Hans Peter Kruger, Korper Leib

Persons and Their Bodies: The Krper/Leib Distinction and Helmuth Plessners Theories of
Ex-centric Positionality and Homo absconditus

Author(s): Hans-Peter Krger
Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, Vol. 24, No. 3 (2010), pp. 256-274
Published by: Penn State University Press
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Persons and Their Bodies: The Krper/Leib
Distinction and Helmuth Plessners
Theories of Ex-centric Positionality and
Homo absconditus
Hans-Peter Krger
universitt potsdam
In German discussions over the last twenty years of the difference between
what it is to be a body (in German: Leibsein) and what it is to have a body
(Krperhaben), many have been concerned to remind us that we owe
this conceptual distinction to the philosophical anthropologist Helmuth
Plessner. He introduces the distinction in an essay from 1925written
in collaboration with the Dutch behavioral researcher Frederick Jacob
BuytendijkDie Deutung des mimischen Ausdrucks. Ein Beitrag zur
Lehre vom Bewusstsein des anderen Ichs (The Interpretation of Mimetic
Expressions: A Contribution to Understanding Ones Consciousness of
Other Subjects). Buytendijk later explained that it was Plessner who
worked out the philosophical sense of this distinction, while Buytendijk
merely helped with the examples illustrating its behavior-theoretical context
(Boudier 1993). In contemporary English and French discussions, Plessner
and Buytendijk are virtually unknown (Krger 1998). One rather assumes
that the difference between lived body (Leib) and mere (physical) body
(Krper) stems from Merleau-Ponty, despite the fact that he (1966, 1976)
journal of speculative philosophy, vol. 24, no. 3, 2010
Copyright 2011 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA
JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 256
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persons and their bodies
257
dutifully makes reference to Buytendijk, Plessner, and Max Scheler in his

main works on behavior and perception. But German discussions in the
last two decades do not stop short at reminding us of the true source of
this distinction; they also purport to give reasons why we cannot follow
Plessner, or can follow him only in part, in his use of it.
For example, in his book Leibsein als Aufgabe (Being Ones Body as a
Task), Gernot Bhme writes that Plessner only works out this distinction within the framework of an anthropological comparison of animals
and humans. This comparison is, however, inconclusive, Bhme claims,
because Plessner at once claims that the Leib/Krper (lived body/body)
distinction should already manifest itself in higher animals while at the
same time maintaining that such animals do not recognize this distinction
but live it as a unity. Clearly, Bhme (2003, 2529) continues, humans
develop a reexive distance to this unity of Leib and Krper, which is why
that unity is experienced as a distinction, albeit in an unclear way. A similar view is to be found even earlier, in the writings of Hermann Schmitz.
Since the mid-1960s, Schmitz has held that Plessner is missing a positive
account of what it is to be ones body in living it (Leib). Rather, Plessner
always characterizes what it is to be ones body only indirectly, by reference to the phenomenon of having a body (Krper), according to Schmitz.
By doing so, Plessner falls back into the tradition of the Philosophy of
Reection, where one might as well endorse something like Fichtes concept of self-consciousness, which Schmitz (1965) himself does. Similarly,
Jrgen Habermas claims, in his series of lectures Der Philosophische Diskurs
der Moderne (The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity [1985, 36869]), that
this phenomenological anthropology simply leads us back to a philosophy
of the subject rather than conceptualizing the social by means of language.
Nevertheless, in his late work (after 2000) Habermas (e.g., 2001) does
employ the distinction between being a body (Leibsein) and having a body
(Krperhaben)with a favorable reference to Plessnerso as to put himself in a position to so much as thematize the role of the body in leading a
life within the realm of linguistic communication. Finally, to conclude this
little survey of the philosophical secondary literature, Bernhard Waldenfels,
despite his high estimation of Plessner, nevertheless recommends an
incisive critique of him in his multivolume Phenomenologie des Fremden
(Phenomenology of the Foreign). For Waldenfels (1999, 164), the bodyin
the sense of the functioning body (Merleau-Ponty)is the transitional
point, the Umschlagstelle (Husserl), where mind merges into nature and
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nature merges into mind. The principle error that has plagued nearly all
philosophers and sociologists, including Plessner, according to Waldenfels,
has been to conceive of the distinction between being ones body and having a body in terms of the role of some thirdthat is, the role principally
occupied by experts and judges. The role of the third, however, leads us into
those self-ratifying orders that one knows from Modernity, in the sense of
the society of normalization (Foucault). Instead of conceiving it in terms of
the role of the third, Waldenfels recommends understanding the distinction in a differently normative way: namely, as subject to the foreignthat
is, even before situations can be responded to, the foreign removes itself
from the order of the third. Yet it strikes me as rather unlikely that we can,
in this globalized society, replace the roles of third persons with those of the
rst and the second. The third must not be understood as a rationally universalizing observer in the place of a normalizing power, which Waldenfels
(1997, 11018; 1998, 17780) himself does.
Now one should only welcome these criticisms of Plessners treatment
of the distinction between lived body (Leib) and mere body (Krper) insofar
as they bear fruit for a systematic somatic philosophy. And I am happy to
admit that they do in certain areasfor example, the description of sensing
and of atmospheres in Schmitz, or the political urgency with which Bhme
presents the body as that nature that we ourselves are, or with respect to
Waldenfelss normative motive for opening up orders for the foreign rather
than closing them against it. Still, it is not clear to me what the advance
over Plessners conception of the framework as a whole is supposed to consist in. It seems to me that the revision and correction of his primary texts
proceed rather selectively and that we might benet from systematically
reconstructing them. It is, after all, striking that Plessner experimented with
this distinction for half a century, without ever managing to arrive at a sort
of textbook solution. There is, in his philosophical-anthropological manner
of developing the distinction, a point that cannot be captured quickly and
easilyor at least not in a conveniently canonical way, to pick up on Kants
distinction between philosophical activity as such and philosophical thought
as organized in discrete, self-contained schools of thought.
Plessners philosophical anthropology is, in my opinion, not an
empirically generalizing anthropology, as Bhme seems to consider it in
distinguishing humans from animals. Naturally, philosophical anthropology starts out from bioanthropology and medicinal anthropology, social and
cultural anthropology, and historical anthropology, in order to integrate all
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of these special anthropologies. But it does not stop at criticizing modern

philosophies from the standpoint of an integrative anthropology. This
sort of criticism Plessner ([1937] 1983, 3639; [1963] 1983, 24245) calls
anthropological philosophythat is, an ersatz philosophy that claims
to be able to solve philosophical tasks on the basis of an anthropological
denition of the essence of man. In contrast to this, his own philosophical anthropology is one step beyond the philosophically integrative sort of
anthropology. For it reconstructs our acquisition of anthropological distinctions in a specically philosophical manner. It investigates how anthropological differentiations are made possible from outside the anthropological
circle (Krger 2001, 2009, 2010). Thus, Heideggers critique of anthropology does not apply to Plessners philosophical anthropology. Nor does it
belong to some purportedly German school of philosophical anthropology,
as is often claimed in connection with works by Max Scheler, Helmuth
Plessner, and Arnold Gehlena claim whose falsity is due mainly to the
academic-political considerations motivating it (for the Frankfurt school, see
Schndelbach 1983, 26972; for Gehlens school, see Fischer 2008, 1415).
In what follows, I will concentrate on the two most important
points raised by contemporary criticisms of Plessners approach. First, for
Plessner, and still today, the systematically decisive question concerning the
Krper/Leib distinction is: From whom and to whom is this distinction to
be made? Plessners answer was clear: the distinction is performed by living
persons and for living persons. This is his response from Die Einheit der
Sinne (The Unity of the Senses, [1923] 1980), through the Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community, [1924] 1981), Die Stufen des Organischen und der
Mensch (The Levels of the Organic and Man, [1928] 1975), and Lachen und
Weinen (Laughing and Crying, [1941] 1982) all the way until his late works,
Conditio humana ([1961] 1983) and Anthropologie der Sinne (Anthropology
of the Senses, [1970] 1980). The distinction, in Plessners view, only makes
sense for persons who occupy a place in life, not those above it (like angelic
or divine entities) or those below it (the molecular and purely instinctual).
Indeed, persons who stand within life stand precisely within this differentiation, which is why their lives are constantly posing a task for them.
This difference thus has the structure of a question. And this interrogativity
inhabits and informs not just any behavioral formation but the specically
personal mode of behavior. One thing that is striking in all of the critiques
of Plessner is that they do not adopt his thirdness, the personalitymostly
because this, as the third person, gets mistaken for the standard observer
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of the natural sciences. And here it also goes unnoticed that Plessner
addresses personhood in two ways, for example, in the introductory chapter about the re-creation of philosophy in the Stufen des Organischen (Levels
of the Organic, [1928] 1975, 3032): anthropological comparison must run
not only verticallythat is, by comparing human and nonhuman life
formsbut also horizontallythat is, within the sociocultures of Homo
sapiens itself in the medium of history. Of course, the three categories of
body (Krper), living body (Leib), and person do not signify three distinct entities in the ontic sense. We are rather faced here with a distinction
between various modes in which a persons life is led.
The second point of contention resides in the problem of Plessners
methodology in developing the distinction between Leib and Krper. Many
of the objections to his employment of the distinction are either of a phenomenological, hermeneutic, dialectic, or transcendental sort. On the one
hand, Plessner is, compared with his contemporaries, a highly reective
author when it comes to methods and theories, which is how he earned
himself such lifelong unpopularity or, formulated more neutrally, why
he did not seem to resonate or cooperate with philosophers of his time.
His chief criticism of them was that they took a single method to embody
an entire philosophy, as though it were not precisely the task of each philosophy to combine a plurality of methods. On the other hand, Plessner
was caught up in a series of discoveries. He did not stand sovereign above
them, nor could he effect a temporal distance from them, which is why so
many of his writings stop short in draft form. I consider his most important discovery to be that personal creatures need to experience their behavioral limits in nonplayed laughing and crying. Nevertheless, this discovery
in Laughing and Crying takes place, methodologically speaking, within a
hermeneutic and thus too simple a framework considering his own, more
ambitious aim.
I begin with the second pointthe methodological procedures required
for competence in making theoretical judgments. By 1920 Plessner had
already extensively analyzed the problem of the power of judgment
that is, the problem of Kants third Critiquein his Habilitations thesis,
Untersuchungen zu einer Kritik der philosophischen Urteilskraft (Investigations
Concerning the Critique of Philosophical Judgment, [1920] 1981). His rst
response to this problem then came in 1923, with his semiotic workthe
functional Unity of the Senses for living persons, which bore the subtitle
An Aesthesiology of the Mind (Einer sthesiologie des Geistes). In that work,
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Plessner develops criteria for philosophical investigation in the following

manner: The latter must (a) guarantee methodological access to the
phenomena in question, so that these phenomena might show themselves
and appear to persons. Moreover, such an investigation must (b) give an
account of how we are to take and regard these phenomenain short, how
the phenomena are to be understood. And nally, an investigation must
(c) methodologically enable a personal stance in which one can arrive at
judgmentsthat is, it must allow for grounded attributions to phenomena,
methods, and persons, both individually, interindividually, and superindividually from a social perspective and subjectively, intersubjectively, and
objectively from an epistemic perspective.
Regarding (a), methodological access to phenomena, it is here, as
part of this methodological task, that Plessner later locates phenomenology as a method, not as a theory. Husserls techniques of bracketing constitute a methodological breakthrough. But one should be careful not to
automatically characterize a phenomenons mode of givenness in a normative manner. Plessner (from 1925 on) methodologically connects the
lived body (Leib), in contradistinction to the body (Krper), with the register of phenomena to which persons enjoy immediate, direct, and, in
part, arbitrary modes of access. Access to Krper phenomena is, by contrast, methodologically available only by means of mediating and indirect
detours, for example, by means of therapy, experiment, or reection. But
since he is mainly concerned with access to specically living phenomena,
Plessner ceases to follow Husserl, preferring instead Max Scheler. Scheler
had replaced the dualism Physis versus Psyche with the following methodological motto: both Physis and Psyche, and hence expression. If a phenomenon displays some indicative physical and psychical featuresthat is, if it
expresses itselfit thereby declares itself, in its mode of appearance, to be a
candidate for the living. For it then has two directions in its behavior: one
from within going outward into the surrounding environment and, conversely, another from the external and exterior going back inside. These two
behavioral directions are processually interwoven in space and time. Thus,
a phenomenon counts as leiblich insofar as it is given in an immediate and
direct manner. The lived body (Leib) attunes itself directly and immediately
to its environment in its mode of appearance. Discovering its corporeal
dimensions (Krper), however, requires the aforementioned detours, laboratory work, experiments, mediation. The lived body as environmental
intentionality (Plessner with Buytendijk [1925] 1982, 8386, 105, 12129),
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which Merleau-Ponty adopts word for word, remainsby the standards of

physicsthe spaceless and timeless presupposition that makes empirical
scientic characterizations of bodies (Krper) in space and time possible
in the rst place. Otherwise, one would not be dealing with the physical
characteristics of the lived body (Leib) but, rather, inanimate bodies (Krper).
Regarding (b), understanding the phenomena, what manifests itself
and whom one is phenomenally encountering are taken up, regarded,
understood in a particular way. Understanding too involves modes of immediacy and directness in the here and nowthat is, modes of lived bodiliness (Leiblichkeit). This is the case insofar as an expression is responded to
here and now as self-evident. But here too there are methodological detours
of mediating and indirect reconstruction of the understanding of the phenomenon, which Plessner calls the intelligible possibilities of the expression. One could, in the latter case, also speak of interpretation. But what now
becomes manifest in the horizontal comparison of culturesas presented
in Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community, [1924] 1981) and Macht
und menschliche Natur (Power and Human Nature, [1931] 1981)is precisely
the difference in kind that obtains between understanding and interpretation, even when it comes to what are, for us, the same phenomena. Even
within Western culture, there is a plurality of understanding and interpretation among experts and laymen, epochs and nations, classes and social
strata. For Rousseau devotees, the direct modes of presenting and understanding phenomena classically have the normative primacy of naturalness
among sovereign equals. Among the followers of John Locke and Adam
Smith, it is rather the mediated and indirect detours in power distribution,
legal procedures, and the market that have the normative primacy of bourgeois civilization. The decisive claim of Plessners ([1931] 1981, 214, 225)
against all hermeneutic turns in phenomenologyespecially and explicitly
against Heideggers existential-hermeneutic turncomes from his 1931
work, Macht und menschliche Natur: there is no natural hierarchy of philosophical problems. Not even the hermeneutical turn in phenomenology
makes one capable of privileged philosophical judgment; it rather leads
one into the hermeneutic circle of a particular culture. In Western modernity, where Christianity has been secularized, this circle is an anthropological one. Not even the existential-hermeneutic interpretation of self-evident
Dasein can serve as a standard for a democratically prejudiced comparison
of cultures, against which all others can be shown to produce decient
human beings (Plessner [1931] 1981, 186, 21011). As soon as one employs
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phenomenology and hermeneutic, not just as methods but taking them

to be theories capable of delivering philosophical judgment, one falls into
making blind, fallacious, ethnocentric, and anthropocentric inferential
leaps from part to whole.
Let us now proceed to (c), the stances ([1923] 1980), which Plessner
later terms positionings ([1928] 1975) taken up by living persons. The
issue here is how to become capable of judgment regarding the association
of a phenomenon with an understanding of it, namely, with its interpretation. Which ascriptions are better, and which are worse? This question cannot be answered without an investigation of the breaks and above all the
breakdowns of human behavior and the ways we break out of that behavior,
and such an investigation must also take the consequences of such breaks
into consideration. It is here that a series of Plessners works comes into
play: his studies in Laughing and Crying, his ([1935] 1974) reections on the
crisis of the bourgeois mind in that extreme case in Germany (later called
Die versptete Nation [The Delayed Nation]), his studies in Emanzipation
der Macht (Emancipation of Power, [1962] 1981) of the phenomenon of
total war and its transformation into a normalizing society, and his studies
of addictions and passions that are no longer capable of being reined in or
conditioned by the aficted person and therefore slide off into the unconditioned. In this third methodological step, Plessner is interested in the
conditions under which all-too-human phenomena are inverted into their
opposites, that is, come to occupy and determine the whole of the personal
life-form in virtue of their eventual consequences in the course of time.
Let us consider Plessners examples of unfeigned laughing or crying.
Both situations must be free of external compulsion in order to develop in
the rst place. In both situations, the individual is no longer able to respond
to the situation with personal mastery, that is, is incapable of balancing,
establishing an equilibrium between her lived bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) and
her corporality (Krperlichkeit). In laughter, the subject is presented with
too many mutually exclusive possibilities of having a body, none of which
appears, from an external standpoint, to be adequate as a response to the
situation. Crying arises when the person lacks any sense of what would
enable her to respond to the situation. In both cases, the person, incapable of responding to the situation, delivers her response through her lived
body: with hesitating struggles (crying) or joyful spontaneity (laughter).
However, this lived body no longer functions in a habitual, practiced manner but, rather, dissolves, disintegrating its personal interconnection with
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having a body. In laughter, the contradictory corporeal possibilities shoot

out of the body into a world at a distance. Crying rather involves the lived
body slumping away from the surrounding environment back into itself
(Plessner [1941] 1982, 36684). In laughter, the association of phenomena dissolves in an ex-centric explosion of behavior toward the outside. In
crying, the integration of phenomena dissolves in a recentering implosion
inward. Plessner emphasizes that the occasions for both kinds of phenomena are not causes, because they depend upon how they are taken up in
a life-historical sense, which involves a certain divergence from habit. In
both kinds of phenomena, the causal mechanism only appears once the
person has capitulatedthat is, once corporality (Krperlichkeit) and living bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) have fallen apart from one another in one way
or anotherand then it plays itself out in phases, automatically. Plessner
emphasizes above all that the aficted person experiences the limits of her
behavioral structure.
If one could draw a general conclusion from all of this, it is not one
of a new dualismthat either Leibliche or Krperliche modes have primacy per se. It would rather be that only through the integration of these
two modes of person does behavioral formation become possible again.
The form of such integration must be determined on an individual basis.
Everyone laughs, but each person laughs differently. Everyone cries, but
each person cries differently. So what we are dealing with here is an individual universality of personal life, from which the aficted person has to learn
(individually) rather than simply bandying about new common denominators. The sovereignty of a person is established to the degree that he can
afrm what he has experienced as the limits of his life, to the degree that
he can, from a temporal and spatial remove, smile about them (Krger
1999, chap. 4). The sovereignty of living persons is thus precisely not established (contrary to the line of thought from Hobbes to Carl Schmitt) when
they have the power to invoke a state of exception in order to be able to
hang on to their limitless self-determination and self-actualization. That
only distracts from the experience of ones own limits and lends them a
shape that, given appropriate distributions of power, can be catastrophic
for oneself and others.
Plessners new understanding of sovereignty contains, in my view,
an important link to psychiatry. The transition into violent situations hinders the specic experience of ones own limits in laughing and crying
either because one must play an instrumental role in such situations or
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because one can no longer play in them at all, without, however, being able
to laugh or cry in a nonplayed way. Does mania arise when the repetition
of laughter becomes compulsive? Does depression arise when the repetition of crying becomes compulsive? When both phenomena stabilize, as
it were, by freezing into automaticity? Thus the extraordinaryindeed the
limit experiencetakes the place of the ordinary and every day, the usual
and self-evident. When the state of exception becomes permanent, there
are no more limit experiences. Would schizophrenia then mean that the
aficted person is simply no longer able to laugh or cry, that both laughter
and tears would be lost to her? In all of these cases, personal life would be
endangered insofar as it would no longer be able to draw its own limits or
to afrm itself within this self-limitation.
Naturally, this connection to psychiatry is further complicated by the
fact that we do, in any case, live in a society and a culture whose most basic
structures are already publicly dominated by a false understanding of sovereignty. The limit experiences that are so necessary from a philosophicalanthropological point of view are, in our lives, suppressed, exaggerated,
marginalized, and, at the same time, deployed in the media in the service
of everything imaginable (apart from their proper delimiting function): a
constant and inationary misuse of a necessary possibility of coming back
to oneself, which becomes no longer available when one needs it in real
life-historical time. The ip side of the secular self-deication of man
consists in the desanctication, the Entgtterung of the world (Plessner
[1935] 1974, 14749). Both counteract the attunement to a personal standard of life in the world.
The problem of the right or wrong time and the right or wrong place
appears in a form exemplary for modernity in Plessners Grenzen der
Gemeinschaft. The familiar forms of community develop early ontogenetically and are irreplaceable. The model for rational and objective associations and communities is developed later, though it is no less important
for successive generations. The habitualization of rational, objective values
builds on the habitualization of affective values. In both learning processes
specic modes of immediacy and directness are developed as the results of
processes of sociocultural mediation and indirectnesssuch as parental
care, nurturing, and cultivation. In both cases, there emerges a dependability in behavior through an orientation to particular and commonly shared
values that the elders have already personally incorporated and the young
are coming to embody.
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In terms of the LeibKrper balance that is demanded by these

affective and rational values, the problem becomes how one is to deal with
the Other and the Foreign or Strange, in good times and bad. This problem
can arise in the individualization of community values as well as in the
encounter with Others and Strangers. One way or another, it is a deviation
from the values as originally learned. Those sorts of interactions, in which
the development of an equivalent to the value orientation of the community
becomes possible in the face of the Other and the Strange, Plessner calls
forms of society. This development requires that one use the surface of
behavior to grant oneself some external leeway spatially and temporally,
since one cannot know the detailed hermeneutic inner of the respective
Other or Foreigner (Plessner [1924] 1981, 7990). One can thus become
educated in diplomatic interactions between public persons and tactful
interactions between private persons (Plessner [1924] 1981, 1059). Forms
of society reciprocally enable, by means of playacting, interactions between
Others and Foreigners whose deep hermeneutics one may never know
but whom we nevertheless can come to know to some extent by delaying
a revelation that, if premature, would be embarrassing or rude (Plessner
[1924] 1981, 95103). Compared to the community values already learned,
the acquisition of forms of society seems highly mediated and indirect. To
the extent that this mode of learning is socially widespread at all, it tends to
be found in those who are relatively older and better situated, above all in
the educated and cultured or, at any rate, in those who are more practiced in
such forms. The latter can seem to young people of disadvantaged classes
(insofar as they seem to seek clear values and reliable behavior in terms of
conventional norms) as wayward, abnormal, purely external, effeminate,
homosexual, opportunistic, inconsistent, and so on.
Plessner ([1924] 1981, 1415) characterizes social radicalism as any
political aspiration to replace the whole complex of social forms with a
particular inection of community forms or society forms. Whatever happens to be held to be immediate and direct here and now is then taken to
be a principled guideline for everythingthat is, for an empty common
denominatorand is enforced with exclusive authority against all Others
and everything foreign. This constrains, if not violently closes off, everyones potential for future development, instead of publicly and legally
expanding them in our pluralistic intercourse with one another. The state
is not a source of value but, rather, a public procedure that, through the
medium of the law, enables the integration of community and society
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forms that is necessary here and now, thereby civilizing politics (Plessner
[1924] 1981, 11516).
If one takes all Plessners methods together, they amount to a progressive suspension of habitual prejudicesviewed logically, the prejudices
of phenomenology, of hermeneutics, and nally of dialectics as a conversational formthrough the investigations of behavioral crises and their
consequences. In this respectconcerning the grounded withholding of
judgmentPlessner is far more methodologically consistent than someone like Husserl, who famously pursued the self-contradictory project of
a science of the lifeworld in the end, in order to nally be able to stop suspending judgment. And so in the end, it turns out that we have to return to
the rst point concerning how the formation of judgment is made possible.
Regarding (1): Personhood and the Third

Plessners Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (Levels of the Organic and
Man) is no contribution to empirical anthropology, although one immediately notes that the author, who was himself also a zoologist, is thoroughly
familiar with biological laboratories and the design of experiments. Rather,
the Stufen investigate which presuppositions biologists employ in making
their contributions to empirical bioanthropology. Presuppositions here
are preconditions drawn from common sense, which the biologists cannot themselves explain. When, as life scientists, they empirically describe
and measure something, they presuppose that they can already distinguish
living from nonliving objects both by intuition (in a roughly Kantian sense)
and through understanding. Plessner speaks here of the prescientic view
of the world that is habitually at work in the scientic view of the world
([1928] 1975, 69, 72, 114) and of the preconditions of human existence
in which the scientist has long since participated as second naturewhich
preconditions are to be contrasted with those conditions the scientists
explicitly draw on in their explanations. In contrast to empirical science,
which characterizes its objects in space and time, philosophy is concerned
with the question of how the emergence of phenomena in spatiotemporal intuition and understanding is indeed possible. Anything we can
encounter, imagine, or remember as specically alive in contrast to inanimate, anything that can be distinguished as specically vegetable, animal,
or human, emerges with inherent spatiality and inherent temporality.
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It presents itself in intuition and understanding as something inherently

spatial and temporal and can then be revealed by empiricism hic et nunc
to be something spatiotemporally determinate. The natural philosopher
directs his attention to disclosing the specic character of vitality and its
levels of interaction in categories, while the biologist investigates living
phenomena in accordance with his empirical concepts. But categories are
not (mere) concepts (Plessner [1928] 1975, 116).
Thus, when Plessner introduces the idea of a person at the end of the
Stufen and his vertical comparison with nonhuman life-forms, he does so in
the following inherently spatial way: a person experiences herself (a) from
the outside as having a body (Krper) like other bodies. She can have a body
insofar as she takes part in the practices of mediation and reection in the
external world. A person has a body to the extent that it can serve as her
representative, that she is interchangeable with it or even can be replaced
by it. Yet a person equally experiences herself inwardly (b) as living as a body
(Leib), that is, as existing in or through this lived body. Insofar as she lives
as and through her Leib, it cannot serve as her representative hic et nunc,
nor are the two interchangeable, nor can it replace her. It is Leib and not
the corporal body (Krper). One does not have the lived body in the external
world as one has a body. It is rather experienced (erlebt) and lived (gelebt)
here and now in the inner world of the person. Thus lived or living time is
irreversible for her who lives it, as Plessner repeatedly emphasizes against
all attempts to replace lived time with corporeal time. The most important aspect is, however, (c) that the distinction between the inner and the
outer is not formed from the standpoint of the organism but, rather, from
that of its shared world (Mitwelt). Someone who only reads the usual passages from the end of the Levels might easily think that inner and outer
referred, as they usually do, to the organism. But in doing so, one overlooks
the fact that Plessner has just spent three hundred pages discussing various organizational formsthat is, forms of the internal differentiation of
organismsand various positional formsthat is, organisms forms of
behavior within the environment (see Grene 1966).
The organism no longer constitutes the point of reference in
distinguishing inner from outer, for it already belongs to centrically
organized creatures with centric behavioral patterns (e.g., mammals) to
live, as Plessner ([1928] 1975, 3078) notes, in social co-relationships
(Mitverhltnissen). The shared world (Mitwelt), by contrast, concerns the
relation between persons rather than organisms. Thus it is located neither
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in the organism nor in the center of the interactions between the organisms
and their surrounding world or environment (Umwelt). If one wants to
imagine quasi-spatially where it is located, it lies outside of the organism and outside of its interactions with the environment. Hence Plessners
formulation ex-centric positionality. Thus, we have here abandoned the
biological correlations between the organism and its environment (J. von
Uexkll) because we are concerned with the question of how their determination comes to be possible. Anyone who resides within these correlations
cannot determine them from the outsidethat is, from the standpoint of
a world with a foreground and a backgroundfor he would not have any
distance from the surrounding environment that he inhabits. By contrast, a
scientist as a living person can distinguish between environment (Umwelt)
in the foreground from a world (Welt) with a background.
Both spatially and temporally, living persons protrude from such correlations ec-statically (Max Scheler). In this sense, they stand like a lter next
to themselves, over themselves, behind themselves, before themselves, and
under themselvestaking themselves to be the organism and its interactions. Thus, the self-understanding of living persons can vary throughout
the history of culturetaking on the form of, for example, a daimon sitting on ones shoulder (Plato, Arendt), or a movie camera, or a Thou
that accompanies one (Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers). Michael Tomasello, a
primatologist and psychologist engaged in intercultural comparative work,
speaks today of a birds-eye view (2008, 160, 179, 266). Structurally, the
shared world (Mitwelt) lies between me and him insofar as it is the referential return from the other person to myself, and it lies between me
and me insofar as it is the referential return from myselfthe person
I am external to my organism and its interactionsto myself. For modern,
empirical scientic observers, each person normally has only one single
body. But whether that is true of a person with her lived body is an entirely
different question. Her lived body may identify with one of the dead, an
angel, or a loved one in the distant future or past. Ones own lived body
(Leib) is not ones corporal body (Krper) but, rather, its lived medium.
Thus the inner world does not mean what happens in the physical organism but, rather, what happens in the lived body. Van Goghs lived bodily
world was an unbelievably yellow world; Bachs lived bodily world was an
incredibly harmonic one. Plessner emphasizes again and again that there
is absolutely no distinction between the corporal outer world and the lived
bodily inner world with respect to their substratum but, rather, with respect
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to the fact that we can have a body (Krper) in the one world by participating
in the relevant practices and that we are involved in the other world through
our vitality (Lebendigkeit), which we cannot escape, neither in moments of
supreme boredom nor in moments of highest intensity. Materially, energetically, structurally, and functionally, the outer world, the inner world,
and the shared world that people inhabit overlap. But the manner in which
people are involved in them changes. Persons carry out their lives in various kinds and manners of world. Plessners worlds designate the modes in
which one can lead ones life as a person.
It is this shared-worldly (mitweltliche) structure of shared life (Mitleben),
and thus of self-life (Selbstleben), that constitutes the fundamental
determination of both mind (Geist), which is always already shared by
persons, and the social, which is always already shared by persons.
Before persons even learn to distinguish themselves in the singular and
the pluralthat is, before they can make attributions to themselves, to
Others, and to Foreignersthey already participate socially in a mode of
mindedness (Plessner [1928] 1975, 300302, 304). What we have here, in
the shared world, is Plessners nal theoretical-methodological disclosure
of the structure that enables personal life. It concerns an ambivalent, in
itself fragmentary, structure (a hiatus-lawfulness), which, consequently,
can only be lived in a historical process. It continually poses the task of
integrating body (Krper) and lived body (Leib) anew. This life-form is both
ahead of and behind its present. Its possibility comes out of the future,
and it stores up its present as the past of this future. Thus repetitive habit
grows, from which the distinction between Krper and Leib diverges anew.
The historical, horizontal change in attributions and their crises is
dealt with in other writingsin Macht und menschliche Natur (Power and
Human Nature), Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community), Conditio
Humana, and so onwhose theory of playing in and playing with roles
I have reconstructed in my book Zwischen Lachen und Weinen (Between
Laughing and Crying [1999]). Plessners philosophical anthropology, even
viewed temporally, has nothing to do with Arnold Gehlens bioanthropology. Gehlens ([1940] 1993, chap. 42) bioanthropology develops the return
to strong institutions that articially restore centric positionality, within
a socioanthropological and cultural anthropological perspective. By contrast, Plessner argues for the person to live ex-centrically, to live doubly, a
doppelgnger-hood. Persons live by doubling themselves into a public and
a private person. One can imagine the most elementary form of this double
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structure as a mask in a role that someone is both playing in and playing

with. Others and Foreigners have public access to the surface of the mask,
while it cloaks a private reference. The medium of public and private roles
enables a person to withstand and resist the presumptions and impertinences that follow from the we-form of her own I (Plessner [1928] 1975,
303) as well as from the we-form of Others and Foreigners. When Plessner
speaks of the we-form of ones own I, he does not mean the third-person
perspective of the empirical sciences but, rather, the symbolically triadic
structure of a person as she lives in her lived body (Leib), as she also has a
corporal body, and as she integrates the two in leading the life of a person.
Within this structure, there is no longer anything like a traditional hierarchy but, rather, a task for living as a person. And it is just this task of integrating Krper and Leib that Plessner poses his readers. One cannot relieve
a person of the task of both living her body as Leib and having it as Krper
like other bodily objects. At any rate, a person is no longer living when she
is totally disembodied or totally decorporealized. Choosing nally between
Krper and Leib would constitute a relapse into a dualistic either/or alternative. I am, but I do not have myself, completely, Plessner ([1961] 1983,
190) tells us; and this describes the task, whose precise form emerges only
in a particular socio- and cultural-historical context.
What Plessner means by the Third or the Person is not at all the standard observer of the empirical sciences. Instead it is the integration of the
First (lived bodiliness: Leiblichkeit) and the Second (corporal bodiliness:
Krperlichkeit). This becomes clear in his ([1931] 1981, 16061, 18182,
18890) thesis of the unfathomability of man as a whole, which he ([1969]
1983) later sums up in the gure of the Homo absconditus. This gure or
image of limit signies that living persons can only come to know someone
or something from particular perspectives and under particular aspects;
and these are themselves historical products (Plessner [1928] 1975, 300,
302) and so do not exclude the possibility of new or different perspectives.
Such perspectives also reect distinctions between Leib and Krper. The
indeterminacy and unfathomability of persons in the leading of their lives
emerge from the variety of these changing perspectives and aspects. It is
only the invalid extension of these perspectives and aspects to the whole
of the future that leads to false promisesto the animal ideologicum
(Plessner [1935] 1974). The animal ideologicum cannot endure its questionability. It ees into a single and exclusive answer for the whole. It is a form
of closing off the Homo absconditus, and this closure represents the most
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powerful and effectual form of Western modernity, regardless of political

sideLeft, Right, or so-called middle. The Homo absconditus, by contrast,
lives in skepticism of the animal ideologicums positive absolutisms. He
does not hold himself to be someone who could or might have to take over
the role of God. The questionability of his form of life keeps him open. And
he thus is alive in a personal way.
Every person must come to (nd or create) herself by living. The
philosophical activity of calling oneself into question is more important
than the school in which one happened to learn it. Being a person is
the irreplaceable answer to the question of how the tension between the
physical body and the lived body can always be resolved anew, here and
now and in the future. Unfortunately, this idea is just what is lacking in
Merleau-Pontys workthis mode of performing, of accomplishing that
unity of Krper and Leiband thus corporal body and lived body become
a new dualism.
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Hans Peter Kruger, Korper Leib

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Persons and Their Bodies: The Krper/Leib Distinction and Helmuth Plessners Theories of

Ex-centric Positionality and Homo absconditus

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 256

persons and their bodies

dutifully makes reference to Buytendijk, Plessner, and Max Scheler in his

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 257

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 258

persons and their bodies

of these special anthropologies. But it does not stop at criticizing modern

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 259

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 260

persons and their bodies

Plessner develops criteria for philosophical investigation in the following

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 261

which Merleau-Ponty adopts word for word, remainsby the standards of

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 262

persons and their bodies

phenomenology and hermeneutic, not just as methods but taking them

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 263

having a body. In laughter, the contradictory corporeal possibilities shoot

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 264

persons and their bodies

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 265

In terms of the LeibKrper balance that is demanded by these

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 266

persons and their bodies

Regarding (1): Personhood and the Third

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 267

It presents itself in intuition and understanding as something inherently

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 268

persons and their bodies

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 269

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 270

persons and their bodies

structure as a mask in a role that someone is both playing in and playing

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 271

powerful and effectual form of Western modernity, regardless of political

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 272

persons and their bodies

. 2009. Philosophische Anthropologie als Lebenspolitik. Deutsch-jdische und

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 273

Odo Marquard, and Elisabeth Strker, S. 23546. Frankfurt am Main:

JSP 24.3_04_Kruger.indd 274

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