Levels of Organic Life and the Human

The most important work by a key figure in German thought, Helmuth Plessner¿s Levels of Organic Life and the Human, originally published in 1928, appears here for the first time in English, accompanied by a substantial Introduction by J. M. Bernstein, after having served for decades as an influence on thinkers as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Peter Berger, Habermas, and the new naturalists.
The Levels, as it has long been known, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources as part of a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings in turn as a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics¿simply put, interactions between a thing¿s insides and surrounding world. On Plessner¿s unique account, living things are classed and analyzed by their ¿positionality,¿ or orientation to and within an environment. ¿Life¿ is thereby phenomenologically defi