Abstract
This essay focuses on two phenomena which strongly affect our life experience: passion and addiction. They both belong to the dynamic structure of what we usually call Human Condition and they are here investigated starting from the work of the philosopher and anthropologist Helmut Plessner. In his works, he states that an access to these phenomena needs a combination of methods, namely, a phenomenological description of them, a hermeneutic exchange of these experiences in their articulations, together with a dialectic openness for critical inversions in these phenomena. Starting from this, this investigation follows five steps, considering: passion and addiction as deviations from the established roles of persons; the all-to-human in extraordinary plays with roles; conflicts between the standard measure of the role and the individualising requirements of the person; contrast to and connection with laughing and crying; an outlook for our socio-cultural reality.
