Between openness and closure: Helmuth Plessner and the boundaries of social life

Introduction

Exactly this rootlessness, this ability to everywhere renew and transform one’s roots once put down and always to be able to pull them out again is what constitutes man as man.

What is man? ¹ Looking at present-day discourses in the social sciences and humanities, this basic philosophical and anthropological question seems antiquated. Instead, the so-called ‘cognitivist turn’ (Knorr Cetina and Cicourel, 1981) in the social sciences has resurrected the egological philosophies of René Descartes and Edmund Husserl as starting point of inquiry. Typically, proponents of constructivism tend to confront the intentional acts of a free subject with the structures of an objective life world (Schütz, 1974 [1932]), or conceptualise the subject as a ‘black box’ (Luhmann, 1995), which is determined by the rules of cognition processing information from the environment. A third account sees actors engaging in intentional and pre-intentional acts of cognition with a socio-material environment (Knorr Cetina, 2001). Nonetheless, there seems to be little consensus about how much freedom and agency is to be attributed to the subject in these different ‘varieties of constructivism’ (Knorr Cetina, 1989). While one side argues that the social is made up of a plethora of ‘micro-interactions’ (Knorr Cetina, 1989), others tend to attribute more force to social mechanisms (Bourdieu, 1981). Answers to the question concerning the foundations of these accounts, however, remain unclear (Aspers, 2010).

Deconstructivist accounts, on the other hand, have made a substantial effort to avoid the ‘essentialist trap’ of Cartesian ontologies by ‘unscrewing’ the social into a network of interrelated relations between humans and non-human actors (Callon and Latour, 1981; Latour, 2005). Following Foucault’s (2002 [1970]) call for a ‘decentralisation of the subject’, the question about the essence of man has been replaced by a systematic ‘archaeology of knowledge’ (Foucault, 1982). As a consequence, the question of the essence of man and the divide between subject and object coalesce into a historical artefact that can be studied and described in its genealogical genesis, rather than as the starting point of inquiry. Moreover, proponents of the so-called ‘post-humanist’ accounts have called for ‘ontological symmetry’ (Latour, 2005) of human and non-human actors, such as computer screens, algorithms, mammals, invertebrates, critters and atoms, which are likewise attributed actor qualities in the genesis of societal discourses and practices (Barad, 2012; Callon, 1986; Callon et al., 2007; Wolfe, 2009).

Despite this ontological scepticism and its moral implications, this article nevertheless tries to raise the question of man’s position in the world and perhaps to provide conceptual tools to bridge the gap between constructivism and deconstructivism, respectively. In order to do so, I make a first attempt to introduce the widely forgotten Philosophical Anthropology ³ of the German philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner (1975), in particular his widely neglected magnum opus Die Stufen des organischen und der Mensch (hereafter Stufen) to the English-speaking world.

To sum up, this article argues that Plessner’s insights into the human condition go beyond the reductionist accounts by highlighting the specific ways in which man relates, in contrast to other living organisms, to his physical boundaries. In brief, Plessner sees the empirical difference between humans and other living organisms in their eccentric relation to the boundaries of their own world, which are collectively reproduced and transgressed over time. Put differently, it is not the fact that humans are, in contrast to animals and other living organisms, privileged holders of sociality, consciousness, intelligence, emotions and agency. With regard to insights into the sociality of animals (Balcombe, 2016; Holmberg, 2015; Strum and Latour, 1987) and animal consciousness (Griffin and Speck, 2004), this categorical anthropocentrism is indeed outdated. This is not to say, however, that animals and humans are alike. Instead of simply adding mind to matter, I argue instead that Plessner’s empirically grounded approach sheds new light on this discussion by pointing at the different ways in which humans and non-humans relate to their own boundaries, while reconciling different branches of constructivism by pointing out the ability of man to be both the constructor and deconstructor of his own world.

Before providing a first overview of Plessner’s basic concepts, I will first engage in a historical contextualisation of the reception of the Stufen and the aftermath in postwar sociology. Finally, I will argue with regard to recent theoretical developments in the social sciences that current debates in contemporary sociology can gain from Plessner’s insights into the human condition.

Plessner’s silent echo in postwar sociology

According to Google Scholar, Plessner’s Stufen has 2220 citations, a fair number. ⁴ It is therefore even more surprising that its reception in Anglo-Saxon sociology is almost non-existent. The same holds true for Helmuth Plessner himself: his name is not mentioned in the International Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences (Sills, 1968), nor is he mentioned in the Handbook of Sociology (Smelser, 1988) and other important overviews (e.g. Alexander, 1987; Giddens and Sutton, 2013). An exception is Joas and Knöbel (2009: 256), who, however, merely acknowledge Plessner’s impact on German discourse in social theory. It is therefore little surprise that, with a few marginal exceptions in philosophy and psychology (e.g. Heinze, 2009; Schacht, 1990), the reception of Plessner is limited to German sociology, where it has experienced a late revival, in particular as the anthropological foundation of cultural sociology (e.g. Delitz, 2008; Lindemann, 1999; Soeffner and Hitzler, 1994) and systematic exegesis (Fischer, 2016). However, a convincing account of what contemporary general sociology can learn from Plessner’s Stufen is still missing.

The historical circumstances certainly contributed to the Jewish-rooted Plessner remaining widely unrecognised by a wider international audience. ⁵ His neglect, however, is even more surprising, as he left a remarkable footprint in one of the most important sociological books of postwar sociology. Although never translated into English, the Stufen is prominently credited as important in a footnote in Berger and Luckmann’s (1966) seminal text The Social Construction of Reality. ⁶ This influence, however, was less credited to Plessner’s fame in the United States, but to a personal encounter at the New School of Social Research, where Plessner served as the first Theodor-Heuss Professor ⁷ from 1962 to 1963. Although Peter L. Berger (Peter L. Berger, 2017, personal communication on 13 January 2017) was already familiar with the philosophical anthropological tradition through his teacher Gehlen, it was Luckmann with his profound interest in phenomenology who had a stronger relationship to Plessner, both intellectually and personally (Pawlowski and Schmitz, 2003: 32). ⁸ Not only did Luckmann arrange for Helmuth Plessner’s wife Monika to translate the original text into German, but he also persuaded Plessner himself to write the preface to the German edition (Berger and Luckmann, 1977), according to Luckmann, despite a certain discontent about the book’s programmatic undertone (Pawlowski and Schmitz, 2003: 32). ⁹ And indeed, one can sense Plessner’s unease about potential misunderstandings of the text when he emphasises in the opening sentence of the German preface that the authors titled the book ‘The societal construction of reality’ and not ‘The construction of societal reality’ (Berger and Luckmann, 1977: IX), ¹⁰ while pointing out later that ‘construction’ itself was a ‘hard’ word, especially for phenomenologists (Berger and Luckmann, 1977: XV). For the scientist Plessner, for whom the human condition was the product of an evolutionary bio-social process, the idea that reality was ‘constructed’ seemed to indicate the risk of a fallback to idealism, which the phenomenological tradition was trying to overcome. More than 30 years after the first publication of The Social Construction of Reality, it seems as if Plessner’s subtle warning did foresee the popular ‘anything goes’ misinterpretations that have come along with the reception of the book.

Although at first glance the influence of Gehlen’s (2009 [1950]) institutional conservatism seems more apparent when Luckmann remarks that the authors were seeking to highlight ‘the weight – and occasionally heavy weight – of tradition, of history, of past constructions’ (Dreher and Hector, 2016: 32) on human life, the idea of the book was nevertheless motivated by breaking with the static world of structural functionalism dominant at the time (Dreher and Hector, 2016: 33). Thus, Berger and Luckmann highlight the fact that societal reality is not directly given, but constantly in flux in a steady move between subjective and objective societal realities. This, however, does not imply some sort of postmodern arbitrariness (Feyerabend, Lyotard) or the idea that society is ‘nothing but’ a social construction, as ‘radical’ constructivist accounts (von Foerster, Luhmann) ¹¹ suggest. Instead, the construction of ‘a human world by human actors’ is grounded in the anthropological preconditions of human life: ‘The bricks are the human body, evolutionary givens and preconditions, et cetera’, as Luckmann remarks in an interview (Dreher and Hector, 2016: 31–32). And it is Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropological account that supplements Gehlen’s institutional conservatism with the dynamic moment that has become the trademark of what has become known as one of the most important books in postwar social sciences. As Luckmann (1983b) remarks in another note,

The most important non-reductionist and non-idealist philosophical connection between the problems of biological and sociological theory is established in the work of Helmuth Plessner. The relevance of his thesis on the ‘eccentric position’ of man in nature and the implications of this thesis for an account of the ‘natural artificiality’ of man as a body and as a social and historical being are slowly being discovered outside the German cultural milieu despite a lack of translations. (p. 33)

Although most of Plessner’s work still remains widely unknown to the English-speaking world, a first interdisciplinary English-speaking conference on Plessner’s Stufen was held in Rotterdam in 2009 (De Mul, 2014: 9). While this late rediscovery contributes to a better understanding of particular aspects of Plessner’s work, I furthermore argue that a critical reception of Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology can help us to solve pseudo-debates in contemporary sociological theory by shedding some light on the socio-biological foundations of social life itself. Moreover, I argue that Plessner’s work provides an original non-reductionist and non-essentialist foundation of constructivism that points at the constitutive openness of boundaries between human and non-human agency. For this reason, I will outline the main arguments of the Stufen before turning to Plessner’s current place in contemporary sociology.

A relational science of life

Looking at the history of modern philosophy, Plessner concludes that the Cartesian divide of res cogitans and res extensa has given way to the development of the natural sciences, which is concerned with the decomposition and quantification of expansive matter. Accordingly, every entity that cannot be studied by means of the exact sciences falls under the Cartesian Alternative Principle, which makes it possible to shift it into the sphere of the ‘psychical’, which remains the object of subjective interpretation. As both spheres – the objective and the subjective – correspond with each other, quality and quantity are in a mutual relationship, as matter can show signs of quality and the psychic signs of quantity. According to Plessner (1975: 42–44), however, it remains unclear from this standpoint in what the relationships between mind and matter, quality and quantity are grounded. Consequently, this dichotomy has led to the chicken-and-egg problem of modern philosophy, in which there have been heated debates on whether the subject (idealism) or the object (materialism) has ontological primacy in the genesis of being. But while the latter was successful in establishing the experimental method of the sciences, idealist philosophies still rely on the principle of immanence as the starting point of their questioning.

At the latest it was Kant who popularised the belief that the perception of qualities always goes back to a closed subject, which is inaccessible to an external observer. This view of a conscious black box provided the starting point for further radicalisation that reached its peak in different formulations of subjective idealisms from Fichte to Husserl (Plessner, 1975: 45 ff). ‘Sensationalist’ proponents of the positive method, by contrast, rather tried to locate the mechanism of perception in the sensory data that act on the subject. This Cartesian division of labour could make progress due to, on one hand, the pragmatic success of the positive sciences and, on the other hand, the establishment of subjective privatism in an individualistic worldview. Explaining the relationship between the two ‘spheres’, however, was left to the philosophers, who did not come up with any convincing solutions, as Schütz’s (1975) comment on the problem of intersubjectivity in transcendental phenomenology suggests. ¹² Moreover, the consequence of this dualism is an underlying anthropocentrism, which assumes that no experience outside the human world can be understood. But how can we understand the relationship between man and other living organisms without the pitfalls of yet another dualistic ontology?

Instead of simply presupposing a ranking of more or less atomised ‘rational’ beings, Plessner conceptualises living organisms in relation to their environment, in line with the biologist Jakob Johan von Uexküll. Plessner takes the idea of life as relational entity a step further by arguing that we can observe gradual differences between organisms based on the complexity of their organisation that allows for different ways of relating to their worlds. In line with Kant’s categories, Plessner denotes these gradual differences between living organisms as ‘vital categories’ (Vitalkategorien), which go beyond behaviouristic and cognitivist models of stimulus and response by analysing the specific qualities of how different forms of life relate to their world. Thus, these a priori categories establish the conditions of possibility for how stimulus and sense data are perceived, not vice versa (Plessner, 1975: 66).

At the same time, Plessner’s relational account allows him to break with the idea of a conscious mind as a black box that is revoked from any form of observation. ‘In fact’, according to Plessner, ‘the relationship is the reverse: consciousness is not in us, but we are “within” consciousness, that is, we behave as self-moving bodies in relation to our environment’ (Plessner, 1975: 67; author’s translation). Accordingly, the mode of consciousness and perception of content can vary, but their actualisation depends on the unity of living organism and environment through the body. This also implies that consciousness and self-consciousness are not the same, as also animals are conscious of their environment in this sense (more on this below).

All in all, Plessner’s critique of the Cartesian worldview has to be understood as a critical revision rather than a mere ‘destruction’ (Heidegger) of the subject–object divide. Instead of simply rejecting the dualist conception of life, Plessner’s post-Cartesian formulation of a Philosophical Anthropology tries to investigate the conditions under which the ‘double aspectivity’ (Doppelaspektivität) – the distinction between an inside-world and an outside-world – can evolve as a specific way of relating to one’s world.

The boundaries of life

For Plessner, the central question of a Philosophical Anthropology is to ask under what conditions beings can become relatively autonomous in relation to their environment. The central question therefore is ‘How is double aspectivity possible?’ (Plessner, 1975: 99; author’s translation).

Plessner’s answer is to try to map out a middle way in the contemporary debate between vitalism (Driesch), which assumes the autonomy and non-reductionism of living organisms, and mechanism (Köhler), which claims to explain life with the reductionist methods of the natural sciences. Accordingly, Plessner holds on to the idea of the autonomy of living organisms, which have empirically observable boundaries that separate them spatially from their environment (Plessner, 1975: 100). These boundaries can either be (1) virtually set by both the body and its environment, with the boundary not being essential to the being of the body, or (2) the boundary is an inherent quality that is set by the body itself. Put differently, the boundaries of the former are defined merely by their physical features, whereas the latter realises its own boundaries. Plessner concludes that only the latter form as boundary realising the form of being can bear the quality of double aspectivity:

Double aspectivity not only sustains the entity and equips it with thingliness, but becomes a quality that is connected to the Gestalt (contour) of the body. (Plessner, 1975: 104; author’s translation) ¹³

Living organisms that realise their own boundaries, however, can be distinguished by the specific ways in which they relate to their environment. For operationalising these qualities empirically, Plessner introduces the notion of positionality (Positionalität) (Plessner, 1975: 127–132), a dynamic trait that enables the evolution of a distinct type (Plessner, 1975: 137). Furthermore, living organisms can be distinguished by their systemic nature (Systemhaftigkeit), that is, the ways in which they demarcate the boundaries to their environment; self-regulation (Selbstregulierbarkeit), that is, the degree of relative autonomy to adapt to a changing environment; and temporality, which results from the unity of actual and potential variations.

Based on these general parameters, Plessner distinguishes between three basic degrees (Stufen) of life that are positioned differently with regard to their relative autonomy to their environment. On the lowest level are plants, which are characterised by an open form of organisation. This means nothing else than that plants are completely embedded in their environment, which determines form and expression and consequently leaves no autonomy to the organism (Plessner, 1975: 218). In contrast, animals can be characterised by a closed form of organisation, which is equipped with an inner impulse located in the ‘here and now’ that enables a relative form of autonomy to the environment. Hence, the positionality of animals allows for rather free movement of their physical bodies that enables them to react to changing environmental conditions.

If closed forms of organisation allow for a relative form of autonomy, what then distinguishes humans from animals? In the next section, we shall look at the fact that humans have the ability to step outside of their physical boundaries and enter a qualitatively new ‘eccentric’ relationship with themselves, which enables a higher degree of autonomy to their environment than their animal counterparts.

The eccentricity of man

According to Plessner (Plessner, 1975: 288–293), man can be characterised by his eccentric positionality, a form of organisation that allows for the highest degree of autonomy for all living organisms. ‘Eccentricity’ in this context means nothing other than man’s ability to relate to his own centre and step outside his own physical boundaries by means of reflection. This ability allows man to gain distance from his subjective body (Leib) and perceive it as a separate object (Körper). Thus, man is the only living organism that can relate to its double aspectivity in a reflexive manner, making him the only form of being that is itself ‘neither the nearest, nor the farthest’ (Plessner, 1975: V–VI, author’s translation). Hence, man does not merely dwell in the oceanic ‘here and now’ (Plessner, 1975) but has the ability to reflect his materialisation in the world of objects. This is enabled by a reflexive ‘I’, which bears the possibility of creating a ‘hiatus’, a difference between itself and its experience. Hence, the positionality of an individual as person – that is, as subject of its own experience – is constituted with reference to the triad of the vital body, within the body as inner life and soul and the body as a viewpoint based on both aspects (Plessner, 1975: 293).

Furthermore, the hiatus comes with a distinct relationship not only to itself but also to its environment. Within the reflexive act of alienation from itself, the I ‘steps behind’ the oceanic here and now to a place without any reference in space and time: man becomes literally ‘homeless’ (heimatlos), as he can transcend the temporal and spatial embeddedness of his subjective body towards sheer nothingness (Plessner, 1975: 293). As Plessner puts it, human existence ‘is truthfully based on nothing’ (Plessner, 1975). Thus, alienation is not merely a historical stage determined by the structural conditions of society that can be dissolved by means of social reform, but a distinct anthropological feature that distinguishes man from all other forms of life by allowing him to transcend his own boundaries in the acts of reflexivity and objectification (more on this below).

The next section will elaborate the specific ways eccentric positionality enables man to relate to his world.

The worlds of human existence

Plessner argues in the Stufen that it is not the shape of the body that defines what is human because one could theoretically think of different shapes that fulfil the same practical purposes. What distinguishes humans from physically similar animals such as chimpanzees or gorillas, however, is that they can transcend their physical body and view themselves from an outside perspective. From this stance, the environment is no longer seen as such, but as a reality that likewise is outside-world (Außenwelt), inside-world (Innenwelt) and with-world (Mitwelt) (Plessner, 1975: 293–330).

Like animals, man discovers his environment by means of a subjective body with a centre as focal point of orientation in the factual world. Due to his eccentric positionality, however, man can create a distance from his body by means of self-reflexivity. The body is then revealed in its objective nature in an outside-world that takes the quality of an empty, three-dimensional space filled with objects (Plessner, 1975: 294). Thus, despite being the same, subjective and objective body cannot be reconciled and do not build a unity in the act of reflection.

Likewise, man can also objectify his self. From this perspective, the world inside the body appears as an inner-world (soul). This attitude makes it possible to create a distance from one’s self by means of self-observation. Furthermore, at this point, double aspectivity implies a difference between soul and experience that cannot be united, although both sides are essentially the same. In contrast to the outside-world, however, the inside-world is characterised by a ‘scale of being’ (Skala des Seins), which allows for different modes of existential orientation perceived as psychic reality. Accordingly, this reality is inherently dialectical, as it pends continuously between the double aspect of ‘soul and experience, determination, coercion, law, happening existence and freedom, spontaneity, impulse and consummating existence’ (author’s translation) without ever bearing the prospect of reconciliation (Plessner, 1975: 299). ¹⁴

Although the inside-world marks a relationship with one’s self, humans cannot yet grasp themselves as a self in isolation. This, however, happens in the with-world, in which the self is distinguished from others. Plessner’s theory of the with-world – or to use a more contemporary expression: ‘social world’ – states that being with others is an a priori condition that is grounded in human existence itself. This also implies that animals do not ‘have’ a with-world, which is grounded in the eccentric positionality of man. Within this world, man experiences himself in the sense of a ‘we’ (spirit), as part of a collective. At the same time, the collective ‘we’ allows man to discover his own self (which animals likewise lack) by realising his own position in relation to others (Plessner, 1975: 302–303). Consequently, man realises himself as part of a collective by means of reflection, which forms the basis for developing an identity as a person. In this sense, the with-world is not external to the human body and mind, but is constitutive of it.

To sum up, all three worlds – outside-world, inside-world and with-world – are grounded in the eccentric positionality of the human condition. Although these different worlds never fuse into one unified world, they are categorically entrenched with each other: the possibility of an inside-world presupposes an outside-world and a with-world, and vice versa. Understanding man in his eccentric positionality thus allows for an alternative description of human existence beyond the one-sided dualism of Cartesian accounts, which have a tendency to reduce human existence to either subjective or objective features. Thus, instead of simply deconstructing dualist accounts, Plessner argues that it is precisely the pending between a subjective and an objective world that is constitutive of the human condition and of the social world, respectively.

The human constitution

To further carve out the categorical attributes of human life, Plessner formulates three basic anthropological ‘laws’: (1) the law of natural artificiality (das Gesetz der natürlichen Künstlichkeit), (2) the law of mediated immediacy (das Gesetz der vermittelten Unmittelbarkeit, and (3) the law of the utopian standpoint (das Gesetz des utopischen Standorts) (Plessner, 1975: 321–346).

Man as superior being?

After outlining the main arguments of the Stufen, we may reasonably ask whether this account implies a fallback to a modernist and essentialising form of humanism that draws categorical boundaries between man and other non-human beings. And indeed, at first glance, Plessner’s emphasis on the exclusivity of eccentric positionality as an inherent feature of the human condition seems reminiscent of old forms of anthropocentrism that put man at the top of the evolutionary tree. Despite this ambiguity, I argue that the core arguments of the Stufen do not stand in opposition to so-called post-humanist accounts, such as when Wolfe (2009: 572) suggests that the study of human–animal relations reminds us of the ‘thickness and finitude of human embodiment’ and that ‘human evolution as itself a specific form of animality, one that is unique and different from other forms but not more different, perhaps, than an orangutan is from a starfish’. The following points will therefore clarify Plessner’s position.

First, Plessner’s account does not exclude the well-documented fact that non-humans have agency. Plessner’s account, however, goes further as he not only attributes ‘human’ features to non-human actors. In other words, Plessner does not only emphatically avoid metaphysical notions such as ‘spirit’ or ‘reason’, but stresses the fact that features such as ‘consciousness’, ‘intelligence’, ‘rationality’, ‘sociality’ or ‘intentionality’ (more recently, ‘cognition’) are not inherently human, as they can be observed among other living organisms, in particular vertebrates. It is for this reason that Plessner emphasises the empirically observable ways in which living organisms are related to their boundaries.

Second, the non-categorical empirical conceptualisation of gradual differences underscores that the ‘height’ of development is by no means to be understood in a normative sense or in the sense of a teleological development, as Hegel’s and Marx’s accounts suggest (Plessner, 2003 [1969]: 360). Nor does his account imply essential differences, which conceptualise man as a superior being, as Max Scheler’s (1991 [1928]) cosmological account of human nature advocates (Plessner, 2003 [1937]: 40). Rather than following the Cartesian tradition of distinguishing between rational and non-rational beings, according to which man has been defined as the ‘rational animal’, gradual differences imply that boundaries between living organisms are fluid and can change over time in the process of evolution. Thus, one cannot deduce from Plessner’s account that man is superior to animals or argue for a methodological anthropocentrism that puts man at the end of evolution and alone at the core of the analysis, respectively. Instead, Plessner compares living organisms in accordance with an empirical scale, in which man happens to have the highest relative degree of freedom towards the environment. With reference to Plessner, Luckmann (1983a: 96) notes that it is this relatively high degree of freedom that forms the precondition for the evolution of personal identity. This, however, does not mean that animals and other living organisms cannot achieve, show traces of or overlap with human features such as personality and identity, as Luckmann (1983a) furthermore remarks in critical reflection on Plessner:

After the recent decades of field investigation and experimental study of primates we must no longer cherish the (neo-Cartesian?) notion that all species, save ours, live in closed worlds. It may well be that the transition between the positionality of other species and the eccentricity of ours is less abrupt than former generations of scholars imagined. Nonetheless it seems reasonably certain that the conditions necessary for a high measure of individual detachment are not fully present – nor all available in the necessary combination – in other species, not even other primates.

Today, we can say that the same holds true for other features such as emotions, sociality, intelligence and tool use, which are observed among not only our closest kin but also fish (Balcombe, 2016). Furthermore, current research in the cognitive sciences shows a wide range of supporting evidence for the existence of some basic form of consciousness for both vertebrates and invertebrates (Griffin and Speck, 2004). Conversely, the lack of some of these features such as reflexivity or empathy does not exclude certain individuals from an empirically observed group showing family resemblances (Wittgenstein), just as the absence of limbs does not exclude an individual from a species.

We have now seen that Plessner’s account goes beyond one-sided views of constructivism that highlight a subject’s relations either with an objective world of institutionalised norms or the ‘messiness’ of social life by means of deconstruction and ontological symmetry between human and non-human agents. Empirically, there are differences between humans and non-humans and other living organisms that are rooted in the biological and bodily foundations of living organisms. In this light, eccentricity and natural artificiality have equipped man with an evolutionarily unique form of freedom, which makes him both the constructor and deconstructor of his own boundaries. ‘World views’ such as Cartesianism, anthropocentrism and essentialism are themselves products of man’s drive to make sense of his world, and so are conceptualisations of human–animal relations, which are nevertheless always mediated through signs and symbols.

But what further implications can be derived from the constitutive openness of man? The next section will outline some sociological implications that come along with freedom and artificiality, which at the same time point to the constructive and destructive features of the human species.

Sociological implications

To understand humans as eccentric beings comes along with a set of qualities that is key to the understanding of social life. In this respect, Plessner’s later works shed new light on (1) the sociology of alienation, (2) the theory of society and (3) methodology.

Conclusion

This article has introduced the basic concepts of Helmuth Plessner’s Stufen to a broader international audience in sociology. I have furthermore argued that we can avoid pseudo-debates such as the chicken–egg problem of human agency, as man is by definition ‘artificial’ and likewise a constructor and deconstructor of his biologically and historically contingent world. Thus, Plessner’s account builds a bridge between the constructivist and deconstructivist camps, as social life can be fully understood only if we take into account both the reflexive acts of cognition and the intentional fixation and situation of ambiguity in which meaning breaks down. Moreover, instead of simply presupposing ‘ontological symmetry’ between all organisms, Plessner’s account points to a more nuanced empirically grounded view that points out distinct human qualities that are key to understanding the dynamics of social life among both humans and non-humans. Moreover, I have shown that a critical reading of Plessner’s account does not imply a fallback to human exceptionalism, as differences between humans and animals are gradual, that is, empirical in nature. It is up to scholars of animal studies, however, to show whether and under what circumstances animals can show traces of eccentricity and how this alters our understanding of human–animal relations in modern society, for instance, with Plessner’s seminal work on emotions and ‘the boundaries of human behaviour’ (Plessner, 1970), one of the few Plessner texts translated into English.

The sociological potential of Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology is far from being exhausted. A first step is to investigate the relationship of Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology to other post-Cartesian approaches, such as theories of practice (Reckwitz, 2002; Schatzki et al., 2001), but also American pragmatism (Joas, 1992). However, much work needs to be done in order to disseminate the works of this wrongly neglected and fascinating scholar to the English-speaking world.