Vida y distancia en «Límites de la comunidad»

Abstract

This paper reappraises Helmuth Plessner’s early sociophilosophical and anthropological understanding of life and distance, as thematically shown in his important philosophy of the soul in The Limits of Community (1924). Firstly, we will present the specific nature and dynamic of the soul’s life, i.e., the ambigous character of the psychic structure that expresses through individuation and by which we have to consider an inherent risk and vulnerability to human beeings in a both theoretical and practical sense. Secondly, we will discuss Plessner’s consequent necessity of distance, his deduction and foundation as generated in society and public sphere, since spaciality of modern life and his political-anthropological implicactions in terms of radicalism require an urgent understanding of those reflexive, protective mechanisms that belong to the specific human form of life.