Human Studies

https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-018-9473-9

THEORETICAL / PHILOSOPHICAL PAPER

Categorial Differences: Plessner’s Philosophy Far

from Reductive Naturalism and from Idealistic Culturalism

Volker Schürmann1 

© Springer Nature B.V. 2018

Abstract
Plessner’s philosophical anthropology is presented as a non-naturalistic philosophy
of nature. Such a position is attractive and indispensable, for instance, to all debates
concerning personhood and human dignity. Plessner’s work rests on a conception
of philosophy that distinguishes without exception the contents of possible experi-
ences from their conditions of possibility. Thus, Plessner’s anthropology is a theory
of categorial contents, but not in the aprioric sense according to which they would
be assumed to be (logically, not only temporally) prior to all experience. Pless-
ner avoids such a misconception by structuring his philosophy in a reflexive way.
Therefore his basic philosophical category or idea—eccentric positionality—doesn’t
mean a property of human or any natural beings, but the categorial frame called
personhood which is in use when we identify empirical properties of humans. The
challenge in understanding personhood as conceptually independent of empirical
properties consists in distinguishing between the contingency of personhood and
arbitrariness.

Keywords  Plessner · Philosophical anthropology · Naturalism · Personhood ·

Transcendental philosophy

“Categories are not concepts, but rather make them possible.". (Plessner 1928:
116)
The outstanding characteristic of Plessner’s philosophy is to involve—in a cer-
tain sense: to be—a philosophy of nature. The charm of this concept springs from

* Volker Schürmann
v.schuermann@dshs‑koeln.de
1
Institut für Pädagogik und Philosophie, German Sports University Cologne, Am Sportpark
Müngersdorf 6, 50933 Cologne, Germany

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 V. Schürmann

the necessary close relation it bears to empirical sciences like biology or sociology,
whereas the challenge or even provocation of this concept lies in its irreducibility to
just these empirical sciences it is necessarily and closely connected to.1 Plessner’s
philosophy is, in short, a non-naturalistic philosophy of nature, or, playing with two
meanings, a non-naturalistic naturalism.
There is no philosophical, scientific or even public discussion that is neutral in
the decision between naturalism and culturalism on the one hand, and between natu-
ralistic or non-naturalistic modes of naturalism or culturalism on the other. In such
debates, nobody can argue that dealing with such things is unnecessary.
Concerning human beings, we are confronted with the old question of reconcil-
ing the evidence that humans are natural beings (naturalism) with the equipollent
evidence that we can’t identify any moment of human nature which would be ‘inno-
cent,’ i.e., not already formed by human action (culturalism). A reductive position is
unable to really reconcile both evidences, whereas a dualistic position is unable to
see the tension between them at all. Therefore, the problem of taking serious both
evidences comes up everywhere, for instance in dealing with human evolution as
culturalisation (Tomasello 2014), in distinguishing ‘first’ and ‘second nature’ of
humans (McDowell 1994) or in discussing the “frontiers of justice” (Nussbaum
2006).
Plessner’s philosophy—a non-naturalistic naturalism—is attractive because many
of us want to spell out the relation between both evidences but don’t know exactly
how to do it in a logically consistent manner. If we don’t want to remain in rhetori-
cal turns like “on the one hand…, on the other hand…,” Plessner’s philosophy is a
chance to learn.
To give only one further example: debates concerning personhood and human
dignity require such a non-naturalistic naturalism. On the one hand, personhood and
human dignity are not empirical properties. Therefore the Lockean tradition doesn’t
fit (Spaemann 1996), since it asks us to search for an empirical attribute that sepa-
rates all persons from all non-persons, understanding the latter as beings that lack
that property. Within that tradition, it is possible, necessary and an empirical fact
that we struggle for the ‘right’ property, but that tradition is unable to see that per-
sonhood is not a question of right or wrong properties. Personhood is a question of
the mode how we treat one another. To respect the dignity of a coma patient can-
not be based on saying: “We have to treat this being in this or that way because
this being has this or that property (or because this being is, in principle, able to do
this or that)”. Rather, we have to respect dignity because this being is one of us—it
doesn’t matter why this being belongs to us, but it simply does so.
On the other hand, the question who belongs to us and who does not is not a
question of pure arbitrariness or pure decision. To respect human dignity is a mat-
ter of commitment and bindingness. The question of respecting human dignity
or not is not reducible to the answers that I or some of us or most of us give. To

1
  In some contexts, one might put the stress in this statement just the other way round, thinking of the
irreducibility of Plessner’s concept to empirical sciences as its charm and taking its necessary close rela-
tion to them as its provocative point.

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Categorial Differences: Plessner’s Philosophy Far from…

respect human dignity is not a question of individual or collective moral sentiment

but the basis of fundamental human rights. But, going back to the first problem,
we can’t base the commitment and the categorical bindingness of human dignity
on an empirically given, historically and culturally unchangeable attribute. We want
to mutually respect the dignity common to us all—nowadays. Before the American
and French Revolutions, some of us respected the dignity of some of us. Therefore
we need a non-naturalistic naturalism. Otherwise, we would have to search for an
empirical property or to say that the affordance to respect human dignity is only a
game, a game of powers or a question of mere ascription. If we don’t want to reduce
personhood to that, it is still not attractive to argue (in the tradition of Natural Law)
that humans are, by nature, persons endowed with dignity, since in this case, we
would be forced to say that even slaves in ancient Greece were persons and that the
ancient Greeks didn’t understand that well. No, slaves are not persons because they
are treated as living instruments for the interests of their masters.2
How to say that? Well, Plessner’s philosophy is a good possibility to do so.

Plessner’s Philosophy as Philosophical Anthropology

Plessner’s philosophy is philosophical anthropology. To give it this name, however,

obscures more than it illuminates. This particular kind of anthropology differs in
many ways from current concepts of what anthropology is supposed to be. Here are
some of the core differences:

• Philosophical anthropology is not empirical anthropology. This difference must

not be understood as an exclusive opposition: Plessner’s anthropology is not pos-
sible without empirical analyses, but cannot be reduced to them.
• It is a philosophical theory of a certain kind of being—we might even say, an
ontology—without relying on a conception of reason that would be indifferent
to its various historical and cultural realizations: Plessner’s anthropology is, in
important ways following Hegel, a philosophy of spirit, and not of reason.
• It rests on a conception of philosophy that distinguishes, without exception,
the contents of possible experiences from their conditions of possibility. In that
sense, it is in accordance with critical and transcendental philosophy. Thus,
Plessner’s anthropology is a theory of categorial contents, but not in the apri-
oric sense according to which they would be assumed to be (logically, not only
temporally) prior to all experience. Plessner avoids such a misconception by
structuring his philosophy in a reflexive way: Every experience in approaching
philosophical conceptions is itself mediated and made possible by the fact that
philosophy is done by finite beings. One might say that Plessner’s philosophy
follows the path laid out by Feuerbach and therefore is a kind of situated meta-
physics.

2
 For more details and references concerning personhood, dignity and their relation see Schürmann
(2011).

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 V. Schürmann

• Philosophical anthropology is possible only if it is at the same time a philosophy

of nature, rooted in a philosophical biology. In Plessner’s view, anthropology
must not be naturalized. But it needs (to be) a philosophy of nature because the
power of man over nature must not be thought of as a pure creatio. Rather, the
power of man as a being within nature stands in “isosthenic” opposition3 to his
impotence, an opposition being impossible to overcome entirely.
• It is guided by a conception of human dignity, serving the protection of the irre-
ducible individuality of each single human being, without being a theory of the
singular I. Rather, it starts from the “we-form of his own I” (Plessner 1928: 303).

The thread connecting these characteristics consists in the “strictly methodical”

(1928:  71) layout of Plessner’s philosophy: Plessner avoids making assumptions
about the content of philosophical anthropology, since such assumptions would call
for certain preliminary decisions regarding the goal and the method of the discipline.
Instead, he gives an account of the questions anthropology is supposed to answer
and of the way they must be addressed in order to be answered in an adequate fash-
ion. If this account is kept in mind, Plessner is convinced that the “strictly methodi-
cal” layout does not lead into a formalistic “methodism” (1928: 71).
The principal feature of Plessner’s philosophy consists in the conception of
“eccentric positionality” or, to say it in an abbreviated way, “eccentricity”. To be an
eccentrically positioned being, in contrast to “centric positionality”, means that this
being ‘looks upon’ every single doing of his while doing. Therefore his doings must
not be understood as automatic or instinctive happenings, but rather as arranged
or already-formed performances. If we remember the point made on strictness of
method, eccentricity clearly does not indicate the content of philosophical anthro-
pology because it is conscious of its own being positioned or situated. Therefore,
eccentric positionality is positioned eccentricity (Schürmann 2014: esp. 95-130).

Anthropology as a Theory of the Person

Keeping philosophy “strictly methodical” prevents us from making presuppositions

what the particular entities, beings or natural bodies are that might be the subject
matter of anthropology (see Lindemann 2009). At the outset of Plessner’s anthropol-
ogy, we simply do not know if it is about humans at all or even exclusively about
humans. It does not presuppose that humanity can be approached only by way of
distinguishing humans from non-humans. Therefore, Plessner’s anthropology is not
centered on a theory of human beings or a theory of mankind, neither in a biological
nor in a humanist sense. Referring to Max Scheler, Plessner describes anthropology
as a “science of the ‘person’ (Scheler)” (1928: 74) still to be formed. Eccentricity
is a “vital category”, indicating a “frame” (1928: 64) (in the sense of, e.g., Butler

3
 Plessner inherits this specific logical situation from Pyrrhonian skepticism, calling it “Unentsc-
heidbarkeit” (“undecidability”: Plessner 1931). Not to be able to decide is not a mistake, not a sign of
incompetence, but an indicator for the parity or equipollence of both possibilities (isosthenia).

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Categorial Differences: Plessner’s Philosophy Far from…

2009) for the life-worlds of eccentrically situated beings. In categorial difference to

that,4 centricity is the frame for the environments of centrically situated bodies. It
is a methodological assumption that we do not know and are not allowed to know
from the outset what man is if we start to develop anthropology. Therefore this
assumption defines the meaning of eccentricity. Neither the comparison between
humans and non-humans nor a kind of evolutionary theory can establish and eluci-
date the difference between eccentricity and centricity. Rather, this difference itself
is the categorial difference that is responsible for our ability to address the differ-
ence between humans and non-humans and the meaning of being human. Therefore,
eccentricity is the category indicating the characteristics of what a person is. This
argument implies that personhood is no empirically accessible property—pace the
Lockean tradition—but a categorial content and a social status, appealing to a tradi-
tion that links personhood to masks and roles (see  Krüger 1999: esp. 17). Not for
nothing does Plessner take the figure of the actor as a prototype for his anthropology
(Plessner 1948).
“In terms of positionality, then, there is a threefold situation: the living thing is
body, is in its body (as inner life or psyche), and outside its body as the point of
view from which it is both. An individual characterized positionally by this threefold
structure is called a person” (Plessner 1928: 293).
Eccentricity characterizes personhood due to three central features. Firstly, it is
a categorial and not an empirical content. Eccentricity characterizes a medium, an
element of life that social agents live in as persons, in analogy to the fact that fish
live in water as in their element of life. Secondly, one cannot be a person as a sin-
gle being: personhood has the form of “We”. Thirdly, eccentricity involves a kind
of normativity: it freely distinguishes those beings we count as “Us” because we
ourselves want to be thus counted in order to guarantee one another the protection
of our unalienable dignity and irreducible individuality. Neither nature nor a god
makes human beings persons, but it is “We” ourselves through our commitment to
treat one another like persons.
A logical presupposition that is central for these features consists in postulating
a fundamental difference between a communitarian and a societal form of “We,”
roughly equivalent to Rousseau’s distinction between “volonté de tous” and “volonte
générale”. According to Plessner, every kind of communitarian “We”—that is,
every group of beings calling themselves “We”—presupposes a certain categorial
framework defining the type of beings which might address themselves as “We”.
This framework is nothing else than a certain societal “We”.
The difference might be explained by way of the following argument: All those
that call themselves “We” might commit two kinds of errors. One kind of error is
empirical: They might exclude a being from the sphere of “We” although it clearly
belongs to this sphere. Humiliation presupposes this kind of thought since only such
beings can be humiliated that we already have recognized as being a part of the

4
  Mind the difference between categorial and categorical. Categorial issues are dealing with the philo-
sophical concept of categories (in difference to pure concepts), while categorical is a mode of binding-
ness. I don’t want to argue that categories are in principle concepts with categorical binding.

13
 V. Schürmann

sphere of “We”. A different kind of error concerns categories. Someone stating that
he tortured a cat does not commit an empirical error, but his statement falls outside
of our categorial framework, since animals might be mistreated and tormented, but
not in a strict sense tortured. Recently, Judith Butler appealed to this difference by
pointing out that the categorial frame of “grievability” (Butler 2009: esp. 13ff) is
presupposed when we distinguish mere organic vitality from what we call life in
the strict sense, i.e., life deserving of protection. If we hardly take notice of count-
less human organisms dying in war, it is not primarily in a moral sense that we are
at fault. Rather, our perception has acquired a categorial frame of grievability that
prevents us from asking questions concerning moral guilt and political responsibility
for those countless deaths.
The frame or the medium which is constituted by eccentricity is, in Plessners
words, “spirit” (Geist). “Spirit” is the name of the societal form of personhood’s
“We,” being synonymous with “Shared-worldliness [Mitweltlichkeit],” the distin-
guishing feature of the form of life of persons:
“We, that is, not a select group or community that can refer to itself as ‘we,’ but
rather the sphere designated by this word, is strictly speaking the only thing that can
be called spirit. Understood in the purest sense, spirit is different from the psyche
and from consciousness. […] Only insofar as we are persons do we stand in a world
of being that is independent of us and at the same time amenable to our actions. It
thus holds that spirit is the precondition for nature and psyche. This sentence is to be
understood in a specific sense. Not as subjectivity or consciousness or intellect, but
as we-sphere is spirit the precondition for the constitution of a reality [Wirklichkeit],
which, in turn, only figures as and comprises reality as long as it also remains con-
stituted for itself, independently of the principles of its constitution in one aspect of
consciousness. Precisely by turning away from consciousness in this way, this real-
ity fulfills the law of the excentric sphere as described above (Plessner 1928: 303f).

Political Anthropology

It is impossible to understand Plessner’s philosophy without articulating the cate-

gorial frame of personhood. Eccentricity is marked by contingence, since it is not
an empirical property, but a categorial frame. Doing anthropology is not possible
without relying on a categorial frame, but it might contingently be a different one
than the one chosen. In this sense, Plessner’s philosophy is built on two fundamental
assumptions:
Anthropology cannot be neutral, since one cannot approach it without choosing a
certain frame beforehand: “We understand […] why a neutral position in the strug-
gle is impossible because every position already is situated within the struggle, so
that there is no indifferent analysis of man that could even ask its central question
without accepting from the outset a definite conception of man” (Plessner 1931:
220f).
The frame can be the frame of eccentricity as well as a different one: “We need
not understand [man] in that way [as an eccentric being], but we can do it” (Plessner
1931: 148).

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Categorial Differences: Plessner’s Philosophy Far from…

Addressing man as an eccentrically positioned being is contingent, but not arbi-

trary. It is contingent because none of the empirical properties of homo sapiens
guarantees eccentricity. As we have seen, eccentricity is the framework enabling us
to evaluate just that kind of properties. Taking man to be eccentrically positioned
expresses a stake in a kind of bet (in the sense of Pascal). We are not obliged to take
him so, but we can and should take him as an equal among equals and as being able
to develop his potential (Plessner 1931: 148). In other words, man should be taken
as “inscrutable” (unergründlich), but this perspective should not be understood as
resting on an arbitrary decision. Rather, it should be based on accepting his inscru-
tability to be “binding” (verbindlich). The meaning of “inscrutability” does not
involve the melancholical acknowledgment of the fact that man can never be entirely
fathomed out. Rather, it is the positive claim that we do not want to restrict ourselves
to what might in fact be fathomed out about ourselves, and it is binding in the sense
that we demand affirmation of the claim of inscrutability in view of not impeding
the development of the richness of human potential.
Philosophy is fundamentally situated. Plessner addresses this situation by call-
ing his anthropology a political one. Thus, “political anthropology” does not mean
an established anthropological theory subsequently to be related to a determined
“political” sphere. The title “political anthropology” points to the idea that philo-
sophical positions regarding anthropological questions cannot argue from a neutral
standpoint and that they are marked by contingency from the beginning. They must
presuppose a decision, and because the decision might have been a different one, it
is a decision issuing from a struggle, i.e., from a certain view of the historical and
cultural situation besides other possible and isosthenic views.5
The thought that every philosophical standpoint is situated due to the contin-
gency of the decision it has issued from marks a common point with Carl Schmitt’s
conception of the political sphere. Plessner, however, understand this common
point in a way exactly opposed to Schmitt’s decisionism (see  Richter 2005: esp.
chapters  4.6–4.9). Decisionist thinking cannot distinguish the contingency of the
decision from arbitrariness: neither is it willing to do so, nor is it provided with
the necessary conceptual resources. In Schmitt’s sense, a decision takes place at a
point zero which requires the power of leadership (“Führerschaft”) in order to cut
a so-called Gordian knot. Plessner denies this type of pseudo-heroism charged with
an existentialist world-view that later on would directly contribute to legitimizing
Nazism (see Krockow 1958) and stresses that the contingency of a decision does not
have anything to do with a “point zero,” but instead is “historical in character” since
our actions and decisions are always related to prior decisions and not situated in a
fictive “point zero”. “Commitments characteristically either rely on prior commit-
ments or revolt against them; thus, they are in a relevant sense historical” (Plessner
1931: 192).

5
  “Struggle” is used here in the sense of Hegel’s “struggle for recognition”. Hegel’s idea is not that there
are two or many persons, who have certain needs and are therefore situated in a fight to get (enough) rec-
ognition. The idea is that what it means to be a person is to be situated in a difference, i.e., in a struggle
for recognition. This struggle is not at all a sort of survival of the fittest.

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 V. Schürmann

Hence, to accept the inscrutability of man as binding is a decision to stick to “our

discovery […] that we have realized a concept of ‘man’ indifferent to religious and
racial differences and that this realization is world-constituting,” and therefore a
decision to stick to a “culture of knowledge […] anchored in a religious manner in
feeling the equality before God of all beings that have a human face” (Plessner 1931:
148). Nowadays, the foundation of this concept of man is no more of a religious and
emotional, but rather of a binding and legal kind due to the declaration of human
rights.
The binding character of the inscrutability of man defines the concept of per-
sonhood, but it does so neither in an arbitrary manner nor by clinging to a moral
and religious principle. The asymmetrical structure which enables us to distinguish
an arbitrary decision from the relation of action to prior commitments assumed the
form of a principle of international law in 1948, and ever since, personhood has sig-
nified the equality of the rights of every human being in view of guaranteeing their
unalienable dignity.
Up to here, the argument comprises two steps: firstly, to understand eccentricity
as personhood; secondly, to grasp the point that the concept of personhood is essen-
tially marked by the binding character of the inscrutability of man. These two steps
characterize the aim of Plessner’s philosophy as a philosophy of human dignity
(Haucke 2003). In this frame, the public sphere protects factually unequal individu-
als because it organizes their informal as well as their formal and legal interactions
in an indirect manner—“in the aura-system [Nimbussystem] of distance” (Plessner
1999/1924: 159), secured by the equality of the rights of each individual. Public
sphere “is an open system of interaction between persons who are unattached to
each other; it is sufficiently wide-meshed to accommodate the fluctuations of life in
all of its shades, while at the same time allowing such fluctuations to move through
it” (Plessner 1999/1924: 149)—“Admittedly, what one does not think worth protect-
ing does not require protection. Only the great requirement to respect the individu-
ally formed dignity of the person, only the presentiment of finality, to which step-
ping too closely is an existential crime against existence, only the sensitivity at the
center of every soul and that means at the center of the world, requires the protection
and grounds, therefore, the logic of the public sphere” (Plessner 1999/1924: 159;
see Accarino 2002).

Minimal Phenomenology

The fact that we guarantee the protection of each person’s dignity and irreplaceable
individuality is a contingent fact, but not an arbitrary one. The declarations of human
rights are an historical achievement grown through the experiences of degradation
throughout centuries. These experiences of degradation have condensed into “the
great requirement” (Plessner) that has found its answer in the codification of inter-
national law. Equality of rights can be claimed by everyone having a human face,
but not due to the fact that he or she indeed does have a human face, but because not
even one single person among us should and may be humiliated anymore.

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Hence, to be a person is a social status. Personhood is the postulate guaranteed by

law that a certain being may claim a certain kind of protection: the protection of his
dignity. Being the title for a social status, personhood is logically independent from
all empirical properties a personal being has. This logical independence is postu-
lated in a binding way in the Declaration of Human Rights: Equal rights concerning
to the protection of dignity apply to all humans insofar as they are humans—and not
insofar as they possess a particular property or ability or achieve a particular accom-
plishment. Hegel has stressed this point in his Philosophy of Right with unsurpassed
clarity: “It is part of education [Bildung], of thinking as the consciousness of the
individual in the form of universality, that the I comes to be apprehended as a uni-
versal person in which all are identical. A human being counts as a human being in
virtue of his humanity, not because he is a Jew, Catholic, Protestant, German, Ital-
ian, etc.” (Hegel 2008/1820, § 209, p. 198).
The fact that everyone who has a human face is endowed with the status of per-
sonhood is, as has been said, not arbitrary. It is the political achievement of having
overcome the restriction of the status of personhood, which prior to the civil revo-
lutions had been accorded only to a selected group of beings and not to all social
agents. Nevertheless, two controversial limitations are implied in what has been
argued up to here. The moral-religious postulate of equality of all humans before
God applies to everyone who has a human face; but the legally binding status of
personhood applies (only) to those who are citizens in a state that is a member of
the United Nations. In the context of international law, the limitation is not related
to the question ‘Human face—yes or no?’ but to the very different one ‘Citizenship/
passport—yes or no?’ Still, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights contains the
right to citizenship: Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person
before the law (Article 6).
The second limitation consists in according personhood only to those who have
a human face. But that only the latter are persons is far from clear today. Serious
debates concern the question if great apes might be accorded personality rights
or if computers, robots or self-driving cars might be held responsible for events
caused by them, responsibility involving personal status in some sense. Limita-
tions of this kind should not be imposed arbitrarily. They are and will always
remain contingent, hence independent from any empirical property possessed by
the living being or machine which is concerned by a debate that turns out to be
about the question if they belong to “us”—and since they remain contingent, limi-
tations of the status of personhood will remain a subject of struggle. But however
contingent they are, it is not true that we limit the sphere of personhood simply as
we fancy or in accordance with purely political interests. It is plausible to a high
degree that we do not guarantee the protection of their irreplaceable individuality
to ants, bees and flies. This plausibility rests on our demanding and in fact prac-
ticing a minimal phenomenological approach to personal beings. This approach
is responsible for the difference between plausible and arbitrary answers to the
question what being may count as a person. International law as currently valid
makes use of the human face as the minimal phenomenological content determin-
ing who is included in the sphere of persons. If this current determination is to
be either changed or maintained in the future, it can rightly be demanded—based

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on the sheer presence of debates like the ones just mentioned—that this minimal
phenomenology be made explicit as such. In other words, it can be demanded that
it be spelt out what it means to appear as an eccentrically positioned being.
Plessner himself articulated this demand in clear terms: He expects the catego-
rial relation “if it is to be ontically and not only logically possible, if it is to really
take place, this special relationship a body has to its boundary contours has to be
expressed and make itself felt in the real thing in a way that does not run counter
to it as a physical thing and is consistent with its ‘means’” (Plessner 1928: 128).
This is one of Plessner’s reasons for stressing the difference between the
mode of positionality and the “form of organization” of the beings positioned
in a determinate way. A second reason consists in the thought that eccentricity
presupposes reflection on centricity and thus centric positionality. The “form
of organization” can be determined empirically. The empirical characteristics
of organization, however, merely point to, but are unable to constitute a certain
mode of positionality. Eccentricity might be realized in many organic forms, not
merely in the human one. The minimal precondition of eccentricity consists in a
being’s organized in a centric mode. Plessner expresses this precondition by say-
ing that an eccentrically positioned being must remain animal as far as the body
is concerned. The crucial passage runs as follows:
“If being outside of itself turns the animal into a human, it is clear that the
human must physically stay an animal, as excentricity does not enable a new form
of organization. The physical characteristics of human beings thus only have
empirical value. Being human is not tied to any particular gestalt and (to recall
an imaginative conjecture by the paleontologist Edgar Dacqué) could just as well
take on a variety of gestalts that do not correspond with our own. The human is
tied only to the centralized form of organization, which forms the basis of his
excentricity” (Plessner 1928: 293; see 291).
However outdated the facts that Plessner’s argument rests upon may seem—
who could imagine current developments of artificial intelligence in 1928?— the
argument itself is sufficiently formal since it allows for a structural concept of
‘animalhood’. Nothing prevents the animal form of organization from being real-
ized by purely artificial means; nothing prevents animal sight from being realized
through cameras and sensors instead of organic eyes. From a structural perspec-
tive, the inquiry concerns the minimal conditions for a centric form of organiza-
tion in order to find out the properties that eccentricity as a mode of positionality
is “tied [gebunden]” to.
Stating that eccentricity does not presuppose a determinate material form obvi-
ously does not mean that it does not presuppose material form at all; and neither
does it mean that it might be realized in any kind of material form. The minimal
requirement for personhood consists in a threefold positionality: as a body, in a
body and outside the body, assuming a perspective from where one looks upon
this two moments, this perspective being the point where freedom is conceptu-
ally located. As far as positionality is concerned, a person always and essentially
has related herself to and thus formed her proper relation between ‘being a body’
and ‘having a body’. Hence, eccentricity presupposes embodied form (leibhaftige

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Categorial Differences: Plessner’s Philosophy Far from…

Gestalt), and a minimal phenomenology of personhood requires a precise account

of what it means to appear as embodied form.

Metaphysical Consequences

Plessner links two thoughts that might seem conflicting: firstly, that personhood and
non-personhood differ in a categorial and thus strictly non-empirical way; secondly,
that personhood requires that we phenomenologically distinguish embodied and dis-
embodied forms. Creating this link leads to manifest metaphysical consequences in
Plessner’s philosophy. It is not clear if the thought that eccentricity itself cannot be
reflected upon (because a non-located view is constitutive for it) is a purely struc-
tural thought or if it summons a kind of worldly phenomenology that denies God an
embodied form. In any case, Plessner insists that there is no ‘transcentricity’—sup-
posedly characterized as reflected eccentricity—in the natural universe.6 “Clearly,
animal nature has to be preserved on this highest level, as it is only a matter here of
the closed form of organization being taken to the extreme. There is only one way
for the living thing in its positional moments to progress, and that is to realize the
possibility of organizing the reflexive overall system of the animal body according
to the principle of reflexivity, and to place that which on the animal level only makes
up life in relation also to the living being. A progression beyond this is impossible,
for the living thing has now actually moved behind itself” (Plessner 1928: 291).
This passage is an inconspicuous, but quite definite dismissal of those philosophi-
cal traditions that understand the metaphysical aspect of philosophy as involving
a relation to a transcendent substantial being (“God”). Plessner’s dismissal of the
possibility of ‘transcentricity’ thus concerns, for instance, Leibniz’ Monadology,
according to which it is God’s privilege to be alone “completely without a body”
(Leibniz 1714/1925: § 72, p. 259); and it concerns Scheler, although Plessner had
referred to him when he claimed that anthropology necessarily had to be a theory of
personhood.
The common ground between Plessner and Scheler consists in the thought that
empirical form cannot constitute personhood: “But with the person and acts we do
not posit a lived body; and to the person there corresponds a world, not an environ-
ment” (Scheler 1913/1916: 387). But Plessner radically parts from Scheler in con-
ceiving personhood as bound to embodiment and to material form whereas the non-
identity of personhood and material form leads Scheler to the conclusion that God is
a person (Scheler 1913/1916: 389)—even more, the paradigmatic person, since only
God certifies that embodiment does not constitute personhood. In order to elucidate
the irreducible difference between world and environment, Scheler is forced to admit
that the world is only and exclusively a totality that excludes any kind of structure
understood as discrete manifoldness. He takes it to be “that person means something

6
  Maybe this claim is premature: something like genome editing might only be understood as a kind of
reflection on eccentricity. But that does not concern Plessner’s point; it merely lifts it to a second level of
reflection.

13
 V. Schürmann

that is completely indifferent to the oppositions ‘I-thou,’, ‘psychic-physical,’ and

‘ego-outer world’” (Scheler 1913/1916: 390), whereas Plessner thinks that person-
hood is not prior to the plurality of concrete persons, but rather irreducibly given
with this concrete plurality: Personhood is the categorial frame that makes it pos-
sible to articulate a personal I and a personal You.
It is very difficult to spell out the difference between Plessner’s and Scheler’s
thought. According to Plessner, the relation between the world of personhood (sin-
gular) and the world of persons (plural) is not “completely indifferent”. To be pre-
cise, the world of personhood is not constituted by the world of persons, but it is
bound to it. This form of binding makes the difference; the relation is not “com-
pletely indifferent”. Plessner and Scheler choose almost the same wording, and
Plessner seems to be entirely in accordance with Scheler by stating the shared world
[Mitwelt] to be “truly indifferent to singular and plural” (Plessner 1928: 305). But
the context of this wording reveals the difference: “If one wanted to speak meta-
phorically of the spherical structure of the shared world, one could say that it deval-
ues the spatiotemporal diversity of human standpoints. As a member of the shared
world, every human stands where the other stands” (Plessner 1928: 304). Plessner’s
formulation that this “true indifference” is characterized by “absolute punctiformity”
is easy to misunderstand. But limiting the status of the spatiotemporal difference
between humans does not entirely invalidate this difference. Plessner insists that
“everything human remains originally linked together, even if the vital base is bro-
ken down into individual beings” (Plessner 1928: 304). And immediately after this
quote, Plessner challenges the understanding of “absolute punctiformity” as abso-
lute: “It is important to understand that the terms ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ cannot
be applied to the spirit as sphere. This should not be construed to mean, however,
that it is here a matter of absolute spirit. […] If we recall, however, that spirit is only
the sphere given by the excentric form of positionality of the human, and that excen-
tricity signifies the form of frontal positioning against the surrounding field charac-
teristic of the human, then we can begin to understand the original paradox of the
human situation: that as subject he stands against himself and the world and at the
same time is at a remove from this opposition. In the world and against the world,
in himself and against himself—neither of the opposing determinations dominates
the other; the gap, the emptiness between here and there, the crossing-over remains,
even if the human knows this and by virtue of precisely this knowledge inhabits the
sphere of spirit” (Plessner 1928: 305).
This subtle, but metaphysically decisive difference between Scheler and Plessner
is still far from being elucidated and resolved. Here is just one example: Kurt Rött-
gers’ so-called post-anthropological social philosophy (2012) describes the “com-
municative text” as the structure of the sphere of Shared World as ‘in between,’ but
he cannot avoid understanding the ‘in between’ as not merely empty, but emptied
because it no more knows (or claims to no more need) the ‘crossing-over’. Rött-
gers presumably would accept the thought of “absolute punctiformity,” but he would
vehemently deny that the positions of Shared World are necessarily occupied by
human beings. Furthermore, he would take punctiformity in a geometrical sense,
that is, as points to be occupied merely empirically or factually, but not as positions.
Indeed, who occupies which positional point is not constitutive for Plessner’s Shared

13
Categorial Differences: Plessner’s Philosophy Far from…

World, but it is constitutive that positions in the Shared World can be occupied only
by persons. Otherwise, there could be no “initial linkage” between positions, and
‘crossing-over’ would not signify a relation concerning the positions themselves, but
merely an arbitrary change concerning the entities occupying them.

Anti‑naturalist Generalizations

The peculiar point in this exposition of Plessner’s philosophy consists in the claim
that the idea of eccentricity is its fundamental categorial content. This point could
also be stated by saying that doing philosophy precludes taking a standpoint suppos-
edly outside of philosophy and that therefore eccentricity has already been made use
of if one philosophically argues for it. Consequently, the only possible approach to
philosophy in the modern age is an anthropological, i.e., a personal one, since the
idea of eccentricity is our idea and thus cannot be justified or determined by appeal
to an instance that transcends society, be it nature, be it God. One should keep in
mind that not every categorial content is an idea, i.e., not every categorial content
requires that one makes use of it in order to articulate it. For instance, philosophi-
cally articulating the forms of intuition is not itself an exercise of intuition.
Still, it is possible to generalize what has been said before in view of categorial
contents in general, for instance of categories, forms of intuition and forms of prac-
tice. The crucial step is made if we strictly distinguish between categorial contents
and empirical contents. Based on this distinction, categorial contents can be shown
to be the frames or media of empirical contents. This amounts to the fundamental
insight of transcendental philosophy that every experience, every consciousness of
empirical contents requires a structure that makes it possible in its specific meaning.
Without recourse to a categorial frame it is impossible to spell out that something
is this experience and not another. The paradigmatic example for this argument was
provided by Kant: The perception of something in space and time cannot be the
result of induction based on countless sense data because even the very first sense
datum is experienced as situated in space and time. Therefore, space and time are
categorial contents that enable empirical perceptions. We cannot consider space and
time as hypotheses that we apply to perceptions and that could subsequently be veri-
fied or falsified on the base of just these perceptions.
If categorial contents are principally irreducible to empirical ones, the thesis
of transcendental philosophy amounts to saying that every experience necessarily
requires a structure a priori to it. Here, the suspicion might arise that such an a priori
structure could and should be defined purely as it is in itself since it is assumed to be
logically prior to experience. But even Kant chooses a different wording (although
there might be controversy about the realization of his intention). Kant intends to say
that categorial contents are not given prior to, but instead with experience. His inten-
tion could also be expressed as follows: Categorial contents are not primary contents
to be applied in a second move to empirical contents; rather, categorial contents in
themselves require an application to some empirical content because empirical con-
tents cannot be determined without recourse to categorial contents. According to the

13
 V. Schürmann

intention of transcendental philosophy, categorial contents are what they are only by
being the categorial contents of this-or-that empirical content.
Plessner’s work counts among those philosophies that realize this intention. He
very consequently follows the insight that categorial contents must not be reduced
to empirical contents; in other words: that categorial contents cannot be natural-
ized; or: that which is given with experience cannot be reduced to what is given in
experience. At the same time, he does not accept categorial contents in an empty
space prior to all empirical contents. Personhood is one conspicuous example for his
understanding of categorial content: Like Scheler, Plessner insists that personhood
is independent from concrete persons, but unlike Scheler, he does not accept person-
hood therefore to be prior to the plurality of persons.
The difference illustrated by way of comparison between Scheler and Plessner
can be generalized for all categorial contents: Categorial distinctions cannot be
made without recourse to empirical distinctions, but the latter do not constitute the
former—otherwise categorial distinctions could not be the conditions of the possi-
bility of empirical distinctions; still, categorial distinctions remain “bounded” to the
empirical distinctions they apply to, since otherwise they would have to be taken as
given prior to empirical distinctions instead of given with them.

Acknowledgements  I would like to thank Dr. Thomas Dworschak for translating this article and Dr. Mil-
lay Hyatt for translating the cited phrases of Plessner’s Stufen expected to be published soon.

Compliance with Ethical Standards 

Conflict of interest  Author declare that I have no conflict of interests.

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