Helmuth Plessners Grenzen der Gemeinschaft. Eine Kritik des sozialen Radikalismus (1924). Eine Rekonstruktion

Abstract

Helmuth Plessner’s Grenzen der Gemeinschaft ( Limits of Community ). A critique on social radicalism (1924). A reconstruction. (1) According to Plessner, organized capitalism gives rise to social radicalism fueled by the false dualism of either society or community. The political mobilization of the community against society thus becomes boundless. Plessner’s critique of social radicalism consists in pointing out the limits of the community. (2) At that time, the younger generations (in a misunderstood fusion of Nietzsche and Marx) perceived community as heroic-idealistic and society as egoistic-materialistic. (3) How does Plessner understand the two basic forms of community – those based on love and those based on practical relationships? From this arise the negative, still external boundaries of the community of life and faith in relation to the public sphere and of the community of interests in relation to the incomparability of life and spirit. (4) The community promises its individualized souls that they can find fulfillment by dissolving into the community. Therefore, Plessner’s immanent critique begins positively with a philosophy of the individualized soul. The embodied psyche seeks to preserve its dignity by acting out behavioral ambivalences rather than being exposed to ridicule. The psychic movements between the need for recognition and restraint, naivety and reflection, concealment and revelation have no final fulfillment or fixation without damaging the psychic life. (5) How do social contacts between unrelated individuals become possible beyond communal bonds? They arise in the medium of public roles through the creation of distance between individuals, initially in a basic sense through ceremony and prestige, which publicly protect the private lives of those involved. (6) In modern society, this civilizational public sphere can be functionalized and systematized in such a way that various spheres are available for the logic of diplomacy and for the social hygiene of tact. In a separation of power, the balance between the mutually incommensurable forms of community and society can be enabled through the medium of law. (7) This intertwining, however, is bound to the sovereignty of historically attained power, which – in the wake of World War I, a failed revolution, and in the face of fascist and Bolshevik dictatorships – was by no means a given for the Weimar Republic. Plessner explores the question of the ultimate responsibility of the holders of sovereign power before history, God, or nature in an interpretation of Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov. The nothingness of freedom thwarts the realization of the communal utopia of nonviolence, but this can be balanced by the duty to exercise the power of self-limitation.