Grenzen der Gemeinschaft Quotes

“The aura of what is veiled seduces the person to break its magic and disclose the secret. But if it is only distance and foreignness that is seductive, this has the effect of drawing the person in the direction of absolute intimacy and familiarity, a direction which destroys the aura. The stimulus of psychological distance lies in a repulsion that attracts and an attraction which ultimately repulses - a movement never in balance. We enjoy such a stimulus not only in art and the regions of contemplative silence, but above all, in life with things and persons. It forms the air of a genuine milieu without which we would atrophy. Magic that wishes to be and, yet, not to be decoded; promises that promise everything and promise nothing - whoever understands this comprehends the being of the soul in its ultimate questionability.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“The more ideology becomes pacifistic, the more militaristic become the ideologists.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“We do not sufficiently respect that anti-mephistoclean force which, like the mephistoclean one, threatens the balance of life: a force that constantly wishes what is good and constantly produces what is evil.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“The most important symptom of tact derives from this respect for the individuality of oneself and others: sensitivity. It is the only way possible to construct pleasant sociable interactions, as it never permits too much closeness nor too much distance. Everything explicit, every eruptive honesty, is avoided. Untruth which succors is always better than truth which damages; however, a bindingness which does not bind is the best. In this sphere there should be neither good nor evil, neither truth nor error, but only the value of beneficence - the hygiene of the greatest possible nurturance. Only the barbaric person lets himself be deceived by flattery and lets himself be surrounded by the fog of politeness, only to curse the world so spoiled. Let us imagine just for a second what interaction between persons who barely know each other and yet who say what they think or even assume about the other is like: After a quick collision, the coldness of outer space would descend upon them.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Nature is at all times unequivocal; its secrets, so difficult to decode, lay open to the eye. It is otherwise with the fullness of being of the soul. It never exhausts itself as having come into existence; rather, it passes through this level of determination and exhaustion only to return again to a process of becoming, to a living actuality. From an unfathomable primordial source, interior being [innern], the soul's difficult-to-comprehend forms climb into the light of consciousness where they dissolve again like all genuine creations of the night. The soul is at all times ambiguous; before every attempt to unravel its secrets, it retreats back to the depths.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“It is not for nothing that the person stands between heaven and hell. He has to live so as to do justice to both the spirit and the flesh and to honor the fragility of life where it reveals itself to him. This he should do as a pragmatist out of a respect for the deep ambiguity contained in all of existence, not as a petty profiteer: he will be part of one of the two halves of the world soon enough.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Dignity concerns at all times the person taken in his entirety - the unity of what lies inside and outside - and describes the ideal constitution to which one strives, but which is only too infrequently reached. The higher the person wants to reach, the harder it is for him to reach this idea; for, with the one-sidedness that results from concentration on a great theme he tears open a crevice between himself and his ambition.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“To be sure, who is strong and who is weak? One-sided racial theories just as little as one-sided class theories here fail to make any advance. The opposition is not correctly expressed with contrasts such as between blond-black, Aryan-Semite, German-Roman, German-slave; nor is it expressed with the contrast between producer-worker, bourgeoisie-proletarian. Strong is whoever controls society [Gesellschaft] because he affirms it. Weak is whoever flees society [Gesellschaft] for the sake of the community because he denies society. ... Strong is whoever affirms the entire essential complex of society [Gesellschaft] for the sake of the dignity of the individual and the social whole; weak is whoever sacrifices dignity for brotherhood in the community.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“We want ourselves to be seen and to have been seen as we are; and we want just as much to veil ourselves and remain unknown, for behind every determination of our being lies dormant the unspoken possibility of being different.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“In nature all things are close to or distant from each other. The psychological world knows first the intermediate region of distance seducing to nearness, nearness pressing towards distance, of an irreconcilable closeness-distance.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“And we also recognize this dance-like spirit, this ethos of grace: societal conduct, the control not only of written and established conventions, the virtuous mastery of forms of play where persons come close to each other without meeting and where they establish distance without damaging each other through indifference; amiability and not insistence is the atmosphere of this ethos of grace - its ethical law is the game and its observation, not seriousness. Forced distance between persons becomes ennobled into reserve. The offensive indifference, coldness, and rudeness of living past each other is made ineffective through the forms of politeness, respectfulness, and attentiveness. Reserve counteracts a too great intimacy.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Every level of our being calls for play and danger.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Humanity demands from their leaders the courage to sin. To take account of reality means to take account of the devil. And to take account of the devil without degenerating and slipping into him is a difficult skill; it is the true problem of an ethic of balance, of the true center, not the ethic of simply negating what resists the demands of honesty, conviction, and love.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Earthly love and heavenly love irreconcilably oppose each other ... No mediation exists between the law of the public sphere and the willingness to be without restraint; between the two spheres there is nothing - to be sure, the positive nothing, the nothing of freedom.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Radicalism is the party of the spirit whose ideas erect signposts to eternity and, in every situation, remind the conscience of the future. It scorns the conditioned and limited, small things and steps, restraint, discretion, and unconsciousness. It is joyful, but only towards what is great; it is reverent, but only towards what is powerful. It is pure and, therefore, self-righteous; principled and, therefore, repressive; fanatical and, therefore, destructive.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“The picture of a being is always a schema, a simplified and crude depiction of what is never entirely representable and exhaustible; such a being seeks to be understood in its potentiality and respected as something infinite, even if boundaries (common forms of existence) have been drawn like fate around it, borders beyond which it can not escape and which its physiognomy constantly remembers. If the person strives for visibility and communicability, then these are often denied to him; if the person flees from visibility and communicability, then these are constantly there.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“The soul suffers from nothing more than from not being understood. This is, though, its fate elicited by its own nature.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Moderation and limitation represent the highest with regard to human strivings. If also an infinite longing never abandons the person because he is rooted ... in the infinite and, thus, if a secret or open mourning never leaves him - the homesickness of one banished to finitude - so the knowledge, which belongs to the effect of limitations, gives the resignation a consoling, indeed, a cheerful character. Life closes itself around a circle. Every thing points to its place and a glimpse in the space of nature reveals the law of modesty. Separation is necessary so that unification can demonstrate itself; longing is necessary so that silence does not become rigid.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“All life with others carries the germ of the capacity of dissolution because souls are more than what they factually are.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Everything must be structured around the center - from the core of the being of the person and not just one aspect of him, from his heart, as the vernacular names the source of the individual - and not from his head. The excessive stretching of the consciousness of responsibility - for which the excessive expansion of the belief in reason, in the social and political effectiveness of conviction, is to blame - already has been broken asunder in the world ... For the most serious human evil is lack of moderation.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“All ceremonial events such as initiation (baptism) and incorporation, signs of communal membership, signify in the final analysis the renunciation of the intimate sphere of the person, if not emotionally, as in the bond of a biological blood-based kinship, then nevertheless spiritually, ideationally, and symbolically.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“One does not escape the fate of Nietzsche's teaching so long as one recognizes strength only as strength and weakness only as weakness.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“The devil, cheated of his legitimate portion of human life, avenges itself by taking over all of life.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“If we proceed like the child does with the puppy, if we examine what is hidden in things and persons, in everything that is stimulating in this colorful world, then we will uncover nothing more than that kind of atomized sawdust with which 'science' for a long time has been feeding those hungry for knowledge. Everything real looked at in the light disappoints. The forms lose their shine, color, and aroma, like a fruit that someone has grasped too strongly.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Only what is mysterious, undiscovered, and veiled attracts us; only what is hidden radiates magic that promises untold possibilities.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft

“Between the two poles of community - blood and ideal - stretches the enormous and, to a certain degree, indeterminate public sphere, which is not quite comprehensible in either political or economic terms and where the entire risk of the humiliation of human dignity is given.”
― Helmuth Plessner, Grenzen der Gemeinschaft