Eccentricity and vulnerability. Helmuth Plessner’s philosophical and political anthropology
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2021
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Palgrave Macmillan
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Navarrete Alonso, R. (2021). Eccentricity and Vulnerability: Helmuth Plessner’s Philosophical and Political Anthropology. In: Rodríguez Lopez, B., Sánchez Madrid, N., Zaharijević, A. (eds) Rethinking Vulnerability and Exclusion. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60519-3_3
Abstract
This chapter will focus on "Macht und menschliche Natur", Plessner’s last book of the Weimar period, published just two years before the collapse of the Republic and the content of which is related to another two major figures of German intellectuality during this epoch of upheaval: the author of "Sein und Zeit", Martin Heidegger, and Carl Schmitt. I will examine the affinities and discrepancies which may be found between Schmitt and Plessner regarding the meaning which the conceptual pair friend-enemy acquires according to both authors. Schmitt understood it as the difference which determines human groupings, whereas Plessner comprehended it as a relation which does not institute identity and has not only to do with groups, but also with individuals.
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This text is a written and extended version of the lecture I gave on 7 November 2017 at the First Spanish-Serbian Workshop on Philosophy and Social Theory, ‘Engaging Vulnerability and Exclusion. Rethinking the Subject in the 21st Century’. On that occasion, I focused on Helmuth Plessner’s conception of the individual and underlined the connection between the notions of ‘eccentricity’ and ‘vulnerability’ from that point of view. The present version also explores at the very end that same connection from the perspective of relations between nations and peoples as it is thematized by Plessner himself in the last chapter of his 1931 book Macht und menschliche Natur. In this way, I try to contribute to the revitalization of the reception of Plessner’s philosophical and political anthropology, which I have been working on during recent years, as well as to reclaim the importance of the so-called ‘continental philosophy’ with regard to the discourse on the vulnerability issue.