Abstract
In two of the most significant and influential contemporary exponents of German philosophical anthropology, anthropogenetic accounts play a large role. Hans Blumenberg and Peter Sloterdijk have presented their mode of philosophical anthropology as a philosophical anthropogenealogy. To this end both of them have ventured into an alliance with paleoanthropology, incidentally drawing on the same paleoanthropolgist, the forgotten pioneer of philosophical anthropology: Paul Alsberg. Taking this observation as its cue, the article addresses two questions. What are the motives for philosophical anthropology to turn into philosophical anthropogenealogy? What is the methodological status of anthropogenetic accounts in philosophical anthropology? By reflecting on these questions the article aspires to convey a synthesis of themes in contemporary German philosophical anthropology and introduce them especially to an English-speaking audience.
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Notes
Man is the not yet determined animal could be a way to convey Nietzsche’s dictum in English. This would imply translating Feststellung with determination. For reasons that will appear later, it is preferable in this particular case to keep the original German word as terminus technicus throughout the paper.
Although inspired by authoritative sources in a few cases, the author takes full responsibility for all translations in the present article.
Caution is of course warranted here. For why should we as critically minded philosophers accept a replacement of sobriety with speculation? This question will be addressed in the concluding methodological considerations.
The overall anthropogenetic sketch presented in this paper does not come with a strong claim to originality. If there is novelty in it, it lies in the selection and synthesis of themes in especially Blumenberg, Sloterdijk and their common paleoanthropological source Alsberg. That there is a parallel movement in French thinking indicated by the names Derrida, Stiegler and their common paleoanthropological source Leroi-Gourhan will only be hinted at—a parallelism which seems not to have been given much attention. In any case, it should not pass unmentioned that this tradition has indeed provided some guidance in the process of selecting and synthesizing. An inquiry into the affinities between these traditions would surely be a worthwhile endeavor into yet to be discovered territory. If the article can provide an entrance to this territory, it will appear to have found an academic raison d’être.
For this central and difficult passage, the reader might benefit from having the original German phrasing in mind as well: “Indem der Mensch sich vom ‘Seienden’ loswirft, wird er erst Mensch. Denn nur so kehrt er zum Seienden zurück und ist als der Zurückgekehrte. Und die Frage bleibt: wie dieser Loswurf anfänglich geschieht und wie dieser Anfang der Geschichte gründet”.
The name of the German sociologist Heinrich Popitz should not be omitted here as he is also a member of the exclusive club of thinkers drawing on Alsberg, although in a slightly more critical way than Claessens (cf. especially Popitz 1995).
For our contemplation Jos de Mul has offered an interesting connection between Plessner’s notion of eccentric position and the concept of telepresence (cf. Jos de Mul 2010: 197–206).
That nomos is ‘written in stone’ does of course not rule out that this extra-corporeal mode of inscription cannot itself be applied to the body. Indeed, this possibility is given with the altogether new relationship of human beings to their excluded bodies. As excluded these bodies become objects of incorporation (Verkörperung)—for instance in the form of various gestural programs (cf. Leroi-Gourhan 1980: 296–320 and for a further discussion Noland 2009). To use Heidegger’s terms, the body is no longer only ready-to-hand but also, and increasingly, present-at-hand. Let us note in passing that this aspect of our technological chiro-practical existence seems to have reached a pinnacle in the present possibility of genetic mani-pulation.
I am aware that this follows Stiegler’s (unwillingly) anthropological emphasis in his account of différance rather than Derrida’s account which includes life in general (cf. Derrida 1974: 149).
As mentioned earlier, the words Fest-stellung and Vor-stellung are kept here in German as technical terms (and to that end also provided with hyphens). The reasons for doing this are a vast number of shimmering connotations. Only a rudimentary idea of this can be conveyed here. First of all, the word Stellung, which may be translated with position or stance, invokes the idea of something standing up. The transitive verb stellen means to put, place, position or set something up etc. If something is gestellt, it has thus rarely come to occupy its position in a natural way. It is put there artificially, i.e., by way of a certain techné. Whoever wants to pursue this in depth can observe Heidegger developing his famous notion of Ge-stell. In the present context it should just be noticed that Stellung is very suitable as a link to the ‘unnatural’ position of homo erectus. That this position is not Fest, i.e., that it is not fixed, firm, stable and so forth, indicates the literal imbalance pertaining to this morphology. A Fest-stellung, however, also means a conclusive statement or a determination. The ultimate lack of Fest-stellung expressed in Nietzsche’s dictum therefore addresses a broader idea. It implies that no description of or theory about this peculiar position can exhaust it. That it is never yet fest-gestellt makes it therefore unfathomable (Unergründlich). A key idea in this article is that a being in this position must reach out for itself in Vor-stellungen. The richness of this term makes it profound but hard to capture. Literally Vor-stellung means something that is put in front. This can both imply something that is put in front of me or something that is put in front of something else, that is to say in the place of or instead of something. Vor-stellung therefore means both imagination or anticipation of something and representation or substitution of something.
To conclude by addressing the eccentric position will provide the opportunity to connect the themes presented here to the general renaissance of German philosophical anthropology which has taken place since the 1990s. The Helmuth Plessner Society was founded in 1999 in Göttingen and has since been at the root of this ongoing renaissance. A number of associated and prominent scholars have been part of this: Wolfgang Eßbach, Joachim Fischer, Kai Haucke, Hans-Peter Krüger, Karl-Siegbert Rehberg, Bruno Accarino, Jos de Mul to name but a few. The present article may contribute to this renaissance of first generation philosophical anthropology by indicating some points of entry for contemporary philosophical anthropology, in casu that of Blumenberg and Sloterdijk.
To the term Bildentwurf we may note that Plessner puts his emphasis on pictures that are pre-given rather than invented by the individual. The positions that an eccentric being aspires to stabilize itself with are thus not primarily self-creations, as a generic mode of existentialist thinking would have it, but rather offers or demands inscribed in a social and historical reality.
This emphasis on a scientific foundation is of course not altered but rather highlighted by the fact that Sheets-Johnstone herself aspires to contribute to making paleoanthropology an even stricter science by the inclusion of corporeal analyses (cf. Sheets-Johnstone 1990: 340, 344, 362).
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Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank The Danish Council for Independent Research, Humanities for financial support and the research-group Existential anthropology, Inquiring Human Responsivenes (Thomas Schwarz Wentzer, Line Rygberg Ingerslev and Rasmus Dyring) at Aarhus University for inspiration and valuable comments.
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Lysemose, K. The Being, the Origin and the Becoming of Man: A Presentation of Philosophical Anthropogenealogy and Some Ensuing Methodological Considerations. Hum Stud 35, 115–130 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9209-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-011-9209-6