Abstract
Our understanding of ourselves and our place in nature constitutes, if not the central, at least a central problem of metaphysics. Yet, faced with this question, modern philosophical thought has for the most part swung helplessly between an empty idealism and an absurd reductivism. It is time we overcame our narrow factionalism and learned not only to think more independently ourselves about persons, minds, and living nature, but to profit from the efforts of those who have already given us concepts and arguments which could help us along this road. Among such writings, Helmuth Plessner’s major work, Die Stufen des Organischen und der Menschseems to me outstanding, in that it provides both a firm rational basis for the biological sciences, in their many-levelled structure, and for the sciences of man.
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Plessner’s book was first published by de Gruyter (Berlin) in 1928, and re-issued in 1965. In the preface to the second edition, Plessner speculates on the possible reasons for its having been so long ignored, or nearly ignored (though its indirect influence has been deep if not wide). As far as the German philosophical audience goes, there were two important reasons. For one thing, the publication in 1927 of Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, had, as it were, cornered the market for philosophical surprises. And for another, the influence of phenomenology in many quarters amounted at that period to a resuscitation of idealism; the down-to-earth realism of much of Plessner’s argument was from this point of view also uncongenial to the Zeitgeist. It was an unlucky turn of fate that this was so: for Plessner does himself, it seems to me, profit from the phenomenological revolution - though without the heavy emphasis on the new ‘method’ and its new certainty which makes much phenomenological philosophy so difficult for the outsider to penetrate. Moreover, as we shall see, he, like Heidegger, has something to say about such concepts as time, death and destiny, and not, like Heidegger, only in terms of human existence cut off from living nature, but in terms of the significance of those concepts for organic being as a whole. But this is just the corrective that Sein und Zeit needs: the analysis of human existence is necessarily distorted unless it is grounded in an adequate philosophy of living nature.
I shall not attempt to convey this argument in the fullness of its philosophical back-ground. German idealism, in particular, forms for Plessner a tradition to be reckoned with, if chiefly in criticism, while for the mid-twentieth century English-speaking reader his references to it provide chiefly stumbling blocks for the understanding of his own position. I shall therefore ignore much of this aspect of the book and try simply to reconstruct the core of the argument. Nor can I render literally much of Plessner’s terminology; I can only follow the argument in outline and hope to remain faithful, on the whole, to its general theme.
Stufen (second edition), introduction and postscript; also ‘A Newton of a Blade of Grass?’, in Toward a Unity of Knowledge (Proceedings of the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity), Psychological Issues, 1969.
Sir MacFarlane Burnet, The Integrity of the Body, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1962.
See my ‘Two Evolutionary Theories’, this volume, Chapter VII.
M. Grene, ‘Portmann’s Thought’, Commentary (November, 1965) and this volume, Chapter XVI.
I am reversing history here, for Portmann’s treatment of display, through the past twenty years, has in fact been influenced by Plessner’s argument of 1928.
Helmuth Plessner, Die Einheit der Sinne, Bonn, 1923 and 1965.
See for example C. H. Waddington, The Ethical Animal, New York 1961;
E. P. Wigner, ‘The Probability of the Existence of a Self-Reproducing Unit’, in The Logic of Personal Knowledge, London 1961.
It would be worth comparing Plessner’s exposition with F. S. Rothschild’s theory of biosemiotic. See for example his article ‘Laws of Symbolic Mediation in the Dynamics of Self and Personality’, Annals of the New York Academy of Science 96 (1962), 774–783.
See Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge, Chicago, 1958 [Torchbook edition: New York, 1964], Part Four. Cf. also M. Grene, The Knower and the Known, New York 1966, Chapter VIII.
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© 1974 D. Reidel Publishing Company, Dordrecht, Holland
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Grene, M. (1974). The Characters of Living Things. In: The Understanding of Nature. Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol 23. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-010-2224-8_18
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