The most important work by a key figure in German thought, Helmuth
Plessner's Levels of Organic Life and the Human, originally
published in 1928, appears here for the first time in English,
accompanied by a substantial Introduction by J. M. Bernstein, after
having served for decades as an influence on thinkers as diverse as
Merleau-Ponty, Peter Berger, Habermas, and the new naturalists. The
Levels, as it has long been known, draws on phenomenological,
biological, and social scientific sources as part of a systematic
account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers
non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings in
turn as a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary
dynamics-simply put, interactions between a thing's insides and
surrounding world. On Plessner's unique account, living things are
classed and analyzed by their "positionality," or orientation to
and within an environment. "Life" is thereby phenomenologically
defined, and its universal yet internally variable features such as
metabolism, reproduction, and death are explained. The approach
provides a foundation not only for philosophical biology but
philosophical anthropology as well. According to Plessner's radical
view, the human form of life is excentric-that is, the relation
between body and environment is something to which humans
themselves are positioned and can take a position. This "excentric
positionality" enables human beings to take a stand outside the
boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant
implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology.
Plessner studied zoology and philosophy with Hans Driesch in the
1910s before embarking on a highly productive philosophical career.
His work was initially obscured by the superficially similar views
of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger and by his forced exile during
World War II. Only in recent decades, as scholarship has moved more
squarely into engagement with issues like animality, embodiment,
human dignity, social theory, the philosophy of technology, and the
philosophy of nature, has the originality and depth of Plessner's
vision been appreciated. A powerful and sophisticated account of
embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to
philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its
own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human
establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book
is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a
range of vital current conversations around the animal,
posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of
cognition. This modern philosophical classic, long-awaited in
English translation, is a key book both historically and for
today's interest in understanding philosophy and social theory
together with science, without reducing the former to the latter.
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