...the important starting point for Gelderloos's study is that the configuration he seeks to explore in his book precedes the familiar disciplinary split that would divide the famous two cultures of the humanities and the natural sciences, a division predicated in turn on the distinction between nature and culture, matter and spirit. The book's four chapters center on Helmuth Plessner's Stages of the Organic and the Human Being: An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology (1928); the photobooks Faces of Our Time by August Sander (1929); and Art Forms in Nature by Karl Blossfeldt (1935); along with writings on photography by Walter Benjamin, Alfred Döblin, and Siegfried Kracauer; Döblin's experimental novel Mountains Seas Giants (1924); and Ernst Jünger's book-length essay The Worker: Dominion and Form (1932). Rather than presenting us with faces revealing a hidden, inner essence, they feature the external social and historical forces that have turned their subjects into types; rather than a Spenglerian narrative of growth and decline, the series' multi-layered "comparative anatomy" of Weimar society (Döblin) offers a "natural history" of "speciation and differentiation" (78). ...the worker's ability to put his body and life on the line is what makes him rise above the bourgeois's sentimental attachment to life, the dignity of the individual, etc.