Revising Plessner’s Transformativism: Toward a Generic Conception of the Human Life-Form

Abstract Several currents in contemporary thought converge in the call for a generic and non-reductively naturalistic conception of the human life-form. I propose to meet this demand through a constructively critical revision of Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology in light of the so-called transformative model advocated by contemporary Neo-Aristotelians (John McDowell, Matthew Boyle). Plessner constructs the nature-philosophical hierarchy outlined in Levels of Organic Life and the Human in accordance with a principle that can be understood along transformativist lines. However, by declaring humans’ distinctive bodily constitution irrelevant to their “eccentric positionality,” Plessner deviates from his transformative scheme and reverts to an additive view. In order to account for this deviation, I ask what it is about the human life form that necessitates eccentric positionality and argue that the answer transpiring from Plessner’s arguments turns on the mediating function of second nature. The shared character of second nature draws attention to the difficulty of accommodating the constitutive role of human sociality in Plessner’s nature-philosophical framework. This difficulty comes to a head in Plessner’s reworking of the Hegelian conception of “spirit” and helps account for his relapse into an additive view. The problem identified here drives major theoretical realignments in Plessner’s writings after Levels , a problem-oriented overview of which puts us on a track towards a viable conception of the human life form: one that reframes the insights reached in Plessner’s later writings in categorial, generic terms by embedding them in a corrected, and consistently transformative, version of the nature-philosophical framework developed in Levels .