One of the central focuses of the new investigations conducted from the beginning of the eighteenth century in Germany is the redefinition of the human being understood both as a bodily and as a social living creature situated into a specific culture. In the anthropological discourse of the time, a new concept is sketched and highlighted: That of the human being as “a whole person” (ein ganzer Mensch). This concept refers to the human body, its functions, instincts, needs, emotions studied from a scientific point of view and to the human, intended as a cultural being, observed from a historical perspective. “Der ganze Mensch” was considered as an indivisible unit of nature and culture, cognition and perception, sexuality and reason, and, above all, mind/soul and body.

One of the most important texts of eighteenth-century German anthropology was Anthropologie für Ärtze und Weltweise (1772) by Ernst Platner, a professor of medicine in Göttingen. Platner writes that while anatomy and physiology consider the human being as a machine working independently from the soul, and while psychology regards the characteristics of the soul as detached from the body, anthropology studies the body and the soul in their reciprocal interactions, because “the human being is neither body nor soul alone: it is the harmony between both of them” (Platner vi). The anthropological inquiry into the complex interaction between mind/soul and body (commercium mentis et corporis) became one of the main issues at that time. It was investigated not only experimentally in works of scholars like Albrecht von Haller (Primae lineae physiologiae, 1747) and De partibus corporis humani sensibilibus et irritabilus, 1752) and Johann Gottlob Krüger (Versuch einer Experimental-Seelenlehre, 1756), but also philosophically, for example in Friedrich Schiller's dissertation (Versuch über den Zusammenhang der tierischen Natur des Menschen mit seiner geistigen, 1780). Therefore, in the eighteenth century, anthropology was conceived not as a science merely based on observation, but also on a self-reflexive approach—i.e., it was understood as the result of experimental and philosophical interpretations made by philosophers and scientists, sharing the aim of trying to understand and define human nature.