Ding und Medium

HEIDER, Fritz, 2005. Ding und Medium. Berlin: Kadmos. ISBN 978-3-931659-71-4.

Samples of the numerous section headings of this article include: Distance Perception, The Problem of Action at a Distance, Causation and Distance Perception, Provisional Naïve Analysis, Coordination, The Fact and its Substratum, Light Waves, Resonance, The Sense Qualities, and Figure and Ground. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved) psycnet

The perception that led Walter Seitter to choose this topic is the following: In his major work The Stages of the Organic and Man. Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology, Helmuth Plessner frequently uses the term Thing for those beings which, according to the usual view, are "higher" than that this term would fit for them. Again and again and – at least for today's ears – almost provocatively Plessner speaks attributively and implicitly predicatively of man as a "Thing".

The speech of the special "limit-setting of the thing called man" lets the two terms collide directly. Mostly, however, Plessner turns on the "middle" quality of the living: "because man is a living thing [...]. He is set in his limit and therefore beyond it, which limits him, the living thing [...]. "

As Joachim Fischer points out, Plessner is concerned with determining what is typically human "from below" [⇒ Above and Below the Line], by demonstrating vivid peculiarities within the factual field of the living. Therefore, he must first characterize this factual field itself – in its two-tiered nature of plant and animal. In meta-linguistic terms this means: Plessner prepares his statements on philosophical anthropology by outlining a "philosophical biology". In this, too, Plessner puts the concept of thing in the foreground and seems to want to compensate linguistically for a certain proximity to vitalism. Constantly the general concept of thing is foisted on living beings, there is talk of "living things", or also of "body things" or "thing bodies" – which must possess a certain peculiarity so that they can be called living beings. Living bodies are those, with which "the aspect divergence, which was shown as precondition of every thing-body appearing unity", also appears – and is not only obvious to the philosophical consideration.

Plessner does not invent new essential vital performances (Growth, Reproduction, etc.), but he searches for a vivid overall characteristic that distinguishes living things from others. He sees this feature in the fact that a living thing not only has Boundaries (from wherever), but actively sets its boundaries: builds them up and crosses them – and in this paradoxical boundary behavior differentiates an Inside and an Outside more clearly than a thing otherwise does.

Plessner emphasizes the phenomenon of skin, which makes the active character of the boundary behavior of the living body perceptible. And he also does not fail to mention a "preform" of skin within the inorganic: the surface tension that leads to the formation of drops in liquids.

The determination of the typical organic is thus carried out by Plessner quite decidedly "from below": From the factual field of the vividly physical. This factual field also receives its characterization beforehand – but it is not reflected so clearly by Plessner; and it certainly does not receive its own disciplinary designation. He assigns the philosophical treatment of this subject field to his earlier writing Die Einheit der Sinne. Grundlinien einer Ästhesiologie der Sinne (The Unity of the Senses), in which he had formulated the qualitative parameters of human perception: colorfulness, extension, resonance, and state. He only mentions thingness insofar as he claims that it is reserved for the ray of sight to grasp the "graspability" of the thing. This formulation at least suggests that the sense of touch also has something to say about thingness.

As indicated, however, there is also a separate section in the stages of the organic, which tries to philosophically determine the subject field lying "under" [⇒ Above and Below the Line] the organic. This part of the "philosophy of nature" could be called "philosophical physics", Walter Seitter thinks. In the philosophical physics, which Plessner actually precedes his philosophical biology, he restricts himself to the presentation of the descriptive constitution of the thing as such.

Plessner relates this constitution in the external world back to the self-conception of the perceiver, in which interiority and appearance are intertwined. In a certain meaning, appearance is the key – indeed, the through-starting key concept for the entire conceptual concatenation of the book – which in turn connects to the motto of the rescue of appearance in the previous book.

The massive presupposition from which Plessner starts is the perceiving human being. Therefore, his themes are on the level of the counterpart, the appearing. To make this clear, he affirmatively acknowledges certain philosophical tendencies of his time: "Our time summons the courage to proclaim the philosophical primacy of the object, and also the strength to prove it." Several times he speaks of "turning to the object," "primacy of the object." He even associates the "return to the object" with the "rediscovery of the great problem of ontology." Such formulations remind us of contemporary authors, who can be attributed to phenomenology – in Plessner's case, however, they do not originate "purely" from philosophical considerations, but also from intensive occupations with individual sciences such as biology and Gestalt psychology.

So Walter Seitter states that the so-called stages of the organic begin factually and obviously with the inorganic, which is the preliminary stage and lasting basic determination of the organic. Plessner outlines this "philosophical physics" in the chapters "2. The double aspect in the mode of appearance of the perceptual thing" and "3. Against the misinterpretation of this analysis. Narrower version of the subject". Insofar as the basic stage of the inorganic is demonstrated by the constitution of the thing, Plessner's introduction to philosophical anthropology, which wants to build up "from below", presents itself not merely as stages of the organic, but even more fundamentally, even more substructively as "stages of thinghood".

Therefore his explanations also contain fine concrete sketches – like for example the one about the jug. Plessner justifies the pre-circuit of his philosophical physics as follows:

Already these few examples show that Plessner's philosophical physics not only "underplays" the difference between inorganic and organic – in order to then be able to work out the peculiarity of the latter. With the same brashness, but with a different systematic intention, it places artificial things next to natural things.

Plessner's first approach to the philosophy of nature – in the unity of the senses – had even explicitly made human art-making and not nature its exemplary object field. Criticizing contemporary – i.e., "modern," what Plessner called "expressionist" – tendencies in art and art theory, such as Kandinsky's attempt to musicalize the pictorial, Plessner had claimed at the time that the sphere of the optical was oriented toward "thing-capture" and, consequently, that "visual art in its thematic sense-making is bound to thinghood in representation." Plessner had thus indirectly assigned other sensual dimensions of phenomena, such as noise, threshold, pure excitement, to the immaterial.

The philosophical physics, which he outlines in the stages of the organic, is from the outset oriented to the thing. Does he already consider the thingly as the whole of the appearing or the physical? Since for a thing its limitation is essential and the different relations of things to their limitations set crucial distinctions within the world of things, Plessner must also name the outside of the thing or the body. He does this with the term Medium, which since ancient times in physics has denoted the outside and the surrounding and more specifically the what in of a body. Already with the use and the juxtaposition of the two terms body and medium Plessner makes clear that his doctrine of things, although it seems to start perceptual-psychologically, actually reaches over to the ground of physics. For in the explanations and drawings of the different relations between body and medium, medium is hardly understood functionally, but predominantly purely topologically: as environment or milieu (medius locus).

Here Plessner concentrates on the differentiation of boundary behaviors and not on the qualitative determination of what exactly is meant by medium: adjacent bodies or physical realities of a non-thing-like kind? Occasionally there is talk of "other bodies", then again of "subsistence means, nutrients, light, heat, water, gases, and other living beings". Under the term medium, therefore, obviously other bodies, even of relatively equal rank, as well as physical realities, to which one would hardly want to ascribe a thing-like corporeality, fall. So the term is not a qualitative counter-term to that of the body. Rather it designates topically an "environment", a "counter-field" and then also vaguely a medium, i.e. a supporting field, for the body meant in each case, especially the living body. Medium is any material outside to which a body borders and to which it can or must relate in different ways, whereby the quality and role of the border also vary: Plessner outlines several forms of body-medium or body-boundary-medium relations. Among them also those typical for living beings, in which the subsistence of a body is diverted via a medium – or as one just says: "mediated". Already in plants and animals the inside-outside relation fractalizes to an inside-inside split, in that the organs of the body have to mediate between the body and the medium.

With the human being the medialization increases as splitting and dependence inwardly and outwardly. "The hand, 'the external brain of man,' by virtue of the opposability of the thumb, created the tool as its natural extension." With its mobility, the hand approaches the other means, whose applicability includes its detachability. The thing we call man (and which we are) conducts its existence by means of other things. The "reification" of anthropology asserts itself in Plessner on both the "metaphorical" and the "metonymic" lines. On the metonymic line, such things crystallize out of the environmental medium that can be subsumed under the functional and instrumental concept of media common today. In this meaning, the hand becomes the "first" more or less material medium, an accrued medium thing that mediates between us "ourselves" and the other, even more distant things.

Man sees "that he has factually only contents of consciousness and that, where he walks and stands, his knowledge of things pushes itself as something between him and the things. But if the knowledge with which he makes contact, the eye with which he sees, is an intermediate thing [...]." Even knowledge is appointed a thing, which already points ahead to a conceptual strategy of Michel Foucault, who occasionally systematically uses "Discourse" for "Knowledge" because the latter represents the phenomenal or physical and consequently the describable surface of that.

While for Plessner the dimension of media prepares the ground for the expansion of the concept of thing, and while nowadays there is more often talk of "media things," Vilém Flusser believes that electronic media, in any case, lead to a recession of things, indeed to an obsolescence of the concept of thing.

However, physics is not a priori or at least not exclusively oriented towards thingness. If one sees how Plessner precedes his determination of the plant, animal and human existences of things with the doctrine of the constitution of the "mere" perceptual thing, then one comes to the assumption that already this constitution rises above an even more general field of non-substantial possibilities of appearance, which Plessner also touches upon in his aesthesiology. The level of the inorganic, which precedes (and is inherent in) the levels of the organic, seems to be divided into two levels; that of the non-thing and that of the thing.

It is precisely this distinction that is more strongly considered by one of Plessner's contemporaries, who made the relationship between thing and medium his special topic. Simultaneously with Plessner's early work on aesthesiology and philosophical anthropology (which also includes the limits of community, not yet mentioned), the Austrian philosopher and psychologist Fritz Heider (1896-1988), who came from the Meinong School in Graz, dealt with problems of the psychology of perception. In his dissertation Zur Subjektivität der Sinnesqualitäten (On the Subjectivity of Sense Qualities) he adopted from Mally the concept of the law of appearance and from Meinong the concept of perceptual forums. These divide into an inner forum, which is bisected into the psycho-physical and the physiological, and an outer forum, which corresponds to the medium. He means such media, which already Aristotle described as such, namely as perception media (e.g. air, light). However, he emphasizes that these media, although they causally contribute to the perceptual event, fall out of perception. As a rule, there is a perceptual discrimination of the perceptual media against the objects of perception, i.e. the things, and Heider asks the question whether this half-concealed, half-obvious difference between the things and the media is caused by their physical constitution.

In 1922 and 1923 Heider wrote an essay on thing and medium, which then appeared in 1926. In it he took up the question just mentioned, whether something that serves as a mediation of cognition is "purely physically" different from an object of cognition. He answered it thus: Realities that are "soft," "many-coupled," or "loosely coupled" and therefore take over and transmit the effects of "hard," "uniform," or "tightly coupled" realities are suitable as media. The smaller the loosely coupled elements of the media are, the more faithfully and exactly they can take over the influences of the firmly coupled things; then "every single impact is a special messenger, which announces a new side, property, a new moment of the cause. And the more independent it is of its neighbors, the other messengers, the more unclouded, undisturbed it carries the message."

Walter Seitter believes that the allegorical personification which Heider uses in describing the atomistic media elements reinforces the drastic physical characterization of the typical media qualities of suppleness and permeability – today one would say: of high resolution. Air and light are such media materials or media processes which, due to their inner looseness, transmit impulses of things to our ear or eye in such a high degree of "discreetness" that we perceive the transmission as "analog". Due to their physical structure they are close to the sign being.

Therefore, the sign systems created by humans follow the same principle. So many letter combinations can be formed from the 24 letters because the letters are independent of each other. If A always had to be followed by B, then we would no longer have the two letters A and B, but only the one character element AB. However, the script also works when it consists of only two letters, as Heider states with the example of Morse script [⇒ Morse Code]. But then the separation of the two letters and the "freedom" of their succession is all the more important. For the reader, the letters have a similar function as the light waves have for the seer. For the scribe, on the other hand, they are the medium of a motor intervention in the world-and in a certain sense, for the scribe, they are not black figures on a white background, but expressed meaning made into an "outside world thing." In Heider, then, a similar language of reification as in Plessner, who appointed knowledge an in-between thing.

The media play their role not only sensorially, but also motorically: There the human being is the hard, uniform and firmly coupled "thing", which passes on its impacts – whereby the hand with its inner articulation and mobility (from which the modern term of digitality originates) is the first motoric (by the way also sensory) medium. The motor direction of the mediation leads to the fact that the people also get into the role of the triggering things.

With his physical analysis of mediality, Heider can establish the transition from the purely topical medium defined as thing-environment, which is common in physics and is also taken up by Plessner, to the Aristotelian natural media of perception, which are also topically determined, but also already clearly functionally defined, and finally also to the so-called media of today, i.e. to the artificial means, which must combine with their more or less pronounced thingness an "undinglich" softness, flexibility, even atomistics. An atomistic which, according to the view of the ancients, reaches vivid evidence in fire, and which, according to the view and experience of the moderns, finds its most extreme manifestations and usability in electronics, in photonics, etc..

Although Heider, in contrast to Plessner, explicitly defines thing and medium qualitatively against each other, his considerations also lead him to a – not only linguistic – multiplication of things. Although thing and medium are formally set off from each other, they can materially very well coincide – as the hand already demonstrates. Certain loose couplings occur just at certain fixed couplings. Therefore Heider says: "But not only the own body can be a mediation of action. Tools, machines, apparatuses, and even people can carry the impulse coming from within an agent to the place where the essence of an action is going on." The reason for this convergence is probably that also in his thinking something like a physical turn is decisive – and with him even more explicitly than with Plessner.

In the latter's work it says – though only in a summary from 1970: "Things, tools, machines, living beings, fellow human beings populate the space of behavior in work and conversation." As with Heider, here, too, an allegorical personification of things. The metaphorical and metonymic integration of things into the human world is intended to make the social physically describable as well and, in part, actually physicalize it: Things as socii, things in the role of comrades, of co-beings. In this respect, the conceptual field of thing and medium belongs to the "social philosophy" that appeared in Plessner in two forms: In a rather esoteric anthropology of the political, which starts with the limits of community, experiences its theoretical elaboration in Power and Human Nature and its historical elaboration in the Late Nation, as well as in the rather exoteric transition to the subject of sociology.

After World War II, Fritz Heider devoted his official major work, Psychology of Interpersonal Relations, to social psychology. But he also continued his morphological, topological, "ecological" (as he himself says) reflections on the constitution of things, wholes, orders: The Notebooks. Volume 6: Units and Coinciding Units. The "formalistic" character of these reflections connects them with Plessner's considerations, which operated with boundary and form, inside and outside, positionality and positional field, centrality and eccentricity.

Walter Seitter has shed a little light on Plessner's writings founding philosophical anthropology not from today's media theories, but from their own handling of the concepts of thing and medium, as well as from the exactly synchronous considerations devoted to the concepts and phenomena of thing and medium by a thinker quite forgotten among philosophers because he had migrated to psychologists.

In today's media theory, such considerations are increasingly gaining weight, which was actually already apparent in the father of modern media theory, MacLuhan. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and Karl Ludwig Pfeiffer have pointed to the materiality of media. Médiologie, invented by Regis Debray, approaches concrete material media dispositifs in detailed descriptions. It, too, has inspired the author of these lines to attempt a physics of media in consistent elaboration, in which, by the way, he has named the authors Aristotle of Stageira and Fritz Heider, who are far apart in time, "classics of media physics." Critically, the physics of media turns against the thesis that with the so-called new media a great dematerialization movement has begun – a thesis that overlooks the fact that media have always worked with miniaturization or/and with atomization, which, however, have also put new bodies into the world. With this critique, which could also hit an exaggerated "ontological" mathematicism (of Pythagorean or modern character), she moves in the footsteps of Plessner, who, as already mentioned, in his earliest writings wanted to prove to contemporary art tendencies that they directly chase the purely immaterial in vain. The fact that immateriality can only or best be achieved by working with materialities is particularly evident in the large-body phenomenon of architecture, as Heike Delitz emphasizes in recent works.

The concept of media commonly used today is the functionally determined one: human actions, which mostly proceed from desires, transmissions, messages, which address addressees, need "third" interposed elements for their execution, which are at the same time necessary means, detours and possible disturbing factors – and these are called "media". This action-theoretical, anthropological, if one wants also "existential" meaning of media forms a central point in Plessner's Philosophical Anthropology. It is introduced in 1924 in the socio-philosophical essay Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community), where the "intermediate layer" of masks and machines, of ceremonial, artificiality and the "medium" is shown to be necessary for society to come into being. For action, for being human itself, this results in a high degree of "indirectness". In the main work of philosophical anthropology, in the stages of the organic already referred to here, this indirectness – however in close connection with the opposite directness – is declared to be the second anthropological basic law: "law of mediated immediacy". And in this context, the concept of "medium", which had been introduced before on a more topical-physical level as a counter-concept to the bodily thing, is thematized again – in its functional, but apparently also possibly counter-functional relevance. Plessner assumes "that man must realize his drives and plans in an idiosyncratic medium," that the "rays of his intention [...] meet the real medium directly" and suffer "a [...] deflection there." Plessner thus introduces the modern media problem in this way in 1928 and already hints at the ambivalence associated with it, which also triggers the so-called media critique.