Marton Dornbach

Theorists have been reluctant to base human rights on purportedly universally valid claims about the bearers of these fundamental entitlements. However, it is hard to see how any justificatory strategy in this area could succeed without commitment to a normative conception of humanity. In attempting to work out such a conception, we can turn to philosophical anthropology, the subdiscipline investigating what is distinctive about humans in comparison with other living beings. After countering some widely endorsed arguments against such a turn, the paper first sets out the requirements facing a philosophical anthropology that might plausibly underwrite human rights. I argue that our account should be unencumbered by metaphysical assumptions and avoid the pitfalls of formalism, dualism, and scientism; take its point of departure from the normative self-understanding constitutive of our form of biological life; and define humanity in non-speciesist, generic terms, as a categorially distinct life-form whose integrity requires protection by legal norms applying universally to all of its bearers. In the next step, I identify key elements for such an account in the works of Aristotle and three modern thinkers who reworked the Aristotelian conception of rational animality in a post-Kantian spirit of commitment to human self-determination: namely, Hegel, Marx, and Plessner. In connection with each of these authors I address contemporary approaches to their arguments that bear on the justification and substantive content of human rights.

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. ––– NOTE: It was only after publication of this article that I came across an important piece of biographical evidence in support of my claim about the significance of Schelling's Freiheitsschrift for Plessner's philosophical psychology. In 1923, Max Scheler claimed to be powerfully impressed by two of his recent readings, namely, Adolf von Harnack’s major study on the second-century Christian heretic Marcion and Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift (Peter Wust, “Schelers Lehre vom Menschen,” Das Neue Reich 9 [1928–29], 138, quoted in Guido Cusinato, “Schelling come precursore dell’antropologia filosofica del Novecento,” Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 9/2 [2010], 64.) Given that Scheler and Plessner were in constant exchange during the relevant period, it seems likely that Plessner’s invocation of Marcion in the concluding sentence of Levels of Organic Life and the Human reflects a familiarity with that author that was mediated by Scheler’s reading of Harnack (the phrase "die selige Fremde" used by Plesner in that context is in fact a verbatim borrowing from Harnack's Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, Leipzig 1921, p. 225). By the same token, Scheler’s praise for Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift in 1923, along with the textual indications noted in this paper, suggests that the Freiheitsschrift was very much present on Plessner's intellectual horizon when he referred to “the ur-ground character, or better said un-ground character of the psyche” in The Limits of Community, which was published a year later. (Whether it was Scheler who alerted Plessner to the Freiheitsschrift or the other way around is a moot question.)

While Schelling’s anticipation of Freudian psychoanalysis is well established, it has thus far gone unnoticed that Schelling’s ideas also proved fruitful in the context of a distinctively philosophical theory of the psyche developed by a younger contemporary of Freud. During the 1920s Helmuth Plessner, a key figure of philosophical anthropology, outlined a complex conception of the psyche as an individualized, inner region of reality. Although Plessner did not present his philosophical psychology in a systematic form, its building blocks can be found in The Unity of the Senses, The Limits of Community, and Levels of Organic Life and the Human, among other writings. Moreover, Plessner left a clue as to how these building blocks fit together, which suggests that Plessner viewed his philosophical psychology as structurally analogous to the model of personality outlined in Schelling’s 1809 treatise on human freedom. I propose that Plessner sought to formulate an alternative to both idealism and realism about the psyche that might reconcile the insights motivating these rival positions. Schelling provided Plessner with a workable model for such a reconciliation. After reviewing textual evidence for my hypothesis, I sketch Schelling’s predecessor theory. Based on the Schellingian template, I then reconstruct Plessner’s non-reductively naturalistic theory of the psyche, which aligns the real bodily ground of the psyche with its ideal existence. Highlighting the strengths of Plessner’s philosophical psychology against the foil of Paul Ricoeur’s and John McDowell’s relevant arguments, I argue that the theory reconstructed here deserves contemporary consideration as a plausible contender. ––– NOTE: It was only after publication of this article that I came across an important piece of biographical evidence in support of my claim about the significance of Schelling's Freiheitsschrift for Plessner's philosophical psychology. In 1923, Max Scheler claimed to be powerfully impressed by two of his recent readings, namely, Adolf von Harnack’s major study on the second-century Christian heretic Marcion and Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift (Peter Wust, “Schelers Lehre vom Menschen,” Das Neue Reich 9 [1928–29], 138, quoted in Guido Cusinato, “Schelling come precursore dell’antropologia filosofica del Novecento,” Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, 9/2 [2010], 64.) Given that Scheler and Plessner were in constant exchange during the relevant period, it seems likely that Plessner’s invocation of Marcion in the concluding sentence of Levels of Organic Life and the Human reflects a familiarity with that author that was mediated by Scheler’s reading of Harnack (the phrase "die selige Fremde" used by Plessner in that context is in fact a verbatim borrowing from Harnack's Marcion: Das Evangelium vom fremden Gott, Leipzig 1921, p. 225). By the same token, Scheler’s praise for Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift in 1923, along with the textual indications noted in this paper, suggests that the Freiheitsschrift was very much present on Plessner's intellectual horizon when he referred to “the ur-ground character, or better said un-ground character of the psyche” in The Limits of Community, which was published a year later. (Whether it was Scheler who alerted Plessner to the Freiheitsschrift or the other way around is a moot question.)

Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is framed by a comprehensive theory of living nature. Central to this philosophical biology is the claim that animals lack self-consciousness but their awareness of their surroundings is nevertheless anchored in a self. Since Plessner does not explain how this unselfconscious self is manifest to the animal, the warrant for his claim remains unclear. Following Plessner’s construal of human existence as a radically transformed variant of animal life, I argue that he leaves animals’ selfhood unaccounted for because he overlooks the animal precursor of the feeling of pleasure and displeasure, which affords a pre-reflective self-awareness. I fill this lacuna by drawing on Kant’s and Plessner’s theories of human feelings, Hans Jonas’s conception of animal emotion,and recent arguments that make evaluative affects fundamental to animal consciousness. Revised along these lines, Plessner’s framework allows us to specify how animal affectivity is transformed in self-conscious human life.

In attempting to determine why the Enlightenment project had derailed and how this failure might be remedied, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno both turned to canonical literary narratives. The resultant works, Benjamin’s major essay on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and Adorno’s meditation on the Odyssey in Dialectic of Enlightenment, are centrally concerned with the very act of narration. The Saving Line reconstructs a hitherto unnoticed, wide-ranging dialogue between these foundational texts of the Frankfurt School. At the heart of Dornbach’s argument is a critical model that Benjamin built around the concept of caesura, which Adorno subsequently reworked. Countering an obscurantism that would become complicit in the rise of fascism, the two theorists aligned moments of arrest in narratives mired in unreason. The Saving Line throws fresh light on the intellectual exchange and disagreements between Benjamin and Adorno, the problematic conjunction of secular reason and negative theology in their thinking, and the philosophical significance of literary narration. (See PDF file below for a more detailed précis)

Receptive Spirit develops the thesis that the notion of self-induced mental activity at the heart of German idealism necessitated a radical rethinking of humans’ dependence on culturally transmitted models of thought, evaluation, and creativity. The chapters of the book examine paradigmatic attempts undertaken by German idealist thinkers to reconcile spontaneous mental activity with receptivity to culturally transmitted models. The book maps the ramifications of this problematic in Kant’s theory of aesthetic experience, Fichte’s and Hegel’s views on the historical character of philosophy, the Fichtean model of philosophical communication, and Friedrich Schlegel’s theory and practice of literary communication and criticism. Drawing on Gadamer and McDowell, I argue that the conceptual framework established by the Idealists remains indispensable for orientation in the contemporary intellectual landscape. (See the PDF file below for a synopsis)