invent anything it does not discover, and nothing about the human is
determined until it is determined by the human. Every statute is the at-
tempt to compensate for the entitative incongruence of the situation of
the human within the situation itself, a productive possibility of restoring
what has never been by securing what is truly just. Enforcing statutory
Law is the sense of organizing power, including its technically most com-
plicated form, the state.
What is right is a basic characteristic of the human situation insofar
as in this situation, everything can be addressed as to whether it is right,
fair, and just. It expresses itself in the orientation that is linked to finding
what is right, in judging and the many forms of behavior centered on this
meaning, in direction and in being-directed-toward..., in that one thing,
doing justice to a demand, in doing right, etc.24 Independently of the
possibility that determining and pronouncing, creating and securing law
and justice constitute the field proper of a particular administration of
justice, what is right determines the categorial constitution of human life
as a life that is interpreted and interpretable [ausgelegt-auslegbar, gedeutet-
deutbar].
The delimitation of the spheres of what is mine, yours, ours, every-
one’s operated in being able to say I and You and We is already an attri-
bution. It does not yet have an explicitly juridical character but it does
necessitate a legal organization of life in all its manifestations. Because
the human, as open question, is power, it attributes to itself, empowers,
and, forced by the incongruence of its life (that by chance it leads as this
life, not as an another life) with itself, in legislating and adjudicating
raises this being-empowered-to-itself into the sphere of explicit statutes;
because it only lives when it leads a life, because for the human, only that
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HE L MUT H P LE S S NE R

“is already thus” which it has made thus in the first place. As one who
is empowered to itself, the human finds itself to be responsible or free.
Insofar as its will to power stems from human essence being elevated to
the principle of power and of ability, this will must receive the character
of a will to empowerment and thereby a will to what is right and to the
institution of what is right.
It thus seems that to declare the unfathomable to be binding for
knowledge of the human (such as it underpins the philosophy of life and
such as it is maintained by this philosophy in inserting the human into
the horizon of the history it has won and in releasing it into this horizon)
is to declare the primacy of the political for insight into the essence of the human,
for political anthropology.
10

Excursus: Why It Is Significant

for the Question of Power That
the Primacy of Philosophy or
Anthropology Is Undecidable

Is philosophical anthropology possible only as political anthropology?

Perhaps; only with a view to the human as power and ability does the
human remain an open question, only thus does one renounce making
an essential determination, this side of or beyond history past and history
to come, that aims, formally or materially, at any kind of structure already
existing where one is to speak of the human. And from the basis of this
creative renunciation derives that universality of the field of vision for
what is human that alone corresponds to the universal meaning of phi-
losophy. Political anthropology, then, is not an applied science, not an
application of philosophical insight to the field of the political, as if there
were a theological, an economical anthropology, an anthropology of law,
art, society besides— especially since this idea of paratactically organized
cultural fields, of equally possible fields of activity within a culture is a
conception of the age of the liberal bourgeoisie and its notion of free
competition in equally legitimate professions, an idea that is historically
determinate and under destruction. Politics then is not just a field and
a profession. It could become and it can be such because it is also more
than just that. And it could also only fall in such disrepute because in
that notion of profession and field one had forgotten this More. Politics
then is not primarily a field but the state of human life in which it gives
itself its constitution and asserts itself against and in the world, not just
externally and juridically but from out of its ground and essence. Poli-
tics is the horizon in which the human acquires the relations that make
sense of itself and the world, the entire a priori of its saying and doing.
What does it mean to say that philosophical anthropology is pos-
sible only as political anthropology? The phrase expresses a connection
between the essence of what is human and the essence of the political.
This connection is justified by the philosophical character of the essential
determination, and it rests on the principle of unfathomability or of open

61
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immanence. Nonetheless, it cannot be said of philosophical anthropol-

ogy, just as it cannot be said of political anthropology, that they are appli-
cations of this principle. There is no general philosophical anthropology
with various fields of application (the political, the religious, etc.); nor is
there philosophy above anthropology, a philosophy that would as it were
fan out according to particular fields of application to which belong,
for example, the human and history. Philosophy, anthropology, politics
instead belong together in another, central sense. They draw their pos-
sibilities from the same source of the principle of the unfathomability of
life and the world, and each independently seeks to take from the open
ground of powerfulness, by which it knows itself to be empowered, that
share of possibility that is traced out for each by the tradition it joins with
this principle and which it acknowledges itself to be ready to accept. In
this way, each of the fundamental functions of the human, in which it
does not seek to lose itself but to remain powerful and free in intuiting,
thinking, and acting, senses in itself the “logic” of the principle on this
side of life. None of the functions is superior to the others; there is nei-
ther a primacy of theory nor one of practice. The primacy belongs to the
principle of the open question or to life itself. This has now to be shown
to be the case for philosophy.

I. Philosophy is the (itself traditional) name of a particular tradition from

out of which the name acquires a certain average understanding. Who-
ever does philosophy always already knows, partially, what is at issue. All
radical reflections on beginnings for the purpose of obtaining an indu-
bitable starting position, such as they are characteristic of modern phi-
losophizing in particular, all schematic determinations that determine in
principle the originary and central problems of philosophy (Being, value,
consciousness, the concept, the relationship between what is and what
is conscious) in the first place grow out of some kind of somehow under-
standing what philosophy is and wants. Whoever does philosophy moves
within a horizon of rational communication in speech and writing. Even
if at a loss about their goal, philosophers are already doing something
different from what jurists, politicians, physicians, and artists do. For ex-
ample, they know about a certain distance characteristic of philosophy,
from experience and experiential science, from technological practice.
The models that determine them, with which they engage, belong to a
relatively closed genus human. The motives that drive them to their plight
are not fulfilled within the horizon of artistic, governmental, military,
industrial, or commercial activity. Does not, therefore, a determination
of philosophy require that interpretation trace philosophy back to that
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level of human existence from which it grows naturally (leaving aside all
the content conjured up by the mere enunciation of its name)? Does
not such an interpretation of human existence, which gives rise to the
specific concerns that lead to philosophy, turn out to be the natural path
(natural because it was once taken by human existence itself) that, cor-
rectly considering the tradition of the name and the attitude captured by
the name, makes the horizon of determining the essence of philosophy
visible in the first place? Does not the fact that our language, culture, and
entire existential constitution are handed down by tradition demand that
the determination of philosophy be deployed in precisely that layer of
the natural attitude to which it is handed down? Does not the tradition-
ality of philosophy already provide the guiding thread for determining
its essence, namely in that it has in each case already chosen that field
of vision within which alone tradition takes place to be the field where
philosophy is to set in?
Some claim that there is a “natural” way in which to proceed from
the name of philosophy to its essence, which, reascending to its sources
guided by its being handed down to the life of the natural attitude, fol-
lows philosophy as it historically unfolds. This reascent to the true begin-
nings of philosophy requires a constant presentification and interpreta-
tion of the life-frame starting from which and toward which philosophy
amounts to a historical power. The right use of the concepts formed by
the Greeks, which guide our everyday philosophizing, is possible only
when it is understood from out of the conceptions of Greek life. A com-
prehension of this life, however, is unavoidably determined by an inter-
pretation of the life and existence that we have always already somehow
understood in order to lead them. This is the natural circle in which
comprehension and interpretation of the past move in order to achieve
clarity about the goals the present Dasein has decided to make its own.
Every essential determination, and thus also that of philosophy, must, it
seems, take place in this existential cycle of interpretation between pres-
ent and history.
The concerns about referring an essential determination of phi-
losophy to this path derive, first, from the possibility of an incongruence
between the tradition and the problem of essence. In this problem, phi-
losophy is addressed as to its most comprehensive field of vision, which its
“possibilities” alone trace for it in advance. What has taken place under
the sign of these possibilities and become the stock of tradition does
not evade this field of vision but is very well capable of obscuring it. The
history of philosophy proves this. What is decisive is not that, as it pro-
ceeded, it has lost principal possibilities. They might resurface in the cycle
between accepting tradition as part of one’s goals and taking tradition
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back to its sources. Nor is it decisive that the denial of tradition is part of
its tradition. Every revolution is necessarily comprehensible from what it
sets out to overthrow. It could be, however, and this is decisive, that one
can only do justice to this phenomenon, to this denial of tradition that is
formative of tradition, by means of a perfect distance from it, its traditional
objects, problems, concepts, and disciplines. In that case, the abandonment
of the ground on which, as they say, the conflict of opinions is played out
would be part of the precondition for determining philosophy in its most
extreme possibility because the history of philosophy testifies that what it
is occupied with in this conflict about its own essence is, in the first place,
securing this ground.
Granted that this concern is an aspect of the philosophical tradition
that is by no means compulsory, the possibility that that philosophical
conflict has no ground and no object nonetheless demands being con-
sidered as we set out to define the essence of philosophy. A premature
decision in favor of a particular conception of the history of philosophy
would come back to haunt us. Precisely because radical skepticism counts as
part of the tradition, because, despite its claims about the groundlessness
and meaninglessness of all philosophy, it makes itself comprehensible
from out of the tradition as an, albeit self-defeating, theory, the reascent
to the true beginnings of philosophy guided by tradition has to become
problematic when it takes the life-frame, from out of which and toward
which it allegedly deploys its historical power, as the “natural” basis of its
essential determination.
This fundamental dilemma about the ground of the essential deter-
mination already contains the second concern about its reference to the
cyclical (in conformity with life) path of interpretation between present
and tradition (whose cyclical nature makes it the appropriate approach
to life). The Dasein of humans is only taken as a basis when it is fixed as
a determinate region from which philosophy is said to have sprung natu-
rally, i.e., according to the standard of Dasein. Now, it corresponds to
Dasein to fix itself in some kind of interpretation. The human only lives
in somehow leading its life. Dasein, existence, life in its everydayness always
takes place against a background or substrate of interpretation on which
it bases itself (comprehensible to itself). Thus life lays down its basis
for itself according to the various positions it assumes toward itself and
toward the world; in this fixation (which is always possible theoretically),
it does not draw any consequence that is not in conformity with life. The
fixation of Dasein as a region (of a kind of Being or of not-Being or of
intellectuality or of nature, etc.), which is unavoidable for the purpose
of an essential determination of philosophy that springs from human
Dasein, is thus merely a literary way in which life lays down a basis that is
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only ever binding relative to this life itself. This, however, accomplishes
nothing but what existence already accomplishes in order to lead its life:
one interpretation among possible others. An interpretation of Dasein
whose sense, for the purpose of a destruction of philosophy onto Da-
sein, is extended universally into the most comprehensive field of vision
of its history, reveals itself to be one possible achievement of life among
others, suited, like all others, to narrow or completely obscure the field
of vision (according to the standards of an ethnicity, a historically condi-
tioned situation, etc.).
Granted that this concern, too, is by no means compulsory, the de-
pendence on life consciously assumed by this interpretation in its pos-
sible destructability onto life nonetheless demands being considered as
we set out to define the essence of philosophy. No one can assure and
guarantee this interpretation of philosophy, which takes existence as its
basis, that it has assumed a point of view sufficient for comprehending
its possibility in its entirety because the guiding conception of existence
is itself already an interpretation of a something that is not fixed and is
only ever again fixed in leading an existence (a something granted, to
anticipate, to be life, Dasein, existence, human). The choice of such a
“natural” way of determining the essence of philosophy therefore be-
comes problematic. If there really were the possibility of such an interpre-
tation of the human, then it would have to be relieved, as it were in book
form, of the distress of its life, from which it must fashion its life. This,
too, has happened. The Bible, the Qur’an have had this function. This,
too, can happen again. But in this, precisely, in the conditionality of the
aspect, the groundlessness of so-called existence shows itself.

II. Fixing Dasein as a particular region of Being, justified by habit, be-

comes particularly dangerous and detrimental to any essential determi-
nation meant to be truly radical when it links up with ontological and
gnoseological tendencies taken from the philosophical tradition. It en-
tails subordinating philosophy to the aspects of these tendencies. Phi-
losophy narrows down to the scholastic concepts of certain disciplines
and certain classical authors. In the view that “life” understands itself
as Being, which links up with the great tradition of ancient ontology, a
specifically modern movement breaks through. It was Descartes who gave
concise form to this movement. If Cartesianism has time and again suc-
ceeded in gaining influence in philosophy and in securing for its founder
the position of having inaugurated modern philosophizing, it is because
his doctrine salvages the old idea of a gradation of Being according to
degrees of reality or evidence in the specifically nontheological idea of
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the onto- and epistemological primacy of the subject. Although the gra-
dation of Being is thus divested of its hieratic bonds, in its new profane
form it gives free rein to a thinking that needs a certain region as foun-
dation. Counter to Descartes’s intention, the thesis of the ontological-
gnoseological primacy of the subject has become the starting point for an
emancipation of this preferred region of Being. This emancipation has
provoked a turn in the way we philosophize from whose consequences
we still suffer today.
The first argument for the onto- and epistemological primacy of the
subject is usually obtained by drawing on Descartes’s meditation on doubt,
according to which doubt can be directed against everything but the con-
ditions of its own possibility. Yet since the conditions of a doubt include
someone who doubts, the argument goes, and since every doubt springs
from a doubting, this doubting someone, in his acting and his being, is
said to be beyond any doubt. This conception, of a Being of doubting
that lets doubt spring forth as questionability, sets out for every problem,
as condition of its possibility, a basal sphere of undoubted Being.
The second argument for the onto- and epistemological primacy of
the subject is the so-called principle of consciousness or of immanence.
All knowledge of something takes place in a sphere that within the Some-
thing delimits itself against something that cannot in the end be known.
Only within this horizon, which unfolds by reaching out from its own
center, does world become graspable. Only by means of this being-with-
itself of the subject can the object and objectivity be knowingly attained.
By making reference to the will’s particular capacity for interven-
tion, a third argument, finally, emphasizes the central originarity of the
subject that in its Being at the same time reveals a sense of capacity and
ability, a real possibility, and in this departure for action proves in its Da-
sein the principle of its domination. Whether it testifies or not to free-
dom, the semblance of a freedom in the sense of incipience cannot be
denied, a freedom that suggests to the subject that it is itself that which
it is. In that case, being-something-oneself, in opposition to the Being of
mere entities in the manner of physical things or mathematical entities,
signifies a preference because being oneself and being able to be, i.e.,
being one’s own possibility is “more” than just being; and because possi-
bility, according to an old ontological principle, is superior to reality, be-
cause the “Can” “is” higher (or “deeper”) than the “Is,” the Is is based
on the Can.
Now, the claim for an onto- and epistemological primary position
of the subject thus argued is put forward within a framework that is any-
thing but self-evident. In pursuing particular epistemic goals, the claim
is obviously concerned in particular with securing a reality against the
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attacks of skepticism, i.e., with a situation that is given with the particular
narrowing of the concept of the subject. Even if a certain inevitability
in the play of attack and defense cannot be ignored within this frame,
the necessity of the frame itself remains no less dubious. Yet history and
comparative ethnological sociology positively show that there have been
and still are states of life to which such a frame is foreign; they also show
that the conception of a subject pushed aside by its environment and con-
temporaries and thrown back onto itself, along with, as a correlate, the
conception of a knowledge intent on securing the reality of its objects,
has been won in one or several courses of history. Thus, the attempt to
destruct the entire frame onto that from which it has emerged historically
suggests itself. This medium of frame-producing conception is life or
Dasein, such as humans lead it, no matter whether they want science and
knowledge or not. Just like the philosopher who challenges the reality
of the external world or seeks to prove it is reminded by common sense
before, during, and after his work of his activity (an activity whose being
guided by a natural concept of world has allegedly always already refuted
the preconditions of his work), so here, all of philosophy is reminded of
those attitudes that allegedly are its own base although they can never be
questioned by philosophy.
Thus, in the interest as well of understanding remote ages and cul-
tures foreign to one’s own existential constitution, the “pre- philosophical
or pre-scientific” task of detecting those attitudes and motivations emerges
that support one’s own and the foreign framing and that make such fram-
ing necessary relative to their Dasein. The positivist idea of a natural view
of the world loses its scientifistic-European face and transforms into the
idea (which seems to be philosophically nonbinding) of a natural or rela-
tively natural attitude, of a basic constitution that characterizes all human
Dasein and being-in-the-world and is ready to provide the conditions of
possibility for every human design.
Despite its being divested of the boundaries of the narrow perspec-
tives of an extremely ego-like subjectivity, this basic constitution of exis-
tence maintains the field of vision of the specifically subjective existential
position toward the world. What at least allows for the concentration into
ego-like-ness in our sense— according to its constitution as Dasein, life,
existence— thereby unavoidably takes over those characteristics to which
the subject owes its primacy in more recent philosophy. A philosophy of
life within the perspectives of interiority takes the place of relativistic,
formalistic, and even of pan-spiritualist idealism. I, You, We, and They
[Man] become equally possible modes of this allegedly originary-natural
medium from which each and any possible philosophy starts.
According to the theory of the primacy of the subject, the base from
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which philosophy operates is the situation of the subject’s self-isolation

against Being, created by embedding cognizable Being in the conscious-
ness of cognition. Now, although this isolation has been attenuated with
respect to the particular individual, the embedding of philosophy in a
medium that contrasts it with things remains. The human retains the
preferential position onto- and epistemologically; only, the sense of the
onto- and epistemological has transformed into something apparently
nonbinding since it has lost the scientific imprint. Neither does onto-
logical primacy mean indubitable reality (as it does in the idealist ar-
gumentation) over against the dubitable reality of the external world,
nor is epistemic primacy the precondition of cognition, which underpins
doubting cognition as well. In abandoning the gnoseological frame and
destructing it into “life,” from out of which it and problems inevitably
resulting from it are to be understood, the question of the possibility of
interpretation has moved in front of the question of the possibility of cog-
nition. Accordingly, securing the human in its existence as the starting
base of philosophy is a reassurance in the interest not of its reality but of
its self-evidence. Since every historical and sociological comprehension
takes place guided by the comprehension of the Dasein we lead, a theory
of the principles of this self-evidence becomes necessary, which in turn
refers back to a fundamental analysis of Dasein as the natural basis of all
interpretation. In our time, Heidegger, appealing to Dilthey, has taken
on the challenge of such an existential analysis of human Dasein as the
foundation of philosophy as a whole. But the orientation of this analysis
toward an ontology as the theory of the meaning of Being, an orienta-
tion he treats as self-evident, presupposes that existence interprets itself
as being. Misch has objected to this analysis and has done so precisely
from Dilthey’s perspective.
In any case— and only this moment is worth paying attention to
at this point— this claiming of a self-evident (“natural”) way in which
to proceed between the name of philosophy and its essence, a path
that, reascending to the sources of philosophy, follows its historical self-
accomplishment guided by the handing-down of philosophy to the life
of the “natural” attitude— to the Dasein that has always already somehow
understood itself— amounts to proclaiming the primacy of anthropology
over philosophy.

III. To provide philosophy with a foundation, there is not the least com-
pulsion to turn one’s attention to the “most proximate” phenomena—
whatever may be the case for the phenomena of the natural attitude
toward the world, whatever therefore the situation of the philosopher
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may be, however urgent that self-evidence of existence may be that per-
vades our intentions and aspirations and therefore our philosophizing as
well, a self-evidence to which every breath, every gesture, every commerce
with “things” and humans prior to its explicit-distancing excavation in a
question about Dasein has “always already” testified. The anthropologi-
cal basing of philosophy would be a procedure justified from out of the
essence of philosophy only if philosophy and the connection between
its essence and its history had been decided in the sense that the start-
ing point of philosophy— as, for example, a searching investigation, as
science of the “meaning” of the world— must be the most proximate and
palpable phenomena, in which their having sense has possibly always al-
ready come to a “natural” understanding of itself.
Yet the essence of philosophy is precisely what has come under ques-
tion. For the sake of the purity, thoroughness, and decisiveness of the
definition, the acknowledged celebrity of its name, which comes to an
understanding of itself from out of a great tradition, can precisely not
serve as a guide. By correctly considering the tradition of the name in its
“always already somehow understood” meaning, the orientation toward
essence stabilizes the basic problem of an investigation to be undertaken in
principle, but it does not stabilize its starting point.
This is not a refusal to acknowledge phenomena, as if it were al-
ready clear that the appeal to phenomenal qualities is irrelevant for a
basic consideration in general and in any sense. Stabilizing the problem
of the connection between name and essence thus does not mean hav-
ing concerns about the possibility of bringing out natural connections
between them within the horizon of the self-evidence of human Dasein.
On the contrary, the setup of the problem at this point explicitly begins
with the strange and at the same time self-evident traditionality of the
name when it declares the use of this traditionality as a guiding thread for
determining the essence to be problematic. The only question here is
whether a procedure for determining the essence of philosophy may get
involved with phenomena— no matter how much they may lie in the im-
mediate field of vision of humanly existential self-evidence. As long as it
is not clear whether the power of the human to philosophy, which is asserted in
the apparently harmless and nonbinding word philosophize as a being and
doing that originates philosophy, is not itself an expression of a philosophy, of
the philosophy of life, the question has to remain open.
Addressed as to its essence, philosophy has come under question
within the horizon of its history. According to this universality, it is prohib-
ited from settling, from the outset, on something that is itself an object of
contention in philosophy. It must not commit to any results, disciplines,
problems because that narrows the historical perspective. It must grant
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equal rights to being part of the tradition to nihilism and to academic

apriorism or positivism. Respect for the tradition— which is not an empty
attitude but the retreat in favor of history operated in the question of
the essence of philosophy— is evident in the risk that the definition may
be bottomless. Repeating something that has been forgotten merely for
the sake of history does not live up to the greatness of the philosophical
tradition. Only in the conscious acceptance of all of its, even of its most
extreme, possibilities does the question provide space for this tradition.
When humanities scholars seek to obtain the origins of philosophy
(not the mere occasion for its discovery) from its history, that is, from the
past life of its authors, when they acknowledge the first conceptions of
problems, which have since then and all the way up to our own problems
become normative, to be the sources of the a priori that are themselves
to be interpreted genetically, then they know of the philosophical char-
acter of this acknowledgment, then they know themselves to already be
in one possibility of philosophy, in philosophy under the primacy of life.
This situation of the hermeneutic circle is not an objection to the situa-
tion. What in the situation can be logically formalized as a vicious circle
corresponds precisely to its demand for support from a principle whose
genealogy, according to this principle, can only be cleared up empirically.
And this demand is one that constitutes the typical turn in which alone
it is possible to philosophize, to produce philosophy in order to bring
into view and into grasp the entirety of the world, the entire scope of the
world’s relations to the liveliness of the one asking about it: namely the
demand to already be and to already stand within what we want to attain
with the answer in the first place. (Only because we already have and use
reason do we seek to clear up the essence of reason by turning to the past.
Only because we already are creatures in the image of God does the prob-
lem of his essence, our relation to him, arise, which is to be interpreted
and overcome by turning to the past. Only because we already are, are
in the world, are human, live, does the possibility exist of searching for
the possibilities of life, being-human, being-in-the-world, Being.) But to
think of this situation of precedence as having emerged from a specific
turn given to the standards set by the historically concrete humans Par-
menides, Plato, Aristotle, etc., or set by Dasein in them (life already in an
ontic interpretation!) and to inquire into it in the enlightenment of phi-
losophizing, in the “critique” of philosophy, is precisely already philos-
ophy itself and testifies to a being-within-it as one of its possibilities. If, at
this point, we take the precedence of the problem horizon and interrupt
its reference back to an operation of setting a standard (whatever way this
operation is to be interpreted, to be characterized), and we say: “this is
the true philosophy, the one that has broken through to itself, the only,
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ultimate, natural philosophy; this is even to go back behind philosophy,

to where its source lies (here, for example, to the human),” and do not
in so doing see that this statement is already supported by a principle that
has nothing above it and nothing behind it, which is itself an operation
of setting a standard and therefore the principle of a philosophy— then we
give up the principle of the philosophy of life, the principle of the open
question, of unfathomability, and of open immanence. Then we become
incoherent, absolutize life or the finite human, absolutize perhaps the
empirical and thereby declare, be it in the Heideggerian or in a different
version, the primacy of anthropology, of the human, even if perhaps only
in the apparently nonbinding form of declaring the necessity of starting
with the human. Then all the famous disputes about the “natural hier-
archy” in which questions are to be posed, about the “true foundation”
of the problems, or at least about the only appropriate and meaningful
approaches to its objects, about the method of philosophy, are the inevi-
table consequence. If and when what belongs to a state of insight that is
past and has been overcome, to an attitude of consciousness attached to
natural law that— dissolved by the discovery of the historical world— is
today galvanized into a make-believe liveliness by a phenomenology that
takes itself to be philosophy, is ever finally to be filed away; if and when
finally the cognitive attitude achieved by Kant and the German move-
ment that followed him has been freed from the restrictive framework of
the eighteenth century (schemata of faculties, ontology of consciousness,
and theological world aspect) and interpreted as a breakthrough to an
attitude of knowledge that risks the bottomlessness of the real, an attitude that
knows of its autonomy— then there is no longer any space for disputes
about a legitimate, natural procedure according to the standards of an
existing hierarchy of problems. For natural legitimacy is dead— in phi-
losophy as well.
And the natural aspect of the philosophy of life? Its principle, which
“corresponds” to open immanence, to the natural existential situation
of the human? Its thinking in the direction of life itself? Why does it at-
tribute to itself these predicates if it is not convinced of its preferential
position and truth, the truth of life? Does not it, too, like every philos-
ophy to this day, have to posit itself as absolute precisely because it wants
the proclamation of absolute relativity and eternal change?
This, precisely, is what is new about the current that begins with
Dilthey, that it does not point into the unconditional and does not claim
to be anchored unconditionally. It takes as its principle the way of see-
ing of the historian who goes along with events, of the storyteller, of
the one who interprets, of the human who is on equal footing and in
contact with the life of humans as it expresses itself, of the high and the
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low, of the noble and humble, in order to stay precisely on this level on
which everything happens for us, on the level of surprise and recollec-
tion. What all this means from above, from a divine perspective, or from
below, from a cosmic perspective, remains open, and it remains at least
as open as the perspective of this new current itself— the only perspective
in which fear and hope, wish and will unfold— openly loses itself in the
unfathomable. Forms of knowledge that rise from these circumstances
themselves to serve, to express their situational coherence adequately
cope, epistemically, with them— although these circumstances cannot be
surpassed in the everyday and although they cannot, equally, be captured
by the knowledge of a science that is essentially unfinished, projected as
it is for infinite tasks. Life thus always already has its native expression
and displays (if we want to follow the emergence of thinking and saying
that is “proximately” bound to life in this direction) the manner that is
natural to the human in the way it leads its life, the manner according
to which, in its active and reflective behavior, the human expresses itself,
evokes, and makes propositions. This is where the task of the doctrine
of categories outlined by Dilthey lies, whose extension in a logic based
on the sphere of evocation (i.e., a making of propositions that does not
take the form of judgments) has been demanded and begun by Misch.
Such a logic clears up, in a manner corresponding to the human
and its natural existential situation, everything the human has the power
to do by giving it expression and having it mean something in the expres-
sion. Such a logic, then, is the existential analysis or anthropology that
is appropriate to the human, that is to be found in the direction of life,
that follows its elaboration in what is humanly significant. And if perhaps
it does not comprehend such an existential analysis or anthropology in
its entirety, it is nonetheless its point of view and its legitimate first begin-
ning according to the nature of life. Yet since it is in this direction that the
great achievements arise, to which, ever since the great cultural nations of
the East and the Greeks, philosophy belongs as well, hermeneutic logic
finds itself tasked with excavating the roots of philosophy and with bring-
ing to light, in constant contact with the historical events of its develop-
ment, the specific turns that, once they have become part of the stock
of tradition, intemporally and intellectually, condensingly penetrate our
life like a supporting substance. Yet this logic of meaning and under-
standing is prōtē philosophia [first philosophy] according to the nature
of life only because it follows in the direction indicated by the human
existential situation (that is, an immanently indicated direction). This
situation, however, does in no way subsist absolutely, immovably across
history or underneath it. It is precisely its changes that make history and
are experienced from out of history. This logic thus always has to under-
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take its work of enlightenment relative to the situation of the human of

a specific age and culture, a situation that in each case corresponds to
the systems of expression. It seeks the point of view that is in each case the
most extreme creative point vis-à-vis these systems of meaning, the point
from which these humans have come to these systems. The hermeneutic
art of the new logic consists in outlining such systems of norms, which
are covariant with the multiplicity of the systems of meaning that appear
throughout history.

IV. According to the principle of the philosophy of life, primacy would go

to the only anthropology possible under this principle, to the logic and
theory of categories of hermeneutics: primacy over philosophy insofar
as it is through this anthropology that the genesis of philosophy and of
philosophizing from life, as still pre-philosophical and prescientific aver-
ageness and everydayness, is conceived; primacy in philosophy, insofar as
this genesis has its set of problems traced out, in turn, by the principle of
binding unfathomability. The primacy of anthropology or of the human
perspective of being- empowered- to- ability, which allows us humans to
grasp our philosophizing in its origin, is thus only valid on the basis of
the primacy of the philosophy of life and according to its principle, such
that we already have to stand within philosophy in order to come to phi-
losophy and such that it is always philosophy itself that reveals its origin.
On the basis of this insight— and with all due respect to their con-
tent of meaning, which is immanent to historical experience, as well as
to their transcendental function of making historical experience “pos-
sible” from out of itself— the hermeneutic categories (e.g., the natural
life situation, thinking in the sense of life, the natural primacy of logic,
and the hierarchy of the philosophical problems that are relative to Da-
sein, expression, evocation, what is native to life) have to be exposed as
conceptions of a particular kind of philosophy, of the philosophy of life, which
works in alliance with the human who thinks and acts historically. For this
alliance with the empiricity of life is a guarantee of its necessity, a crite-
rion of its correctness, only within the perspective of this insight, which
has governed our life for a good one hundred years now. This insight
already makes life itself, which can be questioned as a witness only in the
suit it has filed itself, a witness for its perspective.
Life, human, history thus reveal their philosophical meaning. What
is prescientific and pre-philosophical turns out to be conditioned by prin-
ciple and, in freely appropriating for itself the principle of the unfath-
omable’s bindingness, to be liberated into its own, immanent, native per-
spectives, its creative world. Yet what does this mean if not declaring the
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primacy of philosophy over anthropology and the historical worldview

when what we sense to be the most natural and most obvious is already
not just an interpretation but is even, in its interpretability, created by
the principle of unfathomability? The relationship is thus reversed. Phi-
losophy now has primacy, first, in anthropology, i.e., as a philosophy of
life, insofar as it is the principles of philosophy that are at the basis of the
experiential genetic reflection and that condition the entire apparatus
of hermeneutics with all its specific proximity to life. And it has primacy,
second, over anthropology when it applies the principle of open imma-
nence and of unfathomability to all of anthropology’s topics concerning
life and the human as already philosophical theses and anticipations.
This apparently creates a situation that the philosophy of life can
no longer deal with within its field of vision. Yet in reality, the philos-
ophy of life is thought precisely from out of this situation, from out of
the undecidability of the primacy of philosophy and anthropology. For in this
undecidability, we encounter the same thing that above we called open
question, as which the human has to take the human in life and thought.
In taking itself as open question and entering into the relation of indeter-
minacy with itself, the human conceives of itself as power of ability and
thus surveys the horizon of its past that becomes history only in sight of
that which is to come.
Because it remains undecidable whether primacy belongs to phi-
losophy or anthropology, both are opened onto life or onto the human
in its unfathomable power and inserted into the same perimeter that is
taken up by politics as autonomous fashioning and assertion of human
power. None of the three, therefore, has primacy and yet they all sup-
port each other reciprocally: there is no truth that would not a priori
be relevant politically, but there is also no politics without a truth, if its
significance is that in politics, the human decides in favor of itself and
makes decisions about itself. By relativizing the world to the human as its
subject of attribution, by, in renouncing the positing of absolutes, leaving
the world to its objective-ontic meaning, and by thereby liberating the
world entirely from all aspects of value and purpose that are heteroge-
neous to knowledge, we are aware that this knowledge, which risks the
bottomlessness of what is, is tied to a certain attitude in and toward life.
This attitude is oriented by what was created by Greekdom and Christian-
ity, by humanism and the Reformation, and in freely adopting them, it
declares the values of independence, of hard-won insight, of developing
every higher sovereignty over Dasein, of being ready to start over again
and again, to be binding. This attitude is aware of the dangerousness
of this vie expérimentale [experimental life], of the fragility of its social,
ethnic, economic basis, which will not extend by itself into the future if
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individual humans do not precede it by education and constant crea-

tive labor on the problems taken to be important. This attitude is one of
political resoluteness that constantly has an eye on its own dependence
on language and its validity in the world, on a certain affluence of the
social strata that carry it forward, on the entire situation of its people,
which has a hereditary affinity to this tradition as its past, and that is
therefore resolved to defend the Dasein of its nation with all appropri-
ate means in an intellectual-industrious anticipation, in economic, terri-
torial, and settlement policy. It is in this always-already-surveyed horizon
of a political project alone that the power to the openness of objective
ability— a power discovered by the Greeks, rediscovered by post- medieval
Europe, and brought to planetary universality today (and therefore all
the more endangered)— has attained a lively effectiveness in which the
face and the essence of humanness are really changed and the last powers
are wrested from silent nature.
Politics is thus not the last, most peripheral application of philo-
sophical and anthropological insights; insights gained from non-purposive
objectivity are never at an end, never definitive, never unsurpassable, and
life can never live up to them. As this process, cognition is never as far
ahead as life and is always ahead of life. Politics, however, is the art of the
right moment, of the favorable opportunity. It’s the moment that counts.
What already announces itself generally in the worry about dealing with
the concrete situation is the primacy of autonomous life and of the open
question, is the acceptance of bottomlessness in the principle of the con-
duct of life, which conduct, on an elementary level, produces as much as
it discovers the problems of philosophy and the problems of the human
empowered to philosophy. That is why anthropology is possible only if it
is politically relevant, that is why philosophy is possible only if it is politi-
cally relevant, especially when their insights have been radically liberated
from all consideration of purposes and values, considerations that could
divert an objectivity coherent to the last.25
Politics is thus an organon of philosophy, just as it is an organon of
anthropology. This statement can be immediately manipulated by gam-
blers and counterfeiters if it is conceived of (in the manner of the legiti-
macy that has been, precisely, overcome by the historical worldview) as
a primacy of political intentions and considerations in the positing of the
problems of philosophy and anthropology. The statement retains its origi-
nary meaning only on the condition that politics is kept clear of the de-
grading idea that it is merely a field of activity and a technical profession,
just as science, art, and religion are kept clear of it even if we know that
their exercise is not possible without their being delegated to humans
who are specifically destined and consecrated for the purpose. And only
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because politics, as the horizon of a life that knows itself empowered to

the entire world, a horizon that opens up history, originates from the open
attitude to the open question from which philosophy and anthropology,
too, originate as theoretical powers— powers that support the modern
culture of knowledge— does it enter into the undecidable struggle for
primacy waged between philosophy and anthropology.
Only now do we understand why, just as there must be a struggle
between peoples for their principles of existence, a struggle that cannot
be decided rationally, there must also be a struggle of philosophies and
anthropologies that cannot be decided rationally; why, at the same time,
a neutral position over against this struggle is not possible but why, rather,
every position is always already a position taken in the field of this struggle
such that there is no indifferent reflection on the essence of the human
that would not already, in the very approach of its question, have decided
in favor of a certain conception; why there is no pre-philosophical logic,
ethics, systematics, and critique of philosophy that would not already be
the result of a particular kind of philosophy, and be it the philosophy of
life; why there is no authentic form of being-human and no essentiality
of life that would not already, in a particular and partisan manner, bear
the determinate and exclusive traits of at least one particular ethnicity.
This is the only thing the human who has assumed the European
principle of open immanence and of understanding the human from out
of life and oriented toward life can do: despite and in its particularity, as-
sert the universally binding position of the being-human that is truly and
authentically so only in this position; despite the monadic individualiza-
tion and closedness of ethnic, philosophical, political positions against
one another, creatively assert the continuous medium that connects them
all, the medium that had come into view as a possibility in the Greek dis-
covery of mathematical general validity, the medium they in fact now run
the danger of losing in the de-deification of the world.
11

The Powerlessness and

Predictability of the Human

To treat the human as open question means to leave the decision about
the primacy of philosophy, anthropology, and politics open. For the phi-
losophy of life, the decision is thus left to human life in its history: the
human can experience what the human is only through history. Within
this perspective, however, the philosophy of life assumes more than this
because it knows about its own relativity. The open, to which it leaves the
decision as a decision that is made historically, i.e., unpredictably, and
is enabled per hiatum irrationalem26 of fate and at the same time surpris-
ing, is addressed by the philosophy of life as “life,” the “humans.” But it
knows— should always know— that this addressing-as-life-and-humans is
not just “already interpretation,” for these categories already lie within the
hermeneutic system of “comprehension.” (This secures the application,
self-evident in turn, of its life-philosophical principle to itself, to the her-
meneutic circle the philosophy of life comes in to close, the circulation
between the philosophy of life, as philosophy or anthropology or logic,
and the life experienced.) It also knows that this keeping-and-knowing-
oneself-to-be-in-circulation is also instituted, that it is also a historical dis-
covery, a possibility and a turn that (life, the human) has been capable of,
through which it has brought itself into its own field of vision. It knows
that through precisely this turn, What or Who has brought about the
turn has itself become questionable— which is why I have placed it in pa-
rentheses. It knows that this turn, in which the natural cognitive attitude
proper to life, to the human emerged from life and the human, thereby
becomes problematic in its naturalness and necessity: the necessity for
life and naturalness of the turn “toward itself” consists in and can only be
defended with reasons within this hard-won philosophical way of seeing.
And, finally, it knows that the discovery of the historical character of this
turn toward a new knowledge is combined with an insight into the im-
possibility of answering directly and outside of historical experience and
its philosophical perspective the question of what and who has turned
“itself” there, is combined with, even maintained by the principle of the
binding unfathomability of this What and Who.

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Within its perspective, the philosophy of life stands outside its per-
spective. Its immanence is an open immanence and not comparable to
the old closed immanence that was guided by the model of conscious-
ness, which has and grasps only conscious content, and that, as a prin-
ciple (applied to the fact that thinking and knowledge are tied into his-
tory, into society and its economic existential constitution), produces
historicism and relativism. Its immanence overcomes historical relativ-
ism, precisely, in favor of an intellectual attitude that opens knowledge
to objectivity and, in its necessary relativity to standpoints, leaves open
the “space” or medium of the standpoints. The peculiar interlocking
of its perspectives, according to which seeing within it (a hermeneutic
thinking, a life-philosophical interpreting in the direction of the human
in the sense of someone empowered to the world as his expression) is a
natural seeing and thinking that is relative to the world, to the human, to
the “subject” of history, and is itself necessary only historically, thus has
nothing to do at all with dialectics in a Hegelian sense.
This is as important methodologically as it is politically. For Hegel,
the One always reveals itself as the Other in the medium of Spirit or
Reason that penetrates them both. Every positing and perspective nec-
essarily, i.e., in a manner guaranteed by the essential nature of the me-
dium or continuum of Spirit, has its opposite about it and therefore
leads by itself to a reversion into its opposite. This is also why politics can
only consist in leaving each factually present situation to itself and to its
natural maturation into its opposite because its reasonableness is already
secured by its self-movability. By itself the World Spirit, as the pervasive
and autonomous medium, takes care and uses individuals with their sub-
jective perspectives as the ruse that consists in giving reality to the Idea in
a sense that is surprising for and, as the case may be, unwanted by these
perspectives. This is the way conservatives think, no matter whether they
want persistence or natural progress; hence also the reliance on this mo-
ment in Hegel on the part of both the Conservative Party and Marxist
revisionism in Germany.
The position of the human (such as it is shown by the philosophy
of life and such as it forms the principle of this showing)— its standing
outside of its perspective within its perspective— is not a dialectical truth
and not a contradiction at all. The interlocking only becomes a contra-
diction because the formulation obeys the constraint (a constraint that is
not merely grammatical but conditioned by the guiding idea of the ori-
gin and the power to the origin) of explicitly thinking what is open and
questionable about what and who is the one who lets originate and oper-
ates the historical turn as a subject (as a subject of a sentence, too): life,
human, history. Such a determining, however, does not thereby become
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unfaithful to the principle of indeterminacy and of the open question

but follows the principle into its own meaning. Through the world- position
of experiencing knowledge, which was created by the great historians,
especially Ranke, and raised by Dilthey to the level of a principle of phi-
losophy, the human, i.e., we, too, has become in this philosophy the prin-
ciple and initial subject within the horizons of a beneficial darkness of the
Where-from and Where-to, horizons that, as space of play of our lively
behavior, are naturally open to us. We thus know ourselves to be empow-
ered to and responsible for philosophy in its entire history, including the
philosophy of life that makes this “we know” possible. And we thus also
know at the same time— this is how we stand outside of its perspective—
that this empowerment (of us) is only that of a philosophy (of life) that
has at one point become necessary historically and will likely pass away
again. For this, precisely, is what the connection with history, which the
philosophy of life has operated in the hermeneutic clearing-up of the
origins of philosophy, thus also of its own origin, means: philosophy rela-
tivizes, thus also relativizes itself to history or the human as power, as the
indeterminate, the unknown, the open question. In that it relativizes
itself to the human, however, it also at the same time relativizes itself over
against it. The insight that the human (in its methodologically assumed
questionability) is the subject that makes philosophy leads immediately
into the opposite direction of another insight that by no means sublates
the first but (non- dialectically) emphasizes and confirms it: it leads to
the insight that it is philosophy which makes the human “the human.”
Especially when the human is conceived in the relativity of its Christian-
Greek conception, the other of the human shows itself in the human as
the subject of attribution of its world; what shows itself is the opposite,
unattributability, what begins to shine through history is the powerlessness
of human life, the powerlessness of the powerful.
The undecidability of the question of whether philosophy or anthro-
pology or politics has primacy corresponds to the historical worldview—
which is set up from the outset in its principle of the human’s unfathom-
ability. In its transparency, undecidability appears as a basic characteristic
of the human life situation. Being-human is being the other of oneself.
Only its transparency onto another realm confirms it as open unfath-
omability. One mustn’t rationalize or banalize by twisting this insight to
say: power is power only against the background of powerlessness; even
Being is only being-oneself on the basis of a not-being-oneself. One must
not give this insight the form of a foundation as if what is powerless un-
derpinned what is powerful or even brought it forth from itself; that
would be to surrender the principle of undecidability and to acknowl-
edge the primacy of (ontological) philosophy. And finally, power and
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powerlessness, capacity and incapacity for attribution do not stand in a

dialectical relationship with one another, which would equally amount
to the primacy of a philosophy.
Neither of the two comes earlier. They do not co-posit one another
and do not logically cause one another. They do not underpin each other
and do not ontically emerge from one another. They are not one and
the same merely seen from two sides. A void gapes between them. Their
connection is an and-connection and an also-connection. Thus being the
other of itself as well as being itself, the human is a thing, a body, an entity
among entities, which is to be found on the earth, a variable of nature,
subjected to nature’s laws of gravity and of falling bodies, of its laws of
growth and heredity like a head of cattle, measurable with measure and
weight, conditioned by heredity, exposed to the misery and the glory of a
blind immeasurability. Blind like this immeasurability, the powers of the
drives arise from it in the district of the human and push the human, who
is ultimately predictable, onto the paths of living, mortal things. This is why
the human not merely has a body that it can discard when the day has
come, but is a body on the same level as it is the powerful and the respon-
sible. Physically the human is as close to— and distant from itself— as its
native regions of liveliness are close to— and distant from it. The human
also is that in which it is not itself for itself, and it is so not in any external,
inferior, or derivative sense.
Just that for the sake of this “itself,” the human can find no rest in
its transparency to itself. The human will prefer the district of its Dasein,
whose limits, for the human, coincide with the limits of comprehensibil-
ity, and address it as the authentic district, since it is always confirmed as
the sphere of the meanings that are native to life (in that these meanings
tell the human about itself). The human will always have to play off this
immanent plus of its interiority perspective against the identification of
its essence with its body (as an other of itself) and raise heaven and hell
against the possibility of materialism. It distances the other of itself vis-à-
vis itself in order to achieve, with this turn, the famous solutions of two- or
three-essence theories that have dominated philosophical anthropology
through the concepts of body, soul, and mind. Again we must say that we
cannot leave it at either the dualist/trialist notions of composition or at
the unconditional prohibition of the possibility of a materialistic inter-
pretation. Like the theories that oppose it, materialism, too, is a genuine
possibility, a possibility to which materialism is empowered by the bottom-
lessness and transparency of the human situation. To this possibility it is
ultimately empowered by the methodological principle of the undecid-
ability of the primacy of philosophy, anthropology, politics, according to
which the struggle of the aspects of life never comes to rest.
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In its power, the human thus shines through onto its powerless-
ness or its thing-ness. It authentically is also body. The human lets itself
be determined down to the last detail by this body, even if it can take
up arms against this, if it comes into conflict with its desires, with dis-
eases. Birth, lineage, death have power over the human and oppose the
power of the human with the same claim to essentiality and universality
made by the district of life, native to the human, expressing itself. Thing
and power collide in that their and-connection forms the composite the
human, which in transparency constitutes the unity of its open essence,
mediated by Nothing. Shining through onto the other of its power and of
itself, the human is placed on one level with physical things and appears,
from the point of view of the other, to be integrated into the realm of a
particular Being of animated bodies, of plants and animals.
Philosophically, this means that there must necessarily be a pos-
sibility of developing the essence of the human guided by a regional
ontology of the organic as a theory of the categories of biology and its
phenomena. Because only if the hermeneutic principle is set out as an ab-
solute principle (which absolutization is precisely wrong) does life appear
as the field for beginning to come to self-knowledge that is closest to the
human, that the human appears as that which is closest to itself. Over
against this, Nietzsche’s dictum remains correct that “everyone is furthest
from himself”27 not just psychologically or hermeneutically. Rather, in the
unfathomable power’s seeming placedness in the “layer” of powerless
exposure to the laws of nature, the native horizons of life telling itself
about itself lose their methodological-existential position of proximity
and move to the most extreme periphery. The human is thus authenti-
cally matter in the form of being-in-each-case-my-body: its brain reflects
for the human the world with all its history.
Politically, the placedness of the human on the level of a scientifi-
cally predictable Being— which, however, can never be surpassed but can
also not be captured by scientific knowledge in the abbreviation of politi-
cally relevant instantaneity— means reckoning with a predictable course
of events; it means a support for the sober objectivity of the unmasking
attitude that knows vital- biological factors to be effective behind every
argument and takes seriously the determination from below of ideals and
ideas and of the eternal values (which political opponents will recite to
one another) and uses them wherever it can.
12

The Human Is Tied to a People

If we accept the hermeneutic principle of the philosophy of life, a prin-

ciple taken to be relative to history and to stand over against history, we
are led, within its perspectives, out of the philosophy of life such that
it appears as one “possible” sovereign form of philosophizing among
others. This, precisely, is its last largesse: transparently, it opens up hori-
zons that lie beyond it. It thus bears witness to its Europeanness, which,
in stepping back from its monopolization of human- ness, releases the for-
eign to self-determination according to its own will and begins to engage
in fair play with the foreign, on the same level. In doing so, it takes the
same turn that political life has taken toward nation-statehood, to which,
if we look at the East and to Africa, the future belongs for the next saecu-
lum [age], and to which the future will belong as long as humans hold
on to themselves as to the unfathomable and keep world and life open
in all dimensions.
Under the life-philosophical aspect, we see the human as nature
or as what is no longer comprehensible; as the thing that is found in a
few billion specimens across the planet and exists split into races; as the
thing that, thanks to certain bodily characteristics, is distinct from the an-
thropoid and that, thanks to these characteristics, allows for designating,
especially in the zoological sphere, as human a certain unity of that which
bears a human face. Every theory that seeks to inquire into what makes
the human the human, be it an ontological or a hermeneutic-logical
theory, and that methodologically or in its results looks past the natural
side of human existence or seeks to deprecate it as what is non-authentic
(all the while granting that it, too, is important), that treats it as second-
ary (at best) for philosophy and for life, is wrong because its foundations
are too weak, because its setup is too one-sided, because its conception
is dominated by religious or metaphysical prejudices. Precisely because
the historical worldview leaves its foundation, the human, indeterminate
with respect to an unforeseeable change of its self and its self-conception
(i.e., a change that can only be experienced historically), it leads out
of the scholastic dogmatization of a hermeneutics (which by no means
proceeds in a methodic a priori manner) and opens the view onto com-
pletely different districts of philosophical reflection— on the condition
that this reflection resolutely sacrifices the absolutization of its position

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and acknowledges, concurrently with the principle that unfathomability

is binding for knowledge, the undecidability of a primacy of philosophy
and of a legitimate hierarchy for raising its problems.28
Open like the world, the human is outside of the world in the world.
The approaches to the human are open and they are not organized natu-
rally until we, i.e., philosophy in its conscious responsibility before history
and for history, have organized them. Placed transparently in nature, the
human is as authentically body (although it can be approached herme-
neutically) as it is authentically not body since it possesses a “deeper”
secret essentia: the power of existence that announces itself. The human
must lead its life in this openness, uncertain which of its sides is preva-
lent: life always already tells the human about its self, while the body ulti-
mately takes away its independence and exposes it to the course of things.
Science, philosophy must grasp the human in this openness, must not
give preference to any “side,” to any term of this and-connection, must
not come to rest in any monistic or pluralistic model of composition. As
eccentric position of an in itself– above itself, the human is the other of
itself: it is the human, neither closest to nor furthest from itself— and
also, in its native ways, the closest, and also the furthest, the world’s last
enigma.
Opened up to itself, in a circle of familiarity, self-evidence, and
at the same time placed into something random, incomprehensible,
which can only be conceived of artificially— these certainly lie side by
side, but they also join in the sphere that the human (not just a thing but
an organism) nonetheless belongs to although it appears refracted and
therefore transparent in eccentricity. This sphere is the sphere of the
living, which the human does not occupy by “somehow leading” a life
(and thereby always being threatened by losing what is “authentically”
its own) but in which the human is corporally constituted ontically as the
other of the self opened up to it by leadership and revelation [Führung
und Kündigung]. This sphere forms the interlocking of the enlivened
body with its field to form the unity of the life situation according to the
standards of the laws of positionality.29 Eccentric position as placedness
into the other of itself in the core of its self is the open unity of the in-
terlocking of the hermeneutic with the ontic-ontological aspect: the in-
terlocking of the open possibility of understanding the human with the
possibility of explaining the human without being able to make the limits
of comprehensibility coincide with the limits of explainability. As Being,
the eccentric position is life, supports life, and yet life emancipates itself
from the human, from being-present, and perseveres in the unfathom-
able disclosability of its revealing and interpreting.
This discord comes out in the refractedness of human transparency
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where, since the limits of comprehensibility and life do not coincide with
the limits of explainability and being- present, we cannot tell whom to
hold responsible: life as it announces and interprets or physical nature.
This refractedness of human transparency is the restricted field of Dasein
and vision of a people or the nationality of human existence. If, in open
questionability and unfathomability, it is a given that the human can live
open to community only as friend or enemy, in transparency or eccen-
tricity, which also express open questionability, then the refraction and
thereby the nationality of the human’s life and Being are given as well.
Yet since there is an equi-originary connection between the mode that
is open to community and the opposite characteristic of its situation,
the setting-off of a familiar, native sphere against an unfamiliar, foreign
one, since the human (because it remains indeterminate and an open
question) is thus a being that primarily distances itself from something—
which is also palpable in its objectivity, its capacity for objectness— human
life necessarily ends up in a form of existence that is relatively random
to it, the form of a specific people that is set off from other, equally ran-
dom forms of existence. According to the principle of the relation of
indeterminacy toward itself or the principle of the open question, the
human can not only conceive of the necessity of having to exist in a com-
munity or society in general, it can also conceive of the necessity of the
particularity of its existence in nations that are positioned against each
other, with different languages and customs, thus with different spheres
of familiarity and traditions. This insight is mediated for the human in
its transparent placedness in the naturalness of its essence as the other of
itself. Mediated by placedness, not justified by it: reasons can be derived
with equal originarity and equal justification from being-present as from
revealing-interpreting life, whose districts, to be sure, are essentially dif-
ferent but nonetheless interlock such that it is impossible to say where
the line runs that delimits them. Yet the fragmentation into precisely
these and not into other nations is a pure fact of ethno-biological and
historical experience.
In the past, one has certainly tried to understand their multiplicity
according to a plan of dramatic succession or cooperation and in this
way to endow the nations of the world with a necessity and a sense that
history is to attest to and that is nonetheless timelessly superior to history.
The efforts of idealist philosophy since Fichte to come to a philosophical
comprehension of historical-biological facts have not been forgotten.
But it is precisely this manner of endowing facts with sense that must be
overcome if world history is to be conceived of as a world tribunal that
pronounces none of its judgments without the possibility of appeal. Just as
the romantic way of thinking, which sees reason in the reality of history,
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degrades history to the theater where a super-worldly drama of absolute

spirit is staged, where nations, as if on cue, enter and exit at the right mo-
ment, so this endowment with sense deprives the real of relativity, of the
indeterminate, and thereby of the power to change on its own strength
that which has happened in the direction of the unforeseeable. A nation
can be necessary among nations only insofar as it makes itself needed and
necessary because history has once and for all overcome the absolutism
of plans that set the standard for history, an absolutism that contravenes
the sense of an experience open all the way down to the furthest reaches.
Here lies the sense of its politics, to assert, with and against the others, its
traditions as the horizon from out of whose familiarity it is more than
just this nation, is, for itself, humanness in its authentic form. Yet at the
same time, politics, as the art proper of the possible, is aware of the ran-
domness of its own ethnicity, which randomness it can grasp, because it is
placed in the same randomness as foreign ethnicities, as the particularity
of its own position over against the comprehensive universality of human-
ness (if the nation holds on to the Western tradition of the human as
the powerful and the responsible). Aware of this, politics does not limit
itself to aiming for the maximum but seeks to obtain the optimum for its
own existential situation. In the gradual overcoming of positing its own
ethnicity as absolute— although this ethnicity, in the sphere of having in
each case already opened up and interpreted itself, has an aspect of ab-
soluteness to it— politics civilizes itself. The means of the struggle change
and the goals become more relative. But the struggle loses neither any of
its severity nor any of its importance for the ultimate human decisions.
For the human, all political problems lie enclosed within the field
of vision of its nation because the human only exists within this field of
vision, in the random refractedness of this possibility. The interlocking
of being-present and life, in which none has precedence, does not allow
the human any pure realization, neither in thinking nor in doing, nei-
ther in believing nor in seeing, but only the realization that it is relative
to a determinate ethnicity to which it hereditarily and by tradition always
already belongs. Belonging to a people is an essential trait of the human
like being able to say I and You, like familiarity and foreignness, like the
riskedness and authenticity of the life it is responsible for leading. As
long as we fail to recognize this elementary significance of belonging to a
people, as long as we fail to grasp in it the ground of possibility on which
alone something like, for example, the “human in the possibility that is
in each case its own” can most personally accept its fate from the depths
of conscience and of resoluteness, we do not see that even the ultimate
individual decision— so far a European possibility— is taken relevant to
an ethnicity because it is empowered by this ethnicity. We then pass by
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politics as by a business irrelevant to the essential matters of our life. Yet

the success in Germany, especially among the philosophically educated,
of a philosophy that inserts Dasein (the human) in the alternative of
either finding its way to itself and into the possibility that is personally
its own in each case or of losing itself in the They of a depraved public-
ity, a philosophy that thereby secularizes the rift tragically produced by
Lutheranism between a private sphere of the soul’s salvation and a public
sphere of violence, such a success indicates the danger to which intellec-
tuals’ political indifferentism exposes our state and our nation.
What good does it do to commemorate on festive occasions the fate
that ties the citizenry together if intellectuals withdraw from the people,
and do so in their work? Politics and the constraint that there must be
politics is certainly no argument in objective work, for which the matter
at hand and ability are the only decisive criteria. The horrendous parti-
sanship, which we have great trouble struggling against even in matters
of culture, sins hourly against this basic law. But if one seeks to call this
a politicization of intellectual life and be correct in doing so, one must
not in the process forget who is guilty, namely the indifference of intel-
lectuals toward politics and philosophy’s deprecation of politics, which
became a tradition, a point of honor in the second half of the nineteenth
century. If we push politics out of the higher domains of disinterested
thinking and acting, we must not be surprised if politics, in the form of
the disease of partisan patronage, attacks intellectual life from below and
threatens to suffocate it.
It is necessary for a nation that has attained political self-
determination at a late enough date, the same way it is necessary for a
philosophy that heeds not the day and the hour but aims for life in its
greatness, to understand that both powers are dependent on each other
because their shared field of vision refers them to one another; a field
of vision that is opened up onto the unfathomable Where-to, from out
of which philosophy and politics, without needing the other for support,
create, in risky anticipation, the meaning of our life “before God and
history.”30
Epilogue

Political Anthropology: Plessner’s

Fascinating Voice from Weimar
Joachim Fischer

In the following pages, I set out to provide a historical reconstruction of

Plessner’s relatively short yet original, difficult, and controversial Political
Anthropology.1 The philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner is a
“voice from Weimar,”2 a voice from a sociocultural world in the 1920s
that fascinated contemporaries, and posterity even more. When in 2019,
the wave of commemorations of the foundation of the Weimar Republic
(1919–33) sets in, there will no doubt be a new round of debates about
how to interpret and assess the period from a scholarly perspective. Like
Karl Mannheim, Plessner belonged to the then-younger generation of
intellectuals working on questions of social policy and politics, which
joined the remarkable group formed by Max Weber, Ferdinand Tönnies,
Ernst Troeltsch, Max Scheler, Karl Jaspers, and Carl Schmitt, all of them
sociologists and philosophers struggling to articulate an adequate con-
cept of culture and the political under Germany’s changed conditions,
of their past and their chances for the future as it then appeared. Already
during the upheaval of 1919/1920, Plessner had intensively engaged with
the dimension of “the political,” for example in newspaper and journal
articles such as “Statecraft and Humaneness,” “Apocalyptic Visions and
Europe,” “Political Culture: On the Value and Meaning of Statecraft as
a Task of Culture,” and “Political Education in Germany.”3
Again, I am concerned here with historicizing Plessner’s book, not
with updating it. In a kind of hermeneutic circle, I will focus on the ques-
tion of how Plessner’s Political Anthropology allows us to understand the
challenges of political thought generally during those years better than
historical research has done up to now—and how, inversely, Plessner’s
book can be understood as an artful attempt at providing an appropri-
ate response to the complex situation of German modernity thus recon-
structed. Within this circle of challenge and response, my reconstruction
proceeds in three stages: (1) the historical context of political philosophy
in 1920s Germany as a challenge; (2) the original core of the argument

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for a “political anthropology” in Plessner’s book; and (3) a reprise of the

historical context and Plessner’s book as an autonomous response.

Context as Challenge: Plessner and the

Political Philosophy of the 1920s

First, the biographical context of Political Anthropology: at the end of the

1920s, Plessner’s career was in crisis. The 1928 publication of The Levels
of the Organic and the Human had not led, as he had hoped, to securing
him a chair in philosophy. He had been hurt by the plagiarism accusa-
tions raised by the older Max Scheler, who had died suddenly in 1928.
In the rekindled debate about a new concept of the human and “philo-
sophical anthropology,” Plessner thus found himself in a marginal posi-
tion, always in the shadow of Scheler’s still-overpowering posthumous
presence.4 Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, published practically in
parallel with Levels of the Organic, had met with enormous success. In
Davos, a debate occurred between Heidegger and Cassirer that quickly
became spectacular and of which Plessner was very likely informed.5 In
this situation, Plessner sought to find an appropriate answer.
He now seized the request, from completely different quarters, to
write a volume on “political anthropology” for the series Fachschriften
zur Politik und staatsbürgerlichen Erziehung (Technical Papers on Poli-
tics and Civic Education) as an opportunity to continue the debate about
“philosophical anthropology” in his own way.6 Under different working
titles such as “The Political Concept of the Human” or “The Human
and Politics” and finally under the title “Political Anthropology,” Plessner
wrote a 100-page manuscript that was published in 1931 under the title—
likely preferred by the publisher—Macht und menschliche Natur (Power and
Human Nature).7 In it, Plessner attempts, as he writes concisely in a letter
to Georg Misch, “the ‘derivation’ of ex-centric positionality as a structure
that opens up the political (the ‘historical’),” signaling that he saw the
book as a continuation of Levels of the Organic with its key category of
“excentric positionality.”8
To understand the book and its thrust, we must understand the
historical context of political philosophy in the Weimar Republic, and
Plessner’s book is particularly apt to serve as a guide to the problems and
tensions of Weimar philosophies of the political.
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Political Philosophy in the 1920s

In reading the meritorious older and newer narratives about political
philosophy in the Weimar Republic9 alongside texts by the prominent
political thinkers of the age, at least two kinds of doubts arise whether
these narrative perspectives are sufficient.
Such doubts concern, first, the assessment of the “philosophy” of
the political in the Weimar Republic. The “irrationalism” of the philos-
ophy of life10 is already the starting point of Sontheimer’s key study of
Weimar Republic Antidemocratic Thought.11 Later approaches, too, regarded
the philosophical at that time either from the perspective of the “de-
struction” of reason or of its restoration after 1945. In the intervening
years, a “philosophical extremism between the World Wars” is said to
have reigned.12 Yet this makes it impossible to understand, especially with
a view to the catastrophe of the years from 1933 to 1945, why thinkers
who supported the “Republic” in the 1920s and early 1930s did not, as
the Western democracies did, draw primarily on the liberal foundations
of the political in European natural law or why they did not even con-
sistently tie the political to the idea of rational law central to German
idealism. Nor does the post-facto highlighting of “a circle of left-liberal
cosmopolitan thinkers”13 (Ernst Troeltsch, Alfred Weber, Ernst Robert
Curtius, Karl Mannheim) change anything about this failure to appreci-
ate the specifically “philosophical” disposition of the 1920s.
A reconstruction of political philosophy must seek to get in touch
with both the difficulties and the opportunities of thinking that pre-
sented themselves to contemporary German- language philosophy and
arose from the particular transformation of the dispositif of a so-called
Deutscher Geist. This “German spirit” or “mind” continued to be self-
confident, thanks to a long history of reflection marked by an interna-
tionally recognized capacity for articulating critique and elaborating sys-
tems. If now the task was to develop a concept of the political from this
history, such a concept would follow from a stage of reflection that no
longer defined itself primarily as a rational philosophy. At the very lat-
est with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey, a “philosophy of life” (60) had
imposed itself against rational philosophy across Europe but did so with
particular intensity in Germany.14 There was much to be discovered that
was without reason and was significant for life, without for all that being
hostile to reason. The medium of the concept of life served to move mo-
ments of the natural, the vital, the emotional from below to the “upper”
noetic strata. This changed the character of the mind’s conception of
itself, which now included the emotional a priori, temporality, historicity,
corporeality. The philosophy of life reacted to these changes in scientific
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and everyday experience and reflectively and speculatively gave expres-

sion to modernity’s nonrational expectations and experiences. It drew
attention to the phenomenon of upheaval and the loss of life-worlds. Was
the philosophy of life, when it turned to the political, necessarily extrem-
ist, or inhumane, or illiberal, or nonreflective?
A second set of doubts about the existing presentations of political
philosophy of the Weimar Republic is apparent in the fact that in their
very titles—The Political Ideas of the Weimar Republic, or Political Philosophy
in the Weimar Republic, or Voices from Weimar— such studies name not only
the epoch but also suggest that the key problem lies in thinking the re-
public. The constitutional break that instituted a democracy was indeed a
centrally important new phenomenon of the political in Germany, but al-
ready the Weimar Constitution of 1919 shows the contemporary political
problem horizon to be more complicated: “The German Reich is a repub-
lic.”15 Contemporary thought thus did take place in the German repub-
lic, a contested form of government whose leadership was elected, not
secured by succession. Yet at the same time, it also took place in the Reich
founded by Bismarck as a major European power, a power that, although
it had been defeated in the First World War in 1918 (which ultimately did
come as a surprise to the participants and most German observers), po-
tentially remained influential among the great powers and, thanks to its
industrial and scientific potential, was considered a possible contender in
world politics. Whatever its internal direction, was the country an object
or a subject of world politics?

Political Philosophy in the Weimar Republic?

In the remainder of this section, Plessner’s book will serve as evidence
for a systematic account of the conditions confronted by a philosophy of
the political in the German-speaking world at the time, conditions it never
encountered before or since. In outlining the type of philosophical ar-
gumentation together with its historical-political allusions, the historically
particular situation of the 1920s becomes clear: the complexity of the
political phenomenon to be considered and the problem of having to
think it from the perspective of a complex and demanding but not really
political intellectual tradition. Plessner’s Political Anthropology evidently
accepts this challenge— and that is why his book is unusual and of par-
ticular interest as a historical document.
A historiography of 1920s German political philosophy that reso-
lutely aims at historicizing this thinking would have to distinguish be-
tween four conditions that are problematic on their own even before
they begin to interact.
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1. Plessner’s book undoubtedly belongs to a “history of political

philosophy of the Weimar Republic.”16 The revolutionary break, the move
from an authoritarian-monarchist to a republican-parliamentarian state
was a new phenomenon in the German context. For political philosophy,
republicanism or democracy was a reality. At the same time, the problem
was whether its institutions— constitution, rule of law, parliament— were
to be considered transitory or permanent. On the one hand, insofar as
power lay with the masses who were eligible to vote, parliamentary de-
mocracy could be considered to announce the end of the bourgeois form
of existence. On the other hand, insofar as the rule of law was consid-
ered merely the form of rule of the bourgeois class— such was the view
of Marxism, which now had a real base in the young Soviet Union and
from there affected Germany as well— the republic was only a transitional
state for the communist goals of the political industrial proletariat. A new
philosophy of the political had to adopt an attitude toward a republic
that had emerged from a revolution. In order to represent the dynamic
divergence of interests within the republican constitution as negotiable
and tolerable, as capable of compromise, a political philosophy of the
republic had to explicate that the republic was conditioned by the rela-
tionship between “community and society,” between social democracy
and the public.
2. Plessner’s book, however, also makes it possible to articulate a
“history of the political philosophy of the German Reich” not in the ideo-
logical but in the factual sense. A contemporary philosophical concept
of the political also had to be adequate to the situation of one power
among other powers in European and even world politics. This was a very
different challenge from the one the philosophy of the political faced in
West Germany after 1949, which was no longer a great power and thus
did not have to reflect on such problems. Even after the end of the war
in 1918, Germany potentially belonged to the great powers, as it had in
the eyes of all European observers since 1871. The necessity to move as a
power among powers came from the historical experience of its threat-
ened position in the middle of Europe; the possibility of being a power
came from the energetic potential of a laboring nation competing in the
global economy.17 Repositioning Germany in Europe and the world after
World War I— with the rise of the United States as a world power on the
horizon— was a real problem that a deeply shaken German bourgeoisie
had to help solve in one way or another.18
After Germany had been defeated but not destroyed by the alliance
of its world-political rivals in an unexpectedly atrocious world war, the
bourgeois citizenry and the elites for the first time confronted a truly
political question: whether Germany should come to terms with being an
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object of world politics or whether it could once more become a subject

of world politics— and in what contexts and with what sacrifices it could
do so. “Reich”— understood as a real potential— was a blank space simul-
taneously invested in vastly different ways. This phenomenon confronted
a philosophy of the political with the problem that it could not simply fol-
low the Enlightenment’s guiding principles of natural and international
law in whose name the victorious Western powers sought to control the
potential of German society. Diametrically opposed ideas of asserting
these ideas in Europe against the West ranged from völkisch-romanticist
Reich mysticism via a pragmatic Middle European bloc to the expecta-
tion on the left of the proletarian revolution in Germany, which it was
believed would make the difference on a global scale because German
industrial workers were comparatively the most advanced.19 This “poten-
tiality” of Germany in European and world politics was a condition that
a contemporary philosophy of the political could not ignore.20
3. Another challenge we find in Plessner’s book is the “history of
the political philosophy of modernity.” The situation demanded that phi-
losophy redefine the status and the achievements of the political with
respect to an epochal break that had to be understood in the first place:
modernity. This break had given the human organism the power of abil-
ity (the primacy of means over purposes) to a previously unknown extent
and exposed it to a powerlessness in the confrontation with previously
unknown possibilities of calculation and domination. The expectation of
what politics could achieve depended on how one interpreted the never-
ending transformations of European life- worlds. If modernity, as ratio-
nalization and bureaucratization, amounted to a petrification of human
life, then politics seemed to be the creative breaking-out of the “brazen
casing” Max Weber had already sought to theorize in the concept of
charisma.21 If, however, the modern destruction of all inner- and other-
worldly authorities was experienced as a “loss of center,” as a multitude
of lifestyles and new medial a prioris, then politics could appear as a
conclusive authority that radically put an end to this state of insecurity.
In this much-evoked laboratory of modernity in the 1920s, the prob-
lematic point for a political philosophy had to be whether philosophy
conceived of the inner conflicts of modern societies, of modern contin-
gency as an “ontological state of exception,” as nihilism— which politics
would have to banish from the world— or whether it interpreted the in-
determinability of the human as a permanent state— in which case the
task of politics would be to keep this open state open in the world and
fashion it into a new humanism.22
4. Finally, Plessner’s Political Anthropology, like all political philos-
ophy in the German-speaking world at that time, came out of the “history
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of the German spirit,” whose center, philosophy, had been the axis and
mainstay of forming Germany into a nation since the eighteenth century.
This very much singles out political philosophy of the Weimar
period. Traditionally, “German spirit” had in no way amounted to a fun-
damental rejection of modern European conditions but at the same time
insisted on not simply adopting them wholesale in the form they had
been given in western Europe.23 Far from insulated but on the contrary
unusually open to translation, this spirit oscillated for a century and a half
between reservations about and zealous adoption of the “Western spirit.”
It became charged with extraordinary tensions between nature and mind,
community and society, between interiority and exteriority, between spirit
and morality on one side and politics and power on the other.
At the end of the nineteenth century, it was still fully under the
spell of the claim of idealist rational philosophy to open up and explain
the world and the self but at the same time be in disagreement with
its presuppositions. Virulent in all European thinking but dominant in
Germany— with Nietzsche, Bergson, and Dilthey— a philosophy of life (for
which the principle of all critique became an object of critique) replaced
critical rational philosophy. This was understood simultaneously as the
loss of a systematic-rationalizing point of unity and as a learning process.
Richer than reason, philosophy addressed the relationship between the
human and the world in all its aspects: as living nature— greater than
mechanic nature; as historicity— greater than civilization; as temporality,
an opportunity that now presents itself and now is gone again— greater
than development.
In the wake of its release by the radical critique of rational phi-
losophy, philosophy in Germany thus was necessarily led from life-
philosophical reflections to political phenomena. Major currents of
thought participated in this paradigm shift: phenomenology, philo-
sophical anthropology, depth psychology, existential philosophy, the so-
called Dilthey current of philosophical hermeneutics, and also critical
theory. When it turned to the political, philosophy in Germany came out
of the dynamization of the “German spirit” and at the same time was
undeterred in its belief to be second to no other philosophical culture
in its power to penetrate reality. This reference back to the intellectual
resources of a “German Spirit,” this protest against western Europe especially
after the defeat in the war, which as it were contained an inner-European
reservation against the “West” in the center of Europe, was another chal-
lenge that was much weakened later, after 1945, when the German men-
tality, including that of intellectuals, westernized rapidly.24
These four heterogeneous conditions, which cannot be reduced
the ones to the others, constituted a set of challenges in terms of which
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all central texts of a philosophy of the political in the 1920s can be read—
and in terms of which Plessner’s book, Political Anthropology, too, can be
deciphered as a contribution to political philosophy.

The Core: Political Anthropology

In Plessner’s book, we must clearly separate the “purpose” from the

“path” of the argumentation. On the one hand, there is “the purpose of
this book”: “to understand the human necessity of politics” (5). Hence also
the working title, “Political Anthropology.” Plessner immediately takes
up the most trenchant conception of politics articulated in contempo-
rary realist discourse by Max Weber and Carl Schmitt. For them, the
sphere of the political is defined by the “social relationship” of “conflict
[Kampf ] insofar as action is oriented intentionally to carrying out the
actor’s own will against the resistance of the other party or parties”25 in
the “life relationship of friend and enemy” (6). Plessner’s concept of
the political thus combines elements from Weber (conflict) and Schmitt
(friend– enemy relationship). These concepts, moreover, differentiate
between inside and outside and are therefore capable, from the outset,
of taking into account those dimensions of a “culture” that pertain to
domestic and foreign policy. The charge of Plessner’s book lies in that
he does not seek to elide this extreme conception of the political in favor
of appeasing, controlling, and moralizing the political. For traditional
rational philosophy, he writes, “politics is merely the expression of the
human’s imperfection whose overcoming . . . is what the ideals of true
humanity, what a moral education that liberates humans toward their
authentic essence demand” (6). Throughout the book, he counters such
a view with the question of whether philosophy at its core is capable of
understanding the human necessity of politics— precisely in its extreme
form as conflict. As always in Plessner, “philosophy” can assume this self-
imposed task, this purpose, only if it is moved by the issue in its core, its
“interiority”:

Just as art, science, and religion became media for knowing the world
because philosophy was able to turn each of them into one of its tools,
so politics will attain that same dignity only if philosophy, by turning
politics into one of its tools, liberates it from its position as an area in
which the human, which is tied to nature, acts merely contingently. (5)

Or, put differently:

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The topic of this book is thus the search for a foundation on which to
consider all things political, a foundation able to support the possibility
that there is a political a priori at the very root of philosophical reflec-
tion itself. Out of the spirit of politics, this book seeks to motivate phi-
losophy in what is most its own in order to understand the human necessity
of politics. (5)

If the purpose of the work is now clear, the path Plessner suggests “toward
political anthropology” is a detour via the “anthropology of the historical
view of the world,” as the subtitle of the 1931 edition has it. At first, the
“political” does not even appear during this detour. It is a path through
the humanities, the path of historical and ethnological studies through
the unforeseeable diversity of ages and cultures, in each of which “the
human” appears differently. It is a detour from which philosophy (thanks
to and beyond Dilthey) is now able to draw an anthropological conclu-
sion (the “principle of the human’s unfathomability”) for the “spirit”
and for the “humanities”— and in drawing this conclusion, it is at the
same time able to account for the unavoidability of the “political” (as a
conflict between respective “spheres of familiarity”).
Here is the structure of the book’s argumentation, reducing the
book’s difficulty as much as possible in a first overview.

Its purpose is to understand politics in its human necessity, or: the

political (in both its associating and its dissociating modes) be-
longs to the “essence” of the human.
To grasp how the arguments for this purpose are joined together—
the path—it helps to look at the book’s German subtitle first and
at its title second.
1. “Anthropology of the historical view of the world” (subtitle): in
taking up Wilhelm Dilthey’s life-philosophical hermeneutics of
the humanities, Plessner develops the concept of “universal an-
thropology” as the “principle of unfathomability” or the “open
question” of the human.
2. “Power and human nature” (title): in taking up Carl Schmitt’s
(and Max Weber’s) “concept of the political” (what is political
is the distinction between “friend and enemy”), Plessner devel-
ops a phenomenology of the political as a “struggle for power.”
3. Combination: “universal anthropology” necessarily leads to
“political anthropology.” Thanks to the “principle of unfathom-
ability,” politics can be grasped in its human necessity. Because
the human is an “open question” (because what and who “the
human” is remains open and unfathomable), “the human” is
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necessarily engaged in political conflicts about the validity of

the different “answers” given by various cultures or peoples.

“Anthropology of the Historical View of the World”:

The Human Is a Being of Cultures
Plessner develops his “anthropology of the historical view of the world”
along Dilthey’s lines in six chapters: (2) The universal conception of
political anthropology with regard to the human as the historical subject
of attribution of its world, (3) Should universal anthropology proceed
empirically or a priori? (4) Two possible a priori procedures, (5) The
new possibility of combining the a priori and empirical views according
to the principle of the human’s unfathomability, (6) Excursus: Dilthey’s
idea of a philosophy of life, and (7) The principle of unfathomability, or
The principle of open questions.
He seeks the “essence of the human” (3) by reflecting on the life
experience (of the human and its essence) in world history, that is, in
the medium of experiential knowledge provided by hermeneutic cultural
studies since the nineteenth century. For Plessner, Dilthey’s achievement
had been to break through to a “life-philosophical” reflection (77–78) on
the human’s historical experience (of the human) as human— in idealis-
tic terms, one might say the experience of the “humanness” in itself— to
break through to an understanding by the human of the human as a life
that is historically conditioned and that conditions life in interpretative
experiences. From this epistemic event, Plessner thinks, he can draw a
number of conclusions, which also apply to the concept of the political.
A philosophy of the “essence of the human” that reveals itself in
world history amounts to this: all “cultural systems and worldviews” by
whose horizons a given humanity finds itself instituted, organized, fright-
ened, or secured are to be attributed to the human as a historical living
being. Not just worlds peopled with gods, but the ideas of progress and
reason, too, can be traced back to the “living human” (31) as a “power”
in the process of life, a process that, insofar as it is physical, is also subject
to life. In philosophical thought, this marks the shift from rational philos-
ophy to the philosophy of life: “the human is no longer a matter of the
system but the system a matter of the human.”26 The timeless inner- or
otherworldly anchors that had secured humans become transparent to
them as their own conceptions of the world in which the human consti-
tutes itself, historically conditioned and conditioning. In making the “life
experience” of world history, it becomes impossible to define the human,
who is “unfathomable” (48). The human is the “creative breakthrough
point” (25)27 of horizons in which the world and what is human appear
and are lived in different ways.
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Plessner thus articulates the experience of the humanities, of his-

torical and ethnological studies, in the principle of unfathomability or in
the formula of the human as an “open question” or as a being of cultures
(Kulturenwesen): “It must remain open, for the sake of the universality of
its view onto human life in the full scope of all cultures and epochs of
which the human is capable” (26). “In [the] relation of indeterminacy
toward itself, the human conceives of itself as power and discovers itself
as an open question to the benefit of its life, theoretically and practi-
cally” (49).
“Open question” (49) means more than just: the human is a ques-
tion to which it must find the right answer via nature and history, an an-
swer that might be conclusive at the end of history. As a living being, the
human must always already give an answer, yet because the question is
“open” (it has no unambiguous criteria), the “answers,” which in the pro-
cess of life cannot but be one-sided, codetermine when and how the ques-
tion is asked. The question is very much shaped by the concrete answers
in which the “generations” (45) of an interpretation of the world are
always already swept up, answers to which they, in “presentification” (46)
as a conscious living of their lives, bind themselves again, answers they
maintain against other answers or which they decide upon in new and
unforeseeable situations by breaking or continuing with them. These an-
swers are limited yet constitute changing horizons in history, they decide
the essence of the human. The statement according to which the human
is the “historical subject of attribution” of its culture, is an “unfathom-
ability” or an “open question” or “power” (59) that must take itself back
to a certain historical horizon from whose possibility it emerges.
The “principle of unfathomability” leads straight to “acknowledg-
ing non-European cultural systems and worldviews that are relative to
their bearers and thereby indirectly are relative to God, before whom,
as ‘humans,’ they are all equal, equally legitimate, or at least equally pos-
sible” (14). In a life-philosophical reflection of historical experience on
itself, which also takes the historicity of the perspective of the philosophy
of life into account, all cultures appear as equally possible perspectives
of human creative power. This, however, does not imply, strictly speak-
ing, that it is indifferent toward its own culture, in which this view has
become possible.28 Only within its (European) perspective do the other
perspectives (up to now) appear as equal possibilities of the human, as
human possibilities. And without seeking to ascribe or even impose this
reflective view on all other cultures, it cannot be a matter of indifference
to this perspective— which has broken open immanently in a certain ep-
och and comes to an understanding of itself in the image of the open
human— to maintain itself in and against an unforeseeable historical
life. The philosophy of life itself, which destructs the absolute systems in
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which the human had enclosed itself, including even rationality, in the
direction of the human, is an expression of a “creative breakthrough” in
a culture, in an aspect of the human that has not yet been lived; namely,
of leading one’s life under the conditions of openness toward reality, in
the “new sense of the world of a closeness to the subject matter that is
open, without direction, in touch with reality” (124n28). At the very least,
it cannot not matter to those who “belong” to this culture, who owe their
individual existential possibilities to this perspective— and especially to
contemporary philosophy.
Because this is a self-reflection not of rational philosophy but of
the philosophy that bears all its traits— temporality, risk, play, decline,
struggle— it considers the open form of life a historical achievement that
can be lost again. What very much counts in concrete life situations is
practical action, public commitment, decisions in favor or against— in
other words, the dimension of the political.

“Power and Human Nature”: The Political Belongs

to the Essence of the Human
Let’s turn now to the second line of thought before we join the two lines.
Plessner develops the argument that refers to “power and human nature”
along the Weber–Schmitt line in five chapters: (8) The human as power,
(9) The exposure of the human, (10) Excursus: Why it is significant for
the question of power that the primacy of philosophy or anthropology
is undecidable, (11) The powerlessness and predictability of the human,
and (12) The human is tied to a people. Looking ahead, we can say that
Plessner seeks to latch the philosophy of the political onto the humanities
philosophy of open “humanity.” Since the essence of the human remains
open, the political must be an essential trait of the human.
Plessner quite classically considers the human as zōon politikon (po-
litical animal) to be separate from the animal. The reasons for the ways
groups of animals relate to one another, including their often aggressive
behavior, are always already contained in and limited by their nature. Only
humans or groups of humans must behave politically because human
organisms discover in themselves the “principle of unfathomability” that
refers them to power and to the struggle for power. If the human is the
“creative breakthrough point” (25) for cultural horizons within which
the world and what is human appear and are lived in different ways,
then the human, as power, “is necessarily engaged in a struggle for power,
i.e., in the opposition of familiarity and foreignness, of friend and enemy”
(53). Plessner derives the unavoidability of the political for human organ-
isms from the historical fact of open human-ness: because the essence of
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the human remains open, the political must be an essential trait of the
human. “We . . . conceive of the friend–enemy relation as belonging to
the essential constitution of the human and we do so precisely by blocking
any concrete essential determination of the human, by treating it as an
open question or as power” (53). If the human in the life to be lived is
an open question, then cultures are horizons of meaning that creatively
open up worlds, “homely zone[s] of familiar references and relations of
signification” (58) that from the very beginning are delimited from an
undiscovered, uncanny world and from horizons that open up different
worlds. The political here is claimed “to be so broad as to penetrate all
human relationships and to counter the restriction to a so- called political
sphere, i.e., the sphere of the state. There is politics between man and
woman, master and servant, teacher and student, physician and patient,
artist and patron,” that is, along the most varied axes of differentiation
(55). “Any kind of companionship and collectivization for the purpose
of habitation, economy, loving, religious activity, progeny, whatever form
it may take, is defined by this friend-enemy relation. A familiar circle sets
itself off from what is unfamiliar and foreign” (53). The “political, as a
constant of the human situation and in its explicit form of a behavior
among humans that is oriented toward securing and increasing one’s
own power by restricting or annihilating the foreign domain, is rooted”
in this correlation (55). Politics is “the necessity, springing from the basic
constitution of what is human as such, to live in a for-or-against situation
and to delimit and to claim for itself a zone of its own against a foreign
zone” (55). And this is what the dignity, the ability, the art of the political
consists in:

Politics is thus not the last, most peripheral application of philosophical

and anthropological insights; insights gained from non-purposive ob-
jectivity are never at an end, never definitive, never unsurpassable, and
life can never live up to them. As this process, cognition is never as far
ahead as life is and is always ahead of life. Politics, however, is the art of
the right moment, of the favorable opportunity. It’s the moment that
counts. (75)

“Power and Human Culture”: “Universal Anthropology”

Grounds “Political Anthropology”
In assigning political behavior to the “essence” of the human, Plessner
focuses on the relationships between large groups, what we call cultures,
peoples, or nations, as “the horizon within which political life unfolds
and from out of which the human’s compulsion and duty to power
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arises” (5). Such cultures as formations of horizons open up but are in

themselves closed. In the tradition of Herder and Humboldt, Plessner
paradigmatically has in mind here the concrete languages that institute
zones of familiarity proper to individual groups. For there isn’t the single
language of humanity, there are always already and necessarily different
languages and cultures that meaningfully limit the constitutional status
of “openness to the world”: different languages, different narrowings
of the horizon. Unlike hermeneuticists (with Dilthey as prototype), for
whom this constellation of different cultures, different zones of famil-
iarity with their corresponding horizons of uncanniness is above all a
question of understanding other languages and cultures,29 philosophical
anthropologists as ethnologists see it primarily as always a question of
behavior— of politics, precisely, of power, of struggling over the domain of
one’s own culture and that of the other, however moderate this struggle
might be. “Open question” (49) for Plessner means more than just: the
human is a question to which it must find an appropriate answer via nature
and history. As a living being, the human must always already give (have
given) an answer, yet because the question has no unambiguous criteria,
because it is “open,” the “answers,” which in the process of life cannot
but be one-sided, codetermine when and how the question is asked in
the development of humanity. Taking the principle of the unfathomabil-
ity of the human, of the human as “open question” seriously precisely
does not turn the political into a moderate ethics but grounds the un-
avoidability of the political, of the political struggle. The various answers,
which as horizons are limited and change in the course of history, decide
the essence of the human in the first place or, rather, decide what “ap-
pears” as “essence” in the history and society of the world. “The history
of culture shows a relentless displacement of the horizon of uncanniness
and a correlative displacement of the sphere of friendly familiarity, such
that the changes in how the friend–enemy relation manifests itself can
only be investigated historically” (55). In the world of human history,
there is no law of a Hegelian objective spirit that imposes itself through
the “ruse of reason” in the medium of various representative embodi-
ments of cultures and their horizons of meaning. Instead, Plessner from
the perspective of philosophical anthropology surmises that for history,
everything hinges on the embodiments and prudential behavior of cul-
tures’ representative elites and depends on their decisions. The course
of human history in this sense depends on the political, on the decisions
made within a given scope.
From the political as the “way in which the relations of life are
refracted” that is “necessarily produced” by life (6), Plessner concludes
a political responsibility for one’s particular culture as the “ground of
possibility” (86) of one’s own existence— precisely because the essence of
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the human is not fixed. “A nation can be necessary among nations only
insofar as it makes itself needed and necessary” (86).
Plessner thus elaborates his 1921 demand for a political culture, which
would integrate the political into culture, in terms of a theory of cul-
ture that demonstrates the political nature of all culture. Against the
backdrop of the “unfathomability” of the human and the contingency
of every culture, each culture can become conscious of its precious ir-
replaceability.
Thanks to knowledge about the “unfathomability” of the human,
“politics civilizes itself” insofar as, in allowing for the foreign answer, it
“does not limit itself to aiming for the maximum but seeks to obtain the
optimum for its own existential situation” (86). The human (in its Euro-
pean interpretation) can open “the horizon of [its] own human- kind
onto a competition with other possibilities of being-human” (54).

To sum up: with his 1931 Political Anthropology, Plessner has written a phi-
losophy of culture, more precisely a philosophy of cultures to bring out a
philosophy of the political. From the fact that the human or “humanity”
always lives only in different cultures that mediate their existence, the book
obtains the theorem that the human is “unfathomable” as a matter of
principle. Two things follow from this anthropological insight. On the
one hand, it necessarily implies respect for difference, for the foreign
expression of the other— because the culture of the other is, precisely,
another possibility of the fundamentally unfathomable human, of the
“homo absconditus,” as Plessner will put it later. And, on the other hand,
it follows for Plessner that human organisms who orient themselves in a
given “zone of familiarity” have a will, even a “duty to power” in order to
politically maintain— to optimize, not to maximize, as Plessner writes—
their own cultural expression (e.g., their own, concrete language), con-
fident in their own power in a competition with other cultures.

Response to the Context: The Historical-

Political Meaning of Plessner’s Political
Philosophy from the 1920s

The Plessner Controversy

Much later,30 right at the beginning of the Plessner renaissance in the
late 1980s, Political Anthropology sparked controversial debates.31 The 1931
book, it was widely held, did not quite fit with the image of Plessner since
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it allegedly contained, in its direct reference to Carl Schmitt’s Concept of

the Political, a “bewildering anthropology of power including the per-
manent establishment of the friend–enemy relation” and seemed, with
its concept of the “people,” to get entangled in irrational, decisionist
patterns of thought. In hindsight, Plessner’s affinity to Carl Schmitt at
the end of the 1920s is now considered scandalous because after 1933,
Schmitt— who had already been a leading jurist in questions of consti-
tutional as well as international law in the Weimar Republic32— provided
emphatic legal support and legitimacy for the National Socialist seizure
of power and supported the fundamental antisemitism of National So-
cialism in his own discipline, legal studies.33 In 1931 or 1932, when he met
Schmitt personally several times in Berlin and Cologne—Schmitt on a
meeting in Cologne on April 17, 1931: “lunch with Plessner, very nice”34—
Plessner could not have known of this decision of Schmitt’s. And in 1932,
when in the second edition of his since-famous Concept of the Political he
referred favorably to Plessner’s 1931 Political Anthropology, Schmitt himself
could not have known that this would be his option in the years after
1933. In 1931, in any event, Carl Schmitt felt “great joy about this book”—
Plessner’s book.35 The following passage in the 1932 edition testifies to
this euphoria:

Helmuth Plessner, who as the first modern philosopher in his book

Macht und menschliche Natur dared to advance a political anthropol-
ogy of a grand style, correctly says that there exists no philosophy and
no anthropology which is not politically relevant, just as there is no
philosophically irrelevant politics. He has recognized in particular that
philosophy and anthropology, as specifically applicable to the totality
of knowledge, cannot, like any specialized discipline, be neutralized
against irrational life decisions. Man, for Plessner, is “primarily a being
capable of creating distance” who in his essence is undetermined,
unfathomable, and remains an “open question.” If one bears in mind
the anthropological distinction of evil and good and combines Pless-
ner’s “remaining open” with his positive reference to danger, Plessner’s
theory is closer to evil than to goodness.36

One might denounce the very core of Plessner’s political anthropology

for his proximity to Schmitt37 or one might try to protect Plessner from
Plessner (who “moves close to Schmitt’s theory only where he has be-
come quite estranged from himself”),38 try as it were to save him as a
liberal philosopher from the maelstrom of Weimar political philosophy.
I will make no attempt here to adjudicate the controversy but
rather take it as an occasion to operate, with Plessner, a shift of per-
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spective.39 Political philosophy in the Weimar Republic is always already

understood as part of the prehistory of the German catastrophe. Given
what happened, that is practically inevitable. Rather than remain with
this pre-comprehension, these by now classic patterns and opinions, and
be surprised time and again to find things that are “bewildering” in the
pre-1933 work even of authors generally appreciated, we might shift our
focus and try once more to use the tensions within a thinker’s oeuvre to
get to the tensions of the time “before.” It may well be possible that the
historiography of “Weimar” political ideas has not yet grasped the com-
plexity of the “bewildering” questions that political philosophy saw itself
compelled to try to answer in the 1920s.

The Historical-Political Meaning of Plessner’s Political Philosophy

In what historical constellation did Plessner’s argument, such as I have
reconstructed it, seek to intervene?
Plessner, first of all, argues as a philosopher of the 1920s with a com-
prehensive grasp of the life-philosophical paradigm, a philosopher who,
via a study of Kant, elaborated his approach in a carefully conducted fun-
damental shift from a rational philosophy to a “philosophy of life.”40 The
latter he explored to the fullest in its two dimensions: as philosophy of the
living (theory of the organic forms of life) and as philosophy of experi-
ence (hermeneutics in the humanities). This places him philosophically
at the center of the many kinds of theorizing inspired by the philosophy
of life that sought to correct one aspect or another of the dominant para-
digm of rational philosophy.
To give an idea of just one aspect of this connection: the break-
through of the philosophy of life came about partly as a protest against
the postwar order the victorious allies had imposed on Germany in the
name of political humanism, of faith in reason. Ever since 1914 and es-
pecially after 1918, German intellectuals had to wonder whether their
habitual protest could give rise to a model of the world of its own that
would be capable of guiding practical life. Yet in turn, radical protest
against the victorious West of Europe was possible because idealist phi-
losophy had already been sidelined. On the rise since 1880 but obscured
by the rational philosophy of neo-Kantianism, then dominant since 1920,
the philosophy of life also kept in touch, subterraneously as it were, with
the speed and insecurity of the new nation-state as well as with dynamic
modernization: it was an expression as well as a protest against this state’s
rationalizing, abstract inflexibilities and dramatized this protest by way of
the tension between the concept of a time of life (Lebenszeit) and world
history.41
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We must also keep in mind that Plessner addressed his argument to

the German bourgeoisie. This is suggested by the two titles of his study
of Germany after 1933: Fate of the German Spirit at the End of Its Bourgeois
Period in 1935 and, in 1959, the same book with the subtitle On the Political
Temptability of the Bourgeois Spirit. For Plessner, the bourgeoisie brought
about its own disorientation by following the kind of mental processing
its educated class proffered. The mentality politics that Plessner’s argu-
ment refers to may be characterized as follows. The dominant current
was “relativism.” Developed through historicism and Marxist critiques
of ideology in the nineteenth century, it had become a matter of course
to trace every intellectual position to a concrete historical situation and
unmask every idea as a cover for particular interests. In its sociology of
knowledge, bourgeois consciousness unmasked even an allegedly univer-
sal proletariat’s dependence on a particular position and western Euro-
pean humanism’s limitation by particular interests. In this radical rela-
tivization all the way down, bourgeois consciousness at the same time
became unsure about the existential constitution that made freedom and
reflection possible.
At issue was “a nation that has attained political self-determination
at a late enough date” (87). In what condition were “self-determination
in a nation state” (3) and the bourgeois-liberal classes on which it rested?
The anti-bourgeois “dictatorship” in Russia and Italy “announced the
death of the goddess of liberty” (5). At the same time, bourgeois Ger-
many struggled against the great bourgeois powers of western Europe
about “appealing” the paradox of, on the one hand, being included by
the West in the “organization of humanity” that was the League of Nations
in Geneva and, on the other, of having its political self-determination
blocked and burdened by the Versailles Treaty at the very same time.
When the world economy collapsed, it lost ground; modernity generally,
it seemed, was the site of “bottomlessness” (74) and Germany had no
unambiguous political tradition of its own that could stabilize it.
Somewhat polemically, we might interpret the historical- political
meaning of Plessner’s philosophical argument in Political Anthropology to
be the empowerment of the German bourgeoisie. The crisis suggested
turning it into a political society, bringing it to empower itself. The Ger-
man bourgeoisie was to know of the historicization and sociologization
of its own educational patterns in terms of social positions (which it had
operated itself in the humanities and social sciences) and at the same time
maintain these patterns. Empowerment to “power” also meant empower-
ment to “great power,” to the “political culture” of a “great power” in the
play of “powers”— very much like Weber’s attempt to wean the German
bourgeoisie off its (politically) submissive mentality by demonstrating to
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himself and to the bourgeoisie how the life of free churches and civic
associations in North America could serve as a source code for bour-
geois self- government in politics as well. As German bourgeoisie, it was
challenged by the industrial proletariat (as in all European bourgeois
societies) either to include the proletariat in bourgeois-civil society and
thereby change itself or to cede leadership to the proletariat. Yet at the
same time, as German bourgeoisie it vied with others in Europe for pres-
tige and influence, a rivalry in which it could bring its potential to bear
politically only if it was able to justify doing so in terms of a supra-national
idea, if, like France and Britain, it appealed to “the imagination of the
nations, to their expectations for the future, to their faith in humanity.”42
And it would have to do all of this under the unprecedented conditions
of modernization, which caught up with the German bourgeoisie espe-
cially quickly, in a situation where it was far from certain that it would be
able to reflect on or process these conditions in and for Europe at all.
The homework Plessner assigned to the German bourgeoisie at the
end of the 1920s and the beginning of the 1930s consisted in the ques-
tion: how is it possible to move from philosophy to politics, from “Ger-
man spirit” to power without losing the “spirit” in the process?
To provide an answer, Plessner took up his position within the Ger-
man discourse of power. Two renowned theoreticians who issued from
the ranks of the educated German bourgeoisie had developed a realistic
concept of politics as power that was obviously applicable to reality but
no longer tied in with the history of German philosophy. Weber may have
suffered from this gap, Schmitt likely did not. Plessner’s point was: could
this realistic concept of the political (struggle, power, enemy) be spelled
out philosophically without having to think a cynical, reduced concept
of the human, of humanity?
Plessner’s idea: one would have to approach the question from the
perspective of a “world citizenry”— in whose name, after all, “German
spirit” had long been advancing its ideas— but not on the path of ideal-
ist world history but on the path Dilthey had suggested via the (scien-
tific) “life experience” of world history. Adopting a political version of
Hegel’s historical idealism, according to which world history is the world
tribunal that, as reason progresses, successively decides the significance
of peoples, the German bourgeoisie had staked everything on victory in
World War I and found itself judged before the world public at Versailles,
judged to embody a stage of development that had been overcome in a
process of civilization represented by the Western bourgeois societies.
Pessimist interpretations of history— such as Spengler’s— were a counter-
move that only allowed for politics in terms of a self-assertion of a civili-
zation whose creativity had gone and quite simply included the victorious
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western Europeans alongside Germany in the decline of Europe. How

would it be possible for life- philosophical reflection on experience to
break the spell that idealist and pessimist philosophies of history exer-
cised on the German mentality?
Plessner sought a counterweight to the German bourgeoisie’s sense
of decline, which was fostered by “historicist despair” (47) and a nag-
ging “suspicion of ideology.”43 He attempted to combine Dilthey’s her-
meneutic concept of culture and Schmitt’s decisionist concept of the
political. Politicizing it was to wrest Dilthey’s hermeneutics from the pas-
sivity of the experiential attitude, the organicity of culture; inversely, the
hermeneutic reference to the concrete European cultural horizon was to
strip Schmitt’s concept of the political of the decisionist arbitrariness of
action. Culture through the human as creative power was genuinely always
already civilization as political struggle about this creation; the image of
the human as an “open question” of contemporary European culture,
too, was a creative achievement that was to be politically secured by par-
ticipating in a “public” and providing renewed answers to new and un-
foreseeable situations, precisely because its historical contingency and
thereby also its historical rarity were apparent.
Plessner attempted a combination of “culture” and “politics” that
previously had been declared unthinkable for the “German spirit.” Since
in German thought, culture was considered that which pertained to the
inside, strictly delimited from the outside of technology, the political, and
so on, Plessner’s concept of “political culture” was at first a paradox that
dragged the political— understood as a cultural sphere in its own right,
not just an instrumental zone— into the interior. The interior and the ex-
terior were no longer to be played off against each other. For Plessner, the
human by nature was the limit-relationship between inside and outside,
which it had to come to terms with via a mediating distance in expression
and behavior. In this combination of inside and outside, the political,
as the so-called exterior, was referred to the interior already in everyday
practical life but did not coincide with it. The “political-diplomatic con-
stant we find in human behavior overall” (6) also explained the dualism
of domestic and foreign policy as the combination of inside and out-
side within the field of politics itself. The concept “political culture” pre-
sented the human simultaneously as a creative “power” and as a strug-
gling and securing “power.”
Plessner’s contributions to political philosophy were paths from
the inside of the “German spirit” to the outside. His elaboration of the
life- philosophical approach was an attempt by a “sympathetic critic”
of the “German spirit” to make Germany realistic, to keep it in touch
with the world, and yet to assume its own history of reflection. All of
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Political Anthropology’s argumentation revolves around combining “spirit”

and “power” by developing the necessity of the concept of the political
(Weber, Schmitt: conflict between groups) from a philosophical theory
of the spirit and the humanities (Dilthey: unfathomability) and com-
mending the concept to being cultivated and carefully tended. With his
thinking, Plessner wanted to intervene in Weimar consciousness, inter-
vene between idealist German cultural criticism that suffered from the
cold world of modernity and the “cynical consciousness” that, having
reflexively relativized everything all the way down, participated in the
cold-hearted game of powerful self-assertion.44 Plessner at times seems
close to the latter. But the pathos of openness and publicity prevails and
so does— in contrast to Schmitt, with whom he shared the awareness of
the problem of outside and inside— the bourgeois confidence that the
public can come to terms with openness without falling into absolutism
or relativism. If the German bourgeoisie could adapt to life in moder-
nity, instead of either seeing it as a humanly estranged historical state of
exception and wishing to make it go away or cynically playing along, it
could also make good on its claim to leadership in public life. From the
perspective of Plessner’s book of political philosophy, the German re-
public appeared, all in all and with respect to world history, at a difficult
moment and yet a moment of opportunity for the German bourgeoisie,
provided it managed to articulate in its “spirit” a concept of the political
as a human reality. Plessner was concerned with urging the masters of
“understanding” in the “German spirit” to master “behavior”— with re-
spect both to questions of stabilizing the Weimar “Republic” within and
to questions of the “Reich’s” policies after “Versailles” and “Geneva.” The
plea for the “value- democratic equalization” of cultures on the global
scale turns the forced renunciation of colonies in 1919 into a prestige
advantage over the Western powers bogged down in colonial empires:
unlike France, Britain, or the Netherlands, Germany can now postulate
diplomatically that cosmopolitan thinking requires acknowledging cul-
tural difference— thereby playing to a strength of the German spirit, in
the tradition of Herder, Humboldt, or Dilthey, to “understand” cultures
in their difference, and putting it to use in the game of power. Against the
“idealist philosophy” of the educated German bourgeoisie that had as-
signed an underlying meaning to the succession of peoples on the world
stage, namely the systematic progress of “absolute spirit,” of reason, the
task instead is to understand that “world history is . . . a world tribunal
that pronounces none of its judgments without the possibility of appeal ”
(85). In the historical context of the 1920s, this was clearly a reference to
the Versailles Treaty. “Because history has once and for all overcome the
absolutism of plans that set the standard for history, an absolutism that
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contravenes the sense of an experience open all the way down to the fur-
thest reaches. Here lies the sense of its politics, to assert, with and against
the others, its traditions as the horizon from out of whose familiarity it is
more than just this nation, is, for itself, humanness in its authentic form.”
And Plessner continues, “politics, as the art proper of the possible, is
aware of the randomness of its own ethnicity, which randomness it can
grasp . . . [it] does not limit itself to aiming for the maximum but seeks
to obtain the optimum for its own existential situation” (86).
 Notes

Introduction

1. [See the glossary, pp. 125–29, for an overview of Plessner’s vocabulary.—

Trans.]
2. See Oliver Marchart, Post-Foundational Political Thought: Political Differ-
ence in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
2007).
3. See Robert Seyfert, Das Leben der Institutionen: Zu einer Allgemeinen Theorie
der Institutionalisierung (Weilerswist, Ger.: Velbrück, 2007).
4. Eric Voegelin, review of Helmuth Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur,
in Collected Works, vol. 13: Selected Book Reviews, ed. and trans. Jodi Cockerill and
Barry Cooper, 38–41 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2001), here at 38.
5. Voegelin, review of Plessner, 41.
6. Such unfathomability is conditioned by the organic structure of human
life, by the human’s “capacity to objectivate his environment into things,” includ-
ing “himself.” As Plessner writes in a 1969 article: “If my thesis of the excentric
position which formulates such a structure of distancing is correct, then man
should encounter boundaries but not limits. . . . This boundlessness of the human
being, anchored in his specific life though he may be, allows us to speak of the
homo absconditus, the man who knows the limits of his boundlessness yet grasps
himself as unfathomable. Open to himself and to the world, he recognizes his
own concealment. Achieving life, man himself as a living being first of all has
to create the conditions for life. . . . This living being must have a history” (“De
homine abscondito,” Social Research 36: 497–509, here 500–501).
7. Plessner had published Misch’s “engagement” with Heidegger in the
journal he founded, the Philosophischer Anzeiger (“Lebensphilosophie und Phän-
omenologie: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Heidegger,” Philosophischer Anzeiger,
vol. 3, no. 3, 267–368; vol. 3, no. 4, 405–75; vol. 4, nos. 3–4, 181–330). Dedicated
to the “cooperation between philosophy and the sciences,” Plessner’s journal was
an important publishing venue for early phenomenologists. Four volumes were
published from 1925 to 1930.
8. On this point, compare Plessner’s short 1967 text, “Das Problem der
Unmenschlichkeit [The Problem of Inhumanity],” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 8:
328–34 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1983): “Only the human knows no measure, only
the human falls prey to its dreams and its consequences. A lack of measure is the
stigma of the human” (333).

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9. See, for example, Helmut Fahrenbach, “‘Lebensphilosophische’ oder

‘existenzphilosophische’ Anthropologie? Plessners Auseinandersetzung mit Hei-
degger,” Dilthey-Jahrbuch 7 (1990–91): 71–111.
10. Helmuth Plessner, Die verspätete Nation: Über die Verführbarkeit bürger-
lichen Geistes (1935; Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1959), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6.
11. Helmuth Plessner, Levels of the Organic and the Human, trans. Millay
Hyatt (New York: Fordham University Press, forthcoming); Helmuth Plessner,
The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism, trans. Andrew Wallace
(Amherst, Mass.: Humanity Books, 1999); Helmuth Plessner, “Abwandlungen
des Ideologiegedankens” (1931), in Der Streit um die Wissenssoziologie, ed. Volker
Meja and Nico Stehr, 637– 62 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982); and Plessner, Die
verspätete Nation.
12. See Joachim Fischer, “Die exzentrische Nation, der entsicherte Mensch
und das Ende der deutschen Weltstunde: Über eine Korrespondenz zwischen Hel-
muth Plessners philosophischer Anthropologie und seiner Deutschlandstudie,”
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift 64, no. 3 (1990): 395–426, here 415, below, 96–97, 104.
13. Meja and Stehr, eds., Der Streit um die Wissenssoziologie.
14. Plessner, “Abwandlungen des Ideologiegedankens.”
15. Fischer, “Die exzentrische Nation,” 406–7, and below, 106–10.
16. Pointing to the recent publication of his Man’s Place in Nature (trans.
Hans Meyerhoff [Boston: Beacon, 1961]), Max Scheler had accused Plessner
of plagiarism, an accusation taken up by Heidegger; see Joachim Fischer, Phi-
losophische Anthropologie: Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Freiburg: Alber,
2008), 80–93.
17. Carola Dietze, Nachgeholtes Leben: Helmuth Plessner 1892–1985 (Göttin-
gen: Wallstein, 2006), 73; and Fischer, Philosophische Anthropologie, 118.
18. On the relation between Bergson and Plessner, see Heike Delitz, “‘True’
and ‘False’ Evolutionism: Bergson’s Critique of Spencer, Darwin & Co. and Its
Relevance for Plessner (and Us),” in Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: Perspec-
tives and Prospects, ed. Jos de Mul, 79– 98 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University
Press, 2014).
19. For the comparison with plant and animal life, see Scheler, Man’s Place
in Nature, and Plessner, Levels of the Organic; for the comparison with apes, see
Arnold Gehlen, Man: His Nature and Place in the World, trans. Clare McMillan and
Karl Andrew Pillemer (1950; New York: Columbia University Press, 1988).
20. Helmuth Plessner, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 1928, 3rd
ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1975), 122.
21. “Every people has its form of radicalism . . . With no other people does
radicalism endanger, however, a sense for reality and a practical resoluteness than
with the Germans. . . . In its radicalism, Germany is radical and seeks a conviction
to live without the consequences of fleeing from the world. . . . Because the Ger-
man is active, creative, energetic and joyful with life, does his inner weight, his
compulsion to conviction, rip him apart. He crushes himself in the antagonism
between the need to act and being conscientious. Germany’s classical problem
is, therefore, the question of the compatibility of reality with the idea; socially
understood, this is the question of the compatibility of politics with morality”
(Plessner, The Limits of Community, 55–56).
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22. Plessner, The Limits of Community, 40.

23. On the argument of Limits of Community, see Andrew Wallace’s introduc-
tion to his translation of the book. Helmuth Lethen interprets the work contextu-
ally as a doctrine of political “cool conduct” (Cool Conduct: The Culture of Distance
in Weimar Germany, trans. Don Reneau [Berkeley: University of California Press,
2002]), while Steven Grosby in a review essay relates it to the political writings of
Albert Hirschman and Edward Shils (“Helmuth Plessner and the Philosophical
Anthropology of Civility,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 28, no. 5 [2002]: 605–8).
24. Plessner, The Limits of Community, 61.
25. See already Plessner, The Limits of Community, 51–53.
26. Plessner, Stufen des Organischen, 3, trans. Hyatt.
27. Monika Plessner, Die Argonauten auf Long Island: Begegnungen mit Hannah
Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Gershom Scholem und anderen (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1995).
28. Helmuth Plessner, Laughing and Crying: A Study of the Limits of Human
Behavior, trans. James Spencer Churchill and Marjorie Grene (Evanston, Ill.:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), 21, 7, and 11.
29. Plessner, “On Human Expression,” in Phenomenology: Pure and Ap-
plied: The First Lexington Conference, ed. Erwin W. Straus, 63–74 (Pittsburgh, Pa.:
Duquesne University Press, 1964); “A Newton of a Blade of Grass?” Psychological
Issues 6, no. 2 (1969): 135–76; the already quoted “De homine abscondito”; and
“The Social Conditions of Modern Painting,” in Aisthesis and Aesthetics: The Fourth
Lexington Conference on Pure and Applied Phenomenology, ed. Erwin W. Straus and
Richard M. Griffith, 178–88 (Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press, 1970).
30. Marjorie Grene, “Positionality in the Philosophy of Helmuth Plessner,”
Review of Metaphysics 20, no. 2 (1966): 250–77; and Grene, The Understanding of
Nature: Essays in the Philosophy of Biology (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1974).
31. See the contributions collected in de Mul, ed., Plessner’s Philosophical
Anthropology; and Phillip Honenberger, ed., Naturalism and Philosophical Anthro-
pology: Nature, Life, and the Human between Transcendental and Empirical Perspectives
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). See also Joachim Fischer’s article “Ex-
ploring the Core Identity of Philosophical Anthropology through the Works of
Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen,” Iris 1, no. 1 (April 2009):
153–70, and, with regard to political anthropology, his epilogue in this volume.
In addition, see Michael Marder, Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl
Schmitt (New York: Continuum, 2010), 84–86; and Wallace’s introduction to Limits
of Community.
32. “But, inversely, since the human being has become historical, through
and through, none of the contents analysed by the human sciences can remain
stable in itself or escape the movement of History. . . . Ought we not rather to give
up thinking of man?” (Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the
Human Sciences [New York: Vintage Books, 1994], 370 and 386). On the structural
similarities between the approaches of Deleuze, Foucault, and Plessner, see Rob-
ert Seyfert, “Poststrukturalistische und Philosophische Anthropologien der Dif-
ferenz,” Internationales Jahrbuch für philosophische Anthropologie 3 (2012): 65–80.
33. Plessner, Stufen des Organischen, 320.
34. Compare “Das Problem der Unmenschlichkeit”: “Inhumanity is . . . the
possibility, given with the human, to negate oneself and one’s equals” (334).
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35. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political: Expanded Edition, trans. George
Schwab et al. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 26.
36. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 60. On Schmitt’s reading of Pless-
ner, see Marder, Groundless Existence, 84–89; as well as Rüdiger Safranski, Martin
Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1999), 205–9.
37. Plessner, The Limits of Community, 47.
38. On the continuing relevance of such a realistic theory of the political,
see Tracy Strong’s assessment in her foreword to Schmitt’s The Concept of the
Political, ix–xxxi.
39. Plessner, The Limits of Community, 58.
40. On Voegelin and Plessner, see David Levy, “The Life of Order and the
Order of Life: Eric Voegelin on Modernity and the Problem of Philosophical An-
thropology,” Man and World 24 (1991): 241–65; and Barry Cooper, Eric Voegelin
and the Foundations of Modern Political Science (Columbia: University of Missouri
Press, 1999), 161–211.
41. Voegelin, review of Plessner, 41.
42. Eric Voegelin, Race and State, ed. Klaus Vondung, trans. Ruth Hein, in
Collected Works, vol. 2 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1997); and Helmuth
Plessner, review of Rasse und Staat, by Eric Voegelin, Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht
14 (1934): 407–14.
43. Plessner, review of Voegelin, 408.
44. Plessner, review of Voegelin, 413–14.
45. Voegelin, Race and State, 8–9 and 27–28; compare xix–xx.
46. Hanna Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1998), 10–11. On the parallels between Plessner and Arendt, see
Andreas Hetzel, “Irreduzible Alterität: Zur Programmatik einer negativistischen
Sozialphilosophie bei Georg Simmel, Helmut Plessner und Hannah Arendt,”
in Profile negativistischer Sozialphilosophie: Ein Kompendium, ed. Andreas Hetzel,
Burkhard Liebsch, and Hans-Rainer Sepp, Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philoso-
phie Sonderband 32, pp. 145–62 (Berlin: Akademie, 2011). On the differences
between the two, see Hans-Jörg Sigwart, The Wandering Thought of Hannah Ar-
endt (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 45. Sigwart’s book generally ex-
plores the “unresolved relationship” between “human condition” and “nature”
in Arendt. Arendt herself does not refer directly to Plessner, whom she met dur-
ing his exile in the United States; see Monika Plessner, Die Argonauten auf Long
Island.
47. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9.
48. Hans J. Morgenthau, The Concept of the Political, trans. Maeva Vidal (New
York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 106. On Morgenthau and Plessner, see Felix
Rösch, Power, Knowledge, and Dissent in Morgenthau’s Worldview (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), 68.
49. Plessner, Stufen des Organischen, 37.
50. On Heidegger and Plessner, see Beth Cykowski, “In Pursuit of Some-
thing ‘Essential’ about Man: Heidegger and Philosophical Anthropology,” in
Naturalism and Philosophical Anthropology, ed. Honenberger, 27– 48; Hans-Peter
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Krüger, “Die Leere zwischen Sein und Sinn: Helmuth Plessners Heidegger-Kritik
in ‘Macht und menschliche Natur’ (1931),” in Die Weimarer Republik zwischen
Metropole und Provinz: Intellektuellendiskurse zur politischen Kultur, ed. Wolfgang
Bialas and Burkhard Stenzel, 177–99 (Weimar: Lang, 1996); Christian Sommer,
“Métaphysique du vivant: Note sur la différence zoo-anthropologique de Plessner
à Heidegger,” Philosophie no. 116 (2012/4): 48–77; and Matthias Wunsch, Fragen
nach dem Menschen: Philosophische Anthropologie, Daseinsontologie und Kulturphiloso-
phie (Frankfurt: Klosterman, 2014).
51. Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966), 249.
52. Krüger, “Die Leere zwischen Sein und Sinn,” 271.
53. Rüdiger Kramme, Helmuth Plessner und Carl Schmitt: Eine historische Fall-
studie zum Verhältnis von Anthropologie und Politik in der deutschen Philosophie der
zwanziger Jahre (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 127.
54. Axel Honneth, “Plessner und Schmitt: Ein Kommentar zur Entdeckung
ihrer Affinität,” in Plessners “Grenzen der Gemeinschaft”: Eine Debatte, ed. Wolfgang
Eßbach, Joachim Fischer, and Helmut Lethen, 21–28 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp,
2002), 21.
55. Norbert Axel Richter, Grenzen der Ordnung: Bausteine einer Philosophie
des politischen Handelns nach Plessner und Foucault (Frankfurt: Campus, 2005), 171.
56. Wolfgang Bialas, Politischer Humanismus und “Verspätete Nation”: Helmuth
Plessners Auseinandersetzung mit Deutschland und dem Nationalsozialismus und die Re-
levanz seiner politischen Anthropologie (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010),
270– 72; and Hans-Peter Krüger, “Die Unergründlichkeit des geschichtlichen
Lebens,” in Die Unergründlichkeit der menschlichen Natur, ed. Olivia Mitscherlich-
Schönherr and Mattias Schloßberger, Internationales Jahrbuch für Philosophi-
sche Anthropologie 5, pp. 15–32 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015).
57. Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London: Routledge, 2005), 15.
58. Mouffe, On the Political, 15.
59. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy:
Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack
(London: Verso, 1985), 111–12; and Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolu-
tion of Our Time, trans. Jon Barnes et al. (London: Verso, 17). The idea of a “con-
stitutive outside” picks up on Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997); and
Jacques Derrida, “Signature Event Context,” trans. Alan Bass, in Limited Inc, 1–
23 (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1981); as well as Henry Staten,
Wittgenstein and Derrida (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984), 16– 26 and
34. Similar points are made, for example, by Shmuel Eisenstadt and Bernhard
Giesen in “The Construction of Collective Identity,” European Journal of Sociology
36, no. 1 (1995): 72–102. Derrida, too, had referred to Schmitt: “The distinction
or the differential mark (Unterscheidung) of the political amounts to a discrimina-
tion (Unterscheidung) between friend and enemy. This Unterscheidung is not only
a difference, it is a determined opposition, opposition itself” (Derrida, “Politics
of Friendship,” trans. Gabriel Motzkin, Michael Syrotinski, and Thomas Keenan,
American Imago 50, no. 3 [1993]: 353–91, here 355).
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60. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso, 2000), 3.
61. Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. Kathleen
Blamey (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998), 371.
62. Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society, 361 and 143.
63. This is where the philosophical anthropologies of Bergson and Plessner
meet again: in two theories of society or the political developed in parallel, which
both start from the human creative, imaginative capacity, the capacity for insti-
tuting something, as well as from the necessity of settling or closing; see Henri
Bergson, The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R. Ashley Audra, Cloudes-
ley Brereton, and W. Horsfall Carter (London: Macmillan, 1935). On this point
and on parallels in the theories of Castoriadis, see Heike Delitz, Bergson-Effekte:
Aversionen und Attraktionen im französischen soziologischen Denken (Weilerswist: Vel-
brück, 2015), 217–41.
64. On this point, see the political philosophy of Claude Lefort, “The Per-
manence of the Theologico-Political?” trans. David Macey, in Political Theologies:
Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrance E. Sullivan,
148–87 (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); and the genealogy of the
social imaginary of the idea of human rights traced by Marcel Gauchet in La Revo-
lution des droits de l’homme (Paris: Gallimard, 1989).
65. Bernhard Giesen and Robert Seyfert, “Collective Identities, Empty Sig-
nifiers and Solvable Secrets,” European Journal of Social Theory 19, no. 11 (2016):
111–26.

Political Anthropology

book epigraph: Heinrich Heine, “On the History of Religion and Philosophy in
Germany,” in The Harz Journey and Selected Prose, ed. and trans. Ritchie Robertson,
199–294 (London: Penguin, 2006), here 268–69.
1. [Plessner’s term here is Wesen des Menschen. This “essence” corresponds
to the “human nature” of the 1931 title, not to the absolutizing or substantializ-
ing conception Plessner refers to as essentia, which he is arguing against. Note also
that in certain constructions, Wesen is translated as being, as in Lebewesen, “living
being” or organism. Overall, however, the traditional translation of Wesen as “es-
sence” has been retained to avoid paradoxes arising from alternative renderings.
See also below, note 8.—Trans.]
2. Helmuth Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne: Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie des
Geistes (Bonn: Cohen, 1923), Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 3.
3. Helmuth Plessner, The Limits of Community: A Critique of Social Radicalism
(1924), trans. Andrew Wallace (Amherst, Mass.: Humanity Books, 1999), Gesam-
melte Schriften, vol. 5.
4. Ludwig Woltmann, Politische Anthropologie: Eine Untersuchung über den
Einfluss der Descendenztheorie auf die Lehre von der politischen Entwicklung der Völ-
ker (Eisenach: Thüringische Verlags-Anstalt, 1903). My discussion here is not, of
course, aimed at a social anthropology that is aware of its limits.
5. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger
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Bittner, trans. Kate Sturge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), no.
1187, p. 215.
6. Max Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, trans. Manfred S. Frings
(London: Routledge, 2012), 41–42 (modified).
7. Scheler, Problems of a Sociology of Knowledge, 41 (modified).
8. [Plessner’s terms, wesenhaft and wesentlich, convey the two possible mean-
ings of Wesen he discusses in the preceding paragraph (also mentioned in note
1 above). The former denotes that which has or is like a being— a living being
(Lebewesen), for example, or an entity (Seiendes)— while the latter denotes a de-
fining characteristic. Yet in common usage, and elsewhere in Plessner (see, for
example, 58), wesenhaft is used synomously with wesentlich, which is why Wesenhaft-
igkeit, that which bridges the “a priori” and “empirical” aspects, in this paragraph
is rendered as “essentialness.”—Trans.]
9. [Martin Heidegger, “On the Essence of Ground,” trans. William McNeill,
in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill, 97–135 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1998), here 108, translation modified; note that this is Heidegger’s defi-
nition not of existence but of transcendence.—Trans.]
10. On this point, also compare Martin Heidegger, “Book Review of Ernst
Cassirer’s Mythical Thought,” in The Piety of Thinking, ed. and trans. James G.
Hart and John C. Maraldo, 32–45 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976).
11. Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, trans. James S.
Churchill (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962), §34, p. 129.
12. Georg Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie (Schluß), in Philosophi-
scher Anzeiger 4, no. 3/4 (1930): 175–330.
13. Compare Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The System of Ethics according to the Prin-
ciples of the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. and ed. Daniel Breazedale and Günter Zöller
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 117–25.
14. Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie, 266.
15. Misch, Lebensphilosophie und Phänomenologie, 238.
16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and
Allen W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), A477/B505, 504.
17. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A476/B504, 503.
18. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A476/B504, 503–4.
19. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxiii–xiv, 109, Plessner’s emphases.
20. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A768/B796, 658.
21. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Practical Philosophy, ed.
and trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 246,
Kant’s emphasis.
22. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Bxviii, 111.
23. Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 197, Kant’s emphasis.
24. [“Im sich Zurechtfinden, das mit dem Finden des Rechten zusammen-
hängt, im Richten und den vielen um diese Bedeutung zentrierten Formen des
Verhaltens, in der Richtung und im Gerichtetsein auf..., in dem einem Dinge,
einer Forderung gerecht Werden, im recht Machen usw. spricht es sich aus.”]
25. “Politically relevant” here means both significant for politics and de-
finable by politics. Knowledge that specifically aims for the whole— philosophy
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and anthropology— cannot like any disciplinary knowledge be neutralized in

certain “domains” over against irrational life decisions. World and human are not
domains but variables that for their “Being” require a deployment of life that is
always still to be accomplished.
26. [Lit., “by an irrational interruption”; the phrase is Fichte’s; see Science
of Knowing: J. G. Fichte’s 1804 Lectures on the Wissenschaftslehre, trans. Thomas E.
Wright (Albany: SUNY Press, 2005), 120.—Trans.]
27. [In the preface to the Genealogy of Morality; see Friedrich Nietzsche, On
the Genealogy of Morality and Other Writings, trans. Carol Diethe, ed. Keith Ansell-
Pearson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3.—Trans.]
28. This new openness of a knowledge that risks the bottomlessness of
zones of “entities” and the “living” that can infinitely be opened up, that wants
objectivity but not absoluteness, supports a new ontology that is apparently the
opposite of Dilthey’s direction. This is Hartmann’s ontology, which has grown out
of Meinong’s theory of objects and phenomenological research at least as much
as it has out of the Marburg school’s transcendental logicism. A new sense of the
world of a closeness to the subject matter that is open, without direction, in touch
with reality, is manifest in these two ways of philosophizing (which, in Germany,
to be sure, distance themselves from one another as much as is possible), the
sense of the world as positive experience that natural science and the humanities
equally are borne by. And if today, after a period of Kantian, Fichtean, Hegelian
philosophizing, in a period of phenomenological research that has obviously
fallen prey to the danger of taking itself to be philosophy and has found its way
back to the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, to Thomas Aquinas and Chris-
tian theology ( just think of Scheler, who even in his last years did not manage to
get away from the conception of a ground of the world and a metaphysics of the
logos), if today there are to be new possibilities of philosophizing that really go
beyond the pragmatism and historism and perspectivism of Nietzsche, Bergson,
Spengler, or James, then they will have to already have taken up the principle
and the fullness of experience in their a priori basic idea if the isolation of phi-
losophizing from experiencing, practiced most recently by phenomenologism,
is finally to be overcome.
29. Compare Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch: Einleitung in die philo-
sophische Anthropologie, where I have developed the laws of positionality according
to a theory of the categories of the living.
30. [A common phrase, used most famously by Bismarck and William II.—
Trans.]

Epilogue

1. Politische Anthropologie was the working title; the volume was eventually
published under the title Macht und menschliche Natur (Power and Human Nature).
2. Austin Harrington, German Cosmopolitan Social Thought and the Idea of the
West: Voices from Weimar (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
3. Helmuth Plessner, “Staatskunst und Menschlichkeit,” Volkswacht für Schle-
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sien und Posen: Organ für die werktätige Bevölkerung, November 9, 1920; Plessner,
“Die Untergangsvision und Europa,” Der neue Merkur: Monatshefte 4, no. 5 (August
1920); Plessner, “Politische Kultur: Vom Wert und Sinn der Staatskunst als Kul-
turaufgabe,” Frankfurter Zeitung, April 3, 1921; Plessner, “Politische Erziehung in
Deutschland,” Die Zukunft 30, no. 6 (November 5, 1921): 149–65.
4. On modern German philosophical anthropology, see my “Exploring the
Core Identity of Philosophical Anthropology” and “Philosophical Anthropology”
as well as Honenberger, ed., Nature, Life, and the Human between Transcendental and
Empirical Perspectives.
5. With Joachim Ritter, Otto Friedrich Bollnow, then a young member
of the Dilthey school in Göttingen, recorded the Davos collaboration between
Heidegger and Cassirer; see Karlfried Gründer, “Cassirer und Heidegger in
Davos 1929,” in Über Ernst Cassirers Philosophie der symbolischen Formen, ed. Hans-
Jürg Braun, Helmut Holzhey, and Ernst Wolfgang Orth, 290– 302 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1988), here 293.
6. Helmuth Plessner, Macht und menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropolo-
gie der geschichtlichen Weltansicht (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1931).
7. See Plessner’s 1929– 30 correspondence with the publisher, Ernst von
Hippel, in the Plessner papers at the Universiteitsbibliotheek Groningen.
8. Plessner to Misch, September 7, 1930, Misch papers at the Universitäts-
bibliothek Göttingen.
9. Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik: Die
politischen Ideen des deutschen Nationalismus zwischen 1918 und 1933 (1962; Mu-
nich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1978); Herfried Münkler, “Die politischen
Ideen der Weimarer Republik,” in Iring Fetscher and Herfried Münkler, eds.,
Pipers Handbuch der politischen Ideen, vol. 5: Neuzeit: Vom Zeitalter des Imperialismus
bis zu den neuen sozialen Bewegungen, 283–318 (Munich: Piper, 1987); Norbert J.
Schürgers, Politische Philosophie in der Weimarer Republik: Staatsverständnis zwischen
Führerdemokratie und bürokratischem Sozialismus (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1989); Hen-
ning Ottmann, Geschichte des politischen Denkens, vol. IV/1: Das 20. Jahrhundert: Der
Totalitarismus und seine Überwindung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2010); and Harrington,
German Cosmopolitan Social Thought.
10. Münkler, “Die politischen Ideen der Weimarer Republik,” 284
11. Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken, 21–54.
12. Norbert Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt: Philosophischer Extremismus
zwischen den Weltkriegen (Munich: Fink, 1989), 11.
13. As the publisher’s description for Harrington’s German Cosmopolitan
Social Thought has it.
14. Herbert Schnädelbach, Philosophie in Deutschland 1832–1933 (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1983), 174–97.
15. “The German people, its tribes united and determined to renew and
consolidate its Reich in liberty and justice, to serve peace within and without, and
to foster social progress, has adopted this constitution. . . . Article 1. The German
Reich is a republic” (Verfassung des Deutschen Reiches vom 11. August 1919, in Texte
zur deutschen Verfassungsgeschichte, ed. Günter Dürig and Walter Rudolf, 2nd. ed.,
176–212 [Munich: Beck, 1979], here 176).
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16. On this history see, in addition to the works cited in note 9, Karl Graf
Ballestrem and Henning Ottmann, eds., Politische Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts
(Munich: Oldenbourg, 1990).
17. See Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change
and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987).
18. Since his reconstruction in German Cosmopolitan Social Thought does not
identify this real problem in 1920s Germany, the British sociologist Austin Har-
rington can and must criticize those thinkers of the political (Weber and Schmitt)
whose concepts or conceptions of the political consistently thematized this great-
power dimension on the semantic level and marginalize them within the group
of “Weimar” thinkers.
19. Heinz Gollwitzer, Geschichte des weltpolitischen Denkens, 2 vols. (Göttin-
gen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972 and 1982); and Gregor Schöllgen, “Verfas-
sung und Weltmachtpolitik: Das Anliegen der Weberschen Reformvorschläge,”
in Max Webers Anliegen: Rationalisierung als Forderung und Hypothek, 101– 18 (Darm-
stadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1985).
20. Even so wide-ranging a “history of political thought” as Henning Ott-
mann’s, which for the first half of the twentieth century discusses, in addition to
German thinkers such as Max Weber, Moeller van den Bruck, Thomas Mann,
Oswald Spengler, Ernst Jünger, and Carl Schmitt, international authors such as
Lenin and Stalin, Mussolini and Hitler, and political thought in China, does not
systematically capture the contemporary challenge to also think the problematic
relationships between states and nations, between “powers.”
21. [Max Weber, “Suffrage and Democracy in Germany,” in Political Writ-
ings, ed. and trans. Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, 80–129 (Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1994), 90. On charisma, see Max Weber, Economy and
Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 1111–57.]
22. See Detlev J. Peukert, Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der klassischen
Moderne (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1987); Michael Makropoulos, Modernität als on-
tologischer Ausnahmezustand? Walter Benjamins Theorie der Moderne (Munich: Fink
1989); Bolz, Auszug aus der entzauberten Welt; Harrington, German Cosmopolitan
Social Thought.
23. Plessner reflects on the configuration of “German spirit” four years
later, in his 1935 study, published in exile, on the Fate of the German Spirit at the
End of Its Bourgeois Period (better known under its later title, Verspätete Nation [Be-
lated Nation]). See Christian von Krockow, Diagnose deutschen Schicksals: Helmuth
Plessner, Die verspätete Nation, in Bücher, die das Jahrhundert bewegten: Zeitanalysen –
wiedergelesen, ed. Günther Rühle, 127–31 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1980); and Jürgen
Habermas, “Die Grenze in uns: Helmuth Plessner, Die verspätete Nation,” Frank-
furter Hefte 14 (1959): 826–31.
24. In this respect, Jürgen Habermas is a prototype for his generation. On
the “long road West” after 1945 generally, see Heinrich August Winkler’s Ger-
many: The Long Road West, vol. 2: 1933–1990, trans. Alexander J. Sager (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007).
25. Weber, Economy and Society, 38; see also his “Politics as a Vocation,” in The
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Vocation Lectures, trans. Rodney Livingstone, ed. David Owen and Tracy Strong,
32–94 (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2004).
26. Helmuth Plessner, Krisis der transzendenten Wahrheit im Anfang (1918),
in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 1: 143–310, here 308.
27. Compare the description, with reference to Nietzsche, of the human as
“the domain of creative subjectivity” (15).
28. See Heike Delitz, “Helmuth Plessners Wissenssoziologie: Zur potenzier-
ten Reflexivität klassischer Wissenssoziologie,” Sociologia Internationalis 44, no. 2
(2006): 167–91.
29. An interpretation of Political Anthropology from the perspective of the
hermeneutic philosophy of life or life-philosophical hermeneutics in the tradi-
tion of Dilthey–Misch–König–Plessner can be found in Volker Schürmann, Die
Unergründlichkeit des Lebens: Lebens-Politik zwischen Biomacht und Kulturkritik (Biele-
feld: transcript, 2011). See also Krüger, “Die Unergründlichkeit des geschichtli-
chen Lebens.”
30. The earliest reviews are Hans Barth, “Politische Anthropologie,” Neue
Zürcher Zeitung, no. 1536/60 (1932); and Voegelin, review of Plessner.
31. Especially thanks to Kramme’s Helmuth Plessner und Carl Schmitt. See
also Jochen C. Schütze, “Die Unergründlichkeit der menschlichen Natur: Über
das Verhältnis von philosophischer Anthropologie und Gesellschaftstheorie bei
Helmuth Plessner,” in Philosophische Rede vom Menschen: Studien zur Anthropologie
Helmuth Plessners, ed. Bernard Delfgaauw, Hans Heinz Holz, and Lolle Nauta,
67– 74 (Frankfurt: Lang, 1986); Walter Seitter, Menschenfassungen: Studien zur
Erkenntnispolitikwissenschaft (Munich: Boer, 1985); Heiner Bielefeldt, Kampf und
Entscheidung: Politischer Existentialismus bei Carl Schmitt, Helmuth Plessner und Karl
Jaspers (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 1994); Safranski, Martin Heidegger:
Between Good and Evil; and Konrad Ott, “‘Man muß sich einschalten’: Wie Pless-
ner Heidegger aufforderte, politisch aktiv zu werden,” Zeitschrift für philosophische
Forschung 66, no. 3 (2012): 448–59. Additional philosophical interpretations of
the book can be found in Krüger, “Die Leere zwischen Sinn und Sein”; and Schür-
mann, Die Unergründlichkeit des Lebens.
32. Later, in 1940, Schmitt collected his essays under a telling title that sig-
naled his genuine interest and interventions in constitutional and international
law, Positionen und Begriffe: Im Kampf mit Weimar–Genf–Versailles (Positions and Con-
cepts in the Struggle against Weimar, Geneva, and Versailles, ed. and trans. Simona
Draghici under the title Four Essays [Washington, D.C.: Plutarch, 1999]).
33. Reinhard Mehring, Carl Schmitt: Aufstieg und Fall (Munich: Beck, 2009).
34. Carl Schmitt, Tagebücher 1930–1934, ed. Wolfgang Schuller and Gerd
Giesler (Berlin: Akademie, 2010), 104.
35. In Schmitt’s “parallel diary,” there is a 1931 entry that contains the fol-
lowing series of keywords: “Philosophy and politics—Plessner—Great joy about
this book: discovery— the human, We discover the many kinds of humans”
(Schmitt, Tagebücher 1930– 1934, 441). Moreover, in 1931– 32, Schmitt could
not have known that Plessner, who had been baptized, had a father with Jewish
ancestry— and that Plessner would be banned from teaching in Germany under
what the National Socialists called the “Civil Service Restoration Act.”
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36. Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 59–60.

37. Kramme, Helmuth Plessner und Carl Schmitt.
38. Honneth, “Plessner und Schmitt,” 28.
39. See my “Plessner und die politische Philosophie der zwanziger Jahre,”
in Politisches Denken: Jahrbuch 1992, ed. Volker Gerhardt, Henning Ottmann, and
M. P. Thompson, 53–77 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993).
40. Plessner, Stufen des Organischen, 4. See also Richard Breun, “Helmuth
Plessners Bestimmungen der Idee der Philosophie und deren Ausarbeitung
als philosophische Anthropologie,” dissertation, Tübingen, 1988; and Stephan
Pietrowicz, Helmuth Plessner: Genese und System seines philosophisch-anthropologischen
Denkens (Freiburg: Alber, 1992).
41. For an interpretation of post–World War I philosophical anthropol-
ogy inspired by the philosophy of life as a way for the bourgeoisie to come to
terms with its crisis in a mass society, see Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, “Philosophische
Anthropologie und die ‘Soziologisierung’ des Wissens vom Menschen: Einige
Zusammenhänge zwischen einer philosophischen Denktradition und der Sozi-
ologie in Deutschland,” in Soziologie in Deutschland und Österreich 1918–1945: Ma-
terialien zur Entwicklung, Emigration und Wirkungsgeschichte, ed. M. Rainer Lepsius,
160–98 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1981).
42. Plessner, Verspätete Nation, 53. The problem of a “great power without
an idea of the state” had already preoccupied some at the center of power during
World War I. In 1914–15, Kurt Rienzler noted the “skepticism about Germany’s
qualification to rule the world” on the part of Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg
(this “creature of the old culture of humanity”). “In case of victory, it will no
doubt be destroyed intellectually by its political rule.” He continues: “The lack
of education of the upper classes. Interesting conversation on the subject with
the Chancellor who . . . does not know how the new Germany, the Germany of
political and financial power, is to be reconciled with Goethe. He says that he
cannot see the future in the likes of Thyssen and Stinnes.” See Kurt Riezler, Tage-
bücher, Aufsätze, Dokumente, ed. Karl Dietrich Erdmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck
& Ruprecht, 1972), 271, 217, and 288.
43. Plessner discusses this suspicion in chapter 9 of Verspätete Nation.
44. “Weimar culture” thus appears “as the essential ‘founding period’ of
this cynical structure,” the site where the “strategic immoralisms” “of realpolitik,
of diplomacy, chiefs of staff, secret services, organized crime, prostitution, and
the direction of enterprises” “seeped into collective consciousness” (Peter Sloter-
dijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred [Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987], 389).
 Glossary

ability Können
addressability, to address Ansprechbarkeit, ansprechen
administration of justice Rechtspflege; but see cultural practices
appropriation of oneself Selbstnahme
aspect Aspekt
assume übernehmen
attitude Haltung
autonomy, autonomous Selbstmacht, selbstmächtig
basis of powerfulness Mächtigkeitsgrund
being Sein
being Wesen (as in Lebewesen, “living being” or
“organism”)
being-human Menschsein
being part of a people Volkheit
binding, bindingness verbindlich, Verbindlichkeit
bond Bindung
break, breaking Umbruch, Bruch
calculation Kalkulation
capacity for conversion Bekehrbarkeit
citizenry Staatsvolk
comprehension; to comprehend Verständnis; begreifen, verstehen; see to
conceive of, to interpret
conceive of fassen, begreifen
concept Begriff; see conception, notion
conception Fassung; see concept, notion

123
124
GL O S SARY

conception of the self by the self Selbst-Auffassung

consciousness, conscious Bewußtsein, bewußt
correctness Richtigkeit
creative breakthrough point schöpferische Durchbruchstelle
cultural policy Kulturpolitik
cultural practices Kulturpflege; but see administration of justice
Dasein, existence Dasein
delimitation Abgrenzung
de-restriction Entschränkung
design, fashion gestalten
designation Benennung
destruction, destroy Abbau, abbauen
determinate, determined bestimmt
determination, to determine Festlegung, festlegen
domain Machtbereich, Gebiet
effective context Wirkungszusammenhang
effectuation, to effect Erwirkung, erwirken
emotion Gefühl
entitative–essential wesenhaft–wesentlich (18, 117n8)
essence Wesen
essentia Essenz
essential wesentlich
essentiality Wesentlichkeit (76), Essentialität (81)
essentialness Wesenhaftigkeit (18, 117n8)
ethnicity Volkstum
ethos Gesinnung
events, course of events Geschehen, das
exposure Exponiertheit
fairness Gerechtheit
fathom ergründen
fellow human Mitmensch
 125
GL O S SARY

fixation, to fix Fixierung, fixieren

force, violence Gewalt
foreign fremd
ground Boden
historical studies Geschichtswissenschaft
history Geschichte
human (adj.) menschlich, menschheitlich (19)
human, the der Mensch
human being menschliches Wesen
human being or essence Menschenwesen (49)
humanities, the Geisteswissenschaft(en) as a (set of)
discipline(s)
humanity (as essential) Menschheit
humanity (as quality) Humanität, as in Humanitätskonzeption,
conception of humanity
human-kind (as existent, as that Menschtum, Menschentum
which is manifest in ethnicities etc.)
humanly possible menschenmöglich
humanness Menschheit, Menschheitlichkeit
human-ness Menschlichkeit, Menschhaftigkeit (50)
idea, thought Gedanke
ideology Weltanschauung; see view of the world
intellectual, the das Geistige
interlocking, to interlock Verschränkung, verschränken
interpret auslegen, deuten
interpretation Verstehen, not to be confused withVerstand,
the (faculty of) understanding; Interpretation
jurisprudence Rechtsprechung
justice Gerechtigkeit
knowledge, occasionally insight, Erkenntnis
cognition
lapse verfallen
126
GL O S SARY

law das Recht

life- . . . Lebens . . .
limitation Begrenzung
lively, living lebendig
location Standort; see position
meaning, sense Sinn
nation, nation-state Nation
nationality Volkhaftigkeit
notion Vorstellung
objectivity Objektivität, Sachlichkeit (5)
organization, sometimes order Ordnung
originary ursprünglich
people, nation Volk
personhood Personalität
perspective Blickstellung, Blickrichtung
placedness Durchgegebenheit
policy (in compounds, e.g., Politik
cultural policy)
political, the das Politische
politics Politik
positing Setzung
position (Bewußtseins-/Erfahrungs-/etc.) Stellung,
Position
possibility of designation Benennbarkeit
power Macht
powerlessness Ohnmacht
present-constitution Gegenwartsverfassung
primacy Vorrang
process Geschehen, Prozeß
provenance Herkunft
reference to, to refer to Bezug auf, beziehen auf
 127
GL O S SARY

refractedness Gebrochenheit
refraction Brechung
relation Relation
relationship Verhältnis
relativize to, passive become or relativieren auf, relativiert auf
be made relative to
render conceivable begreiflich machen
renunciation, to renounce Verzicht, verzichten
rights Rechte, die
risk Wagnis
scope Breite
self-conception Selbstauffassung
self-control Selbstlenkung
self-evidence Selbstverständlichkeit
sense Sinn; also, as in sense of equality (14), Gefühl
situation Situation, Lage
strategy Kalkül
subject of attribution Zurechnungssubjekt
theory Lehre, Theorie
unfathomability Unergründlichkeit
view of the world Weltansicht
volition see will
what is human das Menschliche, das Menschheitliche (19)
what is right das Rechte
will Wille
 Index of Names

Arendt, Hannah, vii, xiv, xx–xxii Hobbes, Thomas, xvi, 10

Husserl, Edmund, 38
Bergson, Henri, xii, 49, 91, 95, 116n63
Bismarck, Otto von, 3, 92 Kant, Immanuel, 22, 28, 36, 39, 41–43,
Breysig, Kurt, 34 45, 48, 51, 71, 105
Buckle, Henry Thomas, 34 Kelsen, Hans, 6Kramme, Rüdiger, xxiii
Burkhardt, Jakob, 32
Laclau, Ernesto, vii, xxiii–xiv
Cassirer, Ernst, 90, 119n5 Lamprecht, Karl Gotthard, 34
Castoriadis, Cornelius, xix, xxiv–xxv Lévi-Strauss, Claude, xxiii
Cohen, Hermann, 39 Litt, Theodor, 6
Comte, Auguste, 32 Lotze, Rudolf Hermann, 33, 35

Darwin, Charles, 32 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 10

Deleuze, Gilles, vii, xvii Mannheim, Karl, xi, 6, 89, 91
Derrida, Jacques, vii, 115n59 Marx, Karl, xi, 5, 44, 78, 93, 106
Descartes, René, 65–66 Misch, Georg, ix, xxiii, 6, 22, 37, 39, 49,
Dilthey, Wilhelm, 29, 31–38, 39, 45, 47, 68, 72, 90, 111n7, 117n12, 119n8,
51, 68, 71–72, 79, 91, 95, 97–98, 102, 121n29
107–9, 118n28 Meinong, Alexius, 28, 118n28
Driesch, Hans, xii Morgenthau, Hans J., xx–xxii, 114n48
Mouffe, Chantal, vii, xxiii–xxiv
Engels, Friedrich, 44
Nelson, Leonard, 4
Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 22, 85 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvi, 14, 32, 81, 91,
Foucault, Michel, xvii, 113n32 95, 121n27
Freud, Sigmund, xix, 54
Freyer, Hans, 6 Ranke, Leopold von, 79
Rickert, Heinrich, 34–36, 39
Galilei, Galileo, 40
Gehlen, Arnold, xii Sartre, Jean-Paul, xxiii
Gobineau, Arthur de, 32 Scheler, Max, xii, xvi, 6, 15, 21–22, 29,
Guattari, Félix, vii 89–90, 112n16, 118n28
Schmitt, Carl, vii–xii, xx, xxiii, 5–6, 89,
Hartmann, Nicolai, 28, 118n28 96, 104, 107–109, 115n59, 121n32,
Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm, 38, 39, 121n35
78, 102, 107 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 32
Heidegger, Martin, x–xi, xvi–xviii, 6, 21– Smend, Rudolf, 6
25, 27, 29, 48, 57, 68, 71, 90 Sontheimer, Kurt, 91

129
130
I N DE X OF NAME S

Spencer, Herbert, 32 Voegelin, Eric, viii, xi, xiv, xx–xxi

Spengler, Oswald, 107, 120
Wagner, Richard, 32
Taine, Hyppolite, 34 Weber, Max, 6, 89, 91, 94, 96, 97, 100,
Troeltsch, Ernst, 33, 89, 91 106, 107, 109
Westphal, Otto, 6
Uexküll, Jakob von, xiii Windelband, Wilhelm, 34, 39