The language monopoly: Plessner on apes, humans and expressions

In his late essay On the Anthropology of Language (1973), Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985) focuses on a problem that he already discussed in The Unity of the Senses (1923) and The Gradation of the Organic and the Human (1928): the difference between apes and humans and the human monopoly of language. The human monopoly of language relies on their “eccentric position” that characterizes the specific relation of humans to their organismic mode of being. Plessner calls this relation the conditio humana. I will reconstruct Plessner’s arguments of the “eccentric position” and contextualize his theory within research fields of biology, psychology and philosophy.