Helmuth Plessner 1892 – 1985
Helmuth Plessner was a German philosopher and one of the principal founders, with Max Scheler and Arnold Gehlen, of philosophical anthropology. Trained in zoology, psychology, and philosophy, he spent the years of National Socialism in exile in the Netherlands and after 1945 returned to chairs at Gottingen and Zurich. His Stages of the Organic and Man developed a graded account of plant, animal, and human life in which the human being is characterized by eccentric positionality, always at a reflective distance from the lived body it inhabits. Laughing and Crying gave a celebrated phenomenological account of the expressive limits of human behavior.
Key facts
- Nationality
- German
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Phenomenology, Continental
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Helmuth Plessner:
“The human being is by nature artificial.”
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Attributed to Helmuth Plessner:
“We live an eccentric positionality: always at a distance from the body we are.”
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Attributed to Helmuth Plessner:
“Laughing and weeping mark the limits of behavior the body cannot govern.”
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Attributed to Helmuth Plessner:
“We are bodies, and we have bodies; that is the riddle of human existence.”
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Attributed to Helmuth Plessner:
“Civilization is the form in which we make a home in our own homelessness.”