ABSTRACT
At the beginning of the second chapter of The Levels of Organic Being and Man [Die Stufen des Organischen und der Mensch, 1928], Helmuth Plessner gives a brief outline of what he will later characterize as “vital categories”:
In the language of philosophy, category means a form which experience complies with but which doesn’t spring from experience; a form whose scope doesn’t come to an end with the sphere of subjective acts but rather spills over to the sphere of the objects, which is why not only the experience we have of things, but also the things themselves are subordinate to that form. Thus, categories are forms which belong neither to the subject nor to the object alone but make them come together in virtue of their neutrality. They are conditions of possibility of agreement and concord between two essentially different and independent entities so that these are neither separated by an insurmountable gap nor influence one another directly
(Plessner 1975, 65).