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Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: From the Philosophy of Nature to Politics

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Michael Lewis

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Abstract

One of the most pressing tasks of contemporary thought is to think together the two discourses which have most fully developed the two poles of anthropogenesis in thinking the relation between biological life and the symbolic legal order: Lacanian psychoanalysis (often in conjunction with Hegelian and Marxian dialectics) and (anti-dialectical) post-Foucauldian biopolitics. Both could be described as forms of ‘philosophical anthropology’. In this essay, we investigate the work of one of the philosophical anthropologists from the discipline’s heyday in Weimar Germany, Helmuth Plessner, to illuminate the fundamental issues that confront any attempt to specify the human being and its linguistic and political essence on the basis of a philosophy of nature, in such a way as to pay heed equally to both the natural sciences and the human sciences. This will mark the first step in an attempt to specify the way in which one might bring together psychoanalysis and biopolitics in order to pursue the same task.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Lewis MA

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Stasis

Year: 2020

Volume: 9

Issue: 1

Pages: 35-59

Print publication date: 25/07/2020

Acceptance date: 28/04/2020

Date deposited: 11/05/2020

ISSN (print): 2310-3817

ISSN (electronic): 2500-0721

Publisher: European University at St. Petersburg

URL: https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-35-59

DOI: 10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-35-59

Notes: http://stasisjournal.net/index.php/journal/article/view/158

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