Levels of Organic Life and the Human provides a highly original systematic account of nature, organic life, and human existence, drawing on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources for its arguments. The work 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 outsides. On Plessner’s unique account, living things are classed and analyzed by their characteristic “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 not only provides a foundation 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 of 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 to the Netherlands during WWII. Only in the past 40 years, 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.