Holobiontic Encounters (AI-generated image curated by author)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Introduction
1.2 The Core of Philosophical Anthropology Listed as Four Basic Points
2. Theorizing the Tension of Being
3. Responsivity as an Anthropological Concept
4. Philosophical Anthropology for Shifting Times
4.1 Centralizing Relations (Point I)
4.2 Anthropology and Chronicling Sensibilities (Point II)
4.3 Focus on Lived Experience on All Levels (Point III)
4.4 Resituating the Subject-Object Relation (Point IV)
5. Conclusion: Fieldwork, or Cultivating a Mode of Experience
REFERENCES
The essay that follows will be published in six installments; this, the third, contains section 3.
But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.
An earlier version of this essay appeared under the title “Reviving Philosophical Anthropology for the Age of Extinction” in Nature & Anthropology 4, 1 (2026): 10003, available online at URL = <https://www.sciepublish.com/article/pii/909>.
The Revival of Philosophical Anthropology in the Age of Extinction: Learning to Find Our Place Again, #3
3. Responsivity as an Anthropological Concept
In their focus on the excentric positionality of human beings, the classical approaches to PA highlight the central importance of our capacity for responsivity towards our natural, cultural, and social environment.
In considering the nature of our responsivity, Bernhard Waldenfels’s work on this concept and fact is directly relevant. Waldenfels formulated a phenomenology of responsivity: we respond to our bodies and our environment, yet they also appear as alien to us. In a way, we encounter the world as strange (Fremd) (Waldenfels, 2011). Waldenfels’s work shares a commonality with PA: the displacement or alienation is positioned in the way the world appears to us, including our own bodies. Moreover, Waldenfels’s idea moves beyond mere intentionality: fundamentally, we respond to a call (Anspruch) of something “radical Other”. Applied to our lifeworld as a totality, there appears an elective affinity with the concepts of PA here, especially in the context of the Age of Extinction. Our environment changes, and so a new register of experiences opens, from solastalgia to eco-anxiety and even climate depression.
For Scheler, responsiveness manifests itself in the dynamic relationship between drives and the cultural imagery directing it. We respond to different—often opposing—forces. For Gehlen, effectively responding to natural circumstances is the human capacity par excellence. The result of this responsiveness on a collective scale is the formation of cultures. They are repositories of acts, decisions, habits, customs, conventions, and behavioral patterns that sustain human life and compensate, in the cultural domain, for what the natural domain withheld: given our world-openness, responsiveness is a necessity. For Plessner, organisms are excentrically positioned—their physical form does not coincide with their mode of life. In their capacity for responsivity, human beings conceptualize themselves as experiencing and responsive agents in the world they actively shape—and which shapes them in turn. They are neither completely submerged in this world nor are they elevated above it. To hold the first position would be to revert to naïve animism; to ascribe to the second position would relapse into scientistic positivism. Human beings are caught between two positions, neither of which they occupy fully. Yet, these positions still overlap and inform each other, even while they never fully coincide.
Granted, the classical thinkers of PA never conceptualized the issue in precisely this manner, but their works certainly allow for a reading which positions the capacity to respond at the center of the inquiry. The concept of responsivity as implied in their theories suggests a prior complex of boundary conditions, behavioral dispositions, cognitive capacities, habituated patterns, and what Kant would have called “receptivity” as well as “spontaneity.” In other words: for a human being to be able to truly respond to natural, cultural or social circumstances, one must start not from a naïve view of organic life. One must not treat it as an inexplicable, primitive fact or a “given.”
This tension between (i) the conditions that make responding possible and (ii) the response itself is inherent in all three classical positions. It is explicitly worked out in Plessner’s theory, in which he sketches out a series of increasingly complex levels that connect the inorganic to the organic world. As per point (I), to respond to – for instance – environmental cues demand a body endowed with certain properties, inclinations and capacities. The merit of Plessner’s (and to some degree Gehlen’s) theory resides in showing how these bodies and what they afford are anchored in more basic foundational, biological, chemical, cognitive and reflexive processes. As Scheler emphasized, we can moreover resist or reject urges or avoid taking certain actions. That is, our bodies are equipped with the cognitive apparatus that allows us to break free from drives or instincts. The capacity to respond appears in their theories not as a primitive “given,” but as an adaptable and traceable phenomenon that can be approached at different levels. In analyzing the human capacity to respond and grounding it into findings from biology and chemistry allows us to widen the field of PA to include recent findings in environmental psychology, ecology and anthropology.
As I’ve already mentioned, from its inception—following Kant—the key anthropological question had been: “what is the human being?” Quite often, the natural and religious sciences were instrumental in providing the material for PA. However, the resulting picture became reductionist and one-dimensional, as per point (II) above. Rasini has described such accounts quite rightfully as “images of the human” (Menschbilder) (Rasini, 2011). But like any image, such depictions can hide as much as they reveal.
The fundamental innovation of PA – to view the human being as an embodied, embedded and enactive totality, especially in its capacity for self-shaping (Selbstgestaltung)—was to circumvent the question “what is the human being?” The creators of PA understood that once we inquire “what is X?,” we are obliged to provide answers that circumscribe and delineate X, much has one would expect in the sciences. In short, the prevailing tendency had been to provide often simplified images of the human condition. Recognizing the creative potentials of human beings, PA opted instead for an open, adaptable and interdisciplinary approach. Yet, the focus on responsivity allows for reorienting the main question of PA, while fully retaining its open and interdisciplinary methodology. What assumes center stage is not a question about the essence of a being, but a question of the responses it enacts, embodies and establishes between its mental life, its body and the physical environment in which it is embedded.
If one—as Plessner notes—wants to resonate with a phenomenon instead of merely observing it, a different type of question is required. It no longer need be definitional or focused on defining an essence. Instead, by fully embracing the idea of anthropology as an experiential science (Erfahrungswissenschaft), the experiences and responses of human beings become the focus of analysis. By analyzing responses, one can infer behavioral patterns, affective, cognitive, and individual and cultural habits and their evolution. In performing such analyses, PA resonates with its subject matter, sharing and engaging its experiences. So, description is not aimed at furnishing yet another “image of the human,” but instead of chronicling various modes of human responsivity to the call of the world. Especially in the Age of Extinction, this task becomes increasingly important. For the first time in human history, the global population and its technology have grown to such a degree that humanity has become a planetary force. The changes it sets in motion influence how human beings can engage with the world, and how they must respond to for instance climate-related or ecological changes. But because human beings are embedded, embodied, and enactive, any change in the environment resonates through entire ways of life, whether they are traditional or modern. The call of the world demands a finetuned responsivity
If one wishes to resonate with a phenomenon rather than merely observe it, a different type of question is required. It must no longer be focused on defining an essence. By fully embracing the idea of anthropology as an experiential science or (Erfahrungswissenschaft), the experiences and responses of human beings become the focus of analysis. By analyzing responsivity, one can infer behavioral patterns, affective, cognitive, individual, and cultural habits, and their evolution. In performing such analyses, PA resonates with its subject matter, sharing and engaging its experiences. So, description is not aimed at furnishing yet another “image of the human” but of chronicling various ways of responding to the call of the world. Especially in the Age of Extinction, this task becomes increasingly important. The global population and its technology have become planetary forces, the cultural comprehension of which demands a finetuned responsivity.
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