Quotes by Geoffrey Winthrop Young

"This was the background for Benn's harsh objections. Versed in the arguments put forward by Philosophical Anthropology, Benn was anything but a concerned humanist; he was not irritated by the denial of man's higher status but by Uexkiill's putative blindness to man's fundamentally problematic nature. This critique of Uexkull (which will resurface time and again) is a kind of speciesism in a minor key that tries to reclaim a special place for humans not as the masters but as the misfits of creation. There are always faint echoes of Kierkegaard: somehow, we are special because we are broken, lost, abandoned, or derelict incomplete beings. (Alternately, "unfinished" humans may be labeled as evolutionary to-do projects that await completion.) Uexkiill's "jovial" theory appears to be devoid of tragedy. There is—to span the extremes of the German pantheon—too much Goethe and too little Nietzsche. Heaping insult upon insult, Benn acknowledged the similarity between Uexkull and Goethe but then added that in Goethe's time this type of harmonious leveling of differences may have been "worthy of a great man," but nowadays it revealed nothing other than the "primary joviality of the biologist and insect specialist."

"discursive regimes of the late eighteenth century drew the figure of man into the sand, and even if he manages to survive the etching, typing, and storing of the late nineteenth-century analog media, he is certain to disappear with the compression of that sand into silicon."