Quotes from Helmuth Plessner

The more ideology becomes pacifistic, the more militaristic become the ideologists.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The devil, cheated of his legitimate portion of human life, avenges itself by taking over all of life.

One does not escape the fate of Nietzsche's teaching so long as one recognizes strength only as strength and weakness only as weakness.

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.

All life with others carries the germ of the capacity of dissolution because souls are more than what they factually are.

The soul suffers from nothing more than from not being understood. This is, though, its fate elicited by its own nature.

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.

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.

Only what is mysterious, undiscovered, and veiled attracts us; only what is hidden radiates magic that promises untold possibilities.

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.

Every level of our being calls for play and danger.