Helmuth Plessner’s Limits of Community and the Limits of Gründlichkeit

Abstract

Despite their more accessible style and distinctly socio-philosophical orientation, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (1924) maintain a clear continuity, in both problem and method, with Helmuth Plessner’s early epistemological research, notably the important yet too little-known Krisis der transzendentalen Wahrheit im Anfang (1918). This paper seeks to elucidates Plessner’s argument in defense of “the Western Idea”, i. e. his attempt to exhibit “the true obligatory Idea” of Western civilization, politically characterized as an “ethos of grace and society”, by drawing certain parallels with the problematic and theses developed in the “early philosophical writings”. The feature that Plessner attributes to proponents of community, namely their tendency to correlate all value with “thoroughness” ( Gründlichkeit ), and consequently to devalue life and the “wisdom of what is hidden”, closely echoes the line of inquiry pursued in the Krisis. Plessner’s questioning of philosophy’s ability to secure its own ultimate foundations indeed led him to the conclusion that a true critique of knowledge cannot be grounded in any final foundation, but instead always refers to the “nothingness of freedom”, which always stands at the system’s very limit ( Grenze ). The general political project of the Grenzen , which is to restore among defenders of society an awareness of their legitimacy and to reposition ideas of responsibility and decision-making at the center of political discussion, thus intersects in a particularly striking way with the epistemological thesis shared in 1918: that the legitimacy of the theoretical ultimately rests on the conscious decision to confer absolute dignity to autonomy. By 1924, however, what is at stake is no longer the dignity of a value (namely autonomy), but of the human being himself, together with the mode of social existence corresponding to his essence. Anthropology thus emerges in the Grenzen as the key to the socio-political treatment of issues previously addressed from a predominantly epistemological perspective.