Political Anthropology

148 Pages·2018·2.81 MB·English

by  Helmuth Plessner

POLITICAL ANTHROPOLOGY
Northwestern University
Studies in Phenomenology
and
Existential Philosophy
General Editor Anthony J. Steinbock
P O L I T I C A L
A N T H R O P O L O G Y
Helmuth Plessner
Translated from the German by Nils F. Schott
Edited and with an introduction by Heike Delitz
and Robert Seyfert
Epilogue by Joachim Fischer
Northwestern University Press
Evanston, Illinois
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu
English translation copyright © 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Pub-
lished 2018 by Northwestern University Press. Originally published in German
in 1931 under the title Macht und menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie
der geschichtlichen Weltansicht. This translation is based on the edition published
as vol. 5 of Helmuth Plessner, Gesammelte Schriften. Copyright © 1981 Suhrkamp
Verlag Frankfurt am Main. All rights reserved by and controlled through
Suhrkamp Verlag Berlin.
Support for the publication of this book was provided by the Helmuth Plessner
Gesellschaft and the Groninger Helmuth Plessner Fund.
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Names: Plessner, Helmuth, 1892– 1985, author. | Schott, Nils F., translator. |
Delitz, Heike, editor, writer of introduction. | Seyfert, Robert, editor, writer of
introduction. | Fischer, Joachim, 1951– writer of afterword.
Title: Political anthropology / Helmuth Plessner ; translated from the Ger-
man by Nils F. Schott ; edited and with an introduction by Heike Delitz and
Robert Seyfert ; epilogue by Joachim Fischer.
Other titles: Macht und menschliche Natur. English | Northwestern University
studies in phenomenology & existential philosophy.
Description: Evanston, Illinois : Northwestern University Press, 2018. | Series:
Northwestern University studies in phenomenology and existential philos-
ophy | “Originally published in German in 1931 under the title Macht und
menschliche Natur: Ein Versuch zur Anthropologie der geschichtlichen
Weltansicht.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018020169 | ISBN 9780810138001 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN
9780810138018 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780810138025 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Power (Social sciences) | Political anthropology. | Radicalism.
Classification: LCC JC330 .P55613 2018 | DDC 320.0113—dc23
LC record available at https:// lccn.loc .gov/ 2018020169
Contents
Introduction vii
Heike Delitz and Robert Seyfert
Political Anthropology
Helmuth Plessner
The Purpose of This Book 3
1 The Naturalistic Conception of Anthropology
and Its Political Ambiguity 9
The Path to Political Anthropology
2 The Universal Conception of Political Anthropology
with Regard to the Human as the Historical Subject
of Attribution of Its World 13
3 Should Universal Anthropology Proceed Empirically
or A Priori? 17
4 Two Possible A Priori Procedures 21
5 The New Possibility of Combining the A Priori and
Empirical Views according to the Principle of the
Human’s Unfathomability 25
6 Excursus: Dilthey’s Idea of a Philosophy of Life 31
7 The Principle of Unfathomability, or The Principle of
Open Questions 39
8 The Human as Power 47
9 The Exposure of the Human 53
v
10 Excursus: Why It Is Significant for the Question of
Power That the Primacy of Philosophy or Anthropology
Is Undecidable 61
11 The Powerlessness and Predictability of the Human 77
12 The Human Is Tied to a People 83
Epilogue: Political Anthropology: Plessner’s Fascinating
Voice from Weimar 89
Joachim Fischer
Notes 111
Glossary 123
Index of Names 129
Introduction
Heike Delitz and Robert Seyfert
The Topic
Among German- language theories of the political, Helmuth Plessner’s
difficult, profound, and fraught Political Anthropology occupies a singular
place. Its fraught elements include Plessner’s affirmative (if not whole-
sale) adoption of Carl Schmitt’s friend– enemy distinction, the idea of a
“nationality” of the human,1 the thesis of an anthropologically necessary
struggle for “power,” and the sense of a German-E uropean historical
mission. With Schmitt, Plessner shares a political realism; with Hannah
Arendt he shares a negative anthropology that emphasizes the undefin-
ability of the human and, resulting from it, a theory of the public. As in
his 1924 Limits of Community, Plessner in Political Anthropology thinks of
politics as a rule- based game, an institutional curbing of political vio-
lence, and he thinks the political as an essential sphere of all human life.
Using the terms employed in current debates, the book and its key con-
cept of “unfathomability” may be seen as a variant of “post- foundational
political thought.”2 Plessner assumes that humanity and human beings
are hidden from themselves. This concealment necessarily requires both
individual personality and particular cultures to close onto themselves
and requires all individuals and groups to differentiate others as others. A
first, central, post- foundational element is Plessner’s principle of “a lack
of a beginning” (44), familiar to readers of Derrida, say, or Deleuze and
Guattari. Societies or cultures do not possess an “extra- historical, extra-
temporal absolute position” (44) but are pure cultures of immanence. In
Plessner’s political anthropology, the delimitation of each cultural sphere
against an outside, moreover, plays as significant a role as it does in the
hegemony theory of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, whose political
philosophy is influenced by Carl Schmitt. Such an approach situates the
immanent definition of cultures always also in a differentiation from a
“constitutive outside.” As we will see, however, there are limits to such
parallels with deconstructivist approaches, namely insofar as the latter
make it possible to think only a negative definition of identities i nstead
of a positive, creative, institutive definition.3 Finally, the concept of un-
viii
HEIKE DELITZ AND ROBERT SEYFERT
fathomability also points to a thoroughly historical anthropology that
anticipates post- structuralist thought.
Published in 1931, Plessner’s Political Anthropology continues to stim-
ulate debate. This is true not only for theories of society or collective
identity, of becoming a “people.” It is also true for debates in social phi-
losophy about the relative or universal nature of human rights, for dis-
cussions in political philosophy of the concept of democratic society and
the weakness of liberal political theory, for assessments of the anthropo-
logical necessity of the political, and generally for philosophical claims
about the human.
“As with others, and with Carl Schmitt above all, Plessner wants to
remedy the sorry state of the estrangement of politics from the spirit
by attempting to show the mutual interpenetration of philosophy and
politics.”4 This complex work—E ric Voegelin goes on to admit that he
“cannot offer an adequate critique of this brilliant and very condensed
presentation”5— is a direct continuation of Plessner’s first major work,
The Levels of the Organic and the Human of 1928. And indeed, Political An-
thropology sets in with the concept of “excentric positionality” elaborated
in the earlier book. “Excentric positionality” is opposed to the “centric”
or instinctual positionality of animals and the “open” positionality of
plants and names the specific relationship of humans with their environ-
ment and their world; in other words, the specifically human way of liv-
ing and experiencing. In Levels of the Organic, Plessner had developed the
central aspects of such an “excentric,” decentered life that distances itself
from itself against the background of a philosophy of nature and of life
(of the organic). In Political Anthropology, he spells out its radical historic-
ity. Because humans are excentric, not bound by instinct, they are highly
variable historically and culturally or, in other terms, unfathomable to
themselves: the human is homo absconditus.6 The essence of the human is
not fixed. Instead, this life only ever settles preliminarily and imaginarily.
Rather than privileging one characteristic or another, absolutizing one as-
pect or another in claims about the human, all anthropologies must thus
remain “open,” they must consider themselves “bound” by the openness
of the question of what the human is.
Binding unfathomability as a formula for human life thus joins the
paradoxical definitions from the concluding chapter of Levels of the Or-
ganic, where Plessner, following the definition of the forms of vegetal and
animal life, had articulated specifically human life in terms of its “natural
artificiality,” “mediated immediacy,” and “utopian standpoint.” Yet by
the same token, we might also say that Political Anthropology constitutes
a complement to the philosophical anthropology of 1928 by developing a
concept of the human that is not obtained from a philosophical biology
ix
INTRODUCTION
(that is, by comparing forms of the living) but on the contrary by look-
ing at the historical and cultural diversity of human life alone— which
also includes recognizing oneself to be human in relation to animals or
God, for example. Instead of grounding anthropology exclusively in a
philosophy of organic life, Plessner now also bases it on a philosophy of
historical and political life. Or, in yet another set of terms: while Levels of
the Organic foregrounded the human as subject and object of nature and
(organic) life, the specific, singular relation of the human to itself (the
awareness not just of being a body but of “having” a body, of being able
to objectivize it), Political Anthropology thematizes the human as subject
and object of culture. At its core, “excentric positionality” now constitutes
the originary foundation of anthropology, philosophy (of life), and poli-
tics equally (73– 74). Because the human confronts itself excentrically, it
must always make itself into something— endow itself with an identity,
settle. This is true on the individual as well as, and above all, the cultural
level. To make this point, Plessner discusses the philosophy of Wilhelm
Dilthey (as well as that of Georg Misch).7 The task Plessner has set himself
is to develop a philosophy of the political, a theory of political existence,
from the radical historicity of the human. The human, society, is always
also a differentiation from the other. For Plessner, this follows from the
very principle of unfathomability, which not only allows the self to en-
counter an other (for breaking out of the self) but the very “possibility of
understanding the human” (84). In the analogous space of the political,
it refers to the ethnically other, to other cultural spheres. Every identity
implies difference and therefore implies the political in the sense of de-
fining what is one’s own in delimiting it from what is foreign.
Political Anthropology thus develops, alongside its theory of the
political, a political ethics as well. Each concrete politics— the question
of how one fashions oneself and how one treats others— always depends
on an anthropology, on the contemporary philosophical (or, generally,
cultural) definition of the human. The political relation also permeates
all social relations. For Plessner, besides international relations, relations
of neighborship in the literal sense are “political,” too. With Schmitt and
against him, Plessner here advocates an ethics or a civilizing of politics.
The diversity of human possibilities results from excentric positionality
and thus from the unfathomability of human life. This diversity has a cor-
relate in the competition for political existence, in contest, in striving for
success. The political means a relationship of power. Yet from excentric
positionality also follows powerlessness and thus the possibility of hubris,
crime, and blunders.8 Human life remains tied to the body and to one’s
history. Given the potential seriousness of the political, namely violence
done to organic and mortal living beings, politics, in modern, liberal