The Centered Reality. Helmuth Plessner’s Anti-Naturalistic Approach

This paper discusses the criticism of naturalism based on the irreducibility of first-person-perspective facts. This critique considers naturalism insufficient since it proposes the view of reality as a centerless dimension. However, simply reintegrating subjective facts into a naturalistic view of reality we eventually produce a split situation in which conscious and self-conscious forms of life require a special consideration, thus appearing as separated from the whole of reality. In order to overcome what turns out to be a dualistic interpretation of reality, this paper considers Helmuth Plessner’s non-naturalistic approach. It elaborates the notion of positionality and aspectivity as charac-teristics of all natural forms of life, thus leading to the consideration of reality an essentially centered dimension and of humans as part of nature.