On a Differential Anthropology of Organic Beings with Eugen Fink

Life on Earth, in all its manifold forms, can only be truly understood once a common foundational character of it is identified. To this end, the concept of the organic proves to be philosophically fruitful. Max Scheler and Helmuth Plessner are among the first thinkers to elaborate the notion of the organic beyond its biological-chemical context within the framework of philosophical anthropology. However, it can be shown that their conception of the organic remains entangled in certain difficulties, as it relies on unexamined metaphysical presuppositions. For both thinkers, vitality becomes an irreducible, omnipresent principle, with the human mind conceived as its highest expression. This presents not only a methodological problem—inasmuch as the reasonin about this principle remains circular and thereby dogmatic—but also the danger of anthropocentrism. In contrast and drawing on Eugen Fink, I develop in this article an alternative position which I term differential anthropology. This approach does not conceive of nature in either materialist or idealist terms, nor simply as dead or alive, but rather as a constitutive resistance—that is, as difference. This difference in nature cannot be grasped positively and, unlike life, cannot be elevated into a dogmatic principle. The primary outcome of this line of thought is a novel conception of the organic, one that consists in the sensation of nature as difference and in the autonomous formation of a relation to it. This approach ultimately enables us to conceive of plants, animals, and humans as varying degrees of sensible experience, thus laying the ground for a non-anthropocentric typology of organisms.