Philosophical Anthropology - The Question of the Special Position of the Human Being (1910-1940)
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
Philosophical anthropology arises from a crisis: after Darwin, the human being is an animal. After the First World War, he is barbaric. What is the human being at all anymore? Where does his dignity lie, if he is neither the image of God nor the crown of creation?
Hegel’s answer was: the human being is the being that becomes an object to itself. The animal lives; the human being knows that he lives. The animal has needs; the human being reflects on his needs, can take a stance toward them, affirm or deny them. This self-relatedness constitutes the special position – not biological superiority, but self-distancing.[1]
Philosophical anthropology of the 1920s attempts to reground this insight anew – after Darwin, after Freud, after the World War. Three thinkers are central: Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, Arnold Gehlen. All three seek the difference that distinguishes the human being from the animal. But their answers and their political consequences diverge fundamentally.
Max Scheler - Spirit as Openness to the World
Max Scheler (1874-1928) was the most brilliant and most problematic of these thinkers. Catholic convert, phenomenologist, philosopher of life, sociologist – Scheler united heterogeneous traditions into a distinctive synthesis.
The Human Place in the Cosmos (1928), his major work in anthropology, appears shortly before his death. The thesis: the human being differs from the animal not gradually (more intelligent, more capable of learning, more social), but categorically. There is a new principle that appears in the human being and in no animal: spirit (Geist).[2]
Spirit is not “higher intelligence.” Animals have intelligence too – apes use tools, dolphins cooperate, ravens plan ahead. Spirit is openness to the world: the capacity to distance oneself from one’s immediate environment, to grasp the world as world, not merely as a sum of stimuli. The animal lives in its environment; the human being has world. He can ask: What is this? What is it for? Is it true? Is it good?[3]
This openness to the world shows itself in three capacities:
1. Ideation: The human being grasps essences, not merely individual cases. He does not see this red flower and that red flower, but redness, color as such. He thinks in concepts, not merely in images.
2. Objectification: The human being can make himself into an object. He can reflect on himself, judge himself, want to change himself. The animal cannot say, “I am cowardly and want to become braver.” The human being can.
3. Asceticism: The human being can deny his drives. Not merely postpone them (the animal can do that too), but deny them in principle. He can fast even though he is hungry. He can live celibately even though he has sexual needs. This capacity for self-denial shows that spirit is autonomous with respect to life.[4]
The reference to Hegel is ambivalent. Scheler knows Hegel closely, but rejects his philosophy of identity. Hegel’s absolute idealism equates spirit and being – as if the world were a rational structure. Scheler insists on dualism: spirit and life are two principles, not reducible to one another. Spirit is powerless – it has no vital force. Life is blind – it has no insight. Only their interaction creates the human being: a spiritual being with vital force.[5]
The problem: Scheler moralizes anthropology. “Spirit” becomes “higher value.” The “spiritual person” stands above “drive-life.” This hierarchy is conservative – it legitimates asceticism, discipline, self-denial as paths to “higher development.” Scheler’s late work (The Forms of Knowledge and Society, 1926) develops an elitist social philosophy: the spiritual elites (philosophers, artists, saints) must lead, the masses must follow.[6]
After Scheler’s death (1928), his work is received by right-wing Catholics and conservatives. Scheler himself was not a fascist – but his anthropology was susceptible to authoritarian interpretations. The emphasis on spirit against life, asceticism against drives, the elite against the masses – these were motifs that fascism could radicalize.[7]
Helmuth Plessner - Eccentric Positionality
Helmuth Plessner (1892-1985) also writes a major work of anthropology in 1928: The Levels of the Organic and the Human. The book is more difficult than Scheler’s, less brilliantly formulated, but systematically superior. Plessner develops no philosophy of value, but a structural anthropology: he asks about the conditions of the possibility of human existence – phenomenologically inspired, but grounded in the philosophy of nature.[8]
The basic idea: living beings differ in their positionality – their relation to the boundary between inside and outside.
Plant: “Open positionality.” The plant has no boundary between itself and its environment. It is absorbed in its life processes (growth, metabolism, reproduction). It has no center, no inside, no self.
Animal: “Centric positionality.” The animal has a center – a nervous system that integrates stimuli. It distinguishes itself from its environment, has an inner world (drives, feelings) and an outer world (objects). But it is this center; it has no distance from itself.
Human being: “Eccentric positionality.” The human being is also a center, but he can step outside this center. He can see himself as an object, reflect on himself, judge himself. He is “outside himself” – not in the sense of ecstasy, but structurally: he stands beside himself, looking at himself.[9]
This eccentric position is not a privilege, but a compulsion. The animal is what it is, immediately. The human being must become what he is. He is not finished, not secured by instinct, not harmoniously fitted in. He must shape himself, must take on roles, create institutions, produce culture. Culture is not a luxury, but compensation for the structural “homelessness” of the human being.[10]
The proximity to Hegel is striking, although Plessner rarely cites Hegel. Eccentric positionality is structurally identical to Hegel’s determination of spirit: “Spirit is […] with itself in its otherness.”[11]
The political stance: Plessner was a democratic liberal. When the Nazis seize power in 1933, he emigrates immediately – to Holland, then to Groningen, where he remains until 1951. His book The Belated Nation (1935, published anonymously) analyzes the German special paths that led to National Socialism. Plessner sees: German anti-modernism, the contempt for Western civilization, the longing for “genuine community” – this was dangerous. The eccentric position of the human being requires institutions, not romantic immediacy.[12]
The systematic achievement: Plessner shows how Hegel’s insights can be grounded in the philosophy of nature without becoming biologistic. Eccentric positionality is not merely a biological fact (a larger brain), but a structural property that makes qualitatively new behavior possible. It explains why the human being needs culture, why he sets norms for himself, why he requires institutional mediation. This is Hegel, updated for a post-Darwinian age – without speculation, but with systematic ambition.[13]
Arnold Gehlen - Deficient Being and Institution
Arnold Gehlen (1904-1976) writes Man: His Nature and Place in the World in 1940 – in the midst of National Socialism, as a party member, as the holder of a professorship he owes to a dismissed Jew (Hans Driesch). These biographical facts must be named, for they color his work. Gehlen’s anthropology is the only one of the three major ones that is affirmative – that does not seek freedom, but stability.[14]
The basic thesis: The human being is a deficient being (Mängelwesen). Biologically, he is poorly equipped – no claws, no fur, no speed, no instinctual security. Every animal is fitted into its environment; the human being is not. He is a “world-open” creature, but this openness is initially a deficit, not a privilege.[15]
The compensation is: action. The human being must actively shape his environment; he cannot merely react. He creates tools, language, institutions – a “second nature” that replaces the missing first nature. Institutions (family, law, state, church) relieve: they provide behavioral certainty where instincts are lacking. The human being does not need to decide anew at every step – institutions tell him what to do.[16]
The reference to Hegel is explicit. Gehlen knows Hegel’s concept of “ethical life” (Sittlichkeit) – institutions as “second nature” that realizes freedom by regulating it. But Gehlen inverts Hegel’s point. In Hegel, institutions must justify themselves before reason. Ethical life is not mere habit, but a reflected, grounded order. In Gehlen, institutions become means of stabilization – they replace missing instincts. Criticism of institutions becomes suspect: whoever destroys stable order endangers the capacity to survive.[17]
The consequence: Gehlen develops a conservative cultural anthropology. Modern plurality, individualization, criticism – all of these are dangers. They destabilize, overburden, unsettle. The human being needs firm order, clear hierarchies, binding norms. Institutions must not be questioned, but must be respected – because the human being fails without them.[18]
Critical Excursus: Gehlen’s Entanglement with National Socialism
Gehlen joins the NSDAP in 1933 (membership number 3,587,992), becomes an SA member in 1933. In 1938 he receives a professorship in Leipzig as successor to Hans Driesch, who is forcibly retired as “politically unreliable” (Driesch was a pacifist and had supported Jewish students). Gehlen offers no resistance – he benefits.[19]
During the war Gehlen serves as an officer and writes propagandistic texts. In 1944 he writes essays on leadership and education for the journal Wille und Macht (organ of the Hitler Youth). After 1945 Gehlen is initially dismissed, but already rehabilitated by 1947 (allegedly a mere “fellow traveler”). He receives professorships in Speyer (1962-1969) and becomes an influential conservative cultural critic of the Federal Republic.[20]
Gehlen himself never speaks self-critically about this past. In a 1974 interview he says: “I was never a Nazi, I was a conservative.” This is telling – and false. Gehlen was a party member, a beneficiary, a propagandist. His anthropology was not the cause of his membership in the Nazi party (Plessner develops a similar anthropology and emigrates!), but it was compatible with it. The emphasis on order, discipline, loyalty to institutions, the criticism of “decadence” and “dissolution” – these were motifs of National Socialism.[21]
The systematic problem: Gehlen’s theory of institutions is affirmative – it legitimizes what already exists. Hegel’s ethical life was critical – institutions must justify themselves before reason. If they cannot do so, they are to be reformed or abolished. Gehlen inverts this: institutions are good per se, because they relieve burdens. Criticism of them is dangerous per se, because it destabilizes. This position was compatible with authoritarian regimes – it demands obedience, not maturity/autonomy (Mündigkeit).[22]
The historical lesson: philosophical anthropology is not neutral. The question “What is the human being?” has political consequences. Scheler’s elite-thinking, Plessner’s democratic liberalism, Gehlen’s authoritarian conservatism – these are not merely different answers, but different attitudes toward modernity. Gehlen rejects it, Plessner affirms it. This difference is philosophically and politically fundamental.
Intellectual Continuity 1914-1933
The entanglement of German intellectuals in National Socialism has a prehistory. Already in 1914, a dangerous affect appears:
War enthusiasm in 1914: When the First World War breaks out, 93 prominent intellectuals (including Max Planck, Wilhelm Röntgen, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff) sign the “Manifesto of the 93” – a justification of Germany’s entry into the war, a denial of Belgian atrocities, an assertion of German cultural superiority. Max Weber does not sign, but his war-euphoria is documented: the war as “great and wonderful,” as a chance for national renewal.[23]
Georg Simmel writes in 1914: “War is an absolute situation that sublates all the relativity and relativizations of peace.” Ernst Troeltsch celebrates the “August days” of 1914 as an awakening of the German spirit. These men, too, were not Nazis – but their contempt for Western civilization, their longing for “genuine community,” their glorification of war prepared the ground.[24]
The continuity: contempt for “Western” democracy (already in Nietzsche, then in Spengler), emphasis on German “depth” against Western “superficiality” (the Ideas of 1914 against the Ideas of 1789), longing for “organic community” instead of “mechanical society” (Tönnies). These anti-democratic affects facilitated the accommodation to 1933. Not everyone followed this path: Cassirer emigrates, Plessner emigrates, many offer resistance. But the danger was structural: philosophy can become the legitimation of what exists, when it loses critical self-reflection.[25]
The central lesson: After Auschwitz, philosophy can no longer be innocent. It must become self-critical – must ask which of its motifs are susceptible to authoritarian instrumentalization. The emphasis on order against chaos, community against individuality, instinct against reason – these are dangerous motifs. Not false in themselves, but liable to abuse. A contemporary systematics must have built-in self-criticism: mechanisms that prevent rigidification, dogmatism, authoritarianism. This is the lesson to be drawn from Gehlen – not to discard his anthropology, but to overcome its affirmative structure.[26]
Hegel: Encyclopedia, § 381, addition: “The animal has consciousness; but the animal is conscious of itself only as this, not as I.” The human being “knows of himself.” ↩︎
Max Scheler: The Human Place in the Cosmos, Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1928, pp. 37-55. On the biography: Manfred S. Frings: The Mind of Max Scheler, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997. ↩︎
Scheler: The Human Place, p. 38: “What distinguishes the human being alone and separates him from the animal is […] his being as spirit.” Spirit means: “openness to the world” (p. 40). ↩︎
Scheler: The Human Place, p. 47: “The human being can […] not merely postpone his drives, but deny them altogether, say ‘No’ to the satisfaction of drives, which the animal must carry out.” ↩︎
Scheler explicitly criticizes Hegel’s philosophy of identity in: Die Wissenformen und die Gesellschaft, Leipzig: Der Neue Geist-Verlag, 1926, pp. 15-33. Against Hegel, he posits the dualism of “drive and spirit” (p. 31). ↩︎
Scheler: Wissenformen, pp. 223-287 (“Formation and Knowledge”). Scheler distinguishes elites of formation (spiritual leaders) and elites of function (technicians). The spiritual elites are to lead, without political power. ↩︎
On the right-Catholic reception of Scheler, see: Christian Thies: Die Krise des Individuums. Zur Kritik der Moderne bei Adorno und Gehlen, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1997, pp. 45-67. ↩︎
Helmuth Plessner: Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch. Einleitung in die philosophische Anthropologie, Berlin/Leipzig: De Gruyter, 1928. New edition: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. IV, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1981. ↩︎
Plessner: Stufen, pp. 288-290: “The human being only lives by leading a life. He no longer stands in the here-now, but behind it, behind himself, placeless, in nothing – he stands there, and lives.” ↩︎
Plessner: Stufen, p. 310: “The eccentric form of positionality gives the human being the task of becoming what he is.” ↩︎
Hegel: Encyclopedia, § 381, addition. ↩︎
Helmuth Plessner: Die verspätete Nation. Über die Verführbarkeit bürgerlichen Geistes, Zurich: Niehans, 1935 (under the pseudonym “Anton von der Mühlll”). New edition: Gesammelte Schriften, vol. VI, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1982. An analysis of German “inwardness” as a political problem. ↩︎
On Plessner’s systematic significance, see: Joachim Fischer: Philosophische Anthropologie. Eine Denkrichtung des 20. Jahrhunderts, Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 2008, pp. 223-297. ↩︎
Arnold Gehlen: Der Mensch. Seine Natur und seine Stellung in der Welt, Berlin: Junker und Dünnhaupt, 1940. New edition (13th ed.): Wiebelsheim: Aula-Verlag, 2004. On the biography: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (ed.): Arnold Gehlen – Philosophie – Soziologie – Anthropologie, Munich: Fink, 2014. ↩︎
Gehlen: Der Mensch, p. 33: “The human being is […] organically a deficient being. The animal lacks what the human being calls ‘superiority’: specialization for one environment.” ↩︎
Gehlen: Der Mensch, pp. 40-56. The concept of “relief” (Entlastung) becomes central: institutions relieve the pressure of decision, habits relieve the compulsion to reflect. ↩︎
Gehlen explicitly refers to Hegel in: “Über die Geburt der Freiheit aus der Entfremdung” (1952), in: Anthropologische Forschung, Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1961, pp. 232-246. But he reads Hegel conservatively – as a theorist of stable institutions. ↩︎
On Gehlen’s conservative cultural anthropology, see: Gerhard Arlt: Anthropologie und Politik. Ein Schlüssel zum Werk Arnold Gehlens, Munich: Oldenbourg, 1996. ↩︎
Documentation of the Nazi party membership: Ernst Klee: Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich, Frankfurt/M.: S. Fischer, 2003, p. 173. Gehlen’s membership number: NSDAP 3,587,992. ↩︎
On the postwar career, see: Karl-Siegbert Rehberg: “Nachwort zur 13. Auflage,” in: Arnold Gehlen: Der Mensch, Wiebelsheim: Aula, 2004, pp. 463-492, esp. pp. 464-467. ↩︎
Interview with Arnold Gehlen, in: Der Spiegel, no. 52/1974, pp. 82-89, quotation p. 84. ↩︎
On the critique of Gehlen’s affirmative theory of institutions, see: Jürgen Habermas: “Arnold Gehlen: Imitation Substantiality” (1970), in: Philosophical-Political Profiles, Cambridge/MA: MIT Press, 1983, pp. 111-128. ↩︎
Max Weber’s war enthusiasm is documented in his letters of 1914: “This war, for all its horror, is great and wonderful.” Quoted after: Wolfgang J. Mommsen: Max Weber und die deutsche Politik 1890-1920, Tübingen: Mohr, 1959, p. 204. ↩︎
Georg Simmel: “Die Dialektik des deutschen Geistes” (1916), in: Gesamtausgabe, vol. 16, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1999, pp. 11-23. Ernst Troeltsch: “Die Ideen von 1914” (1916), in: Deutscher Geist und Westeuropa, Tübingen: Mohr, 1925, pp. 31-58. ↩︎
On the intellectual continuity from 1914 to 1933, see: Fritz Ringer: The Decline of the German Mandarins. The German Academic Community, 1890-1933, Cambridge/MA: Harvard UP, 1969. On the Nietzsche-Spengler line: Rüdiger Safranski: Nietzsche. Biographie seines Denkens, Munich: Hanser, 2000, chap. 17. ↩︎
This demand is explicitly formulated by: Theodor W. Adorno: Negative Dialectics, Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp, 1966, p. 358: “To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Philosophy must interrogate itself as to how it contributed to the catastrophe. ↩︎