The lifeworld and the world of life: the concept of relevance and its foundation in organic nature

2.1 Language and the problem of relevance

Human languages resemble closed systems of rules.^[2] When we speak in our native language, we follow complex patterns. We form grammatical sentences and recognize when children or adult learners make mistakes. Syntacticians or authors of grammar primers boil much of this ability down to rules. Likewise, we regularly correlate words with meanings or meaning areas, and again much of this ability can be captured by semanticists or lexicographers in terms of general rules of usage. We move our vocal tract from lips to larynx in complex ways to produce strings of sounds with specific features that make a difference in our language but might go unnoticed by speakers of another language. The linguistic discipline studying the latter phenomenon, phonology, is one of the first fields in which a theoretical concept of relevance was proposed. Only certain features of sounds are “relevant” in a given language while all other features are irrelevant. The relevant features were formulated in terms of systems and “structural laws” (Bühler 1968 [1931]; Trubetzkoy 1929).

Without special training, we are at a loss to explain the grammatical, semantic, or phonological “rules” of our own language. This shows that we follow certain regularities without even knowing that we do. It also reflects how deeply ingrained our native language is. But is a language a closed system of rules or even laws that we follow without fail? And why would we subject ourselves to such a system? On the face of it, a simple answer suggests itself. We are able to use a shared language to communicate because, it seems, a language is a strict code, a rule-governed apparatus that reliably correlates sentences with meanings, no matter who utters these sentences and when.

However, if we use the idea of communicating through adherence to a system of rules as our yardstick, we can see that our actual use of language deviates from the ideal. Karl Bühler, who adapted the phonological concept of “relevance” to the level of meaning, pointed out that real people, from very small children to proficient adults, convey meaning in ways that are incompatible with an ideal of “meaning-constancy.” Bühler (2011 [1934]: 194, 399–400) stresses the “plasticity” and “openness” (Offenheit) that pervades our everyday use of language and that is necessary for us to apply words to ever new and often unique situations. We do not simply decode meaning by following a fixed apparatus. Instead, if measured against the rules we might find in a dictionary or a logic textbook, we both add and subtract meaning, depending on what is “relevant” here and now.^[3]

Bühler was writing this at a time when it had become common across disciplines to see language as a productive activity rather than a fixed system (Humboldt 1999 [1830–1835]). Scholars emphasized that we use our language with a great deal of flexibility and innovation, not only in literature, but in everyday life (Vološinov 1986 [1929]). Hence, the meaning of an utterance could not be interpreted without considering the concrete situational context of that utterance (Malinowski 1923). The rise of structuralism and the “cognitive revolution” starting in the 1950s overshadowed this tradition by turning towards code models of communication. But even many code theorists acknowledged that the actual use of a code in a real situation is not accounted for by the code itself (Eco 1968; Goodman 1968). Many phenomenologists, linguists and semioticians continued to embrace the dynamic character of sign use (Coseriu 1985; Zlatev 2023). Among them, Göran Sonesson (1988) continued the earlier traditions of relevance research.

The keyword “relevance” resurfaced in a different quarter and largely without reference to the earlier accounts when Sperber and Wilson (1995 [1986]) criticized what they called “the code model.” One reason for the prominence of their “relevance theory” is that the challenge against the notion that human communication is governed by a closed apparatus of rules came, in their case, from within a cognitive-science framework that was methodologically oriented towards such rules. Sperber and Wilson show that even if we see a natural language as a strict code, and even if we treat the meaning of an utterance in terms of “propositional contents” amenable to formal logical operations, the producer and interpreter of an utterance must derive these core contents by construing the context of the utterance in a way that is never reducible to a code or logic. The context in which the utterance has its meaning, i.e., its “relevant” context, is not “given” in advance but selected on the occasion (Sperber and Wilson 1995 [1986]: 132–142).

As Sperber and Wilson point out, the context which might become relevant (as shown by the fact that it would become relevant in a slightly different situation) is unrestricted in scope. Far beyond the “co-text” of what was said before, the potentially relevant context encompasses the situation of utterance and the people within it, including the perceptual environment and different ways of framing it, memories, expectations, goals, feelings, “encyclopedic” knowledge, etc. Hence, when construing “the” context, we select what is relevant here and now from an infinite wealth of potentially relevant elements. This is not a task that rules or logic could handle. Still, we perform it on an everyday basis as speakers and listeners.

If humans possess this uncanny ability to construe the relevant context of linguistic signs, they no longer need to adhere strictly to the rules of their language to communicate successfully. Indeed, authors like Wilson and Sperber (2012) argue that we break the rules all the time: We deviate metaphorically or ironically from the standard denotations of words, both adding and subtracting meaning, as Bühler had put it. We modify concepts by widening or narrowing them “ad hoc.” Even where we do not bend the rules, we often add meaning freely, leaving things unsaid but clearly and unmistakably meaning them. True, sometimes, we neither add nor subtract anything and just express what our words mean according to the dictionary. But even then, competent utterers and audiences will know that no additional contextual information is relevant here and now – and this is once again a human judgment that no rule apparatus could make for us.

The fact remains, of course, that a language furnishes us with relatively stable and systematic patterns of use and meaning that carry much of our communication with other members of our community. Yet we do not feel bound by these patterns; we use them in a flexible and often innovative manner. Both facts underlie our everyday communication. And just as we follow the patterns without even knowing that we do, we also deviate from them without thinking about it. Our capacity to judge what is relevant here and now includes both the “closed” circuits of ingrained, abstract patterns and an “openness” towards the richness of ever new, concrete situations. But how should we understand this human capacity, given the tension indicated by the notions of “closedness” and “openness”?

2.2 Meaning and its typifying dynamic

In their efforts to keep to a framework modeled on propositional logic and natural science, Sperber and Wilson could not develop a concept of relevance that fulfilled its purpose. First, their definition of relevance in terms of “cognitive effects” loses track of non-cognitive, e.g., volitive or emotional, factors that play a part in determining the “relevant” context in a communicative situation. Second, their idea that relevance is about deriving these effects in a way that saves resources inside the brain tells us little about communication as a social practice that depends on the ability to know what is relevant to others. As competent communicators, we know how a hearer will take an utterance or what a speaker meant because we can guess what is relevant to them here and now. We clearly do not do this by monitoring people’s brains (for both points, see Strassheim 2010, 2022).

To develop a viable theory of relevance, we should build on earlier accounts of relevance that Sperber and Wilson neglected, especially that of social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. First, Schutz describes meaning making not only in terms of cognitive processes such as thought or perception, but also in terms of actions or emotions (Strassheim 2012). Second, he gives an account of how, within the process of meaning constitution, individual and embodied processes interlink with social structures. What holds his philosophy together is the concept of relevance he kept developing from the late 1920s up to his premature death in 1959.

For Schutz, thoughts, perceptions, emotions, and actions are constituted by “meaning” in the wide sense of German Sinn.^[4] Meaning is carved out of a person’s lived experience at what the early Schutz (2013 [ca. 1925]) calls a series of “levels,” starting from the streaming fullness of my entire experience here and now, through the distinct sensation of my own lived body, via more complex movements and cognitive processes, to conceptual meaning and my understanding of other people. Schutzian “meaning” is thus a selection from a potentially infinite wealth of situational elements. If, as Sperber and Wilson argue, the context relevant to an utterance is “chosen” from an infinite wealth of potentially relevant situational elements, the construal of context is a straightforward example of Schutz’s theory of meaning. Schutz goes on to ask why certain meaning configurations rather than others become “relevant” for a person here and now. In Husserl’s terminology (e.g., Husserl 1989 [ca. 1925]: §56), this question concerns the “motivation”^[5] of specific meanings within the development of meaning over time. Relevance thus concerns the dynamic of meaning (Strassheim 2015).

Schutz’s (1962a [1953]) answer to his question consists mainly in the concept of “typification.” Meaning selections tend to form patterns that reinforce themselves over time, making it more likely that later meanings will conform to the pattern. Typical experiences, expectations, actions, etc. become ingrained through “habitualization.” Types motivate meaning selections that conform to them and, to this extent, make relevance a matter of typical relevancies. This typifying dynamic of meaning characterizes the human lifeworld as a whole. Specific types articulate the lifeworld in historically and culturally variable ways. A chief medium that reinforces types at the individual level and stabilizes them at the social level are signs (most of all language). Conversely, signs are produced and interpreted in accordance with typifying “schemes” (Schutz 1962c [1955]) shared within a group that ease communication along typical lines. This mutual interaction between sign use and the wider lifeworld is possible because both share the typifying dynamic of meaning.

While this may sound at first like a rule or code model of communication as discussed in Section 2.1, types are not rules. A crucial difference is that types are open to whatever adaptation and modification is required in a concrete situation; also, types are valid and trustworthy only “until further notice” (Schutz) and can be suspended, permanently changed, or even given up, at any time.^[6] This flexibility allows types, unlike strict rules, to reflect the dynamic character of the lifeworld into which language is embedded and to which it must be open – or at least in principle. How the openness of types actually works is a question to which I will return shortly.

Types are softer than rules; if anything, they are more akin to rules of thumb. This may be what proponents of rule models have in mind when they add that rules “allow for” or “leave room for” exceptions and modifications (Habermas 1992 [1988]: 47). However, such caveats do not suffice to reflect the flexibility and creativity of our sign use. Rule models, after all, seek to explain how it is that we share meaning through signs in ways that are both reliable and precise. If the explanation were that we follow rules together, this would require that we strictly follow those rules. Once we acknowledge the reality that people deviate from the rules by adding or subtracting meaning à la Bühler, we need an additional explanation for how they can still share meaning no less reliably and precisely. In other words, to explain communication, it is not enough to say that such deviations are possible or “allowed”; we need to show why people deviate from the expected patterns, and how they do so together.

The idea of a lifeworld guided by “relevance” aims at an alternative answer. But if relevance is based on typification, we need to question the concept of a type further. For if a type resembles a “soft” rule and “allows for” deviations, we should demand the same explanation as in the case of a rule model: Why do people diverge from typical patterns of meaning together? During the last years of his life, Schutz, too, increasingly wondered about the source for the changes and innovations that form a part of our everyday life even though they seem to run counter to the idea that our everyday life is guided by “typical” relevancies. Due to his early death, he could not finish his theory of relevance. A hint towards a solution might lie in Schutz’s hope that the fundamental problems of a social phenomenology could only be solved by a “philosophical anthropology” (Schutz 1962b [1959]: 149).^[7]

2.3 Closedness and openness as human tendencies

To approach the anthropological foundation Schutz sought, I propose relating the “closedness” and “openness” at work in human experience to two basic tendencies within the dynamic of human meaning making.

We can safely assume, as Schutz does, a human tendency to form typical patterns of meaning and to continue following these patterns. Such a tendency is easily exemplified by learning processes and the gradual but quick and often lasting formation of habits and routines. Another symptom is the force that such trodden paths seem to have over us once established, to the point of blinding us to alternative ways of doing or seeing things.

The same symptom, however, indicates that this cannot be the only tendency at the basis of relevance. If humans only had the tendency to form types and to keep following them, a sweeping lock-in would ensue. As Schutz argued (cf. Section 2.2), types structure our entire experience and action, from bodily sensation to conscious thought, by motivating our meaning selections. If this were the whole story, we would lack any intrinsic motivation to stray from a system of types once it has been established. Our language and lifeworld would be hermetically closed in a way that resembles a Habermasian rule model with its weak caveat that the rules “allow for” exceptions. We must still explain what motivates us to move away from types, and why we do so together.

One kind of explanation can be found frequently in the literature (e.g., Savransky 2016; Scheler 2021 [1926]; Schutz 1966 [1957]). When a “closed” system – be it a daily routine, a religious worldview, a racist stereotype, or a machine – is interrupted in its normal functioning, e.g., because the system meets external “resistance” from reality (Deely 2021 [1990]: 73) or because an internal contradiction causes the system to break down, we are stopped in our tracks and forced to search for what is wrong. The situation can then motivate us to deviate from the procedure we thought valid so far. We may, for instance, introduce a temporary workaround, an additional element, or a fundamental change to the system. In such a scenario, our deviation from the system is purely reactive and may be consistent with, and even subordinate to, our motivation to maintain the system. Only that which would otherwise continue can be “interrupted,” and the point of troubleshooting and repairs is to return to the originally intended course.

This “interrupt” (or “problem”: Schutz 1966 [1957]) scenario fits a considerable class of cases. Many disturbances, objections, obstacles, and errors that agitate our daily lives belong here. Nevertheless, the scenario fails to account for another, perhaps even larger, class of cases and thus for much of the flexible and innovative dynamic that our lifeworld also displays. When we are interrupted and forced to react, the event has distinct phenomenological characteristics, such as startlement, attention to the problem, and effort to find a solution. These characteristics make cases of the “interrupt” kind prominent, but they also distinguish them from many other cases in which we deviate from types without even noticing that we do. Perhaps most often, when we adapt a typical pattern to the situation at hand by modifying or suspending the type, we are not aware of any “problem” that would make us stop and think, forcing us to deviate from the type. We simply deviate from the type as a matter of course.

This difference is also visible in language use. An “interrupt” scenario aptly describes our reaction to breakdowns in interpretation (e.g., in “garden-path” sentences), or to disturbances in communication. In contrast, as Wilson and Sperber (2012: 47–83) argue, when we interpret metaphorical or ironical utterances, we do not usually first misconstrue the utterance as literally meant, then find our interpretation odd, and then look for a non-literal reading to amend it. Instead, we most often think of the metaphorical or ironical interpretation first and never consider a literal reading. Similarly, when producing such utterances, we do not usually first try to say what we mean literally, then somehow fail, and finally come up with a metaphorical or ironical twist to express ourselves, but we use metaphors and irony without giving a second thought about it. This is even more true of the many small adaptations of “dictionary” meaning we perform in applying words to the changing and sometimes novel situations of everyday life: Our divergence from a typical pattern is, in these cases, not a reaction to a “problem,” but a spontaneous process.

Spontaneous deviations from types cannot be motivated by the tendency to follow types – not even indirectly, as in the “interrupt” scenario. The easiest way to explain what motivates us in these cases is to assume an opposite tendency to move away from typical patterns. In other words, meaning making is driven not only by a tendency towards “closedness,” but also by an active, inherently motivating tendency towards “openness.”^[8] If we assume not only the first but also the latter to be a fundamental feature that underlies human meaning making, we have the ingredients for an explanation for how we actually use language and other signs to communicate with each other: Just as the shared tendency towards closedness in meaning motivates us to follow types together (which lends a rule model some plausibility), the shared tendency towards openness motivates us to deviate from types together (which accounts for our flexible and creative sign use).

Both tendencies can manifest themselves in striking ways. The tendency towards closedness shows in phenomena such as the stunning force of habit, ideology, or professional blindness. The opposite tendency shows in phenomena like curiosity, play, diversion, undirected “anxiety,” or boredom (Heidegger 1995 [1929/30]), which push us away from habitual channels of meaning making. Most of the time, however, both tendencies seem to work together in a more low-key, matter-of-course flexibility or adaptive routinization that characterizes much of our experience, including our acting and communicating.

If we conceive of relevance as the dynamic that motivates our meaning selections, relevance, then, is an interplay of two fundamental tendencies rather than just one. An ambiguity in our everyday use of the word “relevance” appears to reflect this. On the one hand, we think of relevance as “pertinence”: Something is relevant if it belongs to the matter at hand, fits with an established frame, question, or topic. On the other hand, we also call “relevant,” in a second sense (now opposed to “redundant”), that which is new, upsets the status quo, raises a different question, or changes the topic.

4.1 Life as mediation: organization and dynamic form

To characterize life at the most general level, Plessner uses the concept of a “boundary” and then shows that this fundamental structure is by necessity realized through “mediation.” ^[12]

According to Plessner (2019 [1928]: 94–98, 119–123), while we can delineate the “contour” of any material thing, dead or alive, as the imaginary line at which the thing ends and its surroundings begin, a living being also possesses a “boundary” (Grenze). Like any physical body, a living being borders on a surrounding “medium” (Medium), but it also “claims a place” within the medium by “setting itself apart from” it. This relation consists in the fact that an organism’s boundary combines “closedness” with “openness.” On the one hand, the living body shields itself from the medium, retreating inside itself, behind its boundary, and persisting in its autonomous operations. On the other hand, the living body keeps its boundary open in both directions, letting parts of the medium in (as an orb-weaver spider does when eating a fly) and reaching beyond its boundary into the medium (as the spider did when using a tree, its silk web, and its venomous fangs to catch the fly).^[13]

A boundary in this sense is most visibly manifested in the breathing skin of an animal or the semipermeable membrane of a single-celled organism.^[14] But these are not identical with the boundary itself. It would make little sense to say that the spider’s body reaches beyond its own skin or that its body is “inside” or “behind” its skin, since the spider’s skin is a part of its body. What Plessner calls a “boundary” has reality at the level of the body, but mediately, in essentially “roundabout ways,” two of which characterize all organic life.

One of the two roundabout ways is “organization” (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 147–159). A living body cannot be said to exist “inside” or “behind” its skin, and yet we think of an onion or an ocelot as “having” skin and other organs that perform certain functions for “it.” According to Plessner, this intuition^[15] has its basis in the fact that a living body is “organized,” i.e., differentiated into organs. Through its specific structure and operation, an organ is closed off from the rest of the body. But by virtue of the fact that organs work together as part of a functional system, each of them “represents” both the other organs and their overall unity. It is through this representation that the unity of the whole organism comes into being. As the “center” that “has” the organs and which they serve as “means” or “tools” (organa in Greek), the organism takes on an existence beyond the organs although it only exists insofar as it is mediated by the existence of those organs. All life is organic because “life means being in mediation with life” (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 177).^[16] Organs are the “tools” of life, but life only exists through organs. Life is a property of the living body, and without that body, it would be unthinkable.

Importantly, this means that we can ascribe to all living things, including plants, a “center,” a “self” (Zentrum, Selbst: Plessner 2019 [1928]: 148). Organization represents a difference, internal to the living body, between the plurality of specialized organs and the functional unity of the whole organism. By thus “mediating itself,” the living body “has itself” in that it “has” organs: It is both the “subject” and the “object” of this relation of “having” (Subjekt/Objekt des Habens, Plessner 2019 [1928]: 174). According to Plessner, the Cartesian difference between “mind” and “body” has its roots here; it is therefore not a metaphysical principle, but a corollary of organic life as Plessner describes it at a “psychophysically neutral” level. Being a “self” or “subject,” then, is not a human prerogative. The specifically human self has a biological foundation that will later allow Plessner to characterize it more precisely.

The second “roundabout way” in which the “boundary” of a living being has reality through “self-mediation” (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 165) lies in the temporal dimension (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 123–137, 160–171). While a living body cannot move outside its skin, it can change over time, thus realizing openness by crossing the limits of its present form or situation towards a different one. Even so, the living being does not lose its identity in the sense of changing from one thing into another. This is because it also realizes closedness in the temporal dimension. The individual living body displays an internal orientation towards a general “type” (especially, its species) that subsumes its different phases and its unique development under it.

This orientation towards a type produces a complex temporal relation. The present state of the living body already refers to a future state in which it will be different but still the same as to its type. The very fact that such an anticipation persists over time secures a continuity of the process, no matter what will actually follow. In the reverse direction, the reference to the future in the present marks the present state as “unfinished” and helps “motivate” its changing to a different state. The same relation of continuity and discontinuity holds between the organism’s present and its past, as its present state is marked as the “fulfillment” or frustration of an earlier anticipation (i.e., of a past reference to the future). Thus, a living being relates to its own temporal position; it “claims its place” in time as it does in space. A plant or an animal articulates time into past, present, and future, unlike a growing crystal, which is at any point simply identical with its present state and its past up to now.

This two-sided temporal structure which Plessner calls “dynamic form” is at the basis of some of the characteristics of life used in everyday life as well as biology:^[17] growth and development; the “regular irregularity” of the shapes and rhythms we find in organisms and that we metaphorically call “organic” in esthetic or social contexts; and, at least in animals, intentional movement and action as characterized by the tension between an anticipated state and the actual process that will or will not bring about that state (Plessner 2019: 115–118). I will return to action later, but I mention at this point that the temporal character of human relevance as a dynamic of meaning making (and even the role of types in this dynamic) seems to have roots at the level of life in the most general sense.

4.2 The open form of plants and the closed form of animals

Plessner now distinguishes three large groups of lifeforms according to their organizational type. He approaches this distinction by formulating a general problem that derives from the relation of closedness and openness in organic life (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 172–203).

“Organization” expresses closedness insofar as the structures of specialized organs enclose the organs in question, and the organism based on their functioning together, within stable cycles of operation, stimulus, and response. The type of organism (e.g., mammal, dog, Chihuahua) provides a general limiting framework for this, which is even more narrowly circumscribed in the individual member and its individual development over time. As particularly evident in organs that serve metabolism, perception, or action, such closure produces a relation between the organism and its environment that follows narrow patterns. A dog, e.g., has a complex respiratory system that forces it to breathe around 30 times a minute, without being interrupted for more than a few seconds, a gaseous medium containing ca. 20 % or more oxygen, and while no amount of nitrogen in the air has any effect on the dog, 10 % of carbon dioxide are enough to kill it.

Such closure, constitutive of any organism, produces a tension between what Plessner calls “autonomy” and “autarky.” On the one hand, every organism is autonomous to some degree. It “gives itself its own laws” (auto-nomia), closing itself off from its environment and, by the same token, confronting its surroundings in selective ways, fashioning them into its very own Umwelt, as Uexküll had called it, into a field structured in accordance with the organism’s operations. On the other hand, what the organism gains in autonomy it loses in autarky (aut-arkeia: “self-sufficiency”). It has specific needs that must be filled by its surroundings for it to thrive and survive. It is dependent on the environment, “in need of supplementation,” “unfulfilled,” or “needy” (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 179, 215–216).^[18]

This tension poses an objective problem for the organism, as its actual environment is far greater, more volatile and less foreseeable than its Umwelt. Paradoxically, its closedness forces an organism to open itself up towards an “other” beyond its own operations. Precisely because the organism formally approaches its surroundings as an Umwelt, it must, on a material level, engage an environment that transcends that Umwelt. The evolutionary “adaptedness” of a lifeform’s design, overemphasized by Uexküll, correlates with the problem of a dynamic “adaptation” to changing situations (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 186–192). A dog’s respiratory system perfectly fits a free flow of air on Holocene Earth with its typical composition near the ground (>20 % oxygen, <1 % carbon dioxide), but whenever those conditions are not given (e.g., under water, in a box, in a slurry pit, on the summit of Mt. Everest), or when the respiratory system itself is blocked or compromised, the dog will get into serious trouble and had best find ways to get out of the situation or avoid it.

This tension between closedness and openness inherent to organic life raises the problem of how to reconcile the two sides. According to Plessner, plants, animals, and humans represent three basic “forms” of organization, different but equally legitimate and viable solutions to that problem.

Plants are based on what Plessner (2019 [1928]: 202–209, 215–217) calls the “open form” of organization. Plants cede a maximum of autonomy to the environment, embracing their dependence on changing situations and on processes of material exchange with their surroundings. In contrast, the animal’s “closed form” of organization (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 209–217) strengthens its autonomy through a system of clearly differentiated organs. The dog’s respiratory system has specialized and distinctly localized functional units: snout, windpipe, lungs, etc. Plants, by contrast, tend towards functional tissues that can be found in most body parts. A begonia, too, exchanges gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide with the air, but it does so using a largely passive process of diffusion through pores everywhere in its leaves, and photosynthesis, a combination of breathing and eating, so to speak, happens in all of the plant’s green cells at a microscopic scale. Whereas the dog’s precious and vulnerable breathing apparatus is encased deep in its body, the begonia’s is fully exposed and in direct contact with its surroundings.^[19]

What the plant waives in autonomy, it gains in autarky. Unlike the dog, the begonia can go without air for a few hours. Cutting off some of its leaves will not harm it much either. Indeed, a cut-off leaf can be grown into a second, healthy begonia, complete with stem and roots. None of this has obvious analogs in the dog. The animal’s “closed form” entails a more complex relation to the environment. Its greater autonomy reduces its autarky by bringing about more demanding and more specific needs, which exacerbates the mismatch between its closed Umwelt and the open environment. While the motionless begonia is nourished by sun, air, rain, and soil, the dog must go and find food. Furthermore, like all animals, the dog can only feed on other living beings (animals or plants), whereas the begonia, like most plants, changes inorganic elements of the environment into organic compounds. Even to reproduce, a plant, true to the “open form” of organization, can rely on outside factors, such as wind or animals, to disseminate its pollen or fruit, while the dog must meet another, suitable and consenting dog and interact with it in a specific way.

A crucial corollary of the animal form is that the internal differentiation into highly specialized and localized organs requires central “oversight” and is in turn reinforced by it. A “division of labor” among organs correlates with a “central organ” not found in plants: a central nervous system, such as an insect’s ganglia or the dog’s brain and spinal cord. Here we have the first instance of a “higher level” of organic life. Plessner both connects and separates such levels using the notion of “explication,” or “realization” (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 215, 225, 268–269).^[20] As noted, all organisms have a “center.” In a plant, this center only exists in the sense that different organs, by functioning together, implicitly represent the unity of the organism that “has” those organs. In an animal, the center becomes “explicit” in the form of a specialized organ of its own. Physically set off from the rest of the body, the central organ of an animal manifests the self-distanced relation of any organism in which “the body has itself.” The animal’s center also expresses this internal relation by producing a representation of the body as a whole, a second, experienced body: its “lived body” (Leib) as opposed to its physical body (Körper, Plessner 2019 [1928]: 213).

Importantly, the existence of a central organ in animals means that the mismatch between the organism’s Umwelt and a much larger and less stable environment is “given” to the animal itself. As the central organ represents the body, it also represents the environment, which appears to the animal as an endlessly open field in contradistinction to itself and to its situation here and now. This enhanced and explicit dependence on changing circumstances makes animals more or less “restless,” driven to move around and to actively seek or avoid specific foods, dangers, conspecifics, etc. (Plessner 2019: 215–216).

The animal’s central organ functions as a mediator between the organism and its environment. It constantly manages “contact” with the world as it appears to the animal (in accordance with its closed form of organization) through a panoply of specialized sensory and motor organs. But this also means that the central organ “interrupts,” within the animal, the immediacy of stimulus-response chains that can exist in a plant. The “gap” produced by the central organ gives the animal a certain leeway. In principle, therefore, animal behavior has the character of an “action,” of having to make a “choice” among a number of options; it has a “practical” dimension (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 222–223, 227). A stimulus now takes on the character of a “question” to which the animal must find an “answer.” However, there is no guarantee that it will find a fitting answer, an answer that is useful or beneficial to itself. To minimize the risk of individual failure, the closed form of organization must provide some mechanism for narrowing down the range of acceptable options.

4.3 Animals: decentralized and centralized form

Plessner ideal-typically distinguishes two subgroups of animals according to the way their bodies solve this problem of the closed form of organization.

The group of “decentralized” animals, in which Plessner (2019 [1928]: 223–224, 227–230) includes, e.g., insects, spiders, starfish, and octopuses, narrow down their choices of action by putting less emphasis on the central organ and instead strengthening local nodes.^[21] Their bodies contain a plurality of loosely connected centers working in relative independence. This allows the animal to connect stimuli and fitting responses along narrow, local channels that still leave some scope (which gives their behavior the character of action) but to a considerable extent resemble reflexes. The decentralized animal’s body is closely interlinked with its specific Umwelt, which consists of changing “signals” that the animal’s centers single out because of their immediate practical significance and to which the centers immediately respond. The unity of the decentralized animal’s Umwelt and its objects ultimately resides in the unity of the organism itself rather than a centralized representation.

Plessner’s second subgroup of animals includes most vertebrates, among them mammals like the dog and, notably, homo sapiens.^[22] This group is based on a “centralized” deployment of the closed form (Plessner (2019 [1928]: 231–237). With a maximum of command turned over to the central organ, most of these animals’ behavior is relayed via their centers. The central organ collects stimuli coming in from all over the body and chooses fitting responses. For Plessner, the “gap” that separates sensation from action constitutes “consciousness.” This makes the centralized animal’s center a “subject” which relates differently to its environment. Where the decentralized animal’s Umwelt tends to be a dance of signals, each linked to a commensurate response, the centralized animal’s senses represent an overall situation that leaves open a range of possible actions. Its Umwelt is a field of possibilities for action and contains what a human would call “objects”: constant or recurring opportunities for performing certain actions.

However, the detour via consciousness raises a problem more acutely than does the decentralized form of organization (Plessner (2019 [1928]: 231–233). The situation as perceived by the centralized animal correlates far less precisely with a suitable response. Instead, the situation suggests an open range of options; each option, in turn, represents only a “type” of action with a range of variation in concrete execution. Greater insecurity and risk ensue. Therefore, the centralized animal needs additional mechanisms to help it find a fitting response. To a certain extent, this is done by autonomous systems that keep important functions (such as heartbeat) beyond conscious control, as well as by instincts that narrow down the range for conscious action (Plessner (2019 [1928]: 243–244).

Within the range of conscious action, however, a chief mechanism for improving decisions in a centralized animal is the individual process of learning from experience (Plessner (2019 [1928]: 257–266). As the animal’s central organ makes explicit the self that is implicit in every organism, animal learning represents, in its central organ, the temporal structure of how a living being relates to its present, future, and past. Even single-celled organisms can objectively correct their behavior in response to stimuli, but only animals “learn” in the sense of “appropriating” their past for the sake of their future. The centralized animal’s consciousness parses stimuli with a view to possible actions and decomposes what it experiences into elements that might be used again and recombined in anticipated future situations. A dog immediately recognizes the recurrence of a type of object that has proven tasty and digestible in its experience, and its attention will focus on the tempting possibility of eating this slightly different but similar object. But it will also notice different elements in the setting, e.g., when the object in question is offered by a person other than its owner, and strangers offering treats (e.g., veterinarians) have caused it pain that it wants to avoid in the future. The dog visibly hesitates, and the outcome of the present situation will become another lesson to it. A centralized animal’s memory selectively “articulates” its past and constantly re-articulates it in the light of new experiences and new anticipations. The central “gap,” i.e., the internal “interruption” between sensation and action that constitutes consciousness, makes the creature’s present stand out and links it to its future and past, introducing a distanced continuity, a temporal variation of the entanglement of closedness and openness that Plessner calls a “boundary.”

As I said, Plessner counts humans among the centralized animals. We have seen that core concepts most often associated with humans are already present at the animal level. The internal split between a “self” and “its” body that (contrary to Descartes) characterizes all organic life becomes “explicit” in a centralized animal’s layout. The animal self thereby takes on the form of a “subject” relating to objects around it and to its own body. It possesses “consciousness” of its environment and of its own “lived body.” Similarly, the temporal structure of life becomes explicit in the way these animals selectively construe their past in memory and learn from it with a view to an anticipated future. The centralized animal’s relation to its environment and to time both become manifest in “actions,” which, far from being automatic reactions, consist in “choices” made in response to a situation that the animal experiences as an open field of possibilities for engagement. Finally, the analysis has revolved around a constitutive tension between “closedness” and “openness,” the notions I used (in Section 2.3) to characterize human meaning making. But we still lack a specification of humans in contradistinction to other centralized animals.

4.4 The excentric level of human life

In Plessner’s view, the line between humans and other centralized animals is marked once again by a difference in the level of “explicitness.”

To understand this difference, we should recapitulate, with Plessner (2019: 267–269), his architecture of “levels” as described so far. Whereas a plant organism is maximally open to its environment, an animal organism is more enclosed within autonomous functions and specialized structures, which in turn – paradoxically – forces the animal to be more open to its environment. The “self” that is implicitly represented as the “center” of a plant qua organism is made explicit by the animal’s central organ. This produces within the animal the experience of a distance from its own body and from the situation of that body within a larger environment. Like the plant, the animal has a “boundary” that is closed yet open; the organism both retreats behind this boundary and reaches beyond it. But while the plant merely exists as such a configuration or “performs” (vollziehen) it, the animal experiences it. The animal “lives in” its center. From this center, it experiences, and to a varying extent controls, both its body and parts of its environment. Throughout, Plessner’s architecture follows the principle that the structure of the lower level persists at the next higher level but becomes “explicit” through an internal distance that allows the basic structure to relate back to itself.

Plessner (2019 [1928]: 269–272) now applies the same principle to the level of (centralized) animals. Due to its closed form, any animal is more open at a higher level, but remains subject to heavy structural restrictions. While an animal lives in a “here/now” rich in sensations from body and environment and pointing to possibilities for action, its experience never transcends this here/now. Moreover, while an animal’s environment is open in the sense of providing endless contents, it remains, as to its form, a narrow Umwelt corresponding to the limits of the creature’s sensory, motor, and central organs (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 223). All of this is true of humans too, which is why Plessner counts them as animals. However, the human level not only “performs” the animal structure, but also makes it explicit. Human experience is subject to the same structural restrictions as the experience of other animals, but humans experience these restrictions as such. A person not only “lives in” her “center,” but she is also aware of the fact that she lives in her center, and of the restrictions this entails. As the animal center manifests an internal distance from its own body, the human level manifests still another internal distance: a distance from the center itself. Plessner calls this specifically human self-relation “excentric,” literally, “outside of the center.”^[23]

The excentric form shifts the human animal’s relation to herself and to her environment into a different mode that marks our experience – already at a pre-reflective, everyday level – as distinctly “human.” This mode is characterized by the awareness that our experience here and now is only an aspect, or fragment, of a larger “world” that transcends our experience and exists independently of it (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 272). Plessner spells this out with reference to what he calls the “outer,” “inner,” and “social world.”

(a) Whereas even our closest relatives among the animals experience their environment as a field of concrete possibilities for the animal’s own action, humans experience their environment as an “outer world” of “things” (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 245–246, 249–257, 272–274). For a chimpanzee, an object is a cluster of opportunities or dangers relative to the ape himself. For a person, a “thing” is a cluster of properties which her experience will never exhaust. This way of perceiving the world involves, already at the level of perception, a sense of “negativity” that escapes other animals. For us, a thing is a more or less empty “schema” that can be filled by a changing variety of aspects. The thing in turn fills varying places within an order of space and time that negates the priority of the “here/now” in which both humans and other animals live. As a human, I experience those aspects of a thing which are present to me here and now as belonging to an invisible order that connects them with absent aspects. As a result, humans expect things in advance to show ever new aspects under ever new conditions. This, Plessner points out, is how we approach a thing according to Husserl’s phenomenology of perception.^[24] It also explains why chimpanzees “fail” at certain tasks in the artificial environments of human experimentation where a solution would require recognizing a significantly novel configuration or employment of known objects that human children easily recognize.^[25]

(b) For a person, her own body, considered as a material object, is also a “thing” of the outer world in this sense. But the excentric stance turns even her inner life into an “inner world” (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 274–279). An animal’s center is explicitly distanced from its body, and the animal experiences its “self” as located “inside” that body. An excentric animal, due to the additional distance from the center itself, experiences her own experience (including her lived body) as part of a larger nexus or stream that exceeds her conscious attention and even her understanding. In this sense, it is possible for a person to encounter herself as an “other” within herself, to misconstrue, reinterpret, and rearrange her own thoughts, dispositions, wishes, feelings, etc., in the ways that in Plessner’s day were being refined by psychoanalysis.^[26]

(c) As far as others beyond herself are concerned, a human being finds herself in a “social world”^[27] in that she experiences others as likewise excentric (Plessner 2019 [1928]: 279–286). For non-human animals, too, other living beings, particularly conspecifics, tend to stand out in experience. But the other remains firmly embedded within the environment as experienced from the standpoint of the animal’s center. In contrast, a human is excentric: She not only has a center and a corresponding standpoint but also finds herself placed “outside” it. When she assumes another being to be excentric like her, she will thereby assume that, just as she does, the other treats their own standpoint here and now as a fragment of an inexhaustible outer and inner world.

5.1 Plessner’s anthropological laws

The “excentric” level as described in Section 4.4 brings with it a complexity that Plessner elaborates in terms of three “fundamental laws of anthropology.”

Under the title of a law of “natural artificiality,” Plessner (2019 [1928]: 287–298) concludes that human nature drives us to create culture and technology and to believe in the inherent value of our creations. Being “excentric,” a person cannot fully and naively identify with her own standpoint but is always somewhat distanced from it. As a result, she is constitutionally “imbalanced,” anxious, doubtful, restless. To compensate for her imbalance, she seeks something beyond herself that would carry a “weight” and stability of its own and thereby offer her a “second nature” that she might follow naively and without question. However, human creations – e.g., a code of honor, a religion, a consumer society, factory production, air travel – fulfill that function by commanding recognition and compliance, both individually and in a social group. They repress and censor certain aspects of human experience and activity, which rekindles the doubt and inner conflict that motivated their creation in the first place. The process of making an artificial second nature never comes to an end because the imbalance of our “first” human nature as excentric beings is always restored.

This dynamic becomes clearer in light of Plessner’s (2019 [1928]: 298–316) second anthropological law, the “law of mediated immediacy.” As discussed in Section 4.1, all lifeforms relate to their environment in ways that are “mediated” by the organism and its development over time. While this indirect relation becomes even more indirect in the “closed form” of animal organization, to the experiencing animal itself, its contact with the environment nevertheless appears immediate. Only to an “excentric” animal who steps back and recognizes herself, body and mind, as a mediating element in the equation can her own contact with the environment appear as indirect. That is, only a human can treat reality as she immediately experiences it as the “appearance” to her of something not immediately given to her. For Plessner, this attitude is an adequate stance towards reality. Paradoxically, only experienced mediation gives us immediate access to reality (which is why Plessner speaks of “mediated immediacy” rather than vice versa). This point needs some elaboration.

As far as experience is concerned, experienced mediation allows us to recognize that what appears to us here and now is part of a reality that fundamentally exceeds this appearance. This is what gives reality the character, described in Section 4.4, of an outer, inner, and social “world” existing independently of our experience. A person is aware that she can never know everything about the things and people around her, or even about herself. Such awareness tends to protect her from confusing the world with her current perspective on it, and ultimately from mistaking the human Umwelt for the “real” environment. According to Plessner, experienced mediation brings us into contact with reality because this is the only mode in which reality as such can truly “appear” (in the sense of becoming manifest) to an organism, that is, to a being whose experience is inevitably mediated by its own organic nature.

As far as action is concerned, mediated immediacy resides in the tension between an intention and its realization. Intentions cannot be immediately realized. As Plessner (2019 [1928]: 310–311) puts it, the “medium” of the real world (including our own body and “inner world”) always “refracts” or “diverts” the “ray” of the intention in unforeseen ways, so that the result of my action is never the exact execution of whatever plan I had in the beginning. This is the deeper reason why (as per the law of “natural artificiality”) human creation can never come to an end. Even where the intention stays the same, its realizations in words, deeds, and works will differ from what was intended. The same is true of the intentions of other animals, but only an excentric animal is aware of this fundamental “refraction.” Therefore, even successful action will motivate a new attempt. All human action is “expression” due to this inevitable difference between intention and result, and every human expression calls for yet another expression. Nevertheless, this mediate relation between intention and reality is what puts an intention into contact with reality in the first place and allows the intention to be “fulfilled” in the true sense of the word. If my plans could be immediately realized, i.e., without anything coming between my plan and its execution, my intentions would never fail, but neither would they succeed. True success implies that my intention could have failed, i.e., that my action turned out to have been in accord with a reality independent of me, a reality that could have withheld its “consent” but did not. In this sense, Plessner (2019 [1928]: 298–299, 311–313) notes, even creation and invention are processes of “expression,” as they are based on possibilities found in reality and successfully realized in existing materials.

Finally, Plessner’s (2019 [1928]: 316–321) third law, the law of the “utopian standpoint,” captures a human tendency to look for an “Archimedean point” beyond all human creation that would hold together the universe and offer us ultimate rest, meaning, and certainty. This tendency is a natural consequence of the human search for a counterweight to an excentric existence, but the religions, utopias, and cosmologies it produces require a “leap of faith” that can and will always be doubted. The search for ultimate closure remains in a constant tension with expression as an open historical process and, in this sense, it always fails.

5.2 Human relevance and its foundation in organic nature

We can now see that Plessner has brought us back to where we started: the human lifeworld. His anthropological “laws” capture traits that, at least as far as we know, distinguish humans from other lifeforms (cf. Section 3): We build and rebuild cultures, technologies, and expressive media in an historical process that fuels itself and seems to know neither end nor limits despite its failures. More precisely, Plessner’s anthropology reflects the underlying dynamic I analyzed in terms of two tendencies in meaning making which together make up human relevance.

As an “excentric” being, a person cannot help but feel that her perspective reflects – and perhaps distorts – a mere aspect of an inexhaustible outer, inner, and social “world” (Section 4.4) or reality. In Schutzian terms, “meaning” is never more than a selection from a potentially infinite wealth of situational elements. Like Schutz, but more systematically than him, Plessner emphasizes that as humans, we have an intuitive sense of this fragmentary character of our experience.^[29] This sense, as we have seen, drives us human beings in two opposing directions at once.

(a) On the one hand, we seek to gain rest and confidence by investing human assumptions and creations with an inherent and lasting significance that demands compliance on both individual and collective levels. A tendency to follow established typical patterns – what I called the “closedness” of meaning in Section 2.3 – is only a more abstract formulation of the same principle in Schutzian terms. If this tendency stems from an existential search that aims, in the final instance, at an “Archimedean point,” we should not be surprised by the power that routines or ideologies can have over us.

(b) On the other hand, the sense never wanes that all of these are human artifacts which at best cling to mere fragments of the “world.” Types produce channels of meaning making that shut out most of reality in its outer, inner, and social dimensions, but we remain aware that reality does not therefore go away. This sense makes us doubt even what has become second nature to us. The result is what I called the “openness” of meaning in Section 2.3: a tendency to question established typical patterns and to diverge from them even where no “interruption” or “problem” forces us to do so. Human openness is inherently motivated, which makes it productive and destructive at the same time.

Nevertheless, we have seen that the excentric form at the root of this uniquely human dynamic of meaning is, according to Plessner, merely an “explication” of what characterizes the world of life at large. In the human case, the explication follows the path organism → animal → centralized animal → excentric animal. A combination of closedness and openness is constitutive of all organic life. Already in the outer membrane of a microscopic slime mold, closedness and openness characterize the ambiguous relation between organism and environment that Plessner calls a “boundary” (Section 4.1). Through “organization,” a living being produces a tension between the narrow Umwelt to which it is adapted and the wider environment on which it therefore depends. The animal organism strengthens this organic closure and, correspondingly, heightens its openness to the environment through a central organ. The central organ, especially in the centralized animal, makes explicit the internal tension within any organism and causes the animal to live in a “center” from which it experiences its own body and its position within the environment. In the excentric animal, the same principle of self-distance is applied to the center itself – and this seemingly small change makes possible the lifeworld as we know it.

In other words, the unified architecture of Plessner’s “levels” of organic life both connects and separates the human lifeworld and the world of life that contains it. The interweaving relationship of these two worlds (Section 3) becomes much less puzzling then. Against traditional ideas that only humans possess the kind of openness that manifests, e.g., in a sense of self, consciousness, curiosity, learning, future-oriented action, and choice, Plessner finds all of these traits in animals and still distinguishes them from their “excentric,” human form. Conversely, if our biological body, with its design, needs, and organic rhythms, is deeply involved in human relevance, this should not surprise us, since an interplay of closedness and openness is constitutive of organic life. In fact, as Plessner argues, this interplay is what produces the distinction between “body” and “mind” in the first place.

Looking back at the concept of relevance from its foundation in organic nature would also suggest that to assume two opposing tendencies within human meaning making is not a self-contradiction. According to Plessner, organic life “mediates itself” by producing, and unfolding through several “levels,” a tension between closedness and openness. Organic life brings forth both tendencies that underlie human relevance and thus hold together the human lifeworld.