The system of anthropina

Michael Landmann

pp. 13-27

in: Stuart Spicker (ed), Organism, medicine, and metaphysics, Berlin, Springer, 1978

Abstract

1. Humanity has varied historically; from nation to nation, from culture to culture, from age to age it has assumed an ever different form. Therefore some have said that there are no universal, permanent, "ontological" structures of humanity as such. To want to limit humanity by such fixed structures would be static thinking and a failure to recognize the historical mobility, openness, and abundance of possibilities. But such an argument jumps to conclusions. It ignores that timeless structures and the historically varying form are two coexisting strata of man. The structural stratum constitutes, as it were, the underlying genotype; the various forms, the actualized phenotype. To be an historically variable being is itself a supra-historical fixed structure of human existence. The fact of variability is not subject to history; each particular form is a product of history. That is no contradiction.