The aim of this
paper is to place Helmuth Plessner's anthropology within the fundamental
debate on the nature of freedom which has taken place between the
liberals and the communitarians; what I have in mind here, however,
is not just a simple juxtaposition but a proposal of a more dialectical
solution which can be drawn from Plessner's reflection on human
Mangelwesen and its paradoxical,
dynamic eccentricity.
As a founding concept
of modern liberalism, the first model - emancipation - hardly needs
any clarification: it is a freedom defined negatively as a liberty
from all kinds of limitations and conditionings. On the other hand,
the freedom as articulation is a relatively fresh concept; it has
emerged within the communitarian perspective, most notably in writings
of Charles Taylor. But, although it is Taylor to whom the credit
of inventing the name "articulation" should go, the very
idea which lies behind it is, in fact, very old. The articulatory
model of freedom has already been used against the emancipatory
one by early romantics, especially by Herder.
Emancipation offers
a model of identity which is based on the absence of constraints;
first, we must be free, only then we become ourselves, we gain identity
by choosing it. Contrary to this, articulation offers a model of
identity which is based on recognition of some constraints as absolutely
primary and indispensable: first, we must be
in order to enjoy freedom; we must acknowledge and recognise what
we are - in Nietzsche's words, wir müssen werden was wir sind - and only
then we can develop our sense of autonomy: by articulating the primary constraints, by bestowing on the blind factors
which shaped our existences discursive, representative form, a form
that gives us a chance to discuss them, reflect on them, acquire
a minimal, narrative distance from their determining power. The
emancipatory theory is led by a regulative idea of absolute Unbedingtheit,
a strong ethical ideal based on what Peter Berger, quite rightly,
called "false anthropology" - whereas the articulatory model is far more
modest, perhaps too modest in fact, so it isn't sure if it gives
us, by the automatic force of a sheer contrast, what we might call
with clear conscience a "true anthropology". They both
seem dangerously one-sided, going radically in one direction only:
emancipation pushes the notion of abstract, intellectual self-control
to its extremes, while articulation believes in the unlimited power
of dense and concrete "life narratives".
Using Plessner's
famous distinction on two types of communities we could easily substitute
these two forms of radicalism for, on the one hand, die Gemeinschaft der Sache and, on the other, die Gemeinschaft der Blut. Emancipation, especially when seen from
the angle of Habermas' post-Hegelian Kantianism, consists in achieving
a formal, intellectual point zero of consciousness in which all
living content becomes a matter of rational argumentation: his universal
community of unconstrained, liberated discourse resembles closely
the Plessnerian utopia of the Gemeinschaft
based on common rationality which disregards local colouring, perceived
then merely as a distortion. On the other hand, Taylor's communitarian
model of articulation, his peculiar romantic Hegelianism, may be
regarded as a sophisticated version of die Gemeischaft der Blut which takes for
granted subject's situatedness within his/her local tradition and
thus, allowing for nothing more than just a variation of individual
life narratives, severely underestimates the antagonistic aspect
of human freedom.
Emancipation
The emancipatory model derives from the classical, Cartesian ideal
of self-transparency and its later transcendental-idealist avatars.
In his Knowledge and Human
Interests, Jürgen Habermas defends the "emancipatory power
of reflection" according to the characteristic Cartesian-Transcendental
trinity of concepts: reflection, self-consciousness, self-transparent
subjectivity. The only difference here is that Habermas forms his
theory of the "emancipatory interest" already in response
to the critiques of subjectivity coming from the anti-subjectivist
School of Suspicion: subjective freedom is not a matter of fact
(as it is still the case of naive Cartesianism) but an ideal one
strives for thanks to his reflective powers and achieves by "becoming
transparent to oneself in the history of one's genesis" (1972,
197).
Freedom is thus a state we do not possess, but it also is not an impossible
utopia, as it is claimed by reductive hermeneutics of the School
of Suspicion: rather, it is a task we complete by fostering our
"emancipatory interests", that is, by overcoming our primary
- given, inherited and imposed - constraints. Habermas' definition
of self-transparency is therefore no longer oriented towards the
"punctual self-knowledge" of pure cogito but towards "self-knowledge
in biographical context", towards the process of gaining a
reflexive cognition of one's own unconscious, habitual, conventional
conditionings, towards "the model of pure
communicative action":
"According to this model - says Habermas
- all habitual interactions and all interpretations relevant to
life conduct are accessible
at all times. This is possible on the basis of internalising
the apparatus of unrestricted ordinary language of uncompelled and
public communication, so that the transparency of recollected life
history is preserved." (1972, 232-3; italics mine)
This transparency - or, "accessibility
at all times" - can be achieved only thanks to critical distance the individual gains
towards his substantial determinants, i.e. towards everything which
influenced his existence before he could consciously oppose this
influence. It creates a space in which the subject can become his
own impartial observer, himself free of any determining content;
instead of being one with his formative factors, he gains an Abstand:
literally, a stand-away. The distance is implied in the word "access"
which is the key for the Habermasian understanding of self-knowledge:
in order to retrieve all habitual interactions and relevant interpretations,
the subject has first to objectify them, as if projecting himself
away from all the contents which has constituted him so far.
This critical distance
- a notion taken directly from Fichte, his Abstand von Dingen, which separated reine Ichheit, the purely formal aspect of self-consciousness from
all material "impurities" of the empirical self - is not
yet a full detachment, but it can easily become one. In the emancipatory
reflection, the link between the liberated, reflexive self and its
conditionings becomes loose; the self is absolutely free to decide
whether it wants to pick up the direction these various determining
forces made it to follow or whether it wants to break free and follow
another path it chooses. The critical distance, in which the ideal
of self-transparency finds its late modern, post-suspicious fulfilment,
contains therefore a possibility of detachment
- and, somehow, more than just a possibility, rather an implicit
imperative of leaving behind the whole burden of our past constraints
and limitations.
Thus, the critical distance which, for Habermas, is a sign of maturation,
bears a seed of impeachment and negation of all the formative factors,
as if they were just a sort of Wittgensteinian ladder that is used
only in order to be pushed away. The consequence of this "emancipatory
impulse" is somewhat paradoxical: the mature autonomy amounts
to becoming free of everything that played a vital
role in the individual's formative process, or rather, in turning
everything which played such vital
role into a dead, almost disposable weight of past encumberances.
It is a moment of gaining a liberating distance towards everything
that seemed significant before; true identity of a person reveals
itself in its full subjective glory only when she dares to bid farewell
to all her already acquired substance.
Articulation
First redefinition of freedom as the power of articulation rather than
emancipation occurs in Taylor's Hegel
where he introduces his own, highly idiosyncratic definition of
Sittlichkeit:
"'Sittlichkeit' - he writes - refers to the
moral obligations I have to an ongoing community of which I am part.
These obligations are based on established norms and uses, and that
is why the etymological root in 'Sitten' is important for Hegel's
use. The crucial characteristic of Sittlichkeit is that it
enjoins us to bring about what already is. This is a pradoxical
way of putting it, but in fact the common life which is the basis
of my sittlich obligation is already there in
existence... Hence in Sittlichkeit, there is no gap between what
ought to be and what is, between Sollen
and Sein." (Taylor 1975, 177-8)
Articulation, therefore, consists
in ability to bring about
what already is, or, to use a more romantic formulation, to
breathe moral life into the petrified forms of customary and conventional
rules; to find the most valuable core in the already given prescriptions.
Articulation is an art of right enhancement, an art of pulling the
right thread of cultural continuity from the initially entangled,
non-transparent thicket of too many customs and conventions (Sitten).
It has, therefore, its own, non-emancipatory version of achieving
a some degree of transparency, of creating a space for free choice
and action; it consists, however, not in breaking free from the
disorienting abundance of social rituals, but in an ability to reduce
them to few most effective, heuristic patterns. Taylor opposes this
highly articulated Sittlichkeit to Kant's strictly formal Moralität which implicitly fosters an individualistic and, in consequence,
possibly too antagonistic attitude. Taylor writes:
"Here [in Kant's ethics] we have an obligation
to realise something which does not exist. What ought to be is in
contrast with what is... Kant presents an abstract, formal notion
of moral obligation, which holds of man as an individual, and which
being defined in contrast to nature is in endless opposition to
what is... Kant saw the right as forever opposed to the real; morality
and nature (containing also objectified social norms - ABR) are
always at loggerheads." (ibidem, 178)
Taylor uses the word "articulation"
explicitly in the theoretical introduction to his Sources of the Self, where he argues in
favour of "articulating the hidden horizons of modernity",
and in one of his later essays, "Lichtung
or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger and Wittgenstein".
Here articulation is defined as an activity which brings forward
the concealed, half-conscious, habitual background of our reflection:
"In this activity of articulating - says
Taylor - I trade on my familiarity with the background. What I bring
out to articulacy is what I 'always knew', as we might say, or what
I had a 'sense' of, even if I didn't 'know' it." (Taylor 1997,
69); "The background... - he continues - can be represented
as a kind of implicit understanding, or 'pre-understanding' in Heidegger's
term. To bring it to articulacy is to take (some of) this and make
it explicit. But... the idea of making the background completely
explicit, of undoing its status as background, is incoherent in
principle." (ibidem, 69)
The background, although submitted
to the reflexive power of articulation, is thus to be left, at least
partially, non-transparent. Hence the distance, in which the subject
exercises its freedom, can never be complete; it cannot "objectify"
the background and therefore cannot dominate it, become a master
of the rules that before mastered him, as it is in case of Habermas'
emancipation paradigm. A little bit of the sedimented, inarticulable
rudiment of the primary background remains - and it is just enough
to make this reversal of power impossible. Das Ich will not be able to dominate das Unbewußte; the separate punctual self will not reject its primary
dependencies on others; the individual will not emancipate himself
from the ties of his communal loyalty.
Yet, there immediately emerges the following question: is this articulatory
model, which is to replace the "false anthropology" of
the emancipatory one, satisfactory? Or, putting it bluntly, is this
a model of freedom at all? For although Taylor takes a lot of pain
to emphasise that ciriticism of one's own tradition is not only
possible but required, normal, and expected, the room left for its
exercise diminishes radically. The individual self is and will always
remain only what it's been made by its local, social conditioning,
and the only act of autonomy that is left to it boils down to a
rhetorical manoeuvre of emphasis: the selective, and, in fact, rather
limited power to bring about
what already is.
Between the Two Poles: Helmuth Plessner
Plessner is equally
indebted to Herder but it is mainly Herder's dynamic anthropology
of Mangelwesen which is his source of inspiration. Plessner understands
that, both, emancipation and articulation meet their limits which
is due to the fact that neither of them reflects the whole truth
of human subjectivity. Plessner's position is therefore more dialectical
than Habermas' or Taylor's, but it isn't a Hegelian dialectic of
mediated evolution, rather a typically romantic dialectic of insoluble
antagonisms which underlies Hegel's systematic model as its prototype
(which eventually re-emerges, two centuries later, in the post-Hegelian
negative dialectic of Adorno). This romantic, precursory dialectic
originates in Herder's dynamic duality of human self as always oscillating
between two contradictory poles - of lack and compensation, distance
and situatedness, abstract emptiness and concrete predication -
and later takes on the form of the romantic irony as defined mostly
by Friedrich Schlegel: the Fichtean movement of Schweben,
the constant oscillation, becomes the distinctive feature of subjectivity
as such, ironically negotiating its troubled reality built on inner
antagonisms. Irony, pictured as a dynamic state of oscillation,
doesn't allow any of the two opposite poles to develop into an unambiguous
position: the absolutely free and distanced self is always checked
by its empirical, bedingt (conditioned) counterpart, and the reverse; the subject can
never plunge completely into its Geworfenheit
for it is dragged away from its direct situatedness by the pole
of subjective Liberalität. The limitations of both movements
- the emancipation and the articulation - are therefore not external
to the self but belong to its very nature; these two poles pose
the limits on one another's tendency to achieve unequivocal, fully
pregnant realisation. The limits of emancipation come from subject's
necessary situatedness in the world; the limits of articulation
come from subject's necessary excentricity and elusiveness.
Plessner's teaching about soul - especially from his Grenzen der Gemeinschaft but also from
his anthropological essays, like "Homo absconditus" -
draws heavily on typically romantic ambivalence and paradoxes but,
nevertheless, finds its unique, highly original, theoretical expression
(if anything, it bears some resemblance to only one notion of the
soul that has been developed in contemporary humanities, namely
to the psychoanalysis of the self conceived by D. W. Winnicott,
the British pupil of Melanie Klein, also deeply indebted to his
romantic heritage). In the fourth chapter of his book, "Das
Kampf ums wahre Gesicht. Das Risiko der Lächerlichkeit", Plessner
delivers his idea of the soul as a specific entity without essence,
torn by inner contradictions and antagonisms, and precisely for
this reason able to constitute a principle of individuation, principium
individuationis. The soul is this unique instance of indivisibility
that had been called already by Schelling "an indivisible remainder",
i.e., the remnant which cannot be captured or exhausted by any straightforward
attempt of delineation, be it the Cartesian-idealist definition
of punctual cogito, be
it more concrete, predicative definition of the situated self. However
we try to articulate it, this "indivisible remainder"
falls without our conceptual grasp. It defies any sort of - either
abstract, or concrete - predication:
"Was
ihn (den Mensch) wirklich erst individualisiert, von innen heraus
unteilbar und einzigartig macht - says Plessner - ist das Bewusstsein
vom Besitz einer Seele, das Leben im Zentrum einer empfindenden,
wollenden, denkenden, der Umwelt und dem eigenen Leibe gegenüber
eigenwilligen, an Tiefe und innerer Eigenschaftsfülle unvergleichlichen
Innerlichkeit." (Plessner 2002, 61-62)
Note,
however, that psyche, die
Seele, merely resists and defies any sort of predication, no
matter abstract or material, which does not mean that it is absolutely
and safely free from being this or that. Resistance (to use more
psychoanalytic idiom) or defiance (to use Schelling's original concept)
are more complex, more dialectical operations which at the same
time deny and affirm the necessity of definition. The soul is inescapably
double in its inner structure; it is excentric, but its excentricity
doesn't establish the psyche in a separate mode of existence that
could render it free from a temporary fixedness:
"Der
doppeldeutige Charakter des Psychischen - continues Plessner - drängt
zur Fixierung hin und zugleich von der Fixierung fort. Wir wollen
uns sehen und gesehen werden, wie wir sind, und wir wollen ebenso
uns verhüllen und ungekannt bleiben, denn hinter jeder Bestimmtheit
unseres Seins schlummern die unsagbaren Möglichkeiten des Andersseins."
(ibidem, 63)
Winnicott, whose ideas follow
closely, though unconsciously, the path already opened by Plessner,
will later say about the deep self in his Playing
and Reality, that "it is joy to be hidden, by a disaster
not to be found" (Winnicott 1971, 32). Thus, by emphasising
the concealed nature of the soul - "Seele ist ein noli
me tangere für das Bewusstsein", he says - Plessner
goes against the most cherished dogma of expressivism, the doctrine
which underlies both lines of modern thought mentioned above, the
emancipation and the articulation alike. Expressivism defines subjectivity
according to its power of self-expression, taking the form of, respectively,
frei-schwebend cogito
or a fully articulate, self-narrating situated self. Contrary to
this expressivist prejudice, Plessner sees the soul as a being which
stays true to itself only insofar as it resists full articulation.
By speaking itself out too bluntly, the soul merely runs the risk
of ridicule, die Lächerlichkeit, which is caused by the incongruence between its
inner depth and the surface of phenomenal expression. The soul,
says Plessner formulating one of his loveliest paradoxes, should
express itself as it really is, that is, as hidden. As such, it needs mediation, an
indirectness of a form:
"... dieses Zergehen in der Abbreviatur der
Erscheinung - he says - macht Seelisches, wenn es nackt hervortritt,
lächerlich. Es braucht eine Kompensation, welche solchen qualitativen
Gewichtsverlust ausgleicht, es braucht Bekleidung
mit Form, damit es auch an der Oberfläche bleibt, was es, in
seiner unsichtbaren Tiefe genommen, ist." (ibidem, 72)
Now, we can begin to see clearly
why and where precisely these two models of subjective autonomy
- emancipation and articulation - miss the point. The freedom of
the subject does not reside in its ultimate and true identification,
for no identification for a genuinely free subject can ever be either
final or true. Two versions of freedom offered by Habermas and Taylor
merely elaborate two "points of fixation" within the spectrum
of the psychic dynamic; they immobilise and hypostathise two opposite
poles of the constant Schweben,
the oscillation which, simultaneously, allows the psyche to be and
not to be what it is, and thus to negotiate with the fixating oppressiveness
of every possible predication. The Habermasian emancipated ego,
which distances itself from concrete conditionings, achieves its
final truth in abstract identity if Ich denke; the Taylorian articulate self,
on the other hand, discards the moment of agonistic abstractness
as illusion and forces the subject to exercise whatever's been left
of its freedom in narrating its material Ich
bin. In the former case, the subject truly becomes what it can
never fully become, that is an entity defined in opposition to its
Erscheinungen - in the
latter, the subject finds its reality only in the sphere of manifestation,
in "bringing about what already is".
In both accounts, the
subtle eccentricity of human soul and its unique sense of autonomy
gets lost; neither the Habermasian, nor the Taylorian self needs
a play with the conventional form of its Erscheinung.
Whereas the Plessnerian dialectical vision defends the self from
falling into a trap of seriousness that results from the rigid identification
(which is also the deepest psychological source of all radicalism)
and maintains its freedom as a play between identities that constantly
limit one another. The psyche can never actually fully become what
it really is; here, the Nietzschean imperative of werden
was man ist meets the limitation which is inscribed into the
very nature of soul's inner indeterminacy. This limitation, however,
so troubling for the philosophers seeking the ultimate identity
of the human subject, reveals itself as a true blessing in disguise.
The praise of the subjective
principle of indeterminacy is precisely "the blessing of the
limits", the old mystical formula, which in Plessner's writings
has found its uniquely modern echo.
Berger, Peter (1970)
"On the Obsolescence of the Concept of Honour", European Journal of Sociology, XI 1970, pp 339-47
Habermas, Jürgen
(1972) Knowledge and Human
Interests, trans. by J. Shapiro, MIT Press, Boston
Plessner, Helmuth (2002)
Grenzen der Gemeinschaft.
Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am
Main
Taylor, Charles
(1975) Hegel, Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge
Taylor, Charles
(1997) "Lichtung or Lebensform: Parallels between Heidegger
and Wittgenstein" in Philosophical
Arguments, Harvard University Press, London
Winnicott, D. W.
(1971) Playing and Reality,
Basic Books, London