On the Human in Human Dignity

Abstract

Only the incurious and philosophically challenged doubt the significance of dignity as a central issue in human interactions. Human dignity is much debated in religion, law, moral philosophy, anthropology, psychiatry, bioethics, sociology, philosophical anthropology, psychology, communication studies, and elsewhere. It is subject to competing discourses of ontology, epistemology, axiology, and logic. It appears in intercultural and international discussions of rights, autonomy, race, ethnicity, economics, war, and peace. It is contrasted with guilt, shame, and humiliation, both ordinary and extreme. However, the dynamic roots of dignity are usually presupposed or ignored in favor of reductionist typologies and antinomies. Returning us to lived experience and with post-humanist animal studies and the medical model of psychiatry as exemplary cases of reductionism, I interpret H. Plessner’s semiotic phenomenology as a communicative philosophy of the humane in dignity.

1. Introduction: Problematics of the Human in Dignity

Human dignity is most often defended on a legalistic basis that identifies infringements of rights. The word human, of course, is an adjective specifying a kind of being warranted and guaranteed rights, in so far as they can be, by signatories of documents. Though the issue of enforcement of such implicit authority looms large, there is little doubt as to the moral desirability of the effort. Degradations of dignity are identifiable, then, by measure of their deleterious effects on humans. The human in human dignity is literally an afterthought tardily considered as an object of harm. Doubtless everyone is aware that dignity extends well beyond issues of legality and observable manifestations of documentable indignity. Though it may affect thought about rights and human dignity, this paper is not directly concerned with rights, but rather with the scientistic, professional, and social acceptance of reductionist versions of ourselves. The distinction of the human that modifies dignity is my focus. This distinction marks a vital boundary that is at risk. Increasingly, boundaries between the human person and animals, neural substrates of the brain, and machines are blurred by scientific naturalism. Perhaps nowhere is this more pronounced than in post-humanist thinking as applied in bio-semiotic animal studies and in the unfortunate application of the medical model in modern psychiatry.

Instead of presupposing the human, this paper draws attention, then, to scientifically rationalized approaches to the human and cultural acceptance of abbreviated versions of the person. It is not that anyone sets out to purposefully shrink our conception of the human. The influences of the zeitgeist are more subtle than that. What begins as a well-intended but nostalgic effort to return us to our natural origins and to curb excessive misconduct toward the environment is now itself often excessive, to the point of drawing a false equivalence between animal and human communication. Likewise, what begins as a well-intended effort to employ technological advances in biochemistry to help victims of mental illness leads to a false equivalence of the human being organism and the being of the human in communication. It may appear on the surface that I make a fine, abstract, and superficial distinction, but nothing could be further from the case. As we shall see later, when I focus directly on Helmuth Plessner, it is on the basis of boundaries that each organic type is conceived separate from another. The perceived and expressed boundaries of the human species are the primary means by which we distinguish this particular organic kind. Uniquely, the human is able to objectify itself as no other creature can. This necessitates communication, effort after shared meaning in social realization, as well as the development of technology and culture. The diminution or misguided attempts to reduce us, to abbreviate our very personhood, erode our experience of a meaningful existence. The significance of identifying the dominant biological and neuro-based psychocentric culture is underlined and detailed by numerous experts in neuroscience, philosophical anthropology, communicology, and philosophy of psychiatry, a relevant sampling of whom are referenced here. We now have a shared psychological landscape that semiotically mediates how we experience our lives. We see through the lens of mental diagnoses provided by psychiatry, and these are organically based, not communicatively based.

1.1. Purpose and Thesis

My thesis, then, is that a shared image of the human underwrites the possibilities of dignity. In turn, this is a contingency of embodied communication. It should enhance whatever philosophy of dignity we prefer to bring essentialist values into view and to affirm communicative grounds for the constitution of the human.

I advance an image of the human as a communicative being through a synthesis of Plessner’s philosophical anthropology and communicology. This combination is employed to reveal the experience of communication as an underlying dynamic in the perception of expressions of dignity.

1.2. Theoretical Framework and Methodology

To illustrate the argument, I reveal the problem of scientific naturalism’s reductionist images of the person. These include reductions of humans to animals, neural substrates, DNA, and machines. My perspective is grounded in a rich tradition of communicative philosophy applied as a human science, that is, communicology. Communicology is the human science of communication. Semiotic phenomenology is a synthetic paradigm in communicology, rooted as it often is in combinatory themes of European philosophy, American pragmatism, or a synthesis of the two. Centering on the human experience of signs, intersections of cultural, social, and personal life are investigated. Preconscious nonverbal signs as well as verbal sign systems that displace them are essential to theory construction in communication inquiry. Such a theory is worldly in that the focus is on human conduct, social contexts in which communication is anticipated, cultural institutions, and contingencies of embodied experience.

It may initially seem contradictory to speak of the construction of a shared image of the human, to criticize the dominant cultural image, and then to advocate a different understanding of what constitutes the human as a form worthy of dignity. The key to this is the recognition that life is lived as a contradiction between what is required for communication to occur, which is semiotic, and our ownness—the sense of phenomenological existence as unique persons. In the perspective of phenomenology, all experience is constructed. Lived experience is largely preconscious and nonverbal, but nevertheless semiotic. That is to say, the lived body (Leib in German, corps propre in French) is reflexively made conscious as a body lived (Körper in German, corps vécu in French) empirically in communication. This may be thought of as a relation of existence to experience, detailed first by Plessner [1,2] and subsequently by Merleau-Ponty [3] (pp. 5, 87). We may think of this as a contradiction in living a life of somehow knowing that the “I” exists in time (Innenwelt), but is revealed in social space (Mitwelt) primarily through the body—a sort of pivot to the world. The “I” is, so to speak, held captive as a perceived entity requiring expression to realize itself as such. Perception is always tied to an object of attention, which means that experience is inherently relational. Literally, what we perceive is always an expression. Perception and expression are two levels of consciousness synthesized in embodiment. The cultural sign systems within which we are condemned to speak already direct our perceptions. Therefore, human perception includes language and other semiotic systems as the ready-made reality we take for granted. Yet, as a lived contradiction, each person uniquely experiences the available signs for expression. This, then, necessitates a reflexive approach such as semiotic phenomenology, the focus of which is conscious experience, which is simultaneously embodied and personal as well as social and cultural.

The taken-for-granted-ness of everyday life forms a natural standpoint or natural attitude that is, so to speak, sedimented as reality itself. This is to say that the semiotic and phenomenological construction of this “reality” is usually subterranean to awareness. The recursive methodology of communicology exposes such constructions.

Typically, naturalized habits of life are subjected to thematic description, critical reduction to essential structures of oft-hidden sedimented meanings, and subsequent interpretation. As Lanigan proposes, a three-step methodology entails reflection on human expressions as data that are reversible with capta, which is taken in perception as self-implicature, and reflexivity as consciousness continuously emerges in acta [4]. Colapietro concisely verifies the overall procedure in his reversal of the above order, as “the doing and the undoing of the done thing” or acta, capta, and then data [5]. His aphorism demonstrates that, as interpretation, acta is always destined to become new data and it all begins again recursively. The point is that every sign expression is traceable to its experiencer’s intentionality. In semiotic phenomenology, we understand intentionality as the originary conception of ecology. Thus, Merleau-Ponty follows Husserl by describing phenomenological philosophers as “perpetual beginners” [3] (p. xxviii). Generally, then, the purpose is to render conspicuous the “natural standpoint” that is the “taken-for-granted” reality of everyday life [6] (p. 2). Revelatory results manifest the inconspicuous meaning structure that is heretofore merely tacit or suppressed by routinization, embodied incorporations of habitus, and hierarchies of power structures in social relations. Perceptive discernments thus realized in semiotic phenomenology are themselves semiotic expressions open to intersubjective verification.

1.3. Naturalistic Reductionism

Let us take as prime exemplars of this communicative philosophy the important cases of the reductionist concept of the human in post-humanist-influenced animal studies and also in modern psychiatry under a dominant but failed medical model. Animal studies and bio-psychiatry often assume the origin of consciousness in the animal or human brain’s neural substrates. By drawing an equivalence between animal and human consciousness, a significant error is sometimes made. The mistake is to ignore human phenomenological intentionality and instead to abstract the human from its embodied, relational, communicative nexus, and then to treat this disembodied abstraction as if it were the whole being. What is more, and ironically, the critique of anthropocentrism in animal studies often introduces its own kind of anthropocentrism as the result of circular logic from anthropomorphism. It aims to value animals’ dignity, absent human involvement, even while of necessity speaking for them.

I problematize psychiatry’s dominant medical model in a fresh context, that of its meaning within the larger picture of human dignity. The sedimented concept of the human inherent in naturalism generally and specifically in the biomedical model is exposed. The proposed hermeneutic correction is a theoretical convergence of philosophical anthropology and communicology. This synthesis brings into focus communicative dynamics of perception and expression grounding the experience of being human, as opposed to a static, naturalistic, biomedical image of human being as organism or machine.

Importantly, the focus here is not on the history of philosophical debates concerning human dignity, on animal studies generally, or on all of psychiatry. Instead, the paper is about communication. The point is to problematize the naturalistic impulse to exclude the embodied, relational, being of the human by confining it to the organismic category of human being. The being of the human is communicative, personal–social and cultural, flexible, ambiguous, contingent, and dynamic, rather than static. As will be seen shortly in Plessner’s utopian standpoint, life is to be led as an open question. This, however, is work. The first task is always to become aware of our historicity in preconstructed constructions.

1.4. Analytic Procedure

The main analysis proceeds in three steps generally consistent with the methodology previously described. Most of the evidence for reductionism is provided in the third part of the paper, which accounts for the fact that it is the longest of the steps. First, contested grounds of human dignity are briefly reviewed in philosophical and applied life science arenas, commencing with objections to the concept itself and especially its relevance in the bioscientific sphere (part 2 of the paper). The presupposition of dignity as a normative human “right” is adumbrated. An issue is raised of whether expression and reality are separable in this context.

Second, reductions of the human by means of comparisons with animals are briefly considered and criticized, then the medical model is described as the dominant bioscientific approach to psychiatric conditions (part 3 of the paper). It is criticized for being reductionist and a failure as measured by results. The naturalized standpoint toward the psyche reduces the human to neural substrates, inherited DNA, and machine metaphors. Among several problems identified here is the technology of drug therapy.

Third, Plessner’s philosophical anthropology comes into focus as a semiotic phenomenology not of biological human being but of what it means to be human (part 4 of the paper). He identifies the human as a distinctive life form emphasizing the human creative (perceptive) and performative (expressive) capacities in need of fulfillment in social contexts. I describe Plessner’s three laws of being human, interpreting the theme of communication in his theory. I contrast Plessner with reductionism in medicalized–technologized psychiatry and the oversimplified ontological presupposition of the human potentially influencing any version of human dignity.

1.5. Phenomenological Interpretation

I conclude (part 5 of the paper) that for Plessner, human dignity is a complex of moral and ethical semiotic processes and phenomenological events of communication that reflect the specific eccentricity of being human [7]. This means that dignity may become a right only in and through continuous communication. As a right, the human is never to be presumed as it is in some accounts; rather, it is contested and must always be intersubjectively verified. When we bring into focus construction of the human as the perceptual ground of expressions of dignity in speech, we are able to encounter important but subtle affronts to it in everyday experience and beyond the limits of a legalistic paradigm of rights. The necessary and sufficient conditions of human dignity are thus realized at a deeper level.

To reiterate, I do not intend to review all of the research on human dignity, post-humanism, animal studies, or bio-psychiatry. This is not my burden. My focus is on the intersections of these on the communication field. Post-humanist animal studies are addressed only in regard to hyperbolized claims concerning human communication. Psychiatry is addressed in regard to depression, its diagnosis, and its primary treatment by application of a medical model of human being. The exclusivity of a naturalized standpoint impedes an adequate understanding of the distinctive nature of human communication. This is the central issue. Communicology’s reflexive, post-positivist, paradigm exemplar of semiotic phenomenology is ideally suited to promote a fuller understanding and appreciation of communication as the ground of conscious experience.

This brings us to the three forecast steps of analysis.

2. Contested Grounds of Human Dignity

2.1. Opposition to the Concept of Human Dignity

This step moves from rejections of human dignity to a summary discussion of philosophy’s historic interest in it. The intent is to presage our primary emphasis on the human as such in philosophical anthropology. In contrast with objections to dignity in the bioethics of medicine, the analysis shows the importance of dignity, but also the presupposition of the human in dignity as an ontologically given, taken-for-granted, and indisputable right. This is a process of naturalizing the moral order of things in human affairs, anticipating an ethic of dignity without sufficient attention to perception (the human) as the shared phenomenal ground of expression (dignity).

Let us begin by reference to the disputed relevance of human dignity in medicine and in particular the applied interest of bioethics. Macklin is a professor of medical ethics and a member of President G.W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics formed in 2001. Macklin objects to how the concept of human dignity has recently and surreptitiously crept into discussions of medical ethics on Bush’s council. Macklin argues that “appeals to dignity are either vague restatements of other, more precise, notions or mere slogans that add nothing to an understanding of the topic” [8] (p. 2419). She suggests that there are no criteria by which to evaluate whether dignity is being violated, that there is a paucity of literature in medicine dealing with this issue, and that we may dismiss concern with dignity. For her, the concept of autonomy suffices. Macklin is a philosopher who nonetheless comes to the subject from an applied biomedical perspective. The matter of the human in human dignity does not surface because the concept is not analyzed.

Communicologists are likely familiar with Harvard cognitive psychologist and linguist Pinker, who offers up his firm “empirical” science of “mentalese” to refute what he labels the “standard social science model” [9]. In his view, the model audaciously connects language and thought with Sapir and Whorf, who ostensibly advocate “linguistic relativity”. He is, in short, no fan of a logic-based qualitative outlook, having bought into the idea that language is organically given in consciousness, which he locates as a function of the brain. He is committed to the “solid” empirical grounds of cognitive science and its machine metaphors.

Writing with his usual self-assured rhetorical flourish, Pinker enters the discussion of dignity in a humbly entitled essay, “The Stupidity of Dignity” [10]. Objecting to a published report of Bush’s council, he defends the modern technologies of medicine that are under siege by council members who inject human dignity into what in his view should be scientific, not philosophical, discussions. He argues that those who uphold vague and stupid notions such as dignity seek “to impose a radical political agenda, fed by fervent religious impulses, onto American biomedicine” [10] (p. 5). He addresses the prominent right-wing political membership of the council. Naming them “theocons”, he describes their religious dogma as a disruption of the technologies of modern medicine by propagating irrelevant and potentially harmful ideas. Later in the article, he amends his position, admitting some credence to dignity, despite the “overweening hubris” of those who advocate it [10] (p. 14). Unfortunately, Pinker does not separate his criticism of the council’s politics from the generalization that human dignity is a “stupid” concept. Because the whole concept of dignity is declared stupid, the human is again not problematized. The biological conception of the human is literally naturalized.

We might expect that a president’s appointees to a council reflect his political point of view and that their reports might coincide with his presuppositions. Indeed, it may seem naïve to think otherwise. Pinker is arguably correct in his assessment of the religious fundamentalism exhibited by the majority of the council’s appointees. However, it should be remembered that the group’s charge is to engage bioethics. Bioethics is properly a philosophical and human science topic, while medicine is a life science to which the values identified by preliminary philosophical determinations may subsequently be applied. As is to be seen, biologist and social philosopher Plessner’s point of view is that the philosophy of biology is not the province of biologists, but rather that of the humanities.

Both aforementioned commentators offer the idea of autonomy as a substitute for human dignity, as though autonomy is not a problematic philosophical concept. On the contrary, the very idea of the human precedes and penetrates the discussion of what counts as ethical conduct among persons generally, not merely in biomedical ethics. Of course, my concern is that the image of the human presupposed in technologized biomedicine extends to psychiatric medicine, at issue in the second stage of this project.

2.2. Philosophical Anthropology

Perhaps it is useful, then, to return to ground-level questions concerning our image of the human. Are preconditions for the human experience of the material and social world sufficiently known by now that we may dismiss the relevance of such inquiry, as Macklin and Pinker argue? Is human dignity reducible to a simpler and “more precise” idea? Macklin and Pinker suggest the word autonomy as a substitute for human dignity, but is autonomy a pure bioscientific concept separable from axiology? In short, have we transcended the historic task of philosophical anthropology and its focus on conditio humana? As a phenomenologist, I cannot affirm any of these queries. Instead, contrary to Macklin and Pinker, I join philosophical anthropologists in ascribing a degree of complexity to the construction of the human in human dignity.

Ricoeur’s hermeneutic philosophy complies with this assessment. Ricoeur is not usually considered a philosophical anthropologist, but he speaks as one as he dramatically problematizes repression of the human image in a lecture in Milan, Italy more than sixty years ago [10]. His address begins with this: “If philosophical anthropology has become an urgent task for contemporary philosophy, it is because all the major problems of this way of thinking converge on it and make its absence cruelly felt” [11] (p. 1). He is concerned with the dispersal of the human sciences into many diverse and seemingly isolated disciplines. He is not subtle in this comment about the human sciences: “they literally do not know what they are talking about” [11] (p. 1). He specifies that they fail to ask, “Who is this being for whom being is in question?” He continues, “if humans can gain or lose themselves in their work, leisure, politics, and culture, what, then, is a human being?” [11] (p. 1). His poignant criticism is that contemporary human and social scientists presuppose the human rather than problematizing it. His point is more relevant today than in 1960. The criticism is relevant not just to the humanities but also to the psychiatric branch of the life sciences. Moreover, today’s humanities are increasingly adopting a reductionist biological image of human being. Biology is ubiquitous as the presumed scientific foundation of every aspect of life. Universities take a modernist stance by rebranding traditional colleges and academic departments the neuroscience of this and that, seeking to be seen as up to date with the times. We have, for instance: neuro-theology, neuro-law, neuro-philosophy, neuro-ethics, neuro-pedagogy, neuro-psychotherapy, neuro-economy, and neuro-law, all of which operate within an uncritical techno-scientific mask to secure superiority over other sciences. Wilson cheerfully sums it up with the comment: “It may not be too much to say that sociobiology and the other social sciences, including the humanities, are the last branches of biology waiting to be included in the Modern Synthesis” [12] (p. 277). This view is virtually opposite that of Husserl’s phenomenology, as cogently elaborated in The Crisis of the European Sciences, in which he reminds us that “natural sciences consider nature to be concrete and overlook the abstraction through which their nature has been shaped into a subject matter for science” [13] (p. 229) Science itself is a spiritual activity of humans who seek a “communicative understanding” [13] (p. 277).

Ricoeur bemoans the loss of concern with the human image, the condition of possibility of dignity. Ricoeur understands not only that philosophy has a long history of interest in the concept of the human but that anthropos is the central problematic of philosophy. We philosophize for the purpose of understanding ourselves, our relations to others and the natural world, as well as to remain open to the question of who we are, rather than to close the book by presupposing the human being as biological organism or machine. As Plessner interprets Kant, “philosophizing preserves the idea of the dignity of persons” [14] (p. 94).

This view is decidedly phenomenological, which is that to realize the illuminations offered by inquiry in the human sciences requires a self for which the world is illuminated. The lifeworld precedes the scientist’s science. Husserl renders this fact with clarity in “The Vienna Lecture” as he returns us recursively to phenomenological intentionality and reflexively to implicit embodiment [13]. A first-person point of view is not a reflection of dualisms of individualism and collectivism or of community versus society. It is a focus on embodied experience of the signs of culture that are necessary for communication. The phenomenological reduction is readily differentiated from essentialist reductionism, particularly because it returns us to the structure and meaning of existence as it is experienced. Existence that is not experienced cannot be described, and no concepts arise from it. Literally, what we perceive are expressions. It is important to recognize the history of philosophy as a longstanding affirmation of the human.

2.3. Human Dignity as a Preeminent Value

If there is doubt concerning the historic theme of human dignity as a value in philosophy, then Lebech puts that to rest and from an explicit phenomenological and hermeneutic perspective. She summarizes the philosophical history of the idea of dignity, and confirms the importance of the experience of being human as a neglected topic. Affirming philosophical anthropology, her research traces the topic of human dignity to Aristotle, Cicero, Aquinas, Kant, Hume, Hobbes, and interestingly, Wollstonecraft and Stein in an account of the four stages in the development of the idea [15] (p. 60) The stages are discussed chronologically and summarized as follows in Lebech’s article defining human dignity [15] (p. 60).

Cicero may represent the cosmic-centric framework of Antiquity, which explains human dignity on the basis of nature. Thomas Aquinas represents the Middle Ages’ Christo-centric framework, which explains human dignity in relation to Jesus Christ. Immanuel Kant can represent the logo-centric framework of modernity, explaining human dignity as a tribute to reason. Whereas Mary Wollstonecraft, finally, represents the polis-centered framework of Post-Modernity, which explains human dignity in relation to social acceptability.

We return to the idea of social acceptability shortly. According to Lebech, these philosophers as well as contemporary others are sources for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Lebech concludes her book-length investigation with the argument that human dignity is the meta-value of all human values, a rational position for which she garners support from Jürgen Habermas [16] (pp. 288–289). Adopted by the United Nations in the wake of the Second World War, the declaration formalizes international acceptance of human dignity as the value more fundamental than all others and encompassing them. Of course, dignity is equated with rights in legalistic fashion.

There is no argument here with the rights value, only with the fundamental construction of human dignity as a value. The value is an ontological conception in need of theoretical grounding in the human image. Lebech successfully shows that human dignity is justified differently over time and that the rights stemming therefrom are culturally derivative. In fact, in closing remarks, she states:

Therefore we can say that although it was the post Second World War human rights tradition that made the expression human dignity current, it was not the expression but the reality of human dignity (i.e., the affirmation of the value) that made the culture of human rights possible in the first place [16] (p. 292).

The rationale for the declaration is readily understood in historic context considering the massive and unprecedented destruction occurring in the Second World War. However, it is important to understand the problematic distinction of expression and reality in Lebech’s conclusion. I return to this issue later in this paper.

The value of human dignity continuously arises in legal, religious, economic, educational, political, human relations, cultural, philosophical, environmental, medical, and other spheres. The declaration as interpreted by Lebech identifies human rights and human dignity. The document justifies legal judgments, investigations, interventions, and prosecutions of observable behavior by individuals, groups, political, and military entities and the like. The document is based on the ontological premise just mentioned as well as contexts of application, but does not include more subtle affronts to dignity. These are increasingly normalized reductions of the human image, for example, in some animal studies and by technologies of the psyche. A very important case in point, then, is the technological reduction of humans in scientific naturalism. The most serious aspect of reductionism is the naturalization of an abbreviated image of the human that renders it socially acceptable. We have an ever-shrinking image of who we are.

3. Reductionist Abbreviations of Humans

The analysis here is divided into three parts. First, I make a general comment on technology and its critics. Second, I briefly discuss the hyperbole of some scholars in human and animal studies who suggest shared dialogic consciousness will lead to mutual understanding across species. Third, moving from these diminutions of the human to technologies of human consciousness, I describe and criticize the reductive strategies of mechanized psychiatry focusing on drug therapy.

3.1. Technology and Its Critics

Long-recognized features of technology are drawbacks always to be kept in mind, but questioning technology often leads a critic to being accused of technophobia. This label is tantamount to being called antiscientific because of today’s close identification of technology and science. Technology operates at more than one level, in an area of expertise, such as human–animal studies or medicine, but also in the naïve and oft-uncritical minds of the public. Technology is part and parcel of culture’s natural attitude, tacitly defining that which is human. Criticisms of technology are integral to it, but are inevitably submerged as mere additional themes of culture. They are absorbed into the natural attitude. Because of this, the marvelous achievements of modern technology assume preeminence without having to fully reckon with criticism.

Technology is defined here in the broadest sense to include the research and application of increasingly advanced scientific methods and instruments for practical human interests and purposes. Counterintuitively, this sometimes includes the purposeful decentering of the same human interests, or what I consider reductionist forms of scientific naturalism. Naturalism often takes the form of post-humanism. It is more than a little ironic to realize that only a human could advocate a post-humanity.

Critics of technology fear that it impedes human dignity, as exemplified historically by the disciplined mechanization of techno-rationality in fascism, carried out in the Second World War with horrifying efficiency. Lebech reminds us of Marcel’s cautionary argument that technology is susceptible to employment as an instrument of power and domination, devouring the weak and devaluing the sacrality of the human [16] (p. 139). In postmodernity, this is understood as an incorporated preconscious affliction. Lebech contrasts Marcel with Skinner [16] (pp. 139–140). Skinner conceives human dignity as a barrier to technological progress. In his view, progress is made possible by engineering human behavior. The disastrous experiment with this idea, as applied in real life to Skinner’s daughter, is thought by some to be an exemplar of the absolute failure of naturalistic impulses in behaviorism.

Let us make the topic a bit more concrete. I am able only to summarize my arguments here regarding post-humanist and bio-semiotic animal studies and the imposition of the biomedical model in modern psychiatry. I invite readers who wish a more detailed and evidenced account to consult my latest book [17], pp. 44–57, 71–99.

3.2. Post-Humanist and Bio-Semiotic Animal Studies

Think of the movements on many literary, artistic, social scientific, and other fronts in the last many years to bring human beings back to nature. It is a moralistic plea to re-insert us into the natural world on the premise that we appear to have forsaken it in the name of technological progress. One aspect of this movement involves critique of our destructive tendencies toward all aspects of the environment. Many people subscribe to the idea that we are now in the Anthropocene, even though the largest academic organization in the field of geology rejects this assessment. The International Union of Geological Sciences repeatedly rejects designation of the new epoch in which humans have negatively affected our planet, first in 2004, then again in 2024 [18]. The lack of official approval does not impede continued advocacy of the Anthropocene idea, a major theme of which is that animals are devalued and at the mercy of Homo sapiens, who consider themselves superior.

Considerable research is conducted in animal studies and other places, such as biosemiotics supporting post-humanism. An aspect of this is an effort is to establish analogues of animals with human beings in terms of consciousness, sensory capacities, language, morality, sociality, cultures, and communication. There is a concentrated effort to locate similarities in the neural capacities of animals and humans. Reports of animal communication are frequently interpreted as an analogue to human language. The hope is to eventually establish communication between species, and thus to understand these idealized relations as a reciprocity of dignity. While not opposing animal studies as such, responsible critics draw attention to hyperbolic anthropomorphism. There is no need to go so far as to diminish the distinction that is the unique province of humans, and not all animal studies lean in this direction.

Exemplary of the problem, however, is the work of bio-semiotician Tønnossen and colleagues, who believe we can establish “mutual understanding” in dialogue with animals, though there is no evidence of the capacity of logos in animals, not even in our closest evolutionary cousins. Yet, research teams of Tønnessen, Maran, and Harov [19] (p. 324) and Tønnessen and Tuur hold that “insects and birds, sheep and dogs, fish and marmots—just a small sampling of our fellow species” are capable of “mutual understanding” in communication with humans [20] (p. 2). Favareau’s biosemiotics concurs [21]. As every semiotic phenomenologist understands, culture and language are integral to human perception. This ganglia-centered neural research identifies consciousness with “neural substrates” on the false premise that brains train bodies, rather than the fact that persons train their brains [12] (p. 254).

In a criticism of the human sciences and communicology in particular, Hannan similarly proposes that we exaggerate our differences in consciousness and capacities for speech by not paying attention to animals, computing machines, or extraterrestrials who might speak, but are under our current radar [22]. Hannan thinks we overvalue the human, which he asserts impacts negatively on the natural environment. This is a claim much rehearsed in environmental research. It is, however, a popular argument devoid of an adequate argumentative relation of claim and warrant based on evidence. Of course, it is humans who must speak for animals, because they cannot actually speak for themselves, which seems to be a form of anthropomorphism that is ironically but unavoidably anthropocentric. It is difficult to see how valuing persons in the human sciences generally and understanding communication specifically in communicology is somehow causally related to environmental destruction and devaluing animals. We can certainly support the distinctiveness of human communication and care for the environment simultaneously.

We need only refer to renowned neuroscientists and philosophical anthropologists Tallis [12], Tomasello [23], and Fuchs [24] to expel these undocumented conclusions All three focus on the distinction of being human. Our closest animal relatives in the ape family pale by comparison of developmental progress with human children. A chimp develops compatibly with a human child until about the time the latter begins to use language at the age of 1.5 to 2 years. From that point on, there are no important comparisons, as the child’s development accelerates and the ape’s development does not. Animals do not have conventional language, nor do they have the degree of shared intentionality possessed by humans. Ants and bees build intricate nests and beavers build dams. They do not construct cities. Animals occasionally show remarkable feats such as use of sticks as tools or even use of a leaf for medical relief of a wound. These are fascinating remote instances that are one-time events that are not replicated, taught, or passed on generationally. Much is made of dolphins with reference to Bateson, but Bateson is actually embarrassed by Lilly’s claims that dolphins can communicate with humans. Bateson has no such purpose [25] (p. 110). Lilly’s pseudoscientific claims remain a theme of culture, though Bateson strongly corrects Lilly at the time.

To reiterate, the argument here is not with animal studies in general, but with those post-humanists in that area who construct an equation of animal consciousness and communication with that belonging exclusively to humans. Before turning to my second example of reductionism, let me conclude this part of the discussion with Fuchs [26] (p. 3), who concisely states that “post-humanist criticism of anthropocentrism …overshoots the mark. To radically question or even want to overcome man because of his misconduct toward nature is absurd—humans are the only beings who can take responsibility for the world, there are no others”.

This critique does not negate the fact that human beings are part of nature, but the return-to-nature movement does not always sufficiently appreciate the evolution of the human as a distinctive species. I argue in part 3 that humans exceed biological nature by becoming human in communication, just as Tomasello explains based on his ten years of empirical research on this question and as director of the Max Planck Institute of Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig [23]. The emphasis placed on sentience and consciousness in post-humanist animal studies mentioned here presupposes that a person possesses consciousness and then communicates, whereas human communication is in fact the continuous source of consciousness. Consciousness is not in the brain, but rather is relational and of the world.

3.3. Mechanized Psychiatry

There is a common theme in the discussion of animals so far and modern psychiatry. Like animal research described in the foregoing, biomedical psychiatry focuses on the brain as the material object and origin of consciousness. Consciousness is assumed, furthermore, to precede and inform action. Mind as a cultural–semiotic and phenomenological embodied personal–social construction is, if anything, an afterthought. The historic disciplinary relations of communication and psychiatry are overlooked or negated. Psychiatry has all but abandoned the processes and events of communication that are at the roots of mental illness and the essential dialogic basis of satisfactory treatments.

Therapy is now largely technologized. This is a significant reduction of the human because the person is abstracted from essential relations with the world. The promotion of mental disorder as a disease, rather than an illness, is thematic of the ascension of a medical model in psychiatry. This distinction is vital. Disease is a medical marker specifying diagnosis of a physiological and/or biological malady accordingly treatable by medical means. Illness is a more general term, referring to a disruption of ordinary systemic relations in and with the world. It is the usual case that diagnosis of a mental disease presupposes endogenous causality and application of medical instruments. Consequently, mental maladies are presumptively disorders of the brain, and the American Psychiatric Association’s conventional Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Disorders (DSM-5) is more frequently utilized as a foundation to justify psycho-pharmaceutical interventions than as a guide for psychotherapy, such as one of several known talking cures, or what I consider communicative therapies. These therapies are founded not on “cures” for disorders, but rather on identification of troubled communicative relations. That is to say that in psychotherapy, the patient–therapist relationship becomes a co-constructed, though therapist-led, model of communication.

The paradigm case in psychiatry is widely understood to be depression, classified in the DSM as major depression disorder (MDD). To put it succinctly, there are no proven medical markers of depression. Nevertheless, treatments are primarily chemical medicines founded on identification of maladies ostensibly originating in or that affect the brain. Drugs are employed to treat symptoms as though they are the “disease” itself. Efficacy of pharmaceutical technologies is secured in research not as a “cure” for disease, but rather to test the efficacy of the drugs, which of course are two different things. That a patient feels better, by ex post facto reasoning, is often obfuscated with a cure for the psychological disorder. The underlying problem is suppressed by the emotional relief of a drug. This may be acceptable to a patient who is suffering and might be desperate for anything that eases emotional distress. After all, depression ranges on a scale from mild to severe, during which symptoms of sadness, emptiness, apathy, moodiness, worthlessness, hopelessness, loneliness, and feeling hollowed out may spiral to a point of utter despair and suicidal impulses. Symptoms lasting two weeks or more and affirmative responses to several questions on a protocol lead to a diagnosis by algorithm.

The rate of increase in the illness continues unabated by antidepressant medicines. The latest available statistics indicate increasing prevalence of the disease worldwide and in the United States. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 280 million people suffer from depression globally [27]. The National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) estimates that 21 million people in the United States suffer from depression [28]. The latter statistics are based on a study in 2021. Gallup reports that nearly 30% of US adults have been diagnosed with depression, an increase of 10% between 2015 and 2023. The rate of increase is fastest for women and young adults [29].

Causes of depression are numerous, but treatment is said to be psychotherapy, pharmaceuticals, or both. This statement, repetitively made in this order by national and world health associations, suggests a progressive prioritization of treatments. In reality, however, the preferred treatment is drugs. Apparently, it is the first choice of insurance companies that typically cover only a limited number of psychotherapy sessions. In the United States, direct marketing to consumers entices viewers to “tell your doctor” that you want particular drugs, reversing the traditional rational model in which your doctor diagnoses, not television advertising, and your doctor prescribes, not Big Pharma. Doctors representing drug companies give instructions to therapists in some parts of the world to discourage patients from engaging doctors in their narratives, which they regard as irrelevant. Better to go along the most efficient and expedient path of prescriptions [30] (pp. 178–179). The important thing is to learn classifications of disease disorders according to the DSM or perhaps the International Classification of Disease (ICD), most widely used in Europe and by the World Health Organization (WHO). Using the ICD rather than the DSM makes minimal difference in statistics. Anxiety is the most common mental disorder in Europe. However, anxiety and depression are closely related, and treatments are similar, if not the same.

The principal effect of antidepressants is to numb feelings, taking out emotional lows but also emotional highs [30]. A patient on these drugs is not the same emotional being as before. A communication-oriented therapist employing some form of dialogic methodology anticipates an emotional breakthrough, which contradicts the drugged patient’s condition. In any case, the preferred treatment is drugs. In England, only 10.4% of those under treatment are in psychotherapy, with the remainder taking drugs exclusively. In the United States, the figure is about 50% [17] (p. 85).

There is a matter of informed consent to be considered. A patient most likely assumes the drug works by going to the location of disease in the brain, but of course this is not the case. Drugs are generally designed to increase available serotonin and dopamine, positively contributing to neural functioning and improved mood. The truth is that no evidence has ever been found to substantiate the absence of these chemicals as a cause of depression. To reiterate, the pertinent studies only test for drug efficacy, not for any effects on depression itself. The efficacy of drugs that is thought to occur is long proven to be from placebo, which is to say that the patient’s interpersonal communicative relationship with a caregiver is the determinant of success [31]. Indeed, we know that communication can be therapeutic. Lynch, who conducted research on loneliness for decades, names depression the “communicative disease” (I prefer illness) [32] (p. 1). This point is emphasized by Dieppe [33], who argues that healing is a matter of relationships, not the mechanistic fantasies of psychopharmaceutical treatments. Hari [34] sees lack of human-to-human connections as the cause of depression and the reestablishment of connections as the path to healing. Lynch’s [32] (p. 78) comment now seems prescient: “I believe that in this new millennium communicative disease will emerge as every bit as important a health threat as communicable disease! The machine body and the communicative body are moving in opposite directions”.

Antidepressants do not reconnect people and do not contribute to meaningful relationships. The drugs have side effects that should be seriously considered, such as substantial reduction in libido and heightened sensitivity to warm temperatures. These are usually and casually dismissed as minor effects, as though eros is a minor consideration in normal living and the discomfort of rising body temperature amounts to a mere inconvenience. Patients require monitoring by family or friends early in treatment, because suicidal impulses are possible. Of course, suicide is a possibility of depression as well. The risk is greatest among patients under age 24, and pregnant women are advised not to take the drugs. Perhaps the worst side effect is not immediately visible. Namely, the person may be a lifelong patient on a train without a stop. There is always the fear of going off the medicine, and when this occurs, there may be emotional consequences. Doctors employ a euphemism, “discontinuation syndrome”, meaning that there is a relapse back into depression. Actually, the patient suffers drug withdrawal, the symptoms of which often cannot be distinguished from depression. The patient may be put on stronger doses, but meta-drugs do not actually make a difference [31] (p. 36). It is quite common that individuals remain “patients” for ten years or more. The difficulty of withdrawal is well documented, and the consequences of living life as a “patient” under the regime of technologies of psychiatric medicine are more unpleasant than anyone may bargain for. Life itself may seem very much reduced [35,36,37].

Western psychiatry has long sought legitimation, and having largely succeeded in the reflection of its designation as bio-scientific medicine, now finds itself increasingly at risk of a disciplinary and professional suicidal impulse. If we accept the idea that psychiatric disorders are medical problems, the conclusion may seem inevitable that psychiatrists are not needed. The majority of antidepressant drugs are already prescribed by primary care providers who are not psychiatrists and to patients who have not been diagnosed as depressed.

These matters should be of concern to all of us, not just patients. Rose [38] fully documents the failure of psychiatry. Psychiatry and its diagnostic categories literally affect all aspects of our lives. Extending on his list, we may include psychiatry’s influence on politics, economics, parenting, education, media, legal and criminal designations, interpersonal relationships, social welfare, organ transplant decisions, social justice, childbirth decisions, and many others. From an epidemiological perspective, the medical model is a complete failure. Tasked by Western societies with problems of mental health, the record is abysmal. Mental illness has grown rapidly across the world under the regime of the medical model. It is estimated that 450 million people have mental health issues (38] (p. 26). Rose joins an increasing number of scholars who seek to supplant the biomedical perspective with a holistic humanist account that does not reduce human dignity.

Insel is the longest serving director of the NIMH, a post he held for 13 years. Harrington [39] (pp. 90–91) reports Insel’s reflections on where brain-centered research into mental illness takes us. He “repents” as follows:

I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by really cool scientists at fairly high costs—I think $20 billion—I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalization, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness. I hold myself accountable for that.

It is Insel who declares at the beginning of his tenure as director that all mental disorders are to be located in the brain. As Gordon later assumes the role of director, he makes the same sort of announcement, this time with a focus on DNA. The effort is to predict mental illness by genetics. The inherent problem specified by Tallis is of course that “It is obvious that human life evolves independently of genes” [12] (p. 165).

We must accept the reality of the current situation, which begins by attending to the discourse of psychiatry. Blazer [40] (p. 25) references Kleinman’s summary:

The key item for the biological approach has been “endogenous” psychiatric conditions such as depression, so called because they are believed to arise from psychobiology of the person …Diagnosis becomes reductionism, the downward semiotic interpretation of disease of the signs of the infrastructure of disease out of “the blooming, buzzing confusion” of illness and symptoms.

Blazer [40] (p. 25) describes the decline of social psychiatry between the 1960s and now and states quite simply, “the medical model does not apply to the majority of mood disturbances in our society”. Predating Rose by many years, this work emphasizes, as do Ruesch and Bateson [41] that individual expressions always occur in a “social matrix” and are simultaneously cultural expressions. Blazer [40] (p. 25) elaborates:

Given the ubiquitous nature of depressive symptoms, their expression is perhaps best viewed as an interaction between a depressed person and society. The communication of emotional suffering reflects how individuals relate to society and how society shapes the expression of their emotional pain. How depression expresses itself in a society is profoundly influenced by that society.

The point of this part of the paper is to emphasize some important ways that our image of the human is diminished. We are now accustomed to thinking of ourselves as mere organisms on a par with animals and of animals as having the same mental and moral capacities as humans. Concomitant with this, we think of ourselves in psychological terms and a psyche that is determined by a chemical and mechanistic understanding of the brain. These are false equivalences that substantially erode the actual and potential vitality of being a human. The task ahead, then, is to describe a non-essentialist image of the human.

4. The Human in Human Dignity

There are two examples of reductionism identified in this paper, often manifest in animal studies and in the medical model dominating psychiatry. In both, the image of the human is blurred—the human as such is indistinct. Needed, therefore, is a philosophy that brings specifically human nature into focus with an emphasis on the distinction of the human as such. Only in communication do we recover the possibility of the human in dignity.

Thus, in the Section 4 of this paper, I first discuss the importance of recognizing a shared image of the human that contextualizes dignity, and upon which dignity is contingent. However, this cannot be a static positivist image, for then we risk falling back into the same failed logic of reductionism. To respond to that stipulation, I turn to Plessner’s philosophical anthropology. That is adumbrated, and the role of communication in it is interpreted from a communicological standpoint. Third, I conclude with a recognition of human dignity as an ongoing problematic of living in which the human should not be presupposed. That is because it is the very distinctive image presumed to be at risk. Our desire of dignity is actually a need to fulfill an ongoing task of humanity, which is to continuously arrive at shared meaning in communication. Far from being an instrument, a mere technology of use, communication is in fact the perpetual and fertile ground of the human.

4.1. A Shared Image of the Human, Prerequisite to Dignity

It is time to bring communication back into the picture first in a general way, then particularly in Plessner’s philosophy of the human. For us to establish communication with each other, it is desirable that we share an image or concept of the human. An image, after all, is always already present in all our interactions, but as we have seen, it is not necessarily a vital and dynamic image, an image of a communicative self, that is, a human being that is always becoming, on its way, thus being human. This is by way of saying that, in a sense, communication is already presumed in our attempts to share meaning. This is an insight, of course, with a semiotic and phenomenological foundation, which is to say that we embody a habitus in contexts of a Mitwelt, the social world. Plessner offers just the kind of image we seek. We tacitly agree at some fundamental level that we live in the same perceivable world. The perception is inclusive of the logos embedded in culture generally, in nonverbal codes, and in language. As a reminder, logos is unique to our species. It is fundamental to communicology that language is understood as socially acquired, a fact confirmed by Tomasello, not coincidentally a winner of the prestigious Plessner Award [23]. Uniquely for us, the semiotic world in general is already a learned, incorporated reality embedded in every perception as the hither side of a tacit expression. Literally, every human expression gives voice to culture [41,42].

Even a so-called post-humanist is at least preconsciously condemned to begin with an image or concept of the human. However, post-humanism recognizes that it is challenged in the everyday world by the nearly universally held idea of dignity. Post-humanists may wish to claim divine dignity for animals, but as Fuchs emphasizes, this is an impossibility absent human perception. Dignity is semiotically ascribed by humans. We usually affirm dignity negatively in the embodied sense of indignity, that is, when faced with its reduction or outright denial by violent forces of nature or outrageous acts of humans against themselves and, of course, to animals. An image of the human is perceptual ground for the expression of indignity and therefore dignity by default. It is implicit in our felt repugnance for inhumane acts of every kind, prominently including physical or semiotic actions of the powerful against the helpless, though semiotic violence may be quite subtle and even naively rendered acceptable. Beneath this, we are always at least tacitly aware of other beings of our kind, which unequivocally suggests both identification of the other as a version of the self, and also the intrinsic value of the other as such. Perhaps an emergent concept of self is recognizable as a reflection of belongingness, self-esteem, the feeling of being acknowledged and affirmed as socially worthy. Thus, self as person is the ongoing result of perceiving and being perceived, a process of justification in social communication. Unlike animals who are condemned to satisfy themselves, humans must justify themselves to others in a social world. This affirms Lebech’s references to the social acceptability hypothesis of dignity. At its source, human dignity is only a dialogic possibility, that is, the “I” requires a “We” to produce and sustain it. A communicology of the human person reveals that dignity cannot be achieved alone. It is not a positivist’s preconceived “right”, but a contingency of communication, an effort toward shared meaning.

Human dignity is perceived accomplished when we are affirmed by others of our kind. Our perceived image of the human is a shared expression of dignity, but will of course require repetitive affirmation in the time and space of changing contexts as well as in alternative events among different others. For every experience of dignity a possible disaffirmation awaits. There are humiliations both great and small in the unknowable future. This fact invites the question of what might be a non-positivist, flexible and open image of the human.

Ironically, communication is itself usually and casually neglected as a fundamental source of personhood. Communication is most often tacitly understood as instrumentality, a mere technology of interaction so necessary as to warrant little or no mention of it. This superficial and naïve view popularizes the reductive notion that communication is merely a matter of sending and receiving accurate messages. It is as though nature could proceed for a human absent perception by this person, and the self-concept of same could magically occur absent the expression and felt justification of this person as intersubjective verification in a context of the social world. These presuppositions of communication are common even in philosophical anthropology, where a completed self is often viewed as a given biological organism, rather than being conceived as an effect of the distinctively human in its peculiar and special natural world. Remember, humans have inherited capacities that await realization in expression [43].

The much-admired accomplishments of technology, especially in the medical fields, yield considerable confidence that we have finally succeeded in returning human beings to their embeddedness in nature, but at what cost? Barrett [44] problematizes technology when and where it becomes embodied as technique. Then, technology is no longer conceived as a mere instrument of the human but is rather admired as an end in itself. Humans become instruments of technology. According to Merleau-Ponty, the moral and functional tasks of society are to establish “relations among men that are human”, that “the value of a society is the value it places upon man’s relation to man” [45] (p. xiv). Furthermore, he specifies this for those who study such relations as follows:

“To understand and judge a society, one has to penetrate its basic structure to the human bond upon which it is built; this undoubtedly depends on legal relations, but also upon forms of labor, ways of loving, living, and dying” [45] (p. xiv).

And, perhaps for the benefit of the theologically or psychologically focused, he adds that “principles and the inner life are alibis the moment they cease to animate external and everyday life” [45] (p. xiv). I interpret Merleau-Ponty’s body of work as the resolute affirmation of human dignity. That is because his philosophy is grounded in the communicology of embodied communication.

4.2. Plessner’s Semiotic Phenomenology of Distinctive Human Nature

This brings us to Plessner and to aspects of his philosophy on which I have not previously directly focused. His model of the human is semiotic and phenomenological and built upon the communication dynamics of intrapersonal, interpersonal, and social group interrelations. Unlike Lebech, who it may be recalled separates expression from reality and identifies dignity with rights, Plessner makes an integral connection of communication and being human. He poses three laws, which I interpret here for the first time as a communicology of the human. The laws are effectively rules by which we may understand and distinguish the human kind from the remainder of the organic world. Plants are moved by forces in the environment. Animals are centric, meaning that they have biologically given relations with their environments and adapt accordingly for the purpose of satisfying themselves. They are well adapted to their species-specific Umwelts (surrounding environments). While humans, on the other hand, have biologically prepared capacities that are needs to be fulfilled, we bend these to our desired ends. We transcend the idea of living in an Umwelt. The fact that animals are centric means they are absorbed into their given worlds. Environment and species are suited to their relationship. We humans distance ourselves by objectifying ourselves and our circumstances, moving within consciousness, while justifying our existences in relation to experiences of real or imaginary others who are busy justifying themselves. This is human nature involving communication from the start. Despite the ability to distance the self from itself, we are ultimately homo absconditus, the unfathomable. Life that is within (Innenwelt) cannot completely reveal itself, though it is known as a lived body (Leib) by means of the body lived (Körper), the body always exists in relations with its environment, especially the Mitwelt or social world that must be navigated. Communication is required at every step of the way with and among I, You as We, and in terms of It, a constructed environment. We are conflicted from the start, locked inside our bodies, which are necessary to interact with the world, yet never being quite fulfilled.

4.2.1. Law of Natural Artificiality

Communication produces meaning and culture, to include technology, thus realizing the first law of the human, which is “natural artificiality” [2] (p. 287). This is intended as a contradiction, for the conflict between existence and experience is what Plessner seeks to display. Unlike animals that live with the biological predication of instinct in balance with the environment, the human has no such certainty. We are inherently off-balance and must right the situation in the ecology of intentionality, nexus of our relatedness to the world. Humans sacrifice equilibrium as data in a unique positionality as the eccentric being (ex-centric will do as well). Life must be led, it has to be made meaningful, granted dignity; it requires performance. Culture is an artificial semiotic world that has to be created. This means also that the human is moral by nature, making demands on the self and domesticating the self in relations with others. This is the invention of conscience, the source of morality and an ethical life [2] (p. 294). So, Plessner’s first law is semiotic through and through. The semiotic is natural but artificial. It is made up. Already we can see that nostalgic desires to return us to nature fail to account for the specificity of human nature.

4.2.2. Law of Mediated Immediacy

Plessner’s second law is “mediated immediacy”, the connection of expression to its author but at same time independence from it, a synthesis of the sign and its embodied experience. Expression is necessary to give form to life and to participate as a body in it. As Plessner explains in his essay on “On Human Expression”, speech is the very manifestation of life, but there is a lived contradiction of being in a body and having a body in the Mitwelt (social world) [2]. The animal could not abide by a law such as this, because it already is the relation. It knows no conflict of existence and experience. The animal is never removed from itself, never able to objectify itself. The human is able to know what is known and is aware of knowing. This is, as they say, a blessing and a curse. Being inherently off-balance, captive of a body and yet restricted to it as the only means of communicating with the inorganic, organic, and social world, the desire to create equilibrium compels the human to construct a way, to chart a path. Humans live in consciousness, are immanent in it, everything is in it and simultaneously outside it.

Like the first law, this is a semiotic idea that is now grounded in a phenomenology of the sign. Here, the focus is shifted from the need for culture as expression to bodily perception. Culture’s source is in the human voice and its vital interper-sonal relations [42]. Immediate experience of the world is mediated by signs, which is to say the signs are embodied. Ordinary everyday experience is preconsciously lived; it is fundamentally nonverbal. That does not mean, of course, that it is not semiotic. There are numerous nonverbal codes. According to Plessner’s teacher, Husserl, language is the result of social learning and serves to displace nonverbal rules of behavior with verbal rules in language [5]. In this regard, it may be said that language is coercive. We abide within our culture’s primary semiotic systems. This fact is driven home by the immediacy of our mediated experience. Remember, strictly speaking, all that we perceive are expressions. This implies that we are fundamentally capable of experiencing freedom.

4.2.3. Law of the Utopian Standpoint

Plessner’s third law is “the utopian standpoint”, which is understood as inseparable from the other two laws, if we are to grasp the dynamic communicative understanding of the human. We always awaken in consciousness “of the absolute contingency of existence” [1] (p. 317). From a first-person perspective the “I” could have been born as another, yet the “I” is “this one and no other” [1] (p. 318). This realization is nothing less than to say that I am humanity, I am a shared world. It cannot be said more succinctly than Plessner expresses it: “Straightforward relationships between human beings do not follow from human nature, are not part of the essence of the human. The human has to create them” [1] (p. 319). Indeed, the utopian standpoint is “the essential law of social realization” [1] (p. 320). Just as with the other laws, this is an idea rooted in communication and, therefore, in our freedom.

To conclude, we are free to frame ourselves in any way that pleases us, animals, DNA, or machines, but we do not realize the possibilities of dignity in reductions of the human to less than we might be. Dignity is a value if and only to the extent that we share an image of what constitutes the human. This is and will remain a contingency of communicative relations, not a fixed inherent right rooted in the implicit acceptance of an exclusive and partial understanding of what is to be human.

5. Conclusions, Phenomenological Interpretation

Plessner’s semiotic phenomenology is not a reduced and partial image, but rather a holistic image of the human. It is not based on a naturalized biological concept of human being, but instead on a vital understanding of what it means to be human. In this regard, it is an optimistic philosophy, but not an idealistic one. The utopian standpoint comes with no guarantees. Affirmation of embodied experience provides no assurance of dignity. Dignity is a possibility of communicative relations, not a probability. Thus, it is a mistake to presuppose dignity. As a contingency of communication, dignity is constructed intersubjectively by at least two parties in dialogue who might come to share an image of the human. Therefore, to the extent that dignity is endangered by reductionism, it must be retrieved and reconstructed by communicative means.

Following a thorough-going indictment of the medical model in psychiatry, Rose proposes a change in the philosophy of psychiatry based on mental distress, not disease. His rationale is that distress almost always results from adversities of life attributable to the human environment. He is succinct: “all forms of distress—are conditions of persons embedded in increasing dynamic transactions with their interpersonal, social, cultural, semantic, and physical milieus across their lives” [38] (p. 187). He outlines a new psychiatry that is grounded in communication with whole persons, respected for their humanity and open to unique arrivals of dignity.

While Rose focuses on a political anthropology, Fuchs proposes a new ecological model of psychotherapy in which dignity might emerge from shared intentionality of therapist and patient. He recognizes that the therapeutic journey toward dignity is contingent on the accomplishment of interpersonal communication. Notably, Fuchs’s philosophy of psychiatry is explicitly informed by Plessner. (I provide a more thorough analysis of these proposals elsewhere) [17].

We learn from Krüger, one of Plessner’s principal interpreters and past president of the Plessner Society in Wiesbaden, Germany that we must express our “freedom not to be reduced” [14] (p. 108). We develop not alone, but with others of our kind in perceptions and expressions of our shared intentionality. Sooner or later, we realize that our shared human nature manifests in the being of the human, which is to say in communication. Upon this recognition, we are aware of ourselves as dignified.

Fittingly, Plessner concludes his essay “On Human Expression” by saying that: “Hence we must turn to those modes of existence which remain invariably constant in the face of all interpretations; these modes we have called embodiment” [2] (p. 54).