Der kopernikanische Mensch. Geburt des undurchsichtigen Selbst

The article shows the relationship between the Plessnerian notion of “unfathomability” (Unergründlichkeit) and the Copernican revolution. The unfathomability is expression of human excentricity, according to the plessnerian anthropological model. But genealogically it is the result of the extreme complexity of the modern world: individual freedom; intensification of economic, technological and scientific exchanges; ideological, religious and cultural pluralism. These factors originated in the early modern age, with the discoveries of Columbus and the cosmological revolution. The complexity of the experience then took progressively the form of the unfathomability of the mind and behaviors: possibilities as power, openness to possible worlds, but also opacity, concealment, self-illusion of individual and collective consciousness