44 S p i r i t ua l i t y S t u d i e s 8 - 1 S p r i n g 2 0 2 2 Human instincts are undeveloped, not so specialized as to give man the possibility of biological “survival”. Man is thus an unstable, insecure being. But she or he is also a being who can say “no” to instincts and go beyond his or her own limitations, act and develop oneself in the sphere of culture. Man thus becomes (Ger. werden) someone, becomes who he is, in the performance of his life. The relevance and actuality of anthropology in relation to issues of religion and spirituality can be traced in recent and forthcoming publications [2]. Within the platform from which we proceed, two tendencies could be identified in the search for an answer to the role and place of religiosity and God. On the one hand, these themes are explicitly present and elaborated in the work of Max Scheler, especially in On the Eternal in Man, in relation to phenomenology, revelation and givenness, and with his emphasis on the originality of religious experience as irreducible. In Scheler, we can find several impulses from both Christianity and pantheism. On the other hand, there is Arnold Gehlen’s conception, where we can draw from his work Primitive Man and Late Culture. His conception is based on derivation of early forms of religion and the genealogy of institutions, and we can find here rather a localization of this question in the network of human needs and interests, and thus a placing of God and religion in the structure of the stabilization of human life. On this basis, we can say that Helmuth Plessner’s approach is specific. It represents a third way, neither metaphysical nor reductive, which is based on a configuration of human experience, irreducible but originally linked to its expressivity and corporeality. Now that we have clarified the place of philosophical anthropology and the investigation of religious experience within it in the introduction, we should clarify our starting point in Plessner’s work itself. Indeed, the topic of religion and spirituality is not explicitly elaborated in detail within a single work, but we will consider as a source a combination of selected texts: in particular, the final section of Levels of Organic Life and the Human, Homo absconditus, the consideration of the role of anthropology in On the Anthropology of the Actor. The earlier text Die wissenschaftliche Idee: Ein Entwurf über ihre Forme belongs to this context, too, as pointed out by Patrick Wilwert (2011), who together with Oreste Tolone (2011) are among the main contributors to this discourse around Plessner’s work (Vydrová 2022). 2 Spirituality in the Perspective of the Non-Place of Man As we mentioned in the introduction, Plessner’s conception is based on the so-called excentric positionality. What does it mean? In what ways might excentric positionality be beneficial for a kind of distinctive experience that differs from ordinary experience and tends towards self-transcendence, deepening of experience or inner transformation? We believe that we can find here a productive resource for this topic, thanks to the complexity and holistic approach to the human perspective, reaching all areas of human experience. Its starting point is the anthropological difference from which centricity and excentricity, closedness and openness (Plessner 2019, 298–316), develops at the levels of the living: plants, animals, and sphere of human. In centric positionality is the organism situated in an environment in the manner of the center, but in excentric positionality one defines oneself in relation towards the center and becomes aware of one’s situation as a kind of tension, while for human it is impossible to found one’s life from the center. This brings into life of human being the effort to resolve this situation, which is always present. At the same time, man’s perspective is constantly changing since one is subject to configurations according to the situations in which she or he finds herself or himself in the world, in society, in history. As an excentric positionality, one becomes oneself in the performances of one’s own life. Human being is open, not pre-fixed or derived from an instance, but constituted in relation to the boundaries of one’s world, the possibilities of own corporeality, in relation to other people and one’s own activity in the sphere of culture in the broadest sense of the word. Excentric positionality is more specifically determined by three anthropological principles or theses that Helmuth Plessner, in his major work Levels of Organic and the Human, offers to explain in detail what he calls the human situation: natural artificiality, mediated immediacy, and the utopian standpoint. In the case of spiritual experience, we can focus precisely on the third anthropological principle, which expresses man’s coping with his special position (Ger. Sonderstellung) (Scheler 1991, 10–11) as a non-place or without place (Ger. Nicht-Ort, ortlos) (Plessner 2019, 270–271), in which lies the paradoxical grounding of his life – the search for home, the dealing with finitude, the contingency of mundane existence, the search for meaning, as well as the possibility of doubting it. Plessner expresses this inner contradiction or ambiguity of his situation by the designation homo absconditus – man is hidden and is aware of this peculiar situation
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