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Social Action and Human Nature by Axel Honneth; Hans Joas; Raymond Meyer
Review by: Kenneth Baynes
The Philosophical Review, Vol. 101, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 436-438
Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical Review
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185566 .
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MICHAELLISTON
Universityof Wisconsin,Milwaukee
In this brief but demanding study the authors assess the significance of
recent (predominantly German) work in social theory for attempts to for-
mulate a theory of human nature, as well as the relevance of a theory of
human nature for the development of a critical social theory. As Charles
Taylor notes in his foreword, the essay thus constitutes a contribution to
the field of "philosophical anthropology," which the authors conceive of
not as a dogmatic or purely speculative discipline, but as a critical and
interdisciplinary reflection on the "unchangeable preconditions of human
changeableness" (7). Although the text is intended to be an introductory
survey, the authors clearly wish to defend a general thesis (concerning the
intersubjective constitution of human subjectivity), and their presentation
of different positions is to a large extent tailored to this more systematic
concern. The book is divided into three separate parts.
Part 1 takes up the relationship between anthropology and historical
materialism (or Marxism, more generally). After tracing its origins in
Feuerbach's critique of German idealism (or the philosophy of conscious-
436
ness), the authors point out some of the deficiencies in Marx's own an-
thropological reflections. In particular, they suggest that although Marx's
concept of labor retains a link to Feuerbach's notion of free, sensuous
productivity and expressivity, in his later writings the anthropological basis
of historical materialism recedes behind his critique of capitalism. In a
brief review of more recent discussions of the place of anthropology in
Marxist theory (including Louis Althusser, Lucien Seve, and Gyorgy
Markus), the authors suggest that Markus's interpretation, which argues
for an historicized concept of human essence without however denying its
biological roots, offers the most promising basis for a theory of social
action.
Part 2, which makes up the core of the book, deals with the German
tradition of philosophical anthropology that begins with Max Scheler. The
most space is (appropriately) devoted to the work of Arnold Gehlen and
Helmuth Plessner, clearly the most important figures in this tradition. In
his major study Der Mensch (1940) Gehlen argued that the uniqueness of
the human individual consists in his "capacity for action," a capacity which
humans acquire in response to their status as a "defective life form" (51).
The human is distinguished from other animals by virtue of its "organic
nonspecialization," perhaps the result of premature birth induced by up-
right posture. As a result, human needs are highly plastic and dependent
upon processes of socialization. According to Gehlen, these deficiencies
are compensated for by social institutions which protect individuals from
their dangerous openness to the world.
Plessner, by contrast, developed his hermeneutic anthropology in closer
connection with the tradition of Dilthey's Lebensphilosophieand phenome-
nology. Central to his conception of the human being is the distinction
between the human's "organismal body" [Lieb] and "objectual-
instrumental body" [Kirper], the awareness of which accounts for the
unique "excentric positionality" of humans in the world. The human not
only lives in and through his body, but is peculiarly aware of himself as a
living body. In one of his most popular essays, Laughing and Weeping
(1941), Plessner attributed these two general forms of human expression
to the individual's experience of the (ever threatening) disequilibrium be-
tween his organismal and objectual-instrumental body. For Plessner too,
however, the awareness of their natural deficiencies compels human be-
ings to secure psychic distance and to preserve their subjectivity through
the establishment of ceremonially defined interactions and highly stylized
self-presentations.
Despite the contributions of these authors (and others, such as Agnes
Heller and Klaus Holzkamp), especially to the critique of an excessively
rationalistic anthropology, Honneth and Joas suggest that the tradition of
philosophical anthropology has generally suffered from an unjustified
437
KENNETH BAYNES
State Universityof New Yorkat Stony Brook
The thirteen papers in this volume were originally presented at the 1987
Spring Systematics Symposium of the Field Museum. They are organized
into three groups: "Philosophy of Progress" (D. Hull, W. Provine, F. Ayala,
and M. Ruse), "Historical and Comparative Studies" (R. Richards, R.
438