A person cannot do without a ‘mask’ or even ‘armor’, the philosopher Helmuth Plessner argued; we cannot simply ‘expose’ ourselves as individuals in our dealings with others. This is a core idea in Community boundaries (1924), which has now been translated by Jan Vorstenbosch. A book that is interesting and relevant at a time when politicians increasingly appeal to people’s identity, or to group characteristics such as gender, color and religion. Plessner shows why we should not let our individuality suffocate in groupthink.
From the boreal ideas on the right to a black essentialism on the left, it can be a pain when people are supposed to hold certain views based on the characteristics of a group. We feel the need to be part of a larger community, but we also want to escape it. According to Plessner, this double feeling is typical for humans. Who we are cannot be fixed, but is part of a social game; that playing with identities makes us human.
Good choice
Jan Vorstenbosch chose to translate, introduce and comment on this early work by Plessner. Community boundaries is not a political pamphlet against radicalization, but a philosophy of man. Like other animals, we are bound to our environment; nature, our bodies and the way we interact with others (or our ‘positionality’). What makes people unique is that we can reflect on this position; distancing ourselves and looking critically at ourselves (he calls this ‘eccentric positionality’).
A doctrine that the German philosopher would elaborate in Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch (1928), his main work that has never been translated into Dutch. Community boundaries is intended for a wider audience, according to Plessner, and it establishes a connection with politics. Every human being belongs to a number of communities; from your family and people to a culture and religion. But, according to him, ‘being human’ also means that you always try to escape those connections.
Plessner is a founder of philosophical anthropology, or the philosophy of man. He developed his own language for his teaching – as did contemporaries such as Heidegger and Wittgenstein. Besides the ‘eccentric positionality’ of man, he emphasizes the importance of ‘ir-realization’, or the difference between ‘the private person and the public person’. This distance is a condition for the emancipation of people, in a public space where we can free ourselves from the oppressive bonds of family, religious or ethnic group.
Pinned to a group attribute
In his own day, communists tried to fit people into class schemes and National Socialists divided the population according to race. Plessner himself experienced the consequences of this radicalization: as a half-Jew he had to flee his country in 1933, after Hitler had come to power in Germany. The philosopher fled to Groningen, where he became a professor. During the German occupation he had to flee this new home again and go into hiding in Utrecht.
Jan Vorstenbosch had a hard time translating this book and wrote a good introduction, but a little more information about the person of Plessner would have been useful, also given his close involvement with our country. The Dutch weren’t very philosophical, Plessner thought, and he thought that was right in us to appreciate; nowhere else did the German see such an aversion to big words and radical ideologies. A conclusion he drew during his farewell lecture in Groningen in 1951, before he decided to return to Germany.
With which Plessner did exactly what he wanted to warn us about: pinning individuals to a group characteristic, in this case the alleged sobriety of the Dutch. A self-image that has been under pressure of late – and not just from politics. Community boundaries is a good introduction to a great thinker who has worked in our country for a long time and has been wrongly forgotten. A sharp analysis of what it means to be human, which is still refreshing almost a hundred years after its appearance.
Helmuth Plessner: Community Boundaries – Criticism of Radical Social Movements. Translated from the German and introduced by Jan Vorstenbosch. northern book; 260 pages; € 24.90.
