i IMISCOE RESEARCH Jos de Mul (ed.) Jos Helmut Plessner (1892-1985) was one of the founders of philosophical an- thropology, and his book The Levels of the Organic and Man [Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch], first published in 1928, has inspired generations of philosophers, biologists, social scientists, and humanities scholars. This volume offers the first substantial introduction to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology in English, not only setting it in context with such familiar figures as Bergson, Cassirer, Merleau-Ponty, and Deleuze, but also showing Plessner’s relevance to contemporary discussions in a wide variety of fields in the humanities and sciences, such as biology, neurosciences, psychology, sociology, cultural anthropology, philosophy of mind, and technology studies. Jos de Mul is full professor Philosophy of Man and Culture at the Faculty of Philosophy, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He has also taught at the Univer- sity of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Fudan University (Shanghai), and stayed as a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. His book Anthropology Philosophical Plessner’s publications include: Romantic Desire in (Post)Modern Art and Philosophy (State University of New York Press, 1999), The Tragedy of Finitude. Dilthey’s Edited by Franck Düvell, Irina Molodikova & Michael Collyer Hermeneutics of Life (Yale University Press, 2004), Cyberspace Odyssey. Towards a Virtual Ontology and Anthropology (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), and Destiny Domesticated. The Rebirth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Technology (State University of New York Press, 2014). PerspectivesPlessner’s and Philosophical Prospects Anthropology Perspectives and Prospects Edited by Jos de Mul ISBN: 978-90-8964-634-7 AUP.nl 9 7 8 9 0 8 9 6 4 6 3 4 7 Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology Perspectives and Prospects Edited by Jos de Mul Amsterdam University Press Cover illustration: © Helmuth Plessner Gesellschaft e.V., www.helmuth-plessner.de Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Typesetting: Crius Group, Hulshout Amsterdam University Press English-language titles are distributed in the US and Canada by the University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978 90 8964 634 7 e-ISBN 978 90 4852 298 9 (pdf) NUR 761 © Jos de Mul / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2014 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Contents Foreword 9 Artificial by Nature 11 An Introduction to Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology Jos de Mul Part I Anthropology 1 Philosophical Anthropology 41 A Third Way between Darwinism and Foucaultism Joachim Fischer 2 The Nascence of Modern Man 57 Two Approaches to the Problem – Biological Evolutionary Theory and Philosophical Anthropology Hans-Peter Krüger 3 “True” and “False” Evolutionism 79 Bergson’s Critique of Spencer, Darwin & Co. and Its Relevance for Plessner (and Us) Heike Delitz 4 Life, Concept and Subject 99 Plessner’s Vital Turn in the Light of Kant and Bergson Thomas Ebke 5 Bodily Experience and Experiencing One’s Body 111 Maarten Coolen 6 Plessner and the Mathematical-Physical Perspective 129 The Prescientific Objectivity of the Human Body Jasper van Buuren 7 The Body Exploited 149 Torture and the Destruction of Selfhood Janna van Grunsven 8 Plessner’s Theory of Eccentricity 163 A Contribution to the Philosophy of Medicine Oreste Tolone 9 The Duty of Personal Identity 177 Authenticity and Irony Martino Enrico Boccignone Part II Culture 10 Anthropology as a Foundation of Cultural Philosophy 195 The Connection between Human Nature and Culture by Helmuth Plessner and Ernst Cassirer Henrike Lerch 11 Bi-Directional Boundaries 211 Eccentric Life and Its Environments Robert Mugerauer 12 The Unbearable Freedom of Dwelling 229 Jetske van Oosten 13 Eccentric Positionality and Urban Space 243 Huib Ernste 14 Strangely Familiar 261 The Debate on Multiculturalism and Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology Kirsten Pols 15 De-Masking as a Characteristic of Social Work? 275 Veronika Magyar-Haas 16 Helmuth Plessner as a Social Theorist 289 Role Playing in Legal Discourse Bas Hengstmengel 17 Habermas’s New Turn towards Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology 301 Matthias Schloβberger Part III Technology 18 The Quest for the Sources of the Self , Seen from the Vantage Point of Plessner’s Material a Priori 317 Petran Kockelkoren 19 The Brain in the Vat as the Epistemic Object of Neurobiology 335 Gesa Lindemann 20 Switching “On,” Switching “Off” 357 Does Neurosurgery in Parkinson’s Disease Create Man-Machines? Johannes Hätscher 21 On Humor and “Laughing” Rats 375 The Importance of Plessner for Affective Neuroscience Heleen J. Pott 22 A Moral Bubble 387 The Influence of Online Personalization on Moral Repositioning Esther Keymolen 23 Eccentric Positionality as a Precondition for the Criminal Liability Of Artificial Life Forms 407 Mireille Hildebrandt 24 Not Terminated 425 Cyborgized Men Still Remain Human Beings Dierk Spreen 25 Plessner and Technology 443 Philosophical Anthropology Meets the Posthuman Peter-Paul Verbeek 26 Philosophical Anthropology 2.0 457 Reading Plessner in the Age of Converging Technologies Jos de Mul Appendix 477 Plessner’s Collected Writings (Gesammelte Schriften) About the Authors 481 Name Index 489 Subject Index 495 Foreword The works of the German biologist, philosopher and sociologist Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) have remained relatively unknown to the English- speaking world until now. Without doubt, one of the most important reasons for this is the fact that so far only a few of his works has been translated into English. Moreover, the majority of the large corpus of secondary literature is also in German. For these reasons, the “Plessner Renaissance” that took place in the past decades went largely unnoticed among English scholars in the humanities and in the natural and social sciences. In order to widen the audience, the organizers of the IVth International Plessner Confer- ence at the Erasmus University Rotterdam in 2009, which was devoted to Plessner’s magnum opus, The Levels of the Organic and Man: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology [Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, originally published in 1928], decided to hold the entire conference in English. Although the confer- ence did not attract a large group of participants from English-speaking countries, it resulted, for the first time in the history of Plessner scholarship, in a substantive collection of papers on Plessner’s philosophical anthropol- ogy written in English.1 The present volume contains a selection of the papers presented at that conference, offering an excellent introduction to a philosopher whose work has proven to be inspiring for several generations of scholars. I wish to thank Dr. Maarten Coolen from the University of Amsterdam, and Prof. Dr. Huib Ernste from Radboud University of Nijmegen, who acted as co-organizers of the IVth International Plessner Conference and helped 1 As only some of Plessner’s works have been translated so far, the papers presented at the Rotterdam Plessner conference lacked a uniform translation of Plessner’s key terms. In some cases it was just a matter of different spelling. For example, whereas in some contributions the German exzentrisch was translated as “eccentric”, in other papers “excentric” was used. In other cases the differences concerned the entire word. The German Grenze for example, was translated as “boundary” by some authors and as “border” by others. In order to avoid conceptual confusion, in almost all cases the editorial choice has been a uniform translation. For that reason, the word exzentrisch is consistently translated as eccentric (a motivation for this particular choice is given in footnote 2 on page 12). However, in a few cases where different translations were caused by differences in context, for which the English language has different words, the choice has been made to keep the different translations. For that reason the German Grenze is translated with “boundary”, but in some cases as “border”. When an author used synonyms for stylistic reasons (for example by alternatively using “corporeality” and “corporeity”), the different translations have also been maintained. 10 PLESSNER’S PHILOSOPHICAL ANTHROPOLOGY with the selection of the papers for this volume. I would also like to thank Laurens van den Berg and Marjolein Wegman for their encouraging sup- port while organizing the conference, and my research assistants Sassan Sangsari and Julien Kloeg for their help during the editing of the text. I also wish to thank the anonymous reviewers for their critical comments that have helped us to improve the book. Last but not least I would like to thank Inge van der Bijl, Ed Hatton, and Jaap Wagenaar of Amsterdam University Press for their first-rate assistance during the final editing and production of this book. I also wish to express my sincere gratitude to the Helmuth Plessner Gesellschaft, the Erasmus Trustfonds, and the Faculty of Philosophy of Erasmus University for their generous financial contributions, without which the organization of the conference and the coming open source edition of this volume could not have been made possible.