Mediating Life: Animality, Artifactuality, and the Distinctiveness of the Human in the Philosophical Anthropologies of Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, and Mead

Abstract

What is a human being? In the early 20th century, the "philosophical anthropologists" Max Scheler, Helmuth Plessner, and Arnold Gehlen approached this question through a comparison between human and non-human organisms' species-typical interaction with environments and an account of the conditions of the emergence of "higher" cognitive and agentive functions on this basis. In this text I offer a critical review of the central arguments of Scheler, Plessner, and Gehlen on these issues, as well as of their debates with figures such as Jakob von Uexküll, Martin Heidegger, and G. H. Mead. I take note of the consequences of various answers to this question for the interpretation of human beings' dually biological and cultural status and for the theory of the human self or person. I argue that the approaches of Plessner and Gehlen, despite objections raised by Hans Joas and others, have important advantages over those of Scheler, Uexküll, Heidegger, and Mead, as well as over recent suggestions by Korsgaard and Tomasello. I conclude by outlining a reconstructed philosophical anthropology that supports a new perspective on the question of human distinctiveness and on a number of related questions in the context of contemporary debates.