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Helmuth Plessner Quotes

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“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.”

“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.”

“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.”